It was not the voice of an angel which he heard, although it might just as well have been. No sound was more sweet, more well remembered afterward, than “I am here,” she said. “Don’t move, else you will start bleeding again …”
He turned to the voice; Dalin was silhouetted against the are of light and though he could not see her distinctly, her presence touched him with its promise, her hand upon his left arm, like some magic balm that cased all the fears that possessed him. I can go to sleep now. This is not true, this is not true; this is some blissful dream and I don’t want to wake up!
The pain crept back but no longer as sharp as when he moved for the first time, a dull weight against his shoulder and his chest. Though the air smelled clean, he had difficulty sucking it. Were his lungs punctured? He listened to his breathing—there was no whistling, no rasping, but the ache was there, deep and permanent.
“Be still,” Dalin again, oh that beautiful, soothing voice; “You have lost a lot of blood. It is a miracle that you are alive. A miracle. There is a hole below your shoulder and behind your back where the bullet went through …”
His lung must be punctured and he must be bleeding inside. He was so weak, it seemed he had no body anymore and he was just a hollow man, his bones and innards taken out. He was dying, he was now sure of that. Our Father Who Art in Heaven … oh, dear God! Dalin, don’t leave me, don’t leave me … Above him, the design of bamboo slats which held the woven fronds in place—was this the last thing he would sec? Dalin, Holy Mary, Mother of God … then darkness again …
And again, too, the are of light, brighter now. It was no illusion, he was alive, his lungs were intact, he was breathing. He could even bring his head up a little, and in doing so, he realized that his chest was bandaged with strips of cloth.
“Dalin … Dalin …”
“I am here,” she said behind him. He could hear her move toward him, then her hand rested on his arm. Her calm, lovely face, a finger pressed to her lips. “Do not talk,” she said, squatting beside him so that he could see her, feel her leg pressed against his side, her whole wonderful presence banishing the lie of his passing. “I will tell you everything. Your father, your family—they are all in the delta waiting for us. We will not leave till it is dark so that we will not be followed …”
“And where are we?” His voice sounded weak.
“We are within a ring of bamboo at the foot of a hill, away from Po-on. It is no more. They burned it all. Nothing there but ashes and posts still smoldering. They left you in the yard. Thank God, after they shot you, they did not drag you into the fire. Perhaps they thought you were dead. And why not? We were in the delta when we heard the shot, we saw the fire, and after they had left, I came after you …”
Sweet, beautiful stranger.
“I thought you were dead, but I looked closer. You were breathing. The blood had clotted and stopped the flow. I unhitched the bull cart, tilted it, and lifted you into the back.”
Sweet, beautiful stranger.
“My bull is tethered and grazing. If you are hungry, or if you are thirsty?”
Sweet, beautiful stranger, my guardian angel, may you be always near.
“It will be dark soon, we will join them …”
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the joy of being alive waned and a great, formless weariness dropped over him, the weariness not of the wound throbbing in his chest. Another wound festered deeper than the laceration in his flesh, the thought that they showed no mercy to him, ever loyal servant of the Church, of Mother Spain. He closed his eyes as the tiredness suffused him and now he really wanted release, the comfort of sleep, anything to dull the mind, to keep him from thinking. They were only men, doing what would prove them stronger, more powerful, and therefore, fit to rule. There is still a just God who will pass judgment. Or could this be but part of that suffering he must endure, condemned as he was to believe in a God who decreed that salvation lay in suffering?
Bit-tik’s voice woke him, “Will he live?” The rustling of people, heavy breathing, murmurs indistinct and incessant, and blackness heavy and portentous all around.
“Let us pray,” Dalin said.
Now he could feel the cart lurch a bit. They were moving, moving away from Po-on. A still, moonless night, the dark mass of the range their only guide; they would follow the foothills all the way down to La Union, then to Pangasinan.
They had onions and garlic; the two pigs that had squealed when they were still in the riverbed were quickly butchered, their meat salted. Not all the meat could be salted, however, so they feasted in the evening and for a moment forgot that they were fugitives. The chickens were quiet in their bamboo cages under the carts—it was the roosters and their crowing that could give them away, but there were roosters all over the land, many of them wild, their crowing everywhere.
There was room in Dalin’s cart, so he stayed there, in her care. She had really joined them.
That night, Mayang gave him a piece of roasted pork. It should have given him pleasure; it had been a long time since he had had pork, not since he left Cabugaw. But it tasted bitter and he had no appetite. He was weak, he could hardly move, and his right arm was without feeling still. He touched his fingers with his left hand but could feel nothing. He was really like his father now.
Soft footsteps alongside the cart, the carabaos straining at their yoke. Moving along on uneven ground, the cart sometimes dipped or yawed, and each fall brought a bolt of pain. He felt the bandage again and again to make sure that he was not bleeding, and was relieved to find it was not wet.
Dalin sat out front and he could make out her shape, her turning to him occasionally. He slept fitfully and had disjointed dreams: Padre Jose in his black cassock drinking not his wine but basi in a coconut bowl; Carmencita—yes, he had dreamed of her many times—dressed in the white gown of a bride, baring her breasts to him, and he had grabbed at them, sucked them, and when the warm milk filled his mouth, he spat it out and found it red, the dark living red of blood. He woke up, then drifted back to sleep. This time he dreamed he had entered the seminary in Vigan; he was no longer a novice—he was wearing the soutane of a priest, and he was teaching—yes, he was teaching and his students were not Indios—they were all old and venerable friars, among them Padre Jose. They were all listening to him, rapture on their Castilian faces, as he spoke not about theology, but about the mind as healer, about the capacity of man to free himself from the bondage of his own carnal limitations. And he showed them how it was possible for someone of earthly shape like him to do what was not possible—he willed himself off the floor, and he rose till his head almost touched the ceiling, then he looked down at them, smiling benignly at their amazement.
“What does it all mean?” he asked Dalin in the morning when they stopped in the hollow of a hill, surrounded by a flourish of butterfly trees. Children splashed naked in the stream behind the cart and the women were cooking the morning meal. The rich smell of roasting pork drifted into the cart.
“I do not know,” Dalin said, lifting his head a little so he could drink the bittersweet coffee Mayang had brewed. His chest throbbed with a dull blob of pain. “My dreams are so simple … nothing as interesting as yours,” Dalin continued, “although once I flew over the sea and could look down into the depths and see where the schools of fish were.”
As they waited for the dark to come, she kept him company. Mayang drifted in and out, feeling his brow and bringing to him bowls of broth. Outside, the women prepared the meals, pounded rice, and the men mended their fish nets, or wove baskets out of the young bamboo which they cut from the thickets along the streams.
Istak grew weaker and his right arm was still numb no matter how much Dalin massaged it. The wound throbbed even more. He prayed, tears streaming down his face, asking that his life be spared, not because he wanted vengeance, but because he wanted to prove he could surmount this personal anguish to do service to his God still.
He thanked God, too, for Dalin beside him, co
mforting him, telling him now about herself. Who was this angel, whose touch was elixir, whose presence was light? Where had she come from? Lingayen: that was where she was born, a small town at the rim of the sea. Her people were fisherfolk and salt makers. They had a house surrounded by coconuts. Lingayen—a beach with white sand and a gentle surf. There was this tall and ancient tree at the fork of the road which led to their town and when people passed by, they always looked back. Lingayen—looking back—and that was how the town got its name. She knew enough of his language and she spoke it with an accent; she had learned it as a child when her parents sailed up and down the coast, selling coconut sweets, salt, and shrimp paste which they made from the tiny shrimps they caught in fine mesh nets in the gulf.
Long afterward, he remembered what Dalin said through his bouts with pain.
“I’ll tell you what really happened. We were not shipwrecked. All of us in our family, we worked very hard.”
During the dry season, they gathered the dry leaves of coconuts and heated the huge iron vats which had earlier been filled with salt water and then left out in the sun until the water had evaporated. Her mother bought the shrimp from the fishermen and then stored them in earthen jars. And once they had enough to fill their boat, they sailed up the coast. In the next year, they journeyed by cart to the new towns of Nueva Ecija onward to Cagayan. They either sold the salt and shrimp paste or exchanged these for rice, which was abundant in the western plain. If they sailed up the Ilokos coast, they bartered for tobacco, handwoven cloth, and cotton twine, which the Pangasinan fishermen wove into fishnets.
On this particular trip to the north, a freak wind tossed them a distance from the shore. Toward late afternoon, they were overtaken by a boat with giant sails and six men aboard. They maneuvered their craft close to the frail boat for some time, bantering with them. Then toward sunset, the big boat edged alongside and the six men jumped into their boat. They killed her father; her brother and her mother, who were at the other end, were able to get their bolos but they, too, were overwhelmed. Her brother was able to wound one before he, too, was killed. Their bodies were flung into the sea. They tied her arms to a beam and leered at her. Soon it was dark; they loosened her bonds.
Through the daze and terror of the night, in those moments when she was left alone, she prayed that she would be allowed to live, although life would no longer be the same. Toward midnight, they gave her cold chunks of rice and salted fish which were like rocks in her throat. They let her drink a bowl of coconut water—but only so that she would have strength, for the six of them never let her rest.
“They did things to me,” Dalin said simply.
When the dawn limned the east, they were some distance from the shore, and the mountains were a blue wall beyond the waters. Their boat was fast—its sails bloated with wind, its prow cutting the water like a blade. Except for one who was at the stern, manning the rudder, all were asleep on the broad deck, sprawled between the earthen jars of shrimp paste and bales of cloth which they must have taken from other hapless traders. They did not even bother to wash the knives with which they had slain her brother and parents. The blood had caked, and seeing it she retched and threw up all that she had eaten in the night.
In the morning, they transferred the salt, the shrimp paste, and the husked coconuts from her father’s boat, which they had tied to their big sailboat. She was left on board. She could not make out where they came from, although they spoke both Pangasinan and Iloko. In the daylight their skin seemed darker, even shiny, perhaps from too long a punishment from sun and sea. For a time, she thought they were Moros, but those stories of their raids on the coast were of the past. Her parents were always aware of the dangers of travel by sea, but it was much safer than going over land that was infested with robbers, too.
The man who was at the rudder left his post, came over to her, and untied her hands. She would not dare jump into the sea, prowled by sharks and too distant from land. They did not touch her the whole day; they let her sit alone weeping, looking senselessly at the heaving waters around her, listening to the wind whip the gray sails above her. She feared the night, for they would surely come to her again.
They had a jar of basi and they took long draughts from it after they had supped on rice and salted fish. The helmsman often turned skyward, to a sky studded with stars. He pointed the prow to one of them. Perhaps, they never expected her to jump—she would not be able to swim that far to land and they no longer watched her. Drowning or being devoured by sharks was a better fate; if she stayed, they would eventually kill her anyway.
They circled many times, shouting, and at one turn, the prow of the boat almost bashed her head, but she always stayed under when their craft loomed near. They could not see her in the dark. They lighted a torch but that did not help. They gave up after a while and soon the high sails vanished in the dark altogether. She was finally alone, the awesome immensity of the sea around her.
As a child in Lingayen, she was no stranger to the moods of the sea; she knew how to keep afloat and her father had warned her and the other children about the undertow in the gulf that often dragged unwary swimmers to their death. They should not fight it and thereby lose their strength; they should just keep afloat and after the undertow had spent itself, then and only then should they attempt to swim back to shore.
God in His Heaven, where was the shore? Then she remembered the helmsman looking at the stars and guiding his boat by them. She recalled how it was on those nights when her father also turned to the stars and identified landfall.
The evening star—if she swam toward it, she would reach land. She could float—that was easy—but how could she defend herself from the marauders of the deep? Once, she felt something rough like an is-is leaf brush against her leg and her whole being trembled. A shark! The fishermen in their village had often caught baby sharks in their nets and fish traps and their skins were rough and could cut. For a long while, she waited for the snap of those razor jaws. But if it had been a shark, it did not return. She prayed again that she would not fall asleep, that the sea would not grow rough again and that she could continue to float without tiring too much. Already she had drunk mouthfuls of water and her stomach turned.
Dawn came stealthily shimmering on the waters and with sunrise, she was now sure where land was. Through bleary eyes, she could see the high outline of mountains—so near but really far. She paddled slowly toward the vision, doubting that she would be able to reach the shore.
Toward midday, a plume of smoke rose hazily in the distance. Soon it came into view—a black steamboat, one of those which must have come from the Ilokos or from other lands, headed for Manila—a place she had never seen but which she had heard about as the final destination of these giant boats that could go against the wind or sail on even when the seas were rough. It came closer and she could see shapes moving on the deck. She shouted till her throat ached and her lungs seemed ready to burst—but the big black boat did not lose speed—it glided on until it became just a speck in the distance, and then its plume of black smoke disappeared altogether.
In her worst moments of fear and hopelessness she thought she would just sink. But she kept on floating, marking time with her breathing, gulping the air painfully, her mouth now bitter and dry. Then, something glinted in the sun, and for a while she thought it must be a huge fish but it was not. She swam toward it for what seemed like forever and near it at last, she cried—it was a huge banana trunk and she embraced it, clung to it, and thanked God and all the spirits of the departed for this raft.
She paddled slowly. The sun rode the heavens and lashed down at her, blistered her skin, which hurt so much she would scream. Darkness finally came. It was cold. Her eyes closed and she would struggle to keep them open. The searing blisters, the aching in her throat were now dulled, even bearable, as sleep threatened to engulf her. Once, her grip on the trunk loosened and she seemed to have drifted off into sleep; she woke up in time, fear giving strength to her body a
nd she gripped the trunk even tighter. Then, to her dismay, a skein broke off and now she was afraid that the whole trunk would fall apart before she reached the shore. Worse, it seemed as if the sea itself now wanted to claim her. The waves seemed bigger, and she could not see what was ahead as the sea heaved. Thoughts of death flashed through her mind once more, of fish feasting on her flesh as she sank to the bottom. Her legs were already numb and her arms were heavy as logs. It was then that she made the vow: that if she lived, she would serve whoever saved her for as long as she was needed and she would do anything, anything demanded of her …
Morning again; the shore seemed much nearer. A wave lifted her, and through eyes that smarted she was overjoyed to see the line of trees on the shore. But her arms were no longer hers, her throat was being scraped by thorns. With no food in her belly for two days, it seemed as if it were being gnawed by sharp fangs. The banana trunk seemed so enormous, she could no longer hold on to it, and all around her, the turbulence of waves, the sound of crashing surf, of thunder.
“I was very surprised to find out later that I was alive,” she said. The man who rescued her had seen her from the shore clinging to the banana trunk. There were no houses in this part of the coast—surely she was not out there for a swim. He was not a good swimmer but he had four large coconuts whose husks were ripped partially then tied together. He used them as floats when he swam out to her. She was hardly conscious when he reached her, her arms like a vise on the trunk; he towed her to the shore and carried her to his cart, watched her sleep till early evening, when she finally woke up.
“It was dark,” Dalin said, “but there was this cooking fire at my feet, and this man with one hand tending the pot. I cried again and again with happiness. My body ached all over—the blisters on my skin—and I realized that I was naked, that he had removed my wet clothes and covered me with a blanket. More than that, I realized, too, that he had bathed me with fresh water—there was no salt water on me. Even my hair had been combed. I remembered my vow.”
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