They had wanted to go into the deepest jungle, where the Spaniards could not reach them, nor could the big men in the towns who made them work without pay. They could go no farther. Life was difficult. They worked hard enlarging their clearings, and the forest became a benefactor, a provider of meat, and most important, a sanctuary, finally.
“Why did you leave the Ilokos, Apo?” It was a question he should not have asked. Perhaps the old man had killed a priest or a Spanish officer as his father had.
“I am Diego Silang,” the old man replied quietly, firmly.
From the deepest recesses of his mind, Bit-tik dredged up the name. As a boy, he had heard it spoken with awe, this brazen Ilokano who dared oppose the Spaniards and set up a fragile Indio government with Ilokano laws and an Ilokano army to replace the bulwarks of stone the friars had built. But Diego Silang was betrayed and killed, and his followers were disbanded, persecuted, and slaughtered.
To Bit-tik’s incredulous look, the old man had an answer: “You’re thinking, I am an old fool. How can I be Diego Silang, when he died long ago? But his spirit lives and it came to me, became me. How old do you think I really am? They are all gone who joined me in the beginning. I am alone now and the young people—they are our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I worshipped Diego Silang’s memory, just as I worshipped all the men who fought for our freedom. What Diego Silang believed I also believe with all my soul. I believe that this land, this water, this air we breathe—they are God’s gift to all men and cannot belong to just a few merely because they are white or wear the cloth. So we honor all those who have died for this belief. Here, we prepare for the day when we will be ready and strong to strike again. We are not alone. Beyond this mountain are people like us and still more people like us in the valleys beyond. They may not recognize their poor, oppressed brothers elsewhere. Someday they will. Then we will leave this valley and with our prayers, we will defeat the ones who despoiled our land and robbed us.”
Dusk again, thirst and hunger again. In the dimness that was quietly descending upon the valley, they now came out—the children and women, and in the yard of Apo Diego’s house, they built a bonfire and gathered around it to share its warmth, for a chill breeze had come with the night.
“You have seen how fecund the land is,” Apo Diego said softly. “Let me convince you to remain here, to live with us and share our sorrows, our joys.”
From the rear of the house, a group of women emerged. They set the low eating table again with roasted meat, a bowl of steaming rice, and roasted green peppers. There was also a plate of greens. It tasted like saluyot but was not slippery. The women who served him turned their faces away. While he gazed at the bonfire as the children and people gathered around it, he realized why they hid themselves when he arrived, just as the women now, even in the faint light, could not face him. All their faces were horribly scarred by smallpox, the scourge leaving craters so deep and large.
“You will not be lonely here,” the old man was saying. “We have so few men left. Then came this terrible plague. We have more women now than men …”
In the golden glow of the bonfire, he could see them clearly. Those girls, how they must have looked before the dreaded disease had swept over their valley.
“The women are industrious,” the old man said. “They know how to weave, to care for plants, and to raise children.… I can see in your face that you are a seeker, that you will travel distances to find happiness. Stay with us. Every day brings something new. You need not search further for your fate, or for God.”
For a long while, Bit-tik did not speak.
In his mind’s eye, the Agno again—so wide and harsh—how they crossed this last barrier to Cabugawan, his brothers, the land they had cleared together, the kindly neighbors. He belonged to Cabugawan now. Bit-tik talked about his village, his brother who spoke Spanish and Latin, who cured the sick with his herbs and prayers. Did anyone in the valley speak Spanish or Latin at all?
The old man nodded. “Diego Silang does,” he said simply. Then he asked Bit-tik if he could read and write, and Bit-tik proudly said he could.
“That is very good.” The old man was enthusiastic. “We will need wisdom to defeat our enemies. Even now, they are plotting against us, seeking to dislodge us from this land which we carved from the forest. Two more hands here can do so much.”
Bit-tik could only think of Cabugawan, and yes—Sabel, who he knew would always be there when he needed her. That was ordained by the stars.
“I am thinking of a woman I left in Cabugawan,” Bit-tik said, feeling uncomfortable that he could not give the old man a better reason.
The old man brought in a jar covered with dried banana leaves and told him to drink his fill of basi. The basi tasted so good, unlike any he had had in the past. It was slightly bitter but it must be a special brew. He reminisced and felt completely at ease telling the old man about his father’s searing hatred for the friars and why they had to flee Po-on.
His eyes began to sink, the bonfire in the yard seemed to grow smaller and dimmer, the voices of people became muted. He was feeling drowsy, so he lay down on the floor, yet struggled to keep his eyes open. Through the blur of oncoming sleep, he saw six women surround him just as the light from the oil lamp on the low eating table flickered and died. He did not object when they started to undress him. He remembered embracing each one, though he was already half asleep. Six of them, and to each he gave his seed. Then all was blissful ignorance, the deep, deep quietude of dreamless sleep.
He woke up; his head had become a heavy rock, his eyes blinded by dazzling light. He closed his eyes quickly and in the red orb before him, he remembered what had transpired. He opened his eyes again. He was in the shade of a giant narra tree and when he rose in what seemed to be unfamiliar surroundings, he saw the spire of the church of Tayug in the near distance. To his right, the green of the Caraballo range. It was late afternoon and the sun shone fully on his face. Beside him was their parting gift, an earthen pot filled with mountain fish in fermented rice.
His legs were wobbly, but he regained his balance after the first few steps. The heaviness in his head disappeared. He walked toward the town, wondering if it was all a dream. And for the first time, he realized that he wanted to go back to Apo Diego, to the valley and its beautiful peace. He gazed at the mountains where they had started on the long hike and quickly realized that he would not be able to retrace the way through the labyrinthine maze. With a sense of elation he remembered the women who had caressed him. Did it happen at all? It was his first time ever, and there were six he had embraced, not just one. It could not be real! It was one of those grand illusions that only basi could inflict upon the mind. He untied the cotton string of his long carzoncillo and looked at his limp penis. He smiled to himself—it was no dream at all.
All the way to Cabugawan, through a humid, cloudless night, he thought of things to say to Sabel, for he would really pay court to her, build a house for her, and not live with his brother. He was man enough now to settle down. And all he had to do was ask his uncle Blas.
It was about Sabel that Orang spoke first that morning when he arrived to share their breakfast. Sabel was gone—she had eloped the day previous with a farmer from Carmay. The wedding would be next week.
“It was not a dream, Manong,” Bit-tik told Istak. He showed the small jar of fish in fermented rice which they left beside him. It was the best Dalin ever had.
“Could a spirit enter another human being and give it a purpose?” Bit-tik was anxious to know.
“Yes, it is possible,” Istak said after a while, “for a man to welcome into his mind and heart any spirit, a belief, a faith that was expressed in thought and deed by another man. If the receptacle is clean, I think wonders can be achieved. Is this what you are looking for?”
Bit-tik shook his head, “I don’t know, Manong.”
“You must not wander too often now,” Istak advised.
He valued Istak’s advice, so
he made plans to build himself a house, and in the next few weeks, he roamed the forest beyond the farm looking for sagat trees for posts. He found them, cut them, and waited for them to dry. It was not difficult to gather cogon for the roof, buri palm leaves for the walls, and bamboo for the floors. And when anyone built a house, the neighbors always helped, and their only pay was the day’s meal.
Bit-tik did not build his house. The small first hut that he built looked like a beggar’s hut beside the new and bigger homes. A gust of wind could blow it down. An-no added a large room to his house, then told his brother to move in with them.
Bit-tik continued his wandering and journeyed to Tayug again in the hope that he would meet once more the young men who had taken him to their distant valley. He asked the people in the marketplace if they had ever come down again. No one knew—in fact, the people of Tayug knew little of what was beyond the mountains except that it was forbidding and hostile, and the only people who lived there were the Bagos and those who had become savages.
He returned to Cabugawan more subdued than ever. If Dalin and Istak asked him the usual question about when he would finally bring a woman home, he had the same answer, “Maybe when the crow turns white.”
As Orang surmised, he truly loved Sabel and could not find someone to replace her.
There were occasions when thoughts of the past crowded Istak’s mind. During Holy Week in the year Bit-tik told him about the valley high up in the Caraballo range, he remembered the journal he had left in Cabugaw and what his uncle Blas had said about how he would compose a poem about their journey. Hearing the pasyon sung by Orang, listening to her relate the suffering of Christ at the hands of His own brethren, and His betrayal, he relived the past, its sorrow and fear. Listening to Orang, tears burned in his eyes.
Yet, there was comfort in the convent, the certitude not only of God’s presence and the beneficence that Padre Jose had selflessly given. The church was once a redoubt against the violence of Muslim raids, so why could it not be a haven from injustice itself?
It finally came during their fourth year in the new land. First, it was just some rumor brought by Blas, who went to town on Sundays—the market day—to look at farm implements, gossip, and get a little drunk in the tienda there. They were idling in the village yard—the evening was young and a full moon adorned the sky. The children were playing, and their shouts and laughter decorated the vast stillness of the night.
They were talking softly; the planting season would soon be upon them. Though there were still wilds to clear, life already had a distinct, well-ordered pattern that could be rent only by nature’s vagaries.
“In the market this morning,” Blas said, pausing to spit out the wad of tobacco he had been chewing since after supper, “I heard this salted-fish merchant from Dagupan say there is a plague in the south—and it is spreading to the north. Some towns in Cavite already have it. People die in just two days—they vomit and defecate continuously until there is no more body to them.”
Istak tensed; it was the dreaded cholera, for which there was no cure, just as it had been with the pox which infected all Cabugaw when he was still a boy just starting out as an acolyte. His family had survived it; would they survive cholera? Always, like some thorn embedded in the flesh that hurt when memory stirred, he would remember the weeping of people, the bodies with ripe, red sores, the pus oozing out of them. At first it was just three or four deaths in a day, then it was ten or twenty, then fifty—and all had to be buried hastily. “The cholera is worse,” Padre Jose had said, tears streaming down his craggy face. “Perhaps we have not been Christian enough.” And again and again, he heard the old priest intone sadly, dully: “It is the hand of God.”
The very night Blas told them about the plague, Istak had a dream.
He was harvesting the grain, but every time he stooped with the scythe, the stalks in his hands turned to ash and the whole field became an expanse of black.
He was now running away from it, and someone was chasing him, the footfalls behind him growing louder and louder although he was already faster than the deer. Then, on his head a huge hand rested. He stopped and turned to look at what he knew was a giant behind him, but there was no one there and no matter how quickly he turned around, he could not see who was behind him, although he could hear the gusty breathing and feel the great hand clamped on his head.
He ran again, his limbs racing the wind, but still the hand rested on his head, and behind him, the laughing, mocking voice: You cannot run away from destiny.
His legs began to feel like logs. You are not destiny, Istak shouted.
Then who am I?
The devil!
And if I am the devil, what am I trying to do?
You know that I have wavered in my faith, you want me on your side.
Istak slowed into a wearied walk. More derisive laughter behind him, and again he turned abruptly to confront his tormentor, but whoever he was, he was quicker and was behind Istak again.
I am not the devil, the booming voice said. And I will prove to you I am not. Tomorrow, when you waken, there will be a guava branch in your yard. Boil its leaves—the broth can heal the sick. Its fruits though sour can fill the stomach. Plant it in your bangcag. You have three mounds there. You will know which mound to select—dig a hole before it. There will be a treasure there and the guardian of this treasure will test your courage. I do not know if you will pass. If you do, plant the twig close by. It will prove to you that I am neither the devil nor his disciple. I am God’s messenger and you will use all His gifts when the time comes.
Liar! Istak screamed, and again he twisted around. The hand was no longer on his head but there was no one behind him either. The voice!
He remembered it then; it was old Padre Jose’s.
Morning came to Cabugawan with the splendor of May; mayas chirping on the grass roof, and beyond the open window, the bamboo bending to a breeze, the chicken cackling in the yard. It all came back with the urgency of birth or death or whatever could shake the world, for there on the ground was the guava twig that he had seen in his dream, only it seemed bigger, its leaves fuller and greener.
He rushed down and picked it up with trembling hands, raised it to the sun, bent it. Yes, it was real, and to Bit-tik, who was then starting out, he asked if there was anyone who had come that morning to the village to visit, any of the children …
The children? But they were all still asleep; they had not breakfasted yet.
This cannot be, this cannot be; this is reality and what I saw was a dream.
He hurried back to the house and to Dalin, who stirred from their mat, he said, “I must do some digging in the bangcag.” He wanted to explain to her what had happened, but anxiety prodded him. He wanted to know the verity of what lurked in the depths of his mind, what sorcery it was that placed the twig in his yard, for surely it would now reveal itself in the hole he would dig.
The farm was but a short distance from the village. The saplings he had planted here—catuday, marunggay, sineguelas, pomelo—they were bigger now. The mound to which instinct guided him relentlessly was the farthest of the three; twice as tall as he, and crowned with tough ledda grass.
He had brought a spade and a crowbar to loosen the tough earth. He was so intent with his digging he was unconscious to all the world until a sharp hissing shocked him to attention. He breathed deeply, stood erect, and looked for the source of the sound. Then he saw it, close to the base of the mound, but almost as tall as he, this cobra, its shining body almost as big as his leg, its hood now spread—so big, remembering it afterward convinced him it was as wide as a winnowing basket, its eyes glaring at him, its fangs bared.
The guardian of the treasure! And briefly he felt that instant of emptiness within him when he faced the gun of the Spanish officer. It was not quite the same feeling, though, and knowing that he was defenseless, that the doom which stared at him with beady eyes could strike before he could move, he remembered the dream, the courage tha
t he must show. He stood motionless. The liturgy! Padre Jose repeating solemnly, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison—his heart thumping wildly now, his arms nerveless now. Christe eleison again, this time the words taking shape, a hoarse whisper. Christe eleison—this time loud enough for him to hear himself. Then, it happened. The hood which had expanded to the breadth of a winnowing basket started to contract, the head started to sway sideways, the fangs withdrew and the huge snake sank to the earth then slithered into the hole from whence it had come.
Istak breathed deeply, drawing in huge drafts of the good, sweet air; he started to sweat, and his legs felt watery. He wanted to run but could not move, his whole body was numb. The air that had rushed to his lungs reminded him that he was alive, with no venom clotting his arteries, stopping his heart.
The guardian had tested him and he had passed.
In a while, his strength and command of his senses returned. But doubts tugged at him, told him he should leave immediately, forget the dream, the treasure, and even his farm itself. What if there was gold beneath his feet? Or some talisman which was reserved for him alone? Think of your wife, your relatives, and how their lives could be made better. Think.
He grabbed the crowbar and started to dig, scooping up the hard crust of earth which he had loosened. Already, he had dug up to his knees and still there was nothing solid to stop him. The earth began to get soft, then wet, and it was soon muddy. Still, he persisted; he was down to his waist when the mud erupted into a bubbling spring. He had cracked the casement open and water gushed upward so that the hole started to fill.
Water! Life! Istak turned skyward to a sun which now burned in the cloudless sky, and thanked God for this gift. The farm would not be infertile, then. About ten feet from the spring, he dug another hole and stuck the guava twig into it. Then, with the spade, he filled the hole with mud from the spring. The twig would not grow, he told himself; but after what had happened, he knew that here in Cabugawan, in this new Po-on, anything was possible.
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