Riverrun

by Danton Remoto

  Papa said, in-between the lashings, that he would not raise a child like me, that I should learn to check my temper, that we could also afford to buy a TV set, I should have asked for one, that he would never be shamed by a woman who never finished elementary school, whose husband was the dumbest trainee in the barracks.

  All these words were flung while his leather belt cut the air, then bit into my skin. After the third lashing, Mama said, “Stop,” but Papa could not be appeased. And so my grandmother, my old and magnificent grandmother, stood between Papa and me and spoke in a voice that when I remember now still gives me the shivers. She said to Papa: “If you don’t want to stop, then strike me.”

  I looked back. Papa’s hand stopped in midair, the belt hanging limply, like a sail suddenly without wind. My grandmother walked to the bench, gathered me in her arms, and led me slowly back to her room.

  My grandmother’s room was redolent with the smell of White Flower and the medicinal oil Pak Fah Yeow, which she bought from the Chinese merchants in Binondo. She ran her fingers through my hair.

  Later in life, my grandmother would return to Albay, to live in the old house my grandfather built for her. But I only had to smell White Flower or open the 1.5 ml bottle of Pak Fah Yeow, let the soothing smell perfume the air, and I would be back in her room. That night, her fingers traced my buttocks and thighs still raw with pain. Then, she uncapped her Vicks Vaporub and applied it on my reddened skin. Her other hand rested on my forehead. Then she ran her fingers through my hair again, my small and dark grandmother, the “ugliest” among her fair-skinned sisters, as she had claimed, her voice warm and consoling, and suddenly I began to sob, a sharp sob that tore at me savagely, now that my father was no longer there to see me. After that, I fell into a deep, deep sleep.

  But it was Papa who woke me up the next morning. He told me to wash my face and take a warm bath, so we could all have breakfast together. He even led me by the hand to the washbasin.

  After breakfast, he brought me to their room, asked me to stand before him while he sat down and examined my thighs. I knew they had lines on them, like the tracks of tires; parts of my skin had turned ash gray. He asked me why he gave me a lashing, his voice uncommonly gentle, and I told him about Boy, their TV set, his sea-hag of a mother (although I didn’t say sea-hag, then: I didn’t want another lashing), my anger, the rock smashing into the window.

  He asked me, “Did you do the right thing?”

  I was silent. Of course it was wrong, I wanted to tell him, but what really got me was that door slammed before me.

  But all I did was shake my head. He said I should not do it again; he would buy us a TV set, one bigger than our neighbor’s and a colored one, as well, as long as I promised not to smash windows again.

  I nodded, Papa smiled, and we were friends again. Or so he thought.

  American Milk

  MY FIRST DAY in school was a wonderful day. Because my mother had already taught me how to write, I was not afraid anymore to carry my blue school bag with its lined pad paper, pencil, and crayons. And because my mother also taught the Grade Six class in the building across the quadrangle, I knew she would always be near.

  During the first month in school, the Americans from Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City came. The men were tall, with small brown dots on their pale white skin. They came at eight o’clock in the morning in a convoy of three vehicles. The first and last vehicles were trucks with uniformed men carrying rifles. The middle was a van with the men in white.

  All the Grade One students formed two lines in the dry and treeless quadrangle. In front stood the two Americans, giving milk to all the children. The knots of children were excited, their voices buzzing, because we only saw Americans on TV. When my turn came, I looked up at these tall men, craning my neck until I thought it would snap.

  The American smiled and laughed. “Weather up here different, son. Have you had milk for breakfast today?”

  I would have answered “yes,” along with dried fish fried crisp and fried rice smelling of garlic, but he had already poured the milk in a tall, red plastic glass and gave it to me.

  Like the rest of the children, I drank the milk in front of the Americans. “They just wanted to be sure you would have enough energy for the school day,” Mrs. Lood, my Grade One teacher, said later in class.

  And so I drank the milk in one go. It was thick and creamy and so unlike the Darigold evaporated milk we drank at home, watered down so that the supply would last longer.

  “Good boy,” the American quipped. “You may keep the glass, but bring it again on Monday, for the next milk-drinking session.”

  Later, we would return to our classrooms—Quonset huts that were remnants from the Second World War. In these hot and airless rooms, the rooms shaped like domes, we were fined one centavo for every “local” word we used. We became spies of some sort, listening to our pug-nosed Social Studies teacher brightly say: “Thank God the Americans came because they improved the color and features of our race.”

  In our English class, we mouthed “things” by turning our tongues into a curve, with the “h” aspirated so audibly. In this class, we also read hardbound books from America about John and Annie and their dog Spot, which also seemed to speak in English. He barked “arf-arf” and not “bow-wow” the way the local askals, dogs on the streets, did it.

  And so every week for the next ten months, the Americans in white came with their free milk, to make sure we would grow up as tall and healthy and cheerful as they were.

  Ice Drop

  MAMA ALWAYS BOUGHT my merienda or snacks. She did not want me to buy junk food and soft drinks. Bad for the teeth, my mother with the whitest teeth would say.

  Always, when the bell rang for recess, I would go to her classroom, Grade VI Section 1, housed in a building hemmed in by star-apple trees turning their leaves of translucent green in the sunlight. The leaves were green on top, brown below: Their twin colors never ceased to amaze me.

  I would cross the field, the wooden building looming into view. Then I would climb the concrete steps—one, two, three, four—and stop before the door just as my Mama was about to dismiss her class. I would walk into the classroom just as her students were leaving. Some of the girls would pinch my cheeks; the boys would mess up my hair. I wondered why people bigger than me and twice my height would do that, and then I would smirk.

  I would go to Mama, her fingers and uniform smeared with chalk marks. That was how I always remembered her: wiping chalk that somehow had managed to whiten her sky-blue uniform. After this, she would hand me my snacks: boiled peanuts, or colored rice cakes topped with grated coconut, or fried plantains wrapped in sweetened rolls, everything except junk food. That, and orange juice in a tall blue Tupperware glass. Gratefully, I would wolf down the food, smile at her, then rush down the building, onto the wide field glittering with sunlight.

  Since she prepared my snacks anyway, she only gave me five centavos per day. But in those days, five centavos could buy you any of the following: a large rectangle of chicharon, supposedly pork skin but just flour with artificial flavoring and that old reliable MSG.

  Five centavos could also buy you a bar of Chocnut, crumbly chocolate that stuck to your gums; or a try in the game of bunot in the school canteen. The game involved choosing a number, after which the storekeeper would peel away the layer of paper covering the numbers on a board. Whatever was attached to the number—a sheaf of Tex playing cards or five marbles, ten rubber bands or a plastic duck, a car or a robot made of tin and painted with the gaudiest colors—would be your prize.

  But one day I felt healthy enough from all of my mother’s food, so when the canteen was transferred to the building farthest from Mama’s classroom, I ate something she had forbidden me to eat: ice drop.

  “It’s so cold it will just give you tonsillitis again,” she would say, “and then, you don’t even know if the ice drop is clean.” Nevertheless—

  One day I saw the ambulant vendor in the
school yard, standing under the dapple of acacia leaves. He was opening his Styrofoam ice box. I went to him. When I saw vapor rising from the mouth of the box, I ran to take a peek.

  Ice drop, indeed: shreds of young coconut, boiled red beans, milk, and sugar forming a concoction frozen around a flat wooden stick. After looking to the left and then to the right, I bought one, walked fast and only stopped when I was already out of anybody’s view.

  A wall hid me from the world. As I leaned against it, I hungrily pulled away the wrapper. The ice drop had begun to melt, the sticky liquid trailing down my fingers. I licked my now-sweet fingers, and then began nibbling the ice-drop.

  First the top, full and swollen with shredded young coconut meat and red beans, letting the sweetness bloom in my mouth. Then the body (chilling my teeth, numbing my lips, but it didn’t matter). In a few minutes, nothing was left but the stick. I went to the faucet to wash my hands, then returned to the boring class in Arithmetic.

  But that night my tonsils began to itch. I wish I could put my hand all the way down my throat so I could put my thumb and forefinger around the thing that itched. My nose began to run; dry cough followed. And after a few hours, when I faced the mirror and opened my mouth, my tonsils had flamed into a soft, red mass.

  Then my mother would begin her ritual. First she scolded me for disobeying her, threatening to completely cut off my five-centavo allowance. Then she would fix me a glass of lukewarm calamansi juice (five small round lemons squeezed into the water), with no sugar (yuccch!), and make me drink it.

  Then, she would make me gargle a glass with the following mixture: potent vinegar from fermented coconut sap and hot water. This was a “cure” my father said he learnt from his Thai classmate when both Asians were trying to survive their first winter in the military school in Colorado.

  Afterward, my mother would tuck me into bed, giving me a back rub. Like my grandmother, she would use Vicks Vaporub, her warm fingers kneading my back and chest. She would rub my neck and finish this off with something that had the color and coolness of ice. Only then would I drift into a sleep ripe with dreams.

  The Piano

  A MONTH AFTER they were married, Papa bought Mama a piano. It was an upright piano, its body darker than wine, which Father Pelagio had put up for sale because he planned to buy a new Yamaha organ for the chapel.

  Papa borrowed money from the savings and loan association in the military base, added his savings from a year’s stay in Colorado as a military scholar, then one day brought Mama over to the chapel.

  “But we have no choir practice today,” Mama protested loudly.

  “I think Father Pelagio wants to tell you something,” Papa answered.

  Mama must have smirked (that petulant smirk I also have), put on her Catwoman sunglasses with its frame studded with rhinestones, threw a sheer red bandanna over her permed hair, then sat beside Papa in our jeep.

  Dust trailed the jeep. It was summer, and the heat blew right into the very pores of your skin. The leaves fell; the houses snored in their siesta; the sun was an intense eye in the sky. It blinked when Papa’s jeep stopped before the chapel and Padre Pelagio, his belly round like a watermelon, waddled out of the rectory.

  “Good afternoon, Father,” Mama said, kissing the hand of the priest.

  “O ano, are you here to get it na?” the priest asked.

  “Get what?”

  Papa smiled smugly (the way all those smug Hollywood lead actors must have smiled), then led Mama inside the chapel.

  “This,” Papa said, touching ivory keys the color of moth wings, “is my gift to you.”

  Seven years later, I would sit before this piano, required to practice three times a day by my teacher, who also happened to be my mother.

  “But it’s summer!” I wanted to protest. The dragonflies were hovering over the stream, their bodies the color of amber and fire. Our homemade kites were waiting to be flown in the clear, blue sky. The fruit trees were waiting in the orchard—mangoes, guavas, aratiles, duhat—the fruits ripened by the sun, waiting for our young and greedy hands.

  But I had to stay at home and play the piano. Sometimes, I would just sit in my room and sulk. But my sulking Papa would not let pass, so he would make me sit before the piano. Then, he would install himself on the perezosa, the lazy chair beside the piano, and listen.

  He would ask me to play Sarung Banggi, a love song from the Bicol Region where he and my mother were born.

  Sarung banggi

  Sa higdaan

  nakadangog ako

  hinuni ning sarong gamgam

  Sa luba ko, katurugan,

  bako kundi simong boses iyo

  palan.

  Dagos ako hangon

  Si sakuyang mata iminuklat.

  Kadtong kadikloman ako

  ay nangalagkalag.

  Kasu ihiling ko si sakuyang mata

  sa itaas,

  simong lawog nahiling ko

  maliwanag.

  Kadtong kadikloman kan mahiling

  taka.

  Namundo kong puso talos na nag-ogma.

  Minsan di nahaloy idtong napagmasdan

  sagkod noarin pa man dai ko

  malilingawan.

  (One night

  as I lay in bed

  I suddenly heard

  The singing of a bird.

  I thought it was a dream

  But it was your voice

  I heard

  I then rose at once

  And opened my eyes wide.

  In that darkness I looked around

  And when I raised my eyes,

  I saw your face very clearly.

  In that darkness when I saw you,

  My sad heart found happiness

  At once.

  Though I saw your image only briefly,

  I will never forget

  That night

  Forever.)

  But when I looked at my father, he was already asleep. Perhaps it must be the heat. Or my bad playing. Or the song itself, carrying him on its wings, back to a past when he was still young, looking for the images of love on a night washed by the milky light of the moon.

  The Man on the Moon

  LIKE SOMEBODY WITH a Ph.D., Papa was explaining to my grandmother and me how the Apollo 11 would fly to the moon.

  From blast-off at Cape Canaveral to the rocket’s head splitting from its tail to the actual landing on the moon—he explained all this with verve. First, he slipped his right arm in his brown imitation-leather slippers, tracing a trajectory. Then, slipper and hand separated, like molting skin. Soon, only the slippers were left, standing for the rocket landing on the cold, windless landscape of the moon.

  That night we watched man’s first landing on the moon in our new colored TV. A blur of images. The Stars and Stripes. Then, the astronauts in their white, bloated uniforms, looking like aliens. The rocket blasting off, hurtling in space like a bright comet, and then many hours later, the moon: full of craters deeper and wider than anything I had ever seen. After the Apollo 11 had landed on the moon, the three astronauts free-floating in space (One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind). Men on the moon, my father said, the greatest country in the world staking its claim on a territory millions of miles away from home.

  Years later, my grandmother would bring me to Manila on one of her summer vacations. Nora Aunor—the short, brown actress whose rise to fame defied the colonial notions of beauty in the country, she whose eyes spoke a language of their own—has a new film called Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo (Once a Moth). Complete title: Minsa’y Isang Gamu-gamo Ang Lumaban Sa Lawin (Once A Moth Fought A Hawk).

  In the film, Nora plays a nurse, Corazon, whose ambition was to go to the United States and work there. She lived near Clark Air Force Base in Angeles City. But one day, her younger brother was shot by an American soldier on the periphery of the base fence, mistaking the young boy for a “wild pig.”

  Another image: Corazon’s grandfather (played by the magnificent Pedro Fausti
no) was already alive during the Philippine Revolution against Spain in 1896–98, and later, the Filipino-American War from 1898–1904. As a young boy of ten, he wore calzoncillos, like long johns that reached down to the knees. Inside the sewn edges of his calzoncillos was a piece of paper folded many times over. It would contain, in code, the enemy positions, the number of the men, the tactics of the revolutionaries, whom the Americans called bandidos (bandits). When Corazon’s grandfather saw the Americans landing on the moon, he asked, “Kanila na rin ba ang buwan? (Do they now own even the moon?)”

  That night, after a heavy dinner of shrimp sinigang, I went out to the backyard. Everything was silent, as if the night itself was holding its breath. Beyond the acacia leaves, the moon rose clear across the Zambales mountains.

  While helping her set the table, our housemaid Ludy told me that there was already a naked man on the moon even before the men of Apollo 11 came. She said he looked like the man in the five-centavo coin. So that night, I took out the coin I had stolen from the pocket of Papa’s pants, and in the light of the moon I looked for the naked man. Curly hair, a face well chiseled, broad shoulders. His buttocks were firm and his legs, long and powerful. He was bending down, his body frozen in an arc. In his right hand he held a hammer, pounding something on the anvil in front of him. He was trying to make an object from ore, a shape from all that rawness. Like a god. Patiently he bent down, waiting to be blasted by something like lightning, or by a flash of revelation.

  I squinted at the night sky, as if I had Superman’s X-ray vision, or the eyes of Lee Majors, the $6-million man. But tried as I might, beyond the trees and the mountains I saw no man on the moon. There was only a lighted disk suspended in the air many, many miles away, alone, beautiful and pure.

  When the Wind Blew

  TYPHOON YOLING TRAVELED at a dizzying 200 kilometers per hour, in its wake a tail of fierce winds. Like the moon, it seemed to have raised water from the sea, for when it fell on the land, it rained so hard it seemed the very skin of sky had been torn.