The Kite of Stars and Other Stories

by Dean Francis Alfar

  "Of course," mumbled butcher's boy drowsily. "After all, this shouldn't take more time than I have to spare."

  "It may be significantly longer than you think," the artisan said, shaking his head.

  "Then please, Ser Antevadez, dream the design and I'll have everything you listed when we return." She stood to leave.

  That very day, Maria Isabella told her parents and both sets of her padrinos that she was going off on a long trip. She invoked her right of Ver du Mundo (when women of at least sixteen years, and men of at least twenty years, could go forth into the wideness of Hinirang; sometimes to seek their fortune, sometimes to run from it). They all gave her their blessings, spoke fondly of how she used to dance and sing as a child, saluted her new right as a woman and full citizen of Ciudad Meiora, accompanied her all the way to the Portun du Transgresiones with more recalled memories of her youth, and sent her on her way. As for the butcher's boy, he waited until she was well away and then joined her on the well-worn path, the Sendero du'l Viajero, along with the supplies she had asked him to purchase.

  "I'm ready to go," the butcher's boy grinned at her. He was clad in a warm tunic in the manner of city folk, and around his neck, for luck, he wore an Ajima'at, a wooden charm fashioned in the form of a wheel.

  "What did you tell your kinfolk?" Maria Isabella asked him, as he helped her mount a sturdy horse.

  "That I would be back in a month or so."

  It took almost sixty years for Maria Isabella and the butcher's boy to find all the items on Melchor Antevadez's impossible list.

  They began at Pur'Anan, and then trekked to Katakios and Viri'Ato (where the sanctuary of the First Tree stood unmolested by time).

  They traveled north to the lands of Bontoc and Cabarroquis (where the Povo Montaha dwelt in seclusion).

  They sailed eastwards to Palao'an and the Islas du'l Calami'an (where the traders from countries across the seas converged in a riot of tongues).

  They ventured westwards to the dark lands of Siqui'jor and Jomal'jig (where the Silent Ones kept court whenever both sun and moon occupied the same horizon).

  They visited the fabled cities of the south: Diya al Tandag, Diya al Din, and Diya al Bajao (where fire-shrouded Djin and the Tiq'Barang waged an endless war of attrition).

  They entered the marbled underworld of the Sea Lords of Rumblon and braved the Lair of the M'Arinduque (in whose house the dead surrendered their memories of light and laughter).

  When they ran out of money after the third year of travel, Maria Isabella and the butcher's boy spent time looking for ways to finance their quest. She began knowing only how to ride, dance, sing, play the arpa, the violin, and the flauta, embroider, sew, and write poetry about love; the butcher's boy began only knowing how to cut up a cow. By the time they had completed the list, they had more than quintupled the amount of money they began with, and they both knew how to manage a caravan; run a plantation; build and maintain fourteen kinds of seagoing and rivergoing vessels; raise horses big and small, and fowl, dogs, and seagulls; recite the entire annals of six cultures from memory; speak and write nineteen languages; prepare medicine for all sorts of ailments, worries, and anxieties; make flashpowder, lu fuego du ladron, and picaro de fuegos artificiales; make glass, ceramics, and lenses from almost any quality sand; and many, many other means of making money.

  In the seventh year of the quest, a dreadful storm destroyed their growing caravan of found things and they lost almost everything (she clutched vainly at things as they flew and spun in the downpour of wind and water, and the butcher's boy fought to keep the storm from taking her away as well). It was the last time that Maria Isabella allowed herself to cry. The butcher's boy took her hand and they began all over again. They were beset by thieves and learned to run (out of houses and caves and temples; on roads and on sea lanes and in gulleys; on horses, aguilas, and waves). They encountered scoundrels and sinverguenzza and learned to bargain (at first with various coins, jewels, and metals; and later with promises, threats, and dreams). They were beleaguered by nameless things in nameless places and learned to defend themselves (first with wooden pessoal, then later with kris, giavellotto, and lamina).

  In their thirtieth year together, they took stock of what they had, referred to the thousands of items still left unmarked on their list, exchanged a long, silent look filled with immeasurable meaning and went on searching for the components of the impossible kite — acquiring the dowel by planting a langka seed at the foot of the grove of a kindly diuata (and waiting the seven years it took to grow, unable to leave); winning the lower spreader in a drinking match against the three eldest brothers of Duma'Alon; assembling the pieces of the lower edge connector while fleeing a war party of the Sumaliq; solving the riddles of the toothless crone Ai'ai'sin to find what would be part of a wing tip; climbing Apo'amang to spend seventy sleepless nights to get the components of the ferrule; crafting an artificial wave to fool the cerena into surrending their locks of hair that would form a portion of the tether; rearing miniature horses to trade to the Duende for parts of the bridle; and finally spending eighteen years painstakingly collecting the fifteen thousand different strands of thread that would make up the aquilone's surface fabric.

  When at last they returned to Ciudad Meiora, both stooped and older, they paused briefly at the gates of the Portun du Transgresiones. The butcher's boy looked at Maria Isabella and said, "Well, here we are at last."

  She nodded, raising a weary arm to her forehead and making the sign of homecoming.

  "Do you feel like you've wasted your life?" she asked him, as the caravan bearing everything they had amassed lumbered into the city.

  "Nothing is ever wasted," the butcher's boy told her.

  They made their way to the house of Melchor Antevadez and knocked on his door. A young man answered them and sadly informed them that the wizened artisan had died many, many years ago, and that he, Reuel Antevadez, was the new Maestro du Cosas Ingravidas.

  "Yes, yes. But do you still make kites?" Maria Isabella asked him.

  "Kites? Of course. From time to time, someone wants an aquilone or—"

  "Before Ser Antevadez, Melchor Antevadez, died, did he leave instructions for a very special kind of kite?" she interrupted.

  "Well ... ," mumbled Reuel Antevadez, "my great-grandfather did leave a design for a woman named Maria Isabella du'l Cielo, but—"

  "I am she." She ignored his shocked face. "Listen, young man. I have spent all my life gathering everything Melchor Antevadez said he needed to build my kite. Everything is outside. Build it."

  And so Reuel Antevadez unearthed the yellowing parchment that contained the design of the impossible kite that Melchor Antevadez had dreamed into existence, referenced the parts from the list of things handed to him by the butcher's boy, and proceeded to build the aquilone.

  When it was finished, it looked nothing at all like either Maria Isabella or the butcher's boy had imagined. The kite was huge and looked like a star, but those who saw it could not agree on how best to describe the marvelous conveyance.

  After he helped strap her in, the butcher's boy stood back and looked at the woman he had grown old with.

  "This is certainly no time for tears," Maria Isabella reprimanded him gently, as she gestured for him to release the kite.

  "No, there is time for everything," the butcher's boy whispered to himself as he pushed and pulled at the ropes and strings, pulley and levers and gears of the impossible contrivance.

  "Goodbye, goodbye!" she shouted down to him as the star kite began its rapid ascent to the speckled firmament above.

  "Goodbye, goodbye," he whispered, as his heart finally broke into a thousand mismatched pieces, each one small, hard, and sharp. The tears of the butcher's boy (who had long since ceased to be a boy) flowed freely down his face as he watched her rise — the extraordinary old woman he had always loved strapped to the frame of an impossible kite.

  As she rose, he sighed and reflected on the absurdity of life, the he
aviness of loss, the cruelty of hope, the truth about quests, and the relentless nature of a love that knew only one direction. His hands swiftly played out the tether (that part of the marvelous rope they had bargained for with two riddles, a blind rooster, and a handful of cold and lusterless diamante in a bazaar held only once every seven years on an island in the Dag'at Palabras Tacitas) and he realized that all those years they were together, she had never known his name.

  As she rose above the city of her birth, Maria Isabella took a moment to gasp at the immensity of the city that sprawled beneath her, recalled how everything had begun, fought the trembling of her withered hands, and with a fishbone knife (that sad and strange knife which had been passed from hand to hand, from women consumed by unearthly passion, the same knife which had been part of her reward for solving the mystery of the Rajah Sumibon's lost turtle shell in the southern lands of Diya al Din) cut the glimmering tether.

  Up, up, up, higher and higher and higher she rose. She saw the winding silver ribbon of the Pasigla, the fluted roofs of Lu Ecolia du Arcana Menor ei Mayor, the trellises and gardens of the Plaza Emperyal, and the dimmed streets of the Mercado du Coristas. And Maria Isabella looked down and thought she saw everything, everything.

  At one exquisite interval during her ascent, Maria Isabella thought she spied the precise tower where Lorenzo du Vicenzio ei Salvadore, the Stargazer, must live and work. She felt the exuberant joy of her lost youth bubble up within her and mix with the fiery spark of love she had kept alive for sixty years, and in a glorious blaze of irrepressible happiness she waved her free hand with wild abandon, shouting the name that had been forever etched into her heart.

  When a powerful wind took the kite to sudden new heights, when Ciudad Meiora and everything below her vanished in the dark, she stopped shouting, and began to laugh and laugh and laugh.

  And Maria Isabella du'l Cielo looked up at the beginning of forever and thought of nothing, nothing at all.

  And in the city below, in one of the high rooms of the silent Torre du Astrunomos (where those who had served with distinction were housed and honored), an old man, long-retired and plagued by cataracts, sighed in his sleep and dreamed a dream of unnamed stars.

  Saturdays with Fray Villalobos

  I

  WHEN I REMEMBER Fray Villalobos, I always think of Saturdays. During my time at the misión near Kalatag’an in the southern part of Batangas, it quickly became my favorite day of the week, with the exception, of course, of Sundays when we held the solemn and sacred services of the Tres Hermanas. On Saturdays, Fray Villalobos visited the different barangays within the sphere of our Church’s influence (and sometimes, just beyond), and I accompanied him.

  We’d leave right after the first morning bells, on horseback, our satchels filled with hymnals and our saddlebags filled with spices and other ingredients liberally procured from the misión’s pantry — for Fray Villalobos did not only believe in preaching to the heathen, but also in learning their culinary traditions, which, by his definition, were beyond the question of religion. And so we’d invariably travel across the territory marked by our faith, and venture into the villages of both converts and pagans, to preach and to partake of their fare.

  The first time he told me about this, I could not help but ask him why.

  “Monja Barraquias, you are here from Ispancialo to record how our great misión of conversion progresses, yes?” he smiled, as we paused to water our horses.

  “Yes, of course,” I replied. “That is, after all, the entire reason we all came to Hinirang.”

  “True, true,” he said. “Well, my belief is that while we may hold the keys of salvation, the Indio hold the keys to heaven on earth — at least in a gastronomic sense!” he boomed, laughing, as I tried to shape a counter-argument.

  “But why do you bother to know about what they eat? Is not their spiritual nourishment of paramount importance? What relevance do their culinary habits have with the work of the Mother Church?” I asked him.

  “Apparently, Monja Barraquias, you haven’t tried adobo,” he said as he helped me up my mount.

  “No, I do not even know what adobo is,” I confessed, trapped in the non-sequitur he offered.

  “It is simply wonderful,” he grinned again, “and I’m sure if we look hard enough, we’ll find some good family preparing the pork variety.”

  “And you’d trade the Word for a viand?”

  “Ah, Monja Barraquias,” he murmured sagely as his belly jiggled to the road’s rhythm, “I have found that a quiet stomach ensures a quiet mind, and a quiet mind is a lovely, lovely receptacle for the Word. Surely a woman of your perception would not disagree?”

  “But it’s just food. Certainly you don’t mean—”

  “No meal in Hinirang is ever ‘just food’,” he exclaimed, mortified, “It is a way of life.”

  “A pagan way of life, Fray Villalobos.”

  “Are not all edible things of the Tres?”

  “But does it not give the impression that our own food is in some way inferior?”

  “Do you equate food with faith?”

  “But—”

  “You’ll see.”

  We did find an Indio family preparing adobo that Saturday. I surmised that they knew Fray Villalobos quite well, considering the welcome they gave us. He immediately immersed himself in helping them prepare the meal, always smiling and keeping a dual-language repartee going — with the family members in their thick tongue, and with me, in ours. He explained to me about the ingredients, outlining the process of preparation, and kept his hands as busy as his mouth.

  In a large earthen pot, he brought to some water to boil, adding vinegar, garlic, salt, bay leaves, and pepper. He added pork, so favored by the natives, cut into bite-sized cubes, as well as several quick dashes of brown sugar, and let the concoction boil again. Then he lowered the heat, allowing the mixture to simmer, as he and the ladies of the house prepared the rice, chatting what about, I never knew. The final step was to add some heady soy sauce and a splash of Church wine (to my initial dismay) under a low flame.

  Thus began my conversion to Fray Villalobos’ way of thinking, after that single meal, eating the tasty dish with my hands, seated on the thatched floor with him and the Indio family. I found that adding a little salt to my bowl of rice enhanced the pork’s flavor.

  And when the meal was done, Fray Villalobos and I spent the afternoon in the family’s company, as the rotund cleric told stories about the Tres Hermanas. Having heard it all before, I was lulled to sleep by the pleasant afternoon sun, the buzzing of flies, and my nose’s memory of the tender adobo, thinking how the subtle marriage of sugar and vinegar made everything simply extraordinary.

  Adobong Baboy

  a little vinegar

  a little water

  some peeled and crushed garlic

  a pinch of salt

  a few bay leaves

  a pinch of black pepper

  soft pork cut into small cubes

  a little soy sauce

  a splash of consecrated red wine

  very few dried hot peppers

  some sugar

  *

  ANOTHER SATURDAY MORNING found us discussing matters of faith.

  “Do you have difficulty explaining our faith to them?” I asked.

  “At first, yes,” he nodded, “but then I learned their language. And what an astonishing language it is, my friend! Just like their food!”

  I could not repress my laughter. “Why is it that inevitably, no matter where we start from, all our conversations end up with food?”

  “Because food is simply another language and I aim to be a polyglot.”

  “Or a glutton.”

  “Ah, ah,” he admonished me, before breaking into a broad grin, “Gluttony is a terrible sin, eating without control. We eat like this only every Saturday.”

  “If food is a language, then we are all linguists par excellence,” I replied.

  “Just because everyone eats
does not mean everyone understands,” he said. “What people eat and how they prepare what they eat tell you more about their culture and way of life than almost anything else.”

  “And so by eating their food, you claim to know them?” I asked.

  “By eating their food with them, I have learned about their hopes and dreams, their fears and misgivings, yes.”

  “But the Word offers hope.” I told him.

  “Of course, Monja Barraquias. Of course, it does,” he answered, “But it has to be prepared for consumption.”

  For lunch that Saturday, I learned how to prepare bitter melon — in the Indio language, ampalaya — into a dish called pinakbet. We were cooking in a small outdoor kitchen amid wandering chickens, and I offered to help by cutting the vile-looking vegetable into quarters, which prompted both Fray Villalobos and our hosts to stop me physically.

  “My dear friend,” he told me as he gently wrestled the knife from my hands, “if you do it that way, the ampalaya will absorb too much salt and water. That will cause it to toughen and shrink. It is better their way. Watch, watch.”

  Our host, a thin old woman chewing betel nuts, cut the ampalaya lengthwise, on one side, leaving the opposite side uncut. Helplessly, I watched her cut everything up the correct way, her hands a blur of routine motion, everything precise, everything just right, down to the little bit of stem left in the last slice of eggplant, which she cut halfway into four so that it blossomed like a flower.

  When she was done with all the cutting, she nodded at Fray Villalobos who tossed ginger, garlic, onions, tomatoes, and some pork into the pot of sizzling oil. I offered to stir, thinking the act quite logical, which sadly provoked from him a short lecture on how some things were better left alone. I stood back, resigned, as he added a bit of bagoong isda or anchovies to the thickening sauce, then in quick succession, a small rain of ampalaya, okra, and eggplant. The old woman deep-fried some pork, which they call bagnet, which was traditionally served with the steaming vegetable dish.