by J. S. Brent
Cortes asked for directions to the woman’s place. He approached the islanders like a tourist in search of novelty.
“Dyanela.” They gave her name as though spelling out a fish’s name. “On this island, we call her Nela. She lives behind the Church of Lazi. Take a bike ride- -“.
Dyanela. Are you the answer to my prayers? He wondered and laughed at himself. Catholicism was a superstitious indulgence to him. He saw the devils and angels fighting in the numbers he solemnly studied each day at his company. They were people and not just numbers to him. These were people’s fate that lay in his hands.
The hut where Dyanela lived looked small and inconspicuous beside the looming church of Lazi. He could hear waves crashing at a distance, beyond the darkness and the lights of the community of huts built randomly next to each other. He entered and there were people inside who were surprised and awed by the breadth of his presence. Even in his plain clothes, they could feel his power. He wanted to reassure each of them but then he saw her.
Dyanela rose from the bamboo chair and walked towards him. He was surprised. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She had long, black hair tied back into a bun, revealing the full force of a face of such innocence she looked like a dusky angel. He realized then that even the most obvious beauty existed for everyone to see and not just for him because he had gotten used to that; women becoming conspicuous in his sight, trying to divert his attention towards them.
“Dyanela?”
“Yes,” she could speak English. “Are you alone?’
“Yes.”
She approached him some more and he was suddenly taken aback when she felt his forehead.
“Madre mia!” she exalted in old Spanish Chabacano “ You are burning with fever sir. The island does not suit you. I will introduce you to the island tomorrow. Meantime let me give you a bed for the night so that I can take care of you. Have you just arrived?”
“Yes.” He got confused from the flurry of excitement he caused the people in the hut under the kerosene lamp. “I came from- -“
“Hush.” She silenced him and led him to a small room where there was a tidy bed with an inviting clean, floral sheet on it. He allowed himself to feel vulnerable, pulling out his shirt before lying down on the bed. His body ached all over and he really could feel the stirrings of a fever as he sweated.
Dyanela came in soon after with basin and a small towel. She also brought salt which she sprinkled in the water.
Too tired, he allowed her to wipe his forehead with the towel. She dabbed the towel lower, this time, on his chest. He felt shy and wanted to cover his exposed flesh. He left the feelings behind and moaned in pain and relief. Her touch was cool against his burning skin.
Moonlight streamed through the window and he found her face. Her eyebrows furrowed as she attended to his needs. She now wore a white, low cut chemise. As she reached again to dab his forehead he could see the partial soft, brown arches of her breast.
Finally she sealed his forehead with a cross sign with her thumb oiled with a sweet scent and told him to sleep. When she left the room, he turned towards the moonlight and fell asleep.
***
He awoke and the sun was already well set in the sky. He looked at his watch and confirmed it was noon.
“How are you feeling?” Dyanela asked when he emerged from the room. There were no people this time.
“I feel better. A bit drained, that’s all.” He replied.
She told him to sit on the chair by the table. A bowl of clear, steaming soup was laid before him. In the soup was a skinny chicken with young papayas and some slivers of ginger. He tasted it and was comforted by its tangy flavor. The wind blew in through the curtained window. He looked about and found the place curiously neat and fragrant with the smell of wildflowers in a glass vase.
After he ate she told him to sleep again. She said she was going to visit an ill neighbor and would be back before sundown. She enticed him to a walk by the beach later on.
He did as he was told and woke up at the other end of his sleep feeling even much better. He woke up in time to see the sun almost about to set in the horizon.
Dyanela arrived. She wore a blue, floral cotton dress and her hair was tied back in a simple ponytail. She looked young.
Together they crossed the street in front of the church of Lazi and walked past the low coconut trees towards a line of white beach. Children burnt by the sun, were playing tag on the sands.
“Do you live alone?” he asked furtively
“Yes, my only parent left, my mother died a few years back. But there are lots of people here coming to my home to ask for healing. My house is hardly without people. You, what do you do?”
“I sell,” he stalled to find a suitable answer. “computers in the US.”
“So, Mr. Cortes Ancheta, why are you here?” she finally asked.
“I heard about you. I’m looking for my mother. She has been, as you might say, kidnapped in the US.”
She stopped, braced herself and returned a stray strand of hair behind her ears with her forefinger.
“You seem like a very a very important man in the US. You betray yourself.”
“How?” he laughed despite himself.
“I don’t know.” She replied shyly laughing with him. “You just seem so. What do you really do?”
This time he realized what he said was actually true. On this island he was no tech-giant. He was just an ordinary citizen of the world selling computers.
“I’m sorry, could you tell me where my mother is?” he asked a bit impatient by her line of questioning now. He had no more time. His mother was in peril somewhere, possibly dead.
“I’m also sorry but I don’t do those things anymore.” She humbly apologized. “My visions are occluded now. I am only a trained health worker by the government. That is what the government did to us faith healers here in Siquijor.”
Dyanela didn’t seem bitter about it and would not even blame the government for her loss of faith healing practice.
“I am practical now. They used to tire me so much that I’d faint from those visions and the demands of people who needed my help.”
“But you have to help me.” He implored and there was agony in his voice.
Dyanela stopped to consider him. Her eyes were dark pools of mystery, raging against her own desire to help but something was pulling her back.
“I’m sorry.” She replied and walked ahead of him towards home.
***
That night, they ate in amicable silence as though a rift had gone between them. He thanked her for taking care of him last night and added that he would be gone tomorrow.
They ate the same chicken broth they ate that noon. Dyanela said it was native chicken and was more flavorful than the ones sold in the city grocery stores.
Cortes imagined her grappling the head of an irrepressible chicken and slitting its throat to silence it. The thought disturbed him.
No one visited them that night. It was just him and her alone in the hut. The crashing of waves from the ocean was the only sound between them. He stood up and left her to enter his room.
Inside the room, he took off his shirt and threw it on the bed. He dropped on the bed face up and laughed at himself and the folly of it all.
Dyanela entered the room and approached him in the dark. He sat up.
She took his hands and closed her eyes. Sssshhh, she hushed him.
It took time but she was gathering herself. I know about you, she said and opened her eyes. You are a very important man, a powerful man, so powerful that the most evil forces want to partake of you.
I see, your mother. She is alive but in pain. Somewhere, metal. Metal doors locked, Metal walls, you will not be able to hear her screaming. She is wearing a ring your father gave to her when he was still alive.
That is all, for now Cortes, Dyanela said and embraced him. He wept uncontrollably, shaking, uninhibitedly on her shoulder. I will tell you more when the vis
ions come.
Dyanela stood up in the same white chemise she wore the night before and was about to leave when he stood up as well and reached for her hand. He closed the distance between them and tore at her mouth with his.
She felt so pliable and soft, so feminine he could feel his stark contrast as a man touching her. He felt as though he was violating her but his hunger was much more and he demanded her, with his mouth, to kiss back.
Dyanela wove her fingers with his and kissed him back. She did everything she was told not to do and yet what they were doing seemed more of a prayer than the adorations she made at church. This man needed her so much and she was afraid of his power because she knew that once she gave herself to him, she would never be the same again.
He led her to the bed, uncoiled her long hair and laid her down. He lifted her chemise, pulled down her undergarment and began to feel a startling rush of surge in his loins. She sighed and arched to receive him. He entered her softly and craved for more until he was going faster and faster like the engines of his cars. She received all of it, his ambitions, the fear of losing his mother, the days of penitence he had undergone during the recent days, his journey to this island, alone to seek her and felt rebuked. He was almost punishing her as well as giving himself to her as a gift for no one has ever touched him this way.
You are mine. He groaned and was lifted to an orgasm.
***
For godssake, will you please stop killing those chickens. He lamented but he was only teasing her. For the first time in his whole life he was a happy man, simply and unenduringly happy. He was not a happy child. His childhood was filled with chaos and misery and so he clawed his way to wealth and power to find what others seem to have found, so simply in a nanosecond, by falling in love.
We’ll have fish instead, he called out again for Dyanela was behind the hut dealing with another chicken she intended to roast for their lunch.
In the afternoons they would walk, hand in hand by the beach. Sometimes they would play in the shallow part of the water with the waves slapping against their legs. Shirtless, his skin was growing more tanned each day. He would lift her up from the waters and she would pretend to flail and demand to be put down. But she loved touching his bare chest and find moments of rest by putting her head against it.
There were times when they ate alone when Dyanela would see him tinkering with his food, distracted, distant and away from her. She would pull his face towards her and he would smile, as though indulging a small child. She knew then that he was thinking of his mother.
They travelled to Dumaguete City on a ferry boat filled with people and baskets of fish and corals. She touched a passenger, an old woman with chaffed, burnt hands and prayed to heal it. The old woman touched Cortes for him to know they had become smooth as silk.
Dumaguete was a university town and he spoke of paying for her college tuition. This saddened Dyanela a bit, for it meant they would eventually part. But she was elated at the prospect of being able to study. They visited the university, Silliman, and wandered about the hallways with a college entrance brochure in hand. It had very old buildings with fine arches and wooden beams painted over with a soft, cream color.
At night they would walk the boulevard and eat tempura sticks dipped in sauce. They sat by the pier eating their tempura and watched the barges luminous with lights against a tight, black sky. He would look at her when she wasn’t looking at him. He would memorize every detail of her swan-like neck, her wide, slanting Asian eyes, the slenderness of her dusky arms.
They were billeted at a hotel and made passionate love each night. He loved the sound of her voice caught up in the netting of her throat each time he entered her and felt a different kind of power. It was a power to give pleasure to a woman and wondered if he weren’t so different from the animals after all with their simple ways of fruition.
On some nights they would eat at restaurants. Dyanela appeared different now. Yes, he bought her dresses and strappy sandals from the shopping mall. She refused them at first but when he brought her to fine restaurants she became insecure of how she looked therefore accepted his presents, to look beautiful for him. He also gave her a pair of small, diamond earrings that were roughly cut and looked so natural on her.
She was messier now, more loose with her dark hair untied and the diamond earrings stark white and sparkling through the strands of her wild hair. They garfed down on food randomly chosen on top of the menu. She was beautiful and an inevitable fate for him since the first time he knew about her from Sistio.
On some days they would dodge the university guards and librarians to wander about the old library in search of books to read. She seemed hungry for knowledge and this potential for intelligence amazed him. Why did no one bother to send her to school, exploiting her powers of divination without thought to bringing them out into a proper system where she could blossom and flourish. They read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera and she wept at the impatience of Florentino Ariza having sex with different women before telling Fermina Daza that he had never been with another woman all his life. She also laughed at the antics of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov who embodied for her, the realization that a woman, a girl-child could be cruel sometimes and refuse a man his freedom to be with her despite the power and knowledge of what she was doing to him.
On other days they would stroll down the shopping malls and cool off with ice creams in cones, watching people, lovers, old married couples who have become friends after they had been lovers and children straying from their mothers to watch Harlequins. They would watch movies after movies and she would fall asleep on his shoulder on some of them and in others laugh or cry.
He remembered the first time he had made love to a woman. It was his secret. After all, he knew, he was giving a gift to Dyanela by being experienced. The woman was his college professor. He wooed her and she unwound because she could not resist his charming self which was so different from the diligent pupil she had in the classroom. The poor professor was tired, feeling old and gaunt from work. He wanted to transform her into something new in his hands. After he had her, she would sidle past him like a cat while he was in his chair in the classroom. She allowed him to see her panty line. She would follow him to the comfort room when he excused himself in class and they would pump their way inside a cubicle because they had to release tension between them.
But love was a different matter, he believed. Falling in love with Dyanela was a fate he had been saving up for without knowing it until it hit him that he was actually falling in love. He had been celibate for far too many years and was satisfied with this conclusion.
I want to take you.
Where? She asked innocently. Here? In the comfort room?
Oh, the convenience of comfort rooms, he sighed deep inside his mind, his manhood growing between his legs.
They were in another restaurant, facing the sea, with the full view of the sun falling into the ocean.
You are becoming spoilt, young child. He scolded and braced himself for what he was about to tell her.
“Horse, carriage, a white dress, a white veil. Something new, something old, something borrowed, something blue.” He summed it all up for her. “Come with me back to America. I want to marry you.”
She kept quiet for a while.
“Don’t you need to get engaged before that?” she followed his funny, cryptic message done with a table between the two of them.
So, it was going to be a negotiation, he realized.
“There’s nothing for you here. You could study there or do anything you want.” He continued.
Silence.
“I don’t want to marry your money, Cortes. I am happy the way I am.”
“I want to put a ring on that finger and never lose you.” He insisted.
That night they did not make love and tried to sleep like separate entities from different planets. She seemed very disturbed by his proposal and he wondered if she were in love with someone
else.
“Is there someone else?” he asked though confident that the first night he had entered her she had blood on her chemise the morning after.
“Yes, Cortes. Your mother. We have to find your mother in time before they send another ransom note and you are here, far away from where you live and cannot give anything to them. Have you contacted the people in charge over there?”
“No. I haven’t Dyanela because I am here with you.”
“I have to go back soon. I have to do something about it.”
“I know but while you are here you are still mine.” She claimed.
She noticed his head bow down at the weight of his problem. The days he spent with Dyanela had distracted him to the point that he could almost forget who he was and why he came here. She had given him liberation from his troubled thoughts.
He was afraid that if he left her here someone would take his place. He had somehow become jealous of every man who looked at her, as though they tainted her with their eyes. He couldn’t bear it.
That night he dreamt of his mother when his father died. The sound was loud and screeching. Suddenly, it wasn’t a dream at all. It was Dyanela beside him.
Metal! She screamed. Cortes became afraid for her for her eyes seemed blind. She was blindingly reaching out with both hands for something through the dark. Sugar cane? No, fields?
No. A warehouse. Cortes, write this down!
Cortes caught his backpack and pulled out his notebook and pen.