Juggling a dual life has never been this difficult! Now a college instructor and a masters student in Culture and Arts Studies, I barely have time to write a decent post. To make up, I am posting a rough draft of a short story I submitted as part of the compilation of works for my Creative Writing class. And oh, if we're friends on Facebook, you'd probably know why I chose the Subanen people as the main characters in this story. (My final thesis + project would be on the Subanen people, their unrecorded tales, and their balians, shamans and their traces in the contemporary Juan, Filipino.) Enjoy, you guys! I'll be back after I submit all my requirements (both for my masters and my students' grades)!
The Appointed
“I saw an angel at the swamp today,” Gido whispered. His eyes were on my hands clutched around the wooden pestle. I was pounding the burnt rice father brought home from the harvest before the sun rose and my shirt has already started sticking to my torso, and my damp hair to my forehead. In a few days Bae Neneng will be asking for her share of grain for the pangasi, the rice wine, for the next moon’s wedding. Today is not a good day to be bothered if I do not want to get the promised two pesos so I rolled my eyes and continued pounding the remaining grain.
“He is very strange,” he continued in his high-pitched, goat-like voice, disturbing the rhythm of the pounding and the thrusting of my pestle. We used to kid around him, teasing him that he really came from the goat’s belly. But when he starts crying “Baaaaa!” Nanay would stop preparing all meals and lumber down to the kwarto with her heavy calves to pick up the dried up guava branch she saves for our squabbles and whip our legs.
“I didn’t know they glowed, like carabao milk. Or that they do not have wings.”
I stopped pounding, wiped the sweat that had trickled down my chin, and gave him an incredulous look, my hand finding its way to my hip.
“Did you notice I’m not listening?” I whipped back at him. But he was too busy tracing his finger on the damp sand beside his foot; he did not notice the irritation in my voice.
“He also talked about God. That’s when I said, ‘Ayo, my suspicions were right!’” Gido was now engrossed in his own story, he started flapping his arms up and down to keep my attention. “So I asked him about paradise and he answered in detail! Gold everywhere, he said. And shiny stones. And a lot of singing.”
“How did he tell you? Does an angel really speak our tongue?” Nothing seemed to deter him so, defeated, I sat down on a stump and rested the pestle on my lap, watching the sun rise behind the bentud – the hill across the Konakon, the collector’s house. I wanted to test him. How come a young boy who only plays with his bird traps in the swamp gets to see a diwata and I don’t?
I waited for him to raise his chin. He nodded.
“He does. Although they sounded magical. Different,” he replied in a sudden, hushed tone, as if he were sharing a secret. “At first they sounded odd, like he were stretching his mouth, and he messes with the words. But I understood him. I understood him. Could I be…”
“Could be what?”
“The next, you know…”
“Balian?”
He shrugged, digging his sole into the ground, eyes darting from one jar of wine to another. They were stacked in a corner beside the kamalig. “I mean, perhaps, that’s why I can talk to angels.”
I looked at my younger brother and sighed. He’s only been around a few harvests and I’m not sure if someone as young as him could be the chosen one. Besides, the pintow has stopped being a school for priest way before the day I was born. The last time I’ve been there, the men were stacking sacks of rice on top of each other. Beside it now stood our church the big people over the seas have built for us. I watched Gido’s stringy hair stick upwards like dried grass – brown from playing too much under the sun. He couldn’t possibly be one, could he?
That afternoon I found myself wandering around the swamp, thinking about Gido, and thinking about the foolishness of someone of marrying age believing a little boy’s stories. The swamp was right behind the bentud – the hill where we gathered for our weddings and funerals. And although sacred, as the elders have told me, nothing would tell one it is, until the day we actually meet.
Careful with the traps, I reminded myself, remembering the last time I got caught in one of Benito’s traps sitting between the bushful of pako, as I tarried around the edges of the swamp, avoiding the tied twigs. I was half-hoping to meet an angel myself. Perhaps if I turn around the other corner…
“Baes Gendow!” a golden head peeked from a short molave tree. I stared at him, wide-eyed. At his white shirt wrapping his upper body. One of his hands is raised, wrapped around the neck of a wild heron. He grinned, showing a row of white pearls. I nod, still confused if Gido would still be the balian now that I have seen the angel with my own eyes too. His head was shiny like it was covered in gugo, and his hair twirled right above his eyebrows like they never move.
Eventually, I found myself visiting the swamp every day as soon as I finished my chores, trying to talk to the angel, but I always found myself just sitting behind the rubber tree, feeling the cuts beneath my fingers, chewing betel nut, and staring at the angel walking around the bentud, looking at the small caves or the fringes of the swamp. Sometimes he glances at me before he flashes his pearls again. I nod. Again – that’s all I do. Because when he tries to speak he stretches the words like he forgot to adjust his speech when he fell from the skies. To that, I cannot speak back.
“Ate Gaying?” Gido gasped when he found me squatting behind the rubber tree one quiet afternoon. The sun was hitting the other side of the bentud so it was a little cooler where we were and Gido was just about to lay another bird trap on a mossy rock on the swamp. His fingers fumbled for a loose knot for one of the twigs. “So you found the angel too?” His smile was mischievous but there was satisfaction in his eyes like I owed him something.
“Hello!” the angel interrupted us. “Do you not live on this hill?”
I shook my head while Gido started explaining where the people’s houses were, naming them one by one.
“And, we live right over there!” Gido beamed, pointing at our home, raised a little higher than the other houses with taller stilts – our pigs, tied below our bamboo floor.
The angel hummed in response, sounding happier than usual. “So no one on this hill?”
Gido and I shook our heads. A swell feeling has immediately filled our chests, happy for making the angel happy with our answers.
Every afternoon, we found ourselves sitting together by the swamp to look at the angel cutting a few branches and drawing lines on paper. Sometimes we chew betel nut while watching, and sometimes, Gido would crack a fallen durian open to share with the angel.
“Is he writing instructions from God?” Gido whispered. I wanted to ask the angel but I was too distracted with his golden hair gleaming under the sun, and the glowing skin as white as carabao milk. Gido was right about that, while our own skin had darkened by staying too long outside, like roasted corn.
Gido and I started walking home one evening with the same questions in mind. A gush of wind rustled the bamboo leaves that had been sleeping since morning, and my brother was unusually silent.
“Do you think two can be balians?” he blurted out, kicking the rocks beneath his feet, a disappointed look brooding on his face now. His arms were hugging a bundle of firewood we were supposed to bring back for the wedding. Four days from now, our bentud would be filled with people again, gathering for the Timuay’s daughter’s wedding, Aya. Next harvest, I hope it would be my turn. I accidentally overheard mother and father talking about Benito last night and his showing of interest. Perhaps it was my turn to count the moons now.
“Baes gobi!” Gido and I greeted everyone when we came home, shaking the dust from our feet. The elders were sitting on our floor, sharing a few panyalam pieces like somebody just died, but they were not talking. Instead, the older ones were wiping their eyes and the rest were downing on glasses of tuba.
I lay in bed that night wondering if a balian should wed first before the actual appointment. The confusion of roles between me and my brother has not stopped gnawing at my head like a stubborn field rat that I ended up just staring at the roof, popping pieces of lanzones lazily in my mouth. I watched the small bats fly in and out of the house, perching at the farthest corner of the kitchen.
“We should ask the angel, Ate Gaying,” Gido whispered from the other mat. Surprised to see him wide awake, I twisted my body to the right to look at his face better. The nearly full moon has conveniently stopped right outside our open window, hitting Gido’s face with a golden glow. I was almost convinced he looked like somebody the spirits could call.
“I’m not sure about that,” I faintly replied, reaching for another piece of lanzones. “We’re not even sure if we still need balians here.”
“But you saw the angel too. We can’t just pretend he wasn’t there. We could die, right?”
There was a hint of excitement in his voice, but so was uncertainty. Sometimes I regret having told too many stories about our grandfather to my brother. Although he had been the last balian in our place, he died a Christian, shedding off what remains of his role as a shaman. Gido seemed to have listened only to the portions when our grandfather talked to angels and spirits for powers.
I nod. “Okay.”
But the angel was no longer by the swamp the next day, nor the day after that. And Gido had stopped finishing his meals, worried he would miss the angel’s short-lived visit. He would sprint to the swamp still with food in his mouth but it was the same every day. There was no angel walking around the hill. There was no angel writing lines on paper. It was now back to the same hill before we started seeing him. Except on the third sunrise. We woke up to a huge booming sound, setting off a series of cries from the houses beside us. Gido and I ran outside to see what happened. The bentud was no longer the bentud. There was no more grass. There were no more flowers and weeds. But there were people starting to gather around what was left of the hill. Whispering. Crying. Praying.
“It’s scraped away,” I heard the older children whisper in disbelief. The brown lump of soil has replaced our view of green. I looked around, confused, and saw more angels, climbing on the large trucks that were taking more and more of our bentud. And one of them, still in white, was our angel.
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Author’s Notes:
This short story is an attempt to capture a moment from the years of exploitation of the mining companies to the Subanen people who are still fighting for the rights of their own ancestral domain.
