Heartbreak and Magic

A Strange Map of Time-1

A STRANGE MAP OF TIMEFor César Ruìz Aquino

“While anchored at the island of Bohol, Legaspi dispatched a frigate to reconnoiter the coasts of the islands that were visible from that point. Under the direction of the chief pilot, Esteban de Rodriguez, assisted by Joan de Aguirre, and supplied with the sufficient men and provisions, this frigate came to the entrance of the channel between the islands of Cebu and Negros where it was caught by the swift current of the channel and carried to the southwestern coast of Negros … When twenty-one days had passed without any signs of the frigate’s return, Legaspi and his men considered it lost. But on Holy Saturday of 1565, the frigate arrived with its crew looking well, except that the Bornean pilot Tuasan was missing ….”

—Caridad Aldecoa Rodriguez, A History of Negros Oriental

There was no pain, except there was sudden blood and then the surprise of darkness. The last thing he heard—or perhaps he only imagined it—was the Old Man’s murmur, so low it might have been an enchantment: “Tan-awa unsa’y mahitabo, ug dalagan pauli dayon.”1 He had no time to ponder what the words meant. There was only an aching desire to see the sea again. Then he breathed his last.

•••

THE MEMORY OF the light at the end of the long darkness stayed with him. All else ebbed and thrust, like a wall of dark water pushing him out. When he came to the light, everything was a burst of color for which he had no names. There was no vocabulary to seize possession of the sudden unknown that engulfed him—the piercing wail, the whipping air, the crying sound upon the slap of flesh, the glinting of metal, the crushing softness that soon covered skin. But he would remember the light, he told himself in that gibberish language of thought and spaces. That was the exact moment, Sawi remembered, when he decided finally to sleep, a look of surprise—perhaps even a look of wonder—on his newborn’s face.

How someone could have memories of his own birthing, nobody had ever asked him. But no one actually knows, he once told himself, a thought that comforted him exceedingly. He knew, given the strangely vague and surreptitious mission he must lead, what secrets to keep in a world that did not seem to know sacred silence.

What was secret to him was this notion of a life: that the universe existed as infinite mirror-parallels each taking unbounded twists from the same story, and time—as it was—had ceased to be bookends of all tales: the beginning was the end, the past was the future, the present was always awash in the pregnant possibilities of birthing new worlds, of providing wormholes into time to answer the eternal questions.

Years later, he would think of that light again when, straining from behind dark clouds, the full moon revealed itself suddenly and also much too quickly, disappearing yet again behind the constant haze, but not before glinting off that glow on the chrome of strange moving things buzzing like shattered thunderclaps in the night sky. The world, it seemed to him, was murdered desolation.

This is how we have come to be, Sawi thought sadly and tucked the thought into the recesses of his memory.

•••

HE HAD STARTLED Nanay Mohica when he was two years old, and he had made a simple request for her to dim the lights one night so that he could see the Stars from his bedroom window. “The baby can talk!” the mother had shrieked to her husband who had just come home with news that he had bought a chicken to start an egg farm with. That it was a rooster completely incapable of laying eggs was completely lost on the man. In that singular moment before he could discover his mistake (the first of many that would soon mark him completely useless), Nanay Mohica barged in on him with her news, strangling away all his thoughts of chickens and eggs into nothingness.

She was, of course, a sight: hair done up in curlers, a crinkly old daster2 to cover increasingly abundant flesh. “The baby can talk!” she screamed, and in a kilometric gush she explained what she had seen and heard. It was, she dramatically concluded, a miracle.

“The boy is touched by angels,” she pleaded.

The husband only sputtered and said: “Perhaps it is you who are touched in the head,” making a show of fingers circling temple, and then without haste told her, not without cruelty, to make him a cup of coffee.

“But the baby can talk!” was all he got as a reply, indignant this time, even pushy. Nanay Mohica was not one to be trifled with.

There was certainly a disconnect in her husband’s comprehension—perfectly understandable, since he and Nanay Mohica had never heard the baby cry, never heard little Sawi make out even the most endearing of gurgles. No sounds, in fact; only a knowing in the boy’s eyes that constituted a language that spoke more than any mouths could. But here suddenly was Nanay Mohica talking of words springing from the unlikeliest of sources—and in complete sentences, too! The woman had gone mad.

He nevertheless indulged her, swaggering up the staircase to the boy’s tiny nursery, to see his wife’s mad miracle. In the darkness of the room, he could make out the second-hand crib pushed to the wall near the room’s only window.

The boy was sitting up, all two years of him. Sawi was looking up to the night sky as if in search for some extraterrestrial message.

“Are you all right, hijo?” the father said in a low voice, almost snickering, because how could he expect a two-year-old to reply? The silence that quickly followed almost vindicated his disbelief and unseemly humor.

Unfortunately for him a tiny voice soon answered back.

“I’m all right, ’Tay,” came the sound from the dark silhouette. It was, the older man decided, a young voice that edged out of a certain thinness of sound. Something one expected to hear from ghosts or angels. “I just wanted to see the Stars out tonight,” it said.

For a moment, because his mind had to grasp for straws of the plausible, the older man pondered the answer with all seriousness. But what Stars? Who talks of Stars these days? There are no more Stars to see. When he considered finally the source of the voice, the knowledge that came felt heavy, impossible. The father, made mute, stood in the open door trembling, all thoughts of chickens and eggs and wives in daster forgotten.

“In the old days,” the boy went on, almost in a whisper that dripped of unquantifiable loneliness, “sailors used to navigate by the Stars to point to their way home…”

How do you reply to that?

The father never said goodnight or goodbye, nor asked for explanations for this unexpected discovery of speech. He only retreated to his bedroom where he might hide, discovering soon that his own voice had gone. The years would come when he would be known around their neighborhood by the name of Manoy Pipi. There would be future nights when he’d go to bed and consider that unfortunate nickname. In his silence he would ask the rest of the world: Wouldn’t you, too, surrender all words as meaningless and inconsequential when nothing could prepare you for the sound of unspeakable wonder?

In the most ordinary of days, he would have chalked this night up as a pure accident of common miracles. But the world, he knew now, was so much bigger and more complex than most people give it space for. There was magnificence in the air waiting only to be plucked into some kind of manifestation. This was finally for him such a strange world: not even ancient sailors’ forgotten Stars could help in finding paths out of lost trails.

He would need a map of suitable strangeness to navigate its tricky geography.

•••

AT SIX YEARS, Sawi drew the map with the surest of hands. One late afternoon, he had not taken the nap Nanay Mohica wanted him to have—busy as she was chasing after dreams of growing piles of spare change from her lucky streak of picking just the right sort of mahjong tile to seal a small fortune. Sawi had gone instead to the highest part of the old house, a region forbidden to him, given his age, the manic concerns of adults, and the steep staircase that creaked from the burden of dust and history. It was also a dark place full of spiders and cobwebs and ghosts. These never bothered him.

He had gone there to see out of the big window that added awkward grace to the landing leading to the small attic: it was one of those common affairs made of straight slabs of wood, with two rectangles like the wings of a clumsy butterfly hinged on opposite sides of the wooden casing that punched the wall. Most days, these wings were locked shut, keeping away both sunlight and mosquitoes, and rendering the tiny hallway into a cocoon that spooked most people. But it had never spooked Sawi; darkness had never spooked him. He had always believed that all of darkness was never complete without its bordering light—there was always light bound to be somewhere. Sometimes, this very idea seemed to him as simple as breathing in—all it might even take to understand may just be the mere opening of a window.

It was the window’s height from the ground that initially mesmerized him exceedingly. How many times had he gone to this window, to open its somewhat bulky, rain-soaked, termite-infested wooden weight, pushing them in the direction of what was outside, to take in the sudden expanse of air between his body and the sky? Looking down, it seemed to him that this must be the sheerest of drops from heaven to the browning grass below—a distance that reminded him, quite strangely, of oceans that stretched towards the blue beyond infinite horizons. He was, after all, a child—all the world is a giant to a child’s eyes.

But there was also this: from this window, if he spied carefully to take his eyes away from the distracting skirmish of rock trees and the distance in his sight, he could manage to catch a glint of a faraway blueness. It beckoned like a promise.

It was the sea, he knew. He liked to think of the far blueness as sea-sound breaking into surf in his recollections. He knew somehow that there were endless stories in the fathoms, tales of the journeys of salty wind and spray. He felt these stories to be bred in his bones.

Yet, at six years old, he had never even been to the sea, had not seen it, nor tasted its promised saltiness. He persistently requested for even the brief visit, but he knew that Nanay Mohica did not have a care for a child’s sense of adventure, preferring always the familiarity of the house as the perfect playground for any boy. But Sawi nonetheless grew up knowing he had an uncanny sense of knowing the sea well enough, like a child never forgetting his first taste of milk. There were days when he’d stretch out his hand to the air and feel a phantom surf caressing the back of his hand.

The sea must be his world in another place in time, in the universe.

“Do you know what’s there, Iba?” he told his yaya3 once, pointing to the faraway blueness.

But Iba was a simple mountain-woman who had never seen the sea herself. “That is where we will certainly get lost, Sawi,” she said. Iba spoke with the firm wisdom of a woman of the soil. Everything else to her that was not of the earth—be it sea or sky—was always native to dangerous ground. “Don’t think too much of what’s out there, my boy. It’s too far away to even matter to any of us here,” she said.

“I will never get lost there, Iba,” Sawi said with eerie certainty.

She laughed, exposing her toothless gums, for she was already nearing late middle age and had rotted her teeth away with too much betel nut chew. “You’re only six, Sawi,” Iba said. “If you must know, you waste too much of your time thinking of traveling to other places. Other children your age play with toy guns and go hide-and-seek.”

He only said, “Children only know how to squander time.”