All My Lonely Islands

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1A BLANK BLUE sky shimmers outside your window. The white lace curtain is pushed to the side to make way for the ocean breeze. The smell of it feels clean and crisp. The radio

is turned down, but I can still hear the news. A storm is coming in two days, but there’s no sign of that right now. I can hear the ocean from far below pummeling sand and rocks with

consistent frenzy. I have never known it to be calm in the first place.

Outside is an image you can find in any still life painting. Meadows on top of each other with yellow-green grass. Water buffalos and cows chewing and flicking their tails in companionable

silence. They chew as if they knew there is nothing else they’re meant to do. The white lighthouse all the way across to Sabtang Island looks so small from where I’m sitting, I could

fit it between my thumb and forefinger. It’s a wisp of smoke from this angle, undulating under the midmorning light. A few meters from the window is the garden with its white metal chairs and

frame of orchids. Across the garden is the stone road leading to town.

On the other side of the road is yet another cliff. Ferdinand is standing on this cliff, his tall frame wrapped in a black coat, double-breasted with oversized buttons and lapels. More

appropriate for winter than for a cool breeze. His hands are shoved into the pockets, the hoodie draped loosely over his head. He’s looking down at the ocean, auburn hair nearly covering his

eyes. He needs a haircut.

Sometimes, I pretend that I’m really here for a holiday to write beside the ocean with nothing but the indulgence of time. But you are here, and your presence weighs like a boulder on the

otherwise bland whiteness of this room. I would stare at the trees in the garden, but I could still see your blanketed form from the corner of my eye like a specter with an outstretched hand.

I don’t expect your benevolence. I have returned to face your judgment like a runaway child slinking back into her parents’ house and entering through the second-floor window. At

night, I listen to the whoosh of the wind swooping outside, rattling against metal gates and thatched roofs. I watch the shadows of trees shake, casting dark blotches across my bed. I imagine them

assuming your form. The branches become your hands digging its way beneath my sheets, breaking into skin and veins and a lurching heart.

In daytime, I look at you under the benediction of sunlight. Once I was beside the window and I thought I saw you move your head. I spun around, but your eyes were still closed; your face was a

field over which morning was spreading itself. The soft lines across your forehead looked like little streams. I rubbed my eyes, squinted back at the sun, and drank a glass of water.

I feel my heart tiptoeing up endless creaking stairs. It will be caught any moment now.

SOMETIMES, I WANT to shake you into consciousness. I want to tell you everything in one breath and then run away as fast as I can to the end of this island. I’d even walk

on water just to keep going, but I am ye of little faith. So here I remain by the shorelines, staring out into the ocean. I envy its writhing, the self-assuredness in which it sweeps itself across

such an expanse. It must be doing all the screaming for the entire world.

Afterward, I would go back to your room, properly chastised and licked cold by the wind, returning to the solace of writing by your window. With these flimsy words, I seek to reconstruct the

juncture where all our lives met. Ghosts, cobwebs, sickly metaphors. I take them out and line them all, turn them this way and that, and wonder how such wispy things can hold up an entire decade of

recollection.

I would delete pages because I would imagine you reading them. I’m afraid that you would laugh when I would be serious or you would cry when I would be trying to cheer you up. I have such

lousy timing. Remember how it was when we played the piano? You would tell me, count in your head. Feel the beat. Analyze the meter. And I would close my eyes and try to feel the force and

end up being too fast or skipping a rest, lunging at the nearest note like a snapping turtle. You would circle the rest on the music sheet with a pencil.

“Next time, ha? Next time,” you’d say.

There was never enough time.

What I’m not prepared for is for you to wake up and not remember me at all. Or for you to open your eyes and all I would see is contempt, because maybe you have figured everything out by

now. Maybe time has told you all secrets.

So when my throat tightens and my words disembowel themselves, I would look out the window and watch Ferdinand sit by the cliff. He told me the churning of the ocean comforts him. He looks like

a shadow with that coat. I can imagine him falling off. An accident, a little slip. Isn’t life sometimes made up of accidents? Or serendipity. People prefer that word. One stumble and

Ferdinand would be gone. And I won’t be here, and you won’t have to wake up.

Sometimes, I look at the mirror and wonder who this woman is.

IN THIS COUNTRY, the turning point in people’s lives mostly involves a natural calamity: storms, floods, volcanic eruptions. Mine was an earthquake. When you live on an

island, you are aware of fragility and smallness. God has a habit of concocting a grand show for the benefit of one human. That’s what I remembered from Sunday School. God has impeccable

showmanship—the parting of the Red Sea, the Pillar of Fire, the visions of Throne Rooms and Abominable Creatures—all these are characteristics of his nature for flourish. If you get to

be the most powerful Being to exist, it is necessary to unleash that power with style; enough to put the humans in line, enough to show them that they control nothing with their rockets. Theirs is

an open window of a planet, susceptible to meteor passersby, and only the kindness of a Greater Being prevents them from disintegrating. I suppose this is why God can afford to feel sorry for such

small creatures; these creatures so easily swept away by famine and tsunamis and yet have the temerity—no, the lunacy—to step on the moon. It must be heartbreaking to be God; to know

all these mortals, to see so far ahead what becomes of them, of those dreams, of their inherent sadness as species.

This is how I visualized my fate unfolding: God sent an earthquake to bring me to another country. It was the trigger button that ended with you lying on that bed. But then again, maybe I think

too much of it. Maybe he sent an earthquake to remind us once again how the great mysteries of this earth are beyond our reckoning. The reasons don’t matter. We could only agree that it was

an ominous start.

Before the great ’90 earthquake came, I lived in the Philippines my whole life; in Manila, in an old wooden house. The day I was born was the day I lost my mother. Sure, she went home with

me and spent the week staring at the bedroom windows. She would have appreciated billowing curtains, but we had blinds instead. And then she left. She was only 20 years old and was no beauty queen

based on a faded photograph. She didn’t name me, Dad did. He called me Crisanta, in a fanciful effort to prophesy my martyrdom. Because my mother clearly was not eligible for it. Aunt Ramona

swore though that my mother had the voice that could snatch a soul from hell and into the whipped cream bosom of angels. She was a member of the church choir, and that’s where she and Dad

met. The alto and the tenor. It was a musical love affair, which fooled them into thinking that they could hum and sway their way into a blissful life. They were too young to understand the gravity

of marriages. They believed the lilting melodies of kundimans, which are only two minutes long, three if you’re lucky, but must have sounded eternal to those dew-drenched hearts.

My mother took one look at me and decided that she wasn’t ready for this. She didn’t expect it to be so hard when she started giving birth in the middle of the night and was still

giving birth by dinnertime. I was breech at the last minute. Or as Aunt Ramona would say, I was tending a little potato garden in my mother’s womb and was waiting for it to grow at all cost.

They had to perform an emergency C-section. Come to think of it, if I had to labor like a water buffalo for 20 hours just so that they could cut me up at night, I would run away too. There was no

note, no last caress, no hauling of luggage while Dad pleaded with her by the porch. He woke up and she…was just not there.

I know I could have asked him why she’d gone. Was she dying of an illness, was she going off to another country, was she secretly married to another man? The theories evolved as I grew

older. I asked him once but it was under duress, and that didn’t end well. I never asked again. I grew up watching Dad stare outside windows or fiddle with his wedding ring that he never took

off. I knew then that it didn’t matter why she left. I saw her picture, which remains there to this very day, on his bedside table. Torment is a universal fire and when I had enough

experience of the varying depths of its scorches, I could acknowledge its presence in my father’s eyes.

There wasn’t any woman in my life until I turned three and then Dad’s sister came to live with us. The way Aunt Ramona took care of me and loved me and exasperated me, she acted like

she was the one who got cut up so I could live. I grew up quite your ordinary child, the kind who bought small spiders from street vendors to enter them in Spider Combats. Every three in the

afternoon, right after Aunt Ramona would fall asleep from trying to persuade me to take my naps, I would sneak out of our window and join the Insect Mafia. We owned that neighborhood, the ten or so

of us. We’d do whatever we deemed was amusing such as the aforementioned spider fights, climbing precarious trees, and riding car tires down the street straight to the gutter. Broken teeth

and scraped skin were our source of pride.

At night, I would go home to my pets, a set of mother and two ducklings dyed pink. They were the saddest, most displaced creatures on the planet at that time, wading around a small basin of

water and shedding pink feathers. After an entire day of pulling wings from dragonflies and pouring salt on unsuspecting snails, watching Mother Duck preen her offspring was a return to

tenderness.

It was quite a big house which Dad inherited. He was born in it and he spent most of his childhood playing in the backyard. He liked constructing little worlds on a tin can: a patch of moss to

resemble grass, twigs for trees, small animal toys, which came with the cereal, for fauna. I tried to imagine that solitary boy with his shorts and grimy shirt. He didn’t look like the type

who would tie a thread around a dragonfly and tug it around like a kite. I asked him if he sang to birds and other woodland creatures. Did they gather around him to dance under the pale moon? He

shook his head, told me I had a creepy imagination.

Our house had two floors. Made from Cedars of Lebanon, Dad said while rapping on the walls. I didn’t understand the joke until we got to The Psalms in Sunday School. That was one of the

reasons why I resolved to read the entire Bible. I just couldn’t let Dad have the monopoly of Biblical allusions.

The house had huge windows that didn’t have rails or screens as most houses have now. It was the kind of window that you could jump from if you want to knock yourself out or to injure

yourself long enough to get out of school for a week. My favorite was the one facing the backyard, right across the gnarled mango tree. That tree was so old you’d think that one kick was all

it would take to send it crumbling to the ground. Aunt Ramona told me that a kapre who lived in it fell in love with her when she was in her 30s. I wasn’t well-versed with folklore

back then so the first thing I imagined was a tikbalang and not a kapre.

“Tsk! It’s a kapre!” Aunt Ramona said. “I saw him smoking his tobacco once. I wouldn’t have seen him if it wasn’t for the smoke coming out of his

mouth. He was filthy, that one. So dark. Just like in the books.”

“How’d you know he was in love with you?”

“He left mangoes in the refrigerator.”

“What? In the ref?”

“That’s how they woo humans. By putting food in the ref.”

“How’d you know it wasn’t Dad who put them there?”

Aunt Ramona was chopping potatoes at warp speed on the kitchen counter. “Don’t argue with me, child!” She turned around, waving her knife. “I know what’s in there

all the time. Those are mangoes from his tree.”

“Then what happened?”

“Of course, I rejected him! He’s a maligno for heaven’s sake.”

“Where is it now?”

She shrugged. “Must be in another tree in another city. God knows where these things go.”

Dad later told me that Aunt Ramona was engaged to a young mustached lawyer when she still wasn’t “big-boned” and had long, wavy hair. But she found out that he was sleeping

around with two other women. She wouldn’t have minded that much if one of them wasn’t her best friend. It sounded like a story from those Dr. Love programs you hear on the radio,

complete with soundtrack.

If you ask me, our house was really made of books, not Cedars of Lebanon. Books everywhere. Dad never threw one out and let the books disintegrate by themselves. Law books that belonged to my

grandfather, C.S. Lewis from my grandmother. Outdated encyclopedias, yellowing dictionaries. Books in every room, spilling from shelves or lodged behind doors and cabinets. Under beds. Sherlock

Holmes in a box in the basement. Hobbits and dwarves in kitchen cupboards. It became a little game for me to go from one room to another and search for books, pretending that I was a pirate looking

for maps that would lead me to Treasure Island.

Our house was in the middle of what was considered an unpredictable neighborhood. The street was lined with medium-sized houses, cozy solid, painted with pastel colors. It was a

quasi-subdivision with no proper garages. People parked their cars on the street and threw fabric car covers over them. Like that would discourage the thieves. The street was bookended by two

squatter communities. Once a year, the mayor would send bulldozers and a truckload of men with vests, sticks, and tear gas to remind the legal residents that he still cared about the city’s

problems. But the squatters would lie down in front of their shanties, kicking at anyone who attempted to move them, throwing anything they could get their hands on—slippers, firewood,

galvanized iron, their children.

Sometimes the men in vests would win and the houses would be razed to the ground. I could hear the sobbing from my bedroom window on the second floor. I thought of my playmates; their

similar-looking faces, angular and bony, their hands and feet that never seemed to be clean, the ease in which they give and receive violence. I wondered if their mothers were clutching them to

their chests along with what was left of their possessions. But after a month or so, they would reappear like mushrooms or grass. I’d see their familiar faces, although I never bothered to

know most of their names.

That’s how we coexisted in the neighborhood. If you could wade through the congregation of barefooted children, past the women doing laundry by the gutter and the men drinking watered-down

rum, you’ll reach our relatively quiet abode. Dad didn’t forbid me to play with the children who would gather round the large acacia tree near our house. Aunt Ramona used to hang out by

our white gate to ensure that I wasn’t being “mauled.” She saw street kids as knife-wielding, solvent-sniffing hoodlums, but my playmates were scrawny. I could have huffed and

puffed and blown them down the street, easy. But we learned to watch our back, nonetheless. At noon, our school bus (a van really, but they painted “School Bus” on its sides) would

sometimes swerve away from a stone thrown out with a slew of curse words from a window.

We also had our resident stray dogs, which had formed a pack of their own. They would huddle in a corner, a display of spotted brown, black and white creatures, limping from broken legs and ribs

jutting out, nearly resembling the wild dogs of Africa. But they never harmed us when we passed them by in a rough rush of childhood. All they ever did was defecate and then crawl back to their

respective corners, chests heaving with exhaustion. They died one by one and we, well, we grew up.

They said that after the War, our barangay became a cemetery for some of the civilians that the Japanese massacred in the wake of their mad exit from the island. A road of unmarked

graves. Soon, houses were built, new roads were made, and the cemetery was buried deeper to make way for the living. The dogs would howl at night and Aunt Ramona would tell me to come home by six

in the evening, because she said ghosts were about to rise. But sometimes we stayed up late to play patintero especially if the moon was bright. We figured no ghost would attempt to scare

kids who mutilated insects for fun. But we were wrong.

We were playing under a full moon that time, the most conducive for these kinds of encounters. It kept hiding behind clouds, reappearing once in a while to cast a dull light. Isabel, who lived

right next to my house, complained that she could barely see the chalk marks and called a time-out so we could reapply the lines. When we got back to our positions, the moon had vanished, drowned

behind the clouds. For a minute, all we could see were each other’s silhouettes. When the moon came out, a boy was standing at the end of the farthest line from us.

“Totoy! Come here!” Isabel yelled at her younger brother.

Silence.

“Want me to beat you up?”

The boy stood as still as the acacia tree.

Isabel dashed toward him, hands clenched. But just then, someone emerged from the side of the road with a sheepish grin. It was Totoy. He just finished peeing on Aling Gloria’s santan

bush. We all turned back to the dark figure, but all we saw was Isabel staring at the empty spot, her fisted hands now open and slack, her mouth agape.

She wouldn’t come out of their house for a long time after that. She would peer from their gate, but would shake her head whenever we invited her to join us. Her mother said that for

months after the encounter, she would find Isabel sitting up on her bed at night mumbling in the dark. One afternoon, Isabel walked past the mirror hanging beside their living room window, caught

her reflection, and gave a scream. We all heard her from where we were crouching around the acacia tree to pour water on an anthill. Isabel’s mother ran to her side and found the child

yelling that she was covered in blood, could somebody please take away all the blood.

Aunt Ramona said that Isabel probably saw a doppelganger, maybe one of the kids who were bayoneted during the War. Father Tomas, the parish priest, at the behest of the residents, came to

sprinkle holy water on our street. Some came out to kiss his hand and receive his blessing. He sprinkled holy water at the gates, too. Dad and I were Protestants, but we went outside to watch him

read out lines from a little red book and pray.

He stopped when he reached us. “Julian,” he said.

Dad nodded.

“I hope all’s well with your house?”

Dad nodded again.

Father Tomas’s dark hair was plastered to his head as if it were airbrushed on him. He had an approachable face, deeply tanned but with light brown eyes. They were the only part that

looked out of place on his face. He looked like he was Dad’s age. Father Tomas was about to speak again when he finally noticed me and fell silent, his eyes lingering on me. Dad turned away

and gently steered me back toward the house.

It was years and years later, when Dad was on his deathbed and Aunt Ramona had to go out of his room sobbing, that Dad told me about Father Tomas. About a friendship. About my mother walking out

of the house and melting into the night (or early morning); why she left without barely glancing at my face. My mind made a fast rewind to certain occurrences that used to baffle me; the whispering

among the elderly ladies in the church that would quiet down whenever Dad and I walked by, the softening glances bestowed upon me by the old women at the sari-sari store, Dad’s

resolute face as he held my hand.

I wanted to be angry with him then for withholding this piece of history from me, for making me guess my whole life when he could have easily answered all my questions. But I think I understand

him now.