Tulatulahan, Part 4

Published by Vartan Koumrouyan at February 25, 2025

This is a serial. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first.

There’s not much Sheryll and I can do when we go to Puerto Princesa for a day. We watch TV at the hotel and buy what we need for the continued construction of the house: plastic tubes, gallons of paint, various sizes of nails, and a new chain for the chainsaw.

Then I wander, exploring old haunts and remembering that not so long ago, this was my home.

The humid and soggy atmosphere, heavy amidst the dark shades of greenery, is the same. The afternoon breezes in the banana leaves and the waving coconut fronds pretend they’re the same as well. But I know those leaves and breezes in the jungle now, and they are not the same.

These leaves overhang the squalor of the fish market slums, the rotting bamboo fences, and the sawali sheets of woven bamboo walls. Their shadows become promiscuous dark corners, hiding the burned faces, wrinkled skins, and emaciated bodies that seek survival in this gutter.

Mosquito-infested water lies stagnant on the dirty gravel beneath those leaves, where children — half-naked, barefoot, and hungry — run and play. The air smells of salt fish, rotten fruits, and the brine of the Pacific, and flies gather on dried coconut husks that have been thrown by the roadside. The breezes that tickle through these leaves offer no escape, no freshness.

I pass jeepneys, honking as they exit their terminal and playing loud fiesta music as if on an excursion sortie. Their loud, meaningless noise fills and blots out the quiet, meaningful emptiness that exists between the cliffs and the gentle laps of wavelets on Port Barton Beach.

Life under these shadowy leaves feels instantaneous — people consume the past, present, and future immediately and don’t attach to future events. They don’t grow old enough to transmit knowledge. Instead, knowledge is innate, grown from within, and only the young come forth from the shadows, bearing the newly acquired fashion of the day or the latest cell phone gadget.

As I walk, I see young boys standing near the sari-sari grocer on Manalo Street, under a spreading acacia, and I feel an unexpected ache. I saw my friend Jason there once, near the cement bench of the tanod post, talking with some of its officers and drinking Red Horse beer and Tanduay brandy.

That mix was Api’s favorite, too. I stop walking, and let the memories wash over me.

Api — who retired from Amsterdam to come and live with Rica and her two daughters here. I used to meet him every afternoon in Daisy’s shack. We’d sit under the umbrella and watch the sparkling sea on low tide. He would ask Daisy to give him the vinegar bottle to daub his feet and repel the nik-nik sandflies before they could give him a rash.

Api — who lived down to earth and practical, enjoying his time with a drink and Fortune cigarettes. Bored in his retirement, he had no wish to change his views on the world. But he complained about his children who didn’t care about him and treated him like an ATM machine.

“That is how children grow up in the Netherlands today,” he said once. “Why would I go back? Everything is new here — the colors, the weather. Look.” He pointed to the indigo smoke rising against the dark backdrop of the Mangingisda mountains. “They burn coconut husks to keep the mosquitoes away,” he said, as if the knowledge brought him closer to the ideal life he never had.

Api liked to sip Tanduay brandy with his beer. He would have agreed with Schopenhauer’s division of time into three sections: the past, the present, and the insignificant middle. On Api’s last day, having returned from the hospital, he opened a beer bottle and said, “I’m still here,” and died later that night. He lived life to the full, up to that insignificant middle hour.

He rests in peace now in the cemetery on Abueg Road. And Jason rests elsewhere.

But these youths before me, standing where my friend once stood, are not at rest. Barefoot and feline-like, the dark hides the sounds of their footsteps. Mosquitoes don’t bite them. They are immune, as if they know, even here in the midst of the city, that they share in the island’s larger wilderness. They have inquisitive eyes as they watch me, and they don’t smile.

I continue on. This is their identity. They know their limits and possibilities, possessing an intuition of an animal sense. They need no mercy or gratuitous tenderness to please them. Maybe they don’t like to change, but it’s not for a lack of will. Instead, they choose to comply with nature’s fashion, and to shelter a moment beneath nature’s leaves.

This is the Pacific, raw and authentic, with its animalic, predatory eyes and paws ready to pounce. The people here learn the lessons of evolution in the face of adversity. They quest for new blood to perpetuate the breed, seeming at times as desperate as the sand flies that suck the blood from poor bastard dogs.

One can look and not notice their hunger, their melting shadows, or their peeling skin. But their complacency will outlast any foreigner, who sees in this turquoise lagoon of the Puerto a mere paradise. The islanders know every mountain slope and creek. They know at which depth there’s likely to be water if they dig, and by which tree.

The island isn’t paradise. It’s a part of them.

Those who come down from the jungle to the coast adjust quickly. They learn to read the stars at night and the shore from the sea, how to spear fish by moonlight, and how to predict the ebb and flow of the tides. And in this knowledge, they find a freedom to live.

As I return to the hotel, the freshness of rain helps to moderate the hot atmosphere. It washes away the dust that’s settled everywhere along the roadside — the dust on the dry undergrowth, the mango trees bent down by previous storms, the ground by the fence, the nipa huts.

The rain suppresses the smell near the garbage heaps and forms puddles on the new, rough roads and alleyways where the city has not yet laid cement. For a little while, as the rain falls, the city feels cleaner.

Sheryll and I sit and watch the news that evening. El Niño has caused record high temperatures in places, exceeding 50 degrees Celsius. Parched rice fields, with long, dry cracks in the soil and leftover stubble from previous harvests, rest along empty irrigation canals and dry carabao mud holes. This year is worse than the one before.

And with the next rainy season approaching, the newscasters fear that the soil will not absorb the coming rain. They talk of landslides, floods, and the chance that people will disappear.

The TV shows live footage of a rush-hour traffic jam, the cars’ headlights blinking under the low, smog-filled rain clouds of Manila: The quick tempo of urban life brought to a halt by uncontrollable forces.

Once, this was my day-to-day experience. The city squeezed me into a time wrap, pressed upon me the endless déjà-vu of existence, and extrapolated the past onto the future with such urgency that each present moment was nothing more than a flash of lightning — an insignificant middle, vanished in the moment it’s seen.