The Weight of Shadows (13 page)

A few days later, the group of writers travels to Dumaguete in the province of Negros Oriental, the southeastern half of the island of Negros. One of the first things Jeremiah and I notice in our new location is a laminated list of rules posted near the elevator of our hostel. The bulleted commands seem mainly to be aimed at curtailing cohabitation with someone of the opposite gender. We share a look, and without saying it, I think we both get the impression that this is a religious establishment. Near the list there's a locked plastic bin with items for sale, and included among the shampoo and snack
items are rosaries and small pocket Bibles. We don't give it much thought until we decide to cross the street and go for a walk on the stone esplanade along the waterfront. As we approach we see a sculpture of a canoe full of nuns, raised on a spout of water, all wearing black habits topped with large white cornettes that look like rams' horns. Jeremiah points to a plaque that explains these were French missionaries who arrived on these shores in 1904 looking to save souls less than a decade after the United States paid Spain twenty million dollars to annex the entire Philippine archipelago in the Treaty of Paris. The Philippine Revolution against the United States officially started in 1899 and officially ended in 1902. On Negros and elsewhere, indigenous rebel groups collectively referred to as the Irreconcilables continued fighting in opposition to the sale of their country, which they viewed as an illegitimate transfer of power because the Philippines was not, and had never been, for Spain to sell or for the United States to purchase.

Jeremiah and I continue along the boardwalk. The air is saturated in humidity, and I can feel sweat dripping. I squint, and for a moment this looks like it could be Veracruz—brown-skinned people walking on the Spanish-built structure, vendors selling flowers and small trinkets, and palm trees dropping their green oval seeds everywhere. We amble for a few minutes before bumping into another pair of writers, and we decide to spend the afternoon drinking beer at a small restaurant that overlooks the water.

As the sun approaches the horizon, shadows crawl across the street and into the water as though they're going home. We hear a distant racket like a rowdy party, faint but heading in our direction. One of the writers we're with says we should be heading back because our group is being greeted with dinner and a reading by scholars from the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, but several of us decide
to stay. Over the next few minutes the sound grows until we see in the distance a bright, multicolored mass coming toward us down the middle of the street.

Early evening in Dumaguete is a warm blue that signals evening but is somehow still bright. There are floats elaborately adorned with local flowers and shiny metallic ribbons, and crowds have gathered on both sides of the road. We decide to get a closer look, so we settle our bill and push our way toward the street. When we finally make it through, we emerge onto a row of brawny men standing side by side, their hands folded in front of their chests in Catholic prayer. They wear giant silver angel wings and white satin robes with gold trim. Street lamps highlight their wings in orange, and they tremble in the faint breeze.

A young man selling flowers made out of tissue paper approaches us with his white bucket. He's tall and dark, with a broad nose and wide shoulders. He's painted a small crowned figure onto his plastic bucket, a figure that looks to be draped in some kind of robe. When the French nuns arrived on the shores of Negros, several groups of indigenous peasants who had been fighting the Spanish were then fighting both the Americans and European missionaries. These indigenous and peasant groups had been engaged in various forms of resistance since Ferdinand Magellan claimed the Philippine archipelago for Spain in 1521. By the time the French nuns hit Negros, the peasants had already experienced nearly four hundred years of Catholicism, long enough to assimilate it, resist it, and at times transform it. The small figure on the flower vendor's bucket was El Santo Niño, the oldest Catholic icon venerated today in the Philippines. When Magellan hit the archipelago, he was nearing the end of his famed journey, a journey for which he is recognized in history as being the first man to sail around the world, even though he never made it. Before his arrival, the archipelago had been a collection of autonomous and semi-autonomous political
and economic organizations. The rajah of Cebu and his queen received Magellan warmly, so warmly that by mid-April, Rajah Humabon, his wives, and subjects became some of the first indigenous Roman Catholic converts when they were baptized by Magellan's priest. Humabon was christened Carlos after Charles I, and Queen Hara became Juana, after Charles's mother. A statue of the Santo Niño was given to Carlos and Juana as a baptismal gift.

Jeremiah and I make our way to the reception hosted by the Filipino writers. We're surprised to see that tents have been set up on the belt of grass near the esplanade, and I feel a slight pinch of guilt at having disparaged the event earlier. The white tents against the now deeper blue of late evening, and the busied glow coming from underneath them is lovely in a way that reminds me of a wedding. We manage to slip in without anyone noticing we're late. We're already drunk, so when plates of lechón, one of the national dishes of the Philippines, are put in front of us we immediately begin shoveling forkfuls of the steaming pork into our mouths. When we're done we're invited to go up for more, which I oblige. The whole spit-roasted pig is on the table, two slits run down both sides of its spine from which the guests have taken most of their meat and left caverns of white sinew underneath the brittle caramel skin. Its face points out toward the reception and looks calm, as though the animal were soundly sleeping. Lechón, and other whole beasts with intact faces, were not unfamiliar to me as food. Lechón, in particular, was familiar in a roundabout way. Even though it's eaten in parts of Mexico, my dad has always avoided eating pork because of a personal paranoia about pork and brain parasites, and my mom tended to avoid all kinds of meat until she eventually stopped eating it entirely when I was a teenager. The first time I'd tried lechón had been at a Puerto Rican neighbor's backyard barbeque, and I later had it again when a Cuban restaurant opened near our home.

No one has touched the poor animal's face. I know that if I dig my thumb into its cheek, where the opening of the lip ends, and tear upward toward its ear I'd get, arguably, the best part. North Americans tend to like the belly, for obvious reasons, but the face of most animals, including pig, lamb, goat, and certain kinds of fish, is, in my opinion, much better. If the pig is properly spit-roasted—meaning that it has taken an absurd amount of time, been brined, and been cared for with frequent basting—the cheek with skin, ear, and fatty tragus contains in one small portion the best of what the whole pig has to offer. The cheek meat will be among the most succulent despite not being heavily marbled (because of the abundance of connective tissue and collagen in this part of the animal), the skin will be brittle like the properly caramelized top of crème brûlée, the tragus will be a sticky, salty bite, and the ear will provide an almost obscene crunch.

The cheek is mine because the Filipino writers have graciously let their guests have first go at the hog, and none of their guests have wanted to eat the face.

By the time we've finished dinner it's dark. Looking out over the water a yellow moon and its reflection look like the jaundiced eyes of a supine stranger. A stage has been set up on the esplanade, and a succession of Filipino poets read their work. I trail off thinking about what my friend said before the trip, about being liked because I looked like a Filipino celebrity, more European, less indigenous, and how much this kind of thing has probably helped me in life. As I watch another poet take the stage, I think about how one reconciles loving oneself as a colonized person.

No matter how much I drink there is always a full sweaty bottle of San Miguel in front of me. I excuse myself to smoke a cigarette underneath a palm tree, and when I stand up I unintentionally pivot backward on my left heel and stumble onto the guest sitting next to me. I'm good and drunk, and when I take the first drag of my cigarette, blinking lights
bleed in from my periphery like when you stand up too quickly. I feel a weightlessness that makes me lose awareness of where my limbs are in space, and when I look down at my hand it seems like it can almost be not mine.

The rest of the night's edges blend into one another. After the readings there are a series of cultural performances that feel familiar but distinct. A young boy, maybe six or seven years old, stands in front of the crowd holding two metal orbs of some kind. A woman approaches him and sets them on fire. With his arms limp, he releases the orbs and violently turns his body. They fall until they stop and are revealed to be on chains, and then he swings them in large graceful circles by violently jerking his torso in different directions and at different angles. When the orbs are behind his back they silhouette his small head in a crown of orange fire, and when they come within an inch of his face I can see that he's perfectly calm but looking somewhere else. The more violently he swings his small frame, the hotter the fires burn because of the way wind speaks to fire.

Resistance movements—especially indigenous, ethnic, and religious ones—are often discussed in terms of rejection: rejection of modernity, Western values, and, in the case of the Philippines, Catholicism. But resistance has historically been shaped by the particularities of the aggressors. On Negros, Papa Isio's peasant revolt was shaped by the plantation-like structures of exploitative labor. And long before him, when the Spanish were beginning their conquest, lands and peoples that had previously had little amiable interaction, if any at all, suddenly found themselves banding together against their European attackers. Papa Isio, who became the leader of the fiercest peasant revolt in the Visayas, was a babaylan, a pre-Hispanic figure in Southeast Asian culture that has always served as a medium between realms of indigenous reality, a spiritual guide, political and military leader, and healer. By Papa Isio's time, babaylanism had incorporated Catholic
iconography and mythology into its beliefs and practices. Concomitantly, Filipino Catholics had incorporated many pre-Hispanic animistic features into their enactments of faith. In his campaign biography, US-backed Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who presented himself as the devoutly Catholic leader of Asia's only Christian nation, included the story of how a legendary babaylan made an incision in his back and inserted a petrified wood amulet that gave him the ability to disappear and reappear at will and bring the dead back to life.

The following day comes in short bursts of lucidity. The previous evening ended, or more accurately, didn't end, with a few of us hopping on a motorized tricycle and going to several outdoor bars, and then even fewer of us going back to someone's room at the religious hostel and drinking hot Tanduay from the bottle until the sun peered through the curtains.

When we noticed it was morning, Henry, an American poet with a violently affirmative character, produced an orange prescription bottle.

“This will help us,” he said, tipping several peach-colored oval pills into his hand.

Henry's head is a collection of loose curls, and in the neon tube light it looks like a cloud illuminated from within. I open my palm and a cadre of tiny oval pills is there. I stare at him blankly, feeling as though the room were gently swaying. He mumbles something I don't understand, opens the door, and disappears around a corner.

I give my bag to a harbor worker who throws it onto a cart that will be loaded onto the hydrofoil in front of us. I don't remember packing it or recall the bus ride here. Someone
shows me a photo of Henry passed out on the bus and a few of me slumped over in several locations taken earlier that day. In one, my eyes are open and looking at the camera but completely vacant, like doll eyes. Because the picture was snapped so recently, looking at it feels like looking into a mirror at someone else. I don't remember being in these moments, and I wonder who it was looking out through my eyes at the world when that photo was taken. I ask Jeremiah if I'd been okay, wondering if I'd managed to keep things together enough for others not to notice what state I was really in, and he said he'd seen me carry on conversations with prestigious Filipino poets, individuals appointed to national councils, and editors of highly circulated magazines, and that I somehow kept track of my own belongings as we switched several modes of transport.

I fall asleep in my window seat on the hydrofoil, and the moment I wake up I'm looking at something that doesn't make sense, so for a few moments I think I'm still asleep. I turn to see if anyone else is looking, and the entire hull of people is turned toward me staring out at the same monstrous thing in absolute silence. The sky is one dark gray mass that looks much thicker than a cloud, almost like smoke that's being drawn downward in a slowly spinning funnel that seems to be depositing the sky into the ocean. I can't tell how close this thing is, so I don't know if I should be worried about dying. I press my palm against the window, but there is no rumbling, just the image. Looking at it in this chemically induced calm makes the dread sink beyond the immediacy of sensation, of panic. It becomes a muted but seething terror at the waterspout, at the randomness of this kind of violence.

Natural disasters and the random, arbitrary death that comes in their wakes fit comfortably within the way we'd like to think the universe is ordered. They provide a template for how we talk about and deal with one kind of atrocity. Today much of the violence that results from order has been
ascribed the inevitability that rightly only belongs to nature, and the institutions that perpetrate it have enough inertia to seem like mountains or tectonic plates. But even in natural disasters, the susceptibility to devastation, the ability to mitigate that devastation, and the ability to better survive it are distributed inequitably. What happens before and after the storm, and to whom? How many bodies are erroneously attributed to the water and the wind?