Diwata, Where She Walked

Wilfrido Nolledo

Supper the little children, an expatriate poet was to write of the population in Metropolitan Manila, 1990. And she who had just lost hers that windy November morning drifted aimlessly through the memorial grounds where she’d been cannibalizing tombstones of their expensive garlands. There was such a rush on the main highway earlier that afternoon—as there always seemed to be whenever those “extranationals” were being trucked for transshipment abroad—and she had been too distracted to concentrate on her work.

The raggedy tote bag with its cellophaned turnip she’d placed on the nicho without a name by the untended grotto. It was the code among the karitonista or Pushcart People never to steal each other’s supper because that was like robbing the church. Nevertheless, the cloth bag had been ransacked and its lone provision taken when she circled back for a bite.

Diwata, 17, had a quirky comeliness that refused to submerge despite her attempts to push it down. In a family of nine where the Filipina kayumangi ran to a spotty duskiness, she alone had a chinita’s fair complexion, which might as well have been a disfigurement for the gibes elicited from her three younger sisters. Home was a slum quadrangle in northern Manila, underneath of which still ran half of an estero that city engineers had diverted from the thoroughfares. Nobody really noticed when a pushcart first grew itself a root there, until it had spawned a colony of like dwellings, a prevalence of discards that was likened to the coming of locusts. This image was reinforced during a campaign to stamp out vice when, in a “lightning raid,” plainclothesmen turned up sixteen suspects/victims of child prostitution. Journalese headlined this one: “Waifs of Wrath.” For its sidebar, there was the “Gulang Archipelago,” an exposé on magulang, or parents who kept their children as inmates or farmed out the more nubile ones to the sleazy cabanas of Ermita’s pension houses as “tenderloin” for the tourist trade.

Experience had taught Diwata that no matter how much she lugged home from the scavenging, precisely at seven in the evening there would be no supper left for her. And tonight’s kettle had been scraped clean of its lugao or gruel; in a tin saucer were shredded stems of kangkong to which, ravenous as she was, Diwata refused to yield.

“The smell of your flowers would wake the dead,” rasped Gabriela de Gulat, her mother, as she smoothed out the wreaths in a pan of water.

“I will find something else tomorrow,” said the scavenger.

The mother knew better than to contradict this because her eldest worked best the day after a mediocre one. Anyhow, conversation in the shack was as abbreviated as its meals. “The bricklayer was salvaged in the swamp,” volunteered Maryeta, the second eldest. As was their want, nobody added to this, and on that note did they lie down to sleep, gloating over the fact that they were still there and that perhaps no one could kill them.

She came upon him seated before the nameless headstone which was illuminated by a single candle, and this somehow recompensed her for the sunset she had missed. Her assessive mind put him in his early twenties, and educated. Nobody had to tell her he was a banyaga, a foreigner; it was in his eyes and pallor. Though leery of most men, she trusted his face immediately. In the middle of a defaced rectangle of the grave was a paper plate containing a large slice of watermelon, and she saw that he’d set table for her, must have been waiting for hours. When he spoke, it was in a smattering of English and Pilipino.

“I am a boat person,” he began.

He came from a ship? She marveled, and never was a hostage more willingly borne.

No, no, he grinned (and she trembled), he was of the Boat People, hounded by Immigration and attacked by pirates … they’d been seeking asylum at every harbor, dodging crossfire from hostile shores, watching fireflies that were really tracers in the evening sky … a trawler had rammed into their barge along the Surigao Straits … someone produced a pocket dictionary: Hello, bonjour, do not send us back! Today, they were to have been conveyed to (Malaysia?), but desperate to establish contact, he had jumped out of the shuttle van … for he was the Jew of the century, help! Because the narrative had moved her, she edged closer to his candlelight. A digression: Did she know that their national flower was the cambodja? And now, because she smiled: What was her name?

“Diwata,” she whispered.

The assignation lasted two more nights at the grotto.

Lamplit, she sat by the window to read his letters. Rather, her lips moved to simulate the unfamiliar words and accents she imagined to be there. The tribo—yes, the tribe—lay about her, sleeping its many torments or craving for those fabulous steaks of the hotels. Herself, she was no slave to food nor to the hundreds of other deprivations that made her people thin and bitter like the sacramental wafers of the town-church. For such a species as theirs, there could never be any sparkle or sweep of grandeur, and if by some unlikely providence this should come, how would they ever know it? So enthralled, his letters brought her back to him and to that grotto: the sighting, its extraterrestriality, its perverse intimacy. This was the one splendor she had been allowed to have, to do with it as she pleased. All the more incensed was she because, in that third meeting, which neither of them knew to be their last, he also came with a music box on a keychain. She rewound its tiny mechanism, and as once more the music came, she shuddered, clung to him, the dew on her back and the salt of his mouth on her tongue. She thought herself on fire, but it was only those votive candles of the grotto that dazzled her. There would be no memory of when they finished, how he dressed her, where they parted. It was agreed the particular grave with its chipped nicho would be their mailbox. His correspondence came five days in succession, and a week later her menstrual period stopped. The first was a twenty-peso bill tied with a scarlet ribbon, followed by a conch, a box of tamarind sweets, then three letters written in pencil.

In good conscience had she accepted the other presents but had steadfastly resisted the one she treasured most. Do not be angry, she’d consoled him, because I already have the key and have no need of the chain, too. Having inscribed its content in her heart among the kindred minutes of that hour, she then sought out the blind old beggar near the railroad tracks whose singular distinction was that he played a recorder made of wood. For three consecutive Fridays she pushed her cart to his lean-to, as to a novena, put peppermint in his mouth, and hummed to him the music of the grotto. A musician with the smoldering pride of one society had ignored, he was habitually cranky, spitting out tobacco juice as the melody continued to elude him. He had asthmatic fits, snored for hours, and woke up to find the girl where she had always been, hands demurely on her lap: Play it, old man. Soon, the snatches lengthened and deepened; texture fell into place, colors blended in his fingering. It was his phrasing that held her breathless. Not infrequently his lungs were so decrepit, his lips so cracked she had to bend down to hear him. There were times when, at the mere sound of her approach, he started on the introductory bars so that she came no closer, would stand transfixed outside the lean-to as if to absorb some climate indigenous to her alone.

By March she was in her third month with child: she was giddy, as if from herbal spice and sea anemones in her belly. In her community, where small minds abounded, any disgrasyada or fallen woman instantly became an object of mockery; yet, why was it no one ever sneered in her presence or laughed behind her back, wondered her mother, who in her own pregnancies by her runaway common-law husband was not at all a pleasant sight. Diwata’s emergent beauty vexed her, for it brought home the moral that only the young were redeemable from the squalor where they all stewed.

Each night of her arrival Diwata parceled out soup bones and replaced that traditional dried fish with crisp vegetables and diced potatoes, which she fried to a golden brown “the way rich people ate them.” The family that had never known beef stock now had cutlets and noodles to go with them. As for Diwata, she only ate for the baby in her, no more. She was happier introducing grace notes into the shack—a tinted print of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a framed butterfly, a travel poster with the text: sunrise in Saudi Arabia. She’d also come back from a factory with her tamarind seeds glued to a circlet of wire with a bronze clasp. It was, they saw, her rosary.

Born premature under the sign of Gemini, the baby boy weighed less than six pounds, and the midwife in attendance grouched about the umbilical cord, which she compared to certain root crops, the ammoniac sac that had burst like a dam. Aice, the bastard was so malnourished it would not last another hour! Visitors glumly nodded and filed out with condolences to where Gabriela de Gulat was squatted like a fallen bat. “No!” wailed Diwata. Limbs shaky and caked with blood, she flung on a duster, swathed the rigid infant in the folds of a sweater, and hurried outdoors. Never in their wildest fancy, as they notified both the police and the fire department, could the Gulangueños have guessed that the fugitive was but a stone’s throw away, genuflected by the railway, her son cradled under the sunlight and the breeze. Sensing the theater of the hour, the blind beggar tootled out their anthem while she alternately crooned to her baby and recited a litany on the tamarind beads.

It was dusk when mother and child were seen again. As the story was told and repeated, this chit of a girl had fled the quicksand of her mat with a stillborn and had returned with a burbling baby boy. A murmury procession trailing after her, “Diwata the Restorer” re-entered the shack to lie down with her son and suckle him on her breast. Six months later, a deputation of elders escorted the strangeling pair to the baptism. After the ashes and the holy oil, a maya flapped its tiny wings and flew to the chalice. “Call him … Ishmael,” said Diwata, whose tamarind beads the parish priest also blessed. A stevedore stood as godfather; two seamstresses stepped forward as godmothers. That evening, there was feasting in the Gulang; and Gabriela, widowed anew after her loss of rank, died in her sleep.

Diwata, at nineteen, had become maddeningly lovely and, just as infuriatingly, inaccessible. While a brother had been conscripted in the labor marches, and a sister eloped with a merchant marine, Diwata’s regimen had not altered much. Just as resolutely did she make her rounds of the city, to sell souvenirs, take in embroidery, keep house for her dependents. In her cubbyhole kitchen now replenished with utensils, she maintained her dawn vigil in a rattan chair. As the baby nestled upon her to feed, she crooned to him the theme of the grotto. Yes, she mused, you have your father’s eyes.

And the creek—soon, it was the sea—held an almost rabid fascination for him. It was only a coincidence that Diwata took him to Manila Bay because Maryeta, preparing for a legitimate marriage to a hog dealer, had won a slot on a refreshment concession at the Luneta Park, and naturally enough, everyone wanted to go there. The last two of the brothers had stowed away as peons for a sugar central, another sister cooked adidas or chicken feet for a beer garden, was a bedspacer in Misericordia.

Out to the seawall Diwata wandered with her son in a buri basket. Almost instantaneously she felt the tingle of exhilaration in his body. In the wind and sea spray he flexed his skinny arms as if to catch hold of some particle in the atmosphere to rub like ointment on his chest. When she was ten, Diwata had seen this Tagalog film wherein a chieftain raised his offsprings to the sunrise; and these twin visuals of the badjao and her own baby at the seawall were to stay with her like a monologue for her eyes.

Diwata in her twenties—Ishmael at five, six, and seven—had become, by all rites of superstition, the Gulang phenomenon. She had but to pass by, carrying a basin, and someone would offer her a cake of soap. At the talipapa where stall-keepers cut their profits when she came, the din in the makeshift dropped as hawker and customer alike paused to see how she was that morning. The profligate went out to despoil the womanhood of the next barrio, because she was inviolate. Young girls began to wear their tresses long and walk the way she did “because she was there …”

Catechism came to the Gulang via “missionary” students whose one frustration was that they could not go to Ethiopia. Religious instruction, especially bible readings, made Diwata all the more becoming, though she would not replace her seeds with beads that had been blessed by the Papa. It seemed only natural that in their boyish mischief her instructors should describe her as “sweet and sour.” However, the group leader (a gangling, bookish youth) could not reconcile himself to her circumstances because he regarded her as a creature of rituals—he heard Latin when he saw her at mass. One afternoon, she surreptitiously showed him the letters. He put on his spectacles, frowned. Why was he angry? It was to the question she did not ask that he addressed himself with some rancor—“They’re written in French … a Romance language.” For example: Diwa, mon amour ….

Life itself was extraneous to her who’d built a capital from her womb. For she glorified in her son. What if he was not bone and tissue of the tribo? Her mother’s heart would not acknowledge that contradictory streak in him, an inwardness that set him apart from those of his age. No bully bred of the Gulang cared to stand up to him, even if it meant losing face before a girl he’d molested. Tiradores or slingshot boys risked more than their honor whenever they aimed for the birds nesting in Diwata’s guava tree, because her son would bolt out of the shack to chase mercenaries and go for their genitals. From the very beginning, too, they seemed to have signed a pact of silence; for she no—never told him about his father, and he never asked.

Ishmael at home behaved more like a hired hand than the favorite son. Chores came easily to him, each one of which he attended with dispatch. The precocity observed in him by visitors also facilitated his admission to school when he was still underage; and it was he who read to his mother in those wakeful hours as she thumbed her letters and mouthed a rosaryo. His pleasures (she saw) were few; he was an abstemious child. But the creek and the building of its bridge beguiled him. He’d befriended the surveyors and the construction workers in their wake. After classes he fetched drinking water for the site and stayed on for campfires and the work songs which, he puzzled out to his mother in the evening, he seemed to the culture born. Were they Filipinos? he asked.

Then, more and more did he stray from home and reappear, exhausted. On the eve of her twenty-sixth birthday Diwata made a crab omelet, his weakness. Tomorrow, she would roast squid and samaral. But the hours ticked away and still he did not come. Troubled, she headed for the creek to rouse the sleeping men there from their clapboard huts. No, they shrugged, the boy had not been there that day. Back at the shack, she reheated the omelet and took out her tamarind beads. When he finally arrived, he saw his mother swatting mosquitoes with Gabriela de Gulat’s rod.

That night, at the age of eight, he said to her: “Someday, I may hurt you even more.”

All reason gone, she grabbed at his arms and shook him. “Why do you say that, what do you mean by that!”

For answer, he only turned his back and prostrated himself on the lamesita. Herself a veteran of Gabriela de Gulat’s tempestuous justice, Diwata now whipped her own son with vicarious fury. The irrationality of it all was abetted by the supplicant himself who, even as he winced, did not cry out once. When she was done, shaken, he eased the stick from her and kissed her hand. Revolted, she pushed him from her. “You are my mother’s grandchild!”

In the past, once he’d been made aware of it, the boy had rushed to her early in the morning of her natal day, arms outflung to hug her; and she received tokens of that emotion under her pillow; a flower or a sketch of one, a rarely turned out leaf, a seashell. But this Sunday—and it cut her to the quick—he did not go to her, there was nothing. Very well, she thought resignedly, I am my own mother’s daughter and I will not crumble like so many brujas in the Gulas whose sons and husbands are far more accomplished killers than you. It was with consummate austerity that she prepared them both for the six o’clock mass. Although the church was crowded, she never felt more alone. In such a state was she that she didn’t start to miss him at her side until midway through Offertory. Perhaps it was more out of despair than generosity that she handed out the larger coins from her purse for the alms basket, just as it was sheer reflex and not devotion that steered her to fall in line for Communion. “The Body of Christ,” intoned the faceless priest.

Then, as if marooned in the aisles, so leaden were her knees, the choir began to build in her ears. Something about it (a voice, apart and ascendant) lifted her bowed head during that interminable passage back to her seat. Dumbstruck, she saw him tapping a tambourine in the third pew where the choristers sat. Tears streamed down her cheeks as if to melt the Host in her mouth; and now he sang as though this psalm were his solo, arresting, yet ushering her through the wave and flurry of communicants: I am the Resurrection and the light, he who believes in me will never die …! His eyes reached out to embrace her twice, thrice; for this, the richest of altos which echoed down to her toes, he could not have put under her pillow.

One summer evening, a functionary from the city assessor’s office knocked on Diwata’s door with a request to take measurements of her lot “subject to cadastral law.” He unfolded a document, which Ishmael gestured to his mother was in order for him to sign for her. The next day, two carpenters unloaded cement and gravel at her front door (surplus from the bridge, they said), and proceeded on a reconstruction job as specified by that man with the attaché case. The speedy news around the neighborhood was that Diwata had won in the jai-alai, or that some hacendero had picked her as his ward. At any rate, these taciturn carpenters built a boundary fence in the shape of a horseshoe—with septic tanks in the rear—which allocated 100 sq. meters of land in Diwata’s name. The event merited a human-interest story in one of the dailies—home is the scavenger.

It happened after the house blessing.

Someone had solicited membership for Diwata into the Charismatic Society, and she, tremulous with excitement, had sewn for herself a fine white dress with a blue sash on a neighbor’s Singer. Diwata-watchers were later to recount how absolutely stunning she was at that very moment when God appeared to be testing her once more. The sight of listless onlookers ringing her “cottage” was ominous, for Diwata well remembered the day her baby was born. It also occurred to those present that the curious trajectories in Diwata’s life seemed to come in the variable logo of a tableau, that each of these manifest trials swung from its center to encompass even those who merely stood by in abject wonderment. Haltingly, like a mendicant straying in a silk emporium, she stroked the new sala furnishings and the groceries stocked in the cupboard, for a fraction of which the Gulang of old would have stormed a fortress. Such abundance was unnatural, and her scavenger’s raw instincts told her there was a price she had to pay.

Ishmael’s things were gone.

It was partly for this that the mirones or bystanders held fast to their watch. Yes, they commiserated, but they were also there to witness a monumental breakdown: Diwata’s fall from her fabled composure. Only such an extreme would compensate a people whose prickly, maudlin lives demanded a sacrifice. Yet, all Diwata did now was to take an armful of canned goods and go among them, asking quietly if they knew where her son was, so that they averted their eyes.

Her insatiable public was now treated to phase three: Diwata without Child. Sympathizers accompanied the bereaved to the authorities and the hospital with, unhappily, no useful results. A promotion outfit named Compact put out paid ads in the tabloids: Come home, Ishmael. But she herself was the unchangeable locus, being both moth and candle in her almost luminous desolation. Disconcerting was how she was seen where the bridge had risen and been inaugurated, the builders gone. There, she paced like a sentinel in her white dress and blue sash, lighting incense to attract dislocated spirits. Many a Sunday afternoon she disrupted the six o’clock mass by posting herself before the third pew, as if parishioners there were keeping her boy and his tambourine at bay. In rainy June, they saw her in the marketplace, unlicensed but irrevocable, standing erect by her own little stall and bidding for paroquianos as loudly as her fellows. On her grains bin was a sign that read:

TELL ME WHERE MY SON IS,
AND I’LL GIVE YOU ALL MY RICE

Like a benevolent plague, the groceries arrived, transactions of middlemen. Maryeta had quarreled violently with her mate and moved back to the Gulang as retailer of her elder sister’s thriving bodega. The old squad itself was undergoing a radical facelift. New money was pouring in, government funding had been endorsed for an infrastructure, and would-be parliamentarians initiated two overlapping reclamation drives that swept away “aboriginal” squatters to far-flung ruralia where there was nothing but sky and hygiene. Yet, in the mainstream was an undercurrent that coursed throughout the country, a traffic with its own gravitational pull that carried its residuals to undisclosed ports of call in Southeast Asia. For the Mekong Delta had opened arteries and thrown up human cargo no maritime law or bilateral treaty could ever plug again. And with the lilies in Philippine waters was mixed inexorably the flotsam of the Fourth World.

Her “stations” at the regular mercado had been put to a stop and her mini-granary placed in storage by the Charismatic. Undaunted, she walked across that third pew of the six o’clock mass, a madrigal etched on her lips. It was even rumored that an eccentric film director smitten with this “Beata of the Bridge” wanted to buy the exclusive movie rights to her story and project her on the screen “where she belonged.” Her last remembered passion was the reading of placement notices, standing on the embankment and encircling item after item with a piece of crayon. Always, recalled the newsstand owner, she left her mark on ads for overseas employment. One morning, the Gulang learned that she was gone. Like a chorus, people were saying how she’d hired out as a domestic, had flown out to the Persian Gulf. She had always liked the sound of Saudi …

The young man arrived in the Gulang five years later. Maryeta, who’d become a shrew without a husband, felt this twinge of recognition as soon as he’d stepped into her parlor. In the years of her elder sister’s absence, the supply line had slackened, and to its remnants Maryeta brought a hoarder’s coldness.

It had happened so long ago that whatever associations the Gulang may have had between the past and the present were largely specious and unspoken. So it scarcely mattered that this stranger had a chinkiness of the eyes, that he was introverted and held himself aloof. It was April first, feast day of the Gulang, and revelers readying for their pyrotechnics in the sky were suddenly outshone by the fireworks that burst from Maryeta’s cottage. As of old, Gulangueños herded round the horseshoe fence, this time to gawk at Maryeta skipping back and forth in her “PX” and at the young man in the doorway.

“You’re not going to give away any more of my supplies!”

Lobbing a carton of cookies to a child’s outstretched hand, the stranger said: “Behave, or everything stops … the electricity, the water, the food.”

Berserk, she ran back into the house and threw herself bodily against the mound of merchandise on the floor. Take them, signaled the young man almost imperceptibly. The children shrieked and swarmed all over the living room, while Maryeta scratched out and keened, as though vermin were tearing out her very heart.

From here the young man slipped into the low register of an inquest. Where he required logistics, pertinent facts, he only got hearsay, mythology. At the creek and in church it was more of the same. “If ever there was a living saint ….” From those in the print media who’d covered the terrain, the tone was worshipful and therefore less than informative. The scent grew stronger at that particular newsstand where he was shown yellowing pages of newspaper advertisements with crayon encirclements, which the owner had kept. The next logical connection was the travel agencies and recruitment centers, a route he knew exceedingly well.

In a restaurant, over a cup of espresso, a magazine editor he’d been referred to put this three-pronged question to him: Why was he here, could one see his passport, and what was his profession? Wearily, the young man replied that he was a “retriever.” A what …? Well, explained the young man, he was half-Filipino and half-Kampuchean who’d been hired to redeem transients, alive or dead, to their source of origin. This meant transporting the deceased back to the Philippines or taking them out, for there were many complex and unreconstituted halves to the Asian who wanted to go home again.

And how could he tell anyone how it really was? That it was a killing discipline, a madman’s crusade? At twelve he’d discovered that his father was the first retriever and he’d been executed by the Khmer Rouge in Prey Veng? As a boat child he himself had seen pregnant women sodomized and their placenta squeezed out into the paddies, tubercular girls picking each other’s lice and eating them with condiments from the China Sea, militia at target practice carving out graffiti on a decapitated head nailed to a tree. It was training by exposure that was not fit for any man and he underwent it in his boyhood. Not once did his counselors expound on Human Rights, but as the voyaging and the ferrying went on and on, the body count rising with the waves, he realized the fishbone he’d swallowed so long ago could never be spat out again.

Yes, there were relatives of evacuees who wrote out handsome commissions for a reconciliation with their loved ones. But for him the truest dividend lay in taking back a body to its homeland, like restoring a lost icon to its rightful altar. He’d sailed and choppered, starved and gagged on beetles, dined with government trooper or urban guerrilla, endured pestilence and drought, froze on mountaintops or baked in the desert only to rescue a severed hand that could still be repossessed by its mother soil. Oh, the Hueys and the horror …

Riyadh! That was the first step in his odyssey. And so it was there he flew, to pick up the unwieldy threads of a profession whose extravagant aberrations spewed him out of airport or depot and thence to a schizophrenic Asia’s ramparts, promenades, casbahs, catacombs, and castles—holding up a snapshot, haggling for directions, jotting down probables, bouncing from vendor to bureaucrat, at times with all of God’s informants seemingly born mute or spoke only Speranto.

And on this one—the childhood guilt had made him insomniac and obsessive—the trail was a spiral, a coral reef. No absolution for him who bore the mark of the beast on his forehead, and he longed to be punished, scourged in the streets, for having mounted an allegiance to a shadowy race above the dictates of his own blood. Casting questions in pidgin Arabic, he gratefully set off with whatever crumbs were thrown to him, observing their Ramadan, avoiding pork, ever deferential with the women veiled and ambiguous. No, they hadn’t seen her … Yes, perhaps at the mosque … That Iranian is always sending infidels to my shop … Try the oasis, that’s where the berbers are … Can you quote from the Sharia? … You mongrels are always crawling over here for a drop of oil … Then: Ah, the lovely lady with the haunted eyes? Yes, she was a substitute helper in the orphanage but got sick and moved on to Jeddah. Saddik!

Once there, he learned he’d missed her by a year. Seoul? somebody said. In Sri Lanka they remembered her well—“The beautiful one with the beads.” His credit was running low and he had to load contraband on a sampan fleet and sell a pint of blood before he could resume. Already, he’d been declared persona non grata in three countries. Or “wanted for questioning,” ripe for extradition, convicted in absentia. Provocateur! Two more years passed, he’d been reprimanded and “reassigned,” and was sitting, visa-less, in a Bangkok eatery when a pawnbroker he’d done some black-market business with tapped him on the shoulder, handed him a message: She was in Indonesia.

Something about the way it went with the Indons both disarmed and disturbed him. It was too smooth, too serene; he wasn’t used to this kind of rhythm. The topography of his quest was virtually unchanged, for he commenced in the city limits and with tips, referrals, and notations in the books of registry, worked himself out to suburbia and then to the countryside. Everywhere he went, by bus or bullock cart, there seemed to be a shy eagerness to help him, an accordance of small kindnesses he had not encountered in the Middle East. Yet as he drew sustenance from this benign and sunburst land, the worrier in him pulled back for another look, a second reading.

If anything, it was this fatalism that readjusted his sights and saw him through his journey’s end. For in a coastal town east of Bali where batik weavers lived, a fisherman’s niece who’d been tutored by a barnstorming preacher told him, yes, she had been there. And now, with the girl interpreting for him in spurts, the uncle stood up to speak. But you see, young man, the couple whose only child she had been given food and shelter to care for, had rented a boat during the holidays … a monsoon had been forecasted, and a “monster” came … all four had been lost, their bodies never recovered. Ah, but that one, reminisced the fisherman, melodious in his dialect despite the monotone of translation. How she adored that boy and the beach … there she sat on the sands, fingering ornamental beads and listening to chanteys. Because she was always there, watching, it was assumed she had been forsaken by a seaman, and that she would wait there till the day she died. Did he want her things? They were not much, really, but they had saved them wrapped in her own bandanna.

The young man, who had never found the remains of his father but had not stopped looking, now returned to the Gulang and its cemetery to dig a hole beside a blind man’s grave and inter with due ceremony a white dress with a blue sash she may have worn at the wrong portal to Phnom Penh. The rosary he plucked pellet by pellet and dropped into the loamy ground. The seeds were his father’s, the beads his mother’s; and in the napalmed, renegade world he knew, where refugee families were torn screamingly apart and often buried a continent away from each other, perhaps that was reconciliation enough. It was as a chance passenger in another airport, in another time, that this poem he’d read as a boy sang in his ears: Mother Asia, the impurities in your veins runneth over ….

“Diwata, Where She Walked” is from the collection Cadena de Amor, which will be republished soon by Exploding Galaxies, a new publishing house focused on republishing out-of-print works of contemporary Philippine fiction.