Green Sanctuary 

Chapter 1

The two of them --- Alberto Gonzales and  his cousin Francisco --- were  on top of the papaya tree by the house in Zamboanga.  They were then still boys.  Suddenly, the papaya tree started to sway toward the house.  Before he and his cousin could climb down, the three fell.  The papaya'’ top broke off against the edge of the galvanized iron roof and came down upon both of them:  fruit, flowers, leaves, and all.  They were too shocked and scared of his mother and Tia Isabel, who were in the yard near by, to cry.

 “What was that, Albertito?” said the mother, using his pet name.

“Nada, mama,” he said.  “Nothing” --- although they were standing there, the papaya tree trunk still between their legs, for they had had no time to climb down because the tree fell so quickly.

 “Ooohhhh,” she said.  She never once looked at them, not even to turn her head for a glance, since she was too busy talking to their aunt.  “Then what was that racket I heard?”  She went on talking, not looking at them still.

 “It was nothing, mama,” he said.  “Nada, nada,” although the leaves, flowers, and fruit were still coming down on them like rainfall.

 The two squatted there under the eaves, Alberto and his cousin Francisco, not moving a hair, really scared to move so as not to catch his mama’s or their aunt’s attention.

 They were then still boys.

Chapter 2

For was he not a Zamboangueño, born and raised in Zamboanga, with Moros as his childhood playmates?  Quite often, outside of his home town, in the Visayas or in Luzon, he was mistaken for a Moro.

“You must be a datu,” the dimpled whore from Culi-Culi, a haven for worn-out prostitutes in Manila, had said to him while putting the money away under her elastic panty belt.

He had tipped her generously for one lay and treated her more gently than he would a decent girl.  “No, no, I’m not a datu,” he said, sitting up on the side of the pallet and gazing at the icon of Christ on a tiny altar up against a wall.  “Why do you say I’m a datu?”

She sat up on the pallet too, and, wrapping her arms round him, leaned her head on the small of his back.  She said, “Did you not say you were from Zamboanga?”

“It does not mean I’m a Moro,” he said.  Her hair brushed against his back.  Under a glaring electric ceiling bulb he was naked but for his socks, which he had not taken off.  While screwing her he had felt silly and had even once turned his head to look at his stockinged feet.  “Much less am I a datu,” he said, “just because I gave you a big tip.”

Because Alberto had treated her decently, gently, the whore said she would give him an extra lay.  He said, “No, no, no, thanks,” and immediately felt so proud for having self-control and strong will.  And yet one lay was truly enough, because before the week was over he had the clap, and while pissing into the toilet bowl in his boarding-house in Sampaloc, Manila, to relieve the burning sensation he broke the toilet bowl cover, and two days or so later he nearly broke his head when he slipped on the bathroom tiles.  He made up his mind then to see a doctor who had his clinic on the unlit ground floor of a half-demolished building in front of the University.  The doctor gave him a long sermon on morality and the virtues of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the soldier saint and patron of fornicators, but after over half an hour had not written any prescription for his social disease.  Alberto stood up to leave, and the doctor nonchalantly asked him where in the devil’s name he was going without the prescription.  Alberto changed his voice to an effeminate’s, and said, “I’m going to see a preacher.”

Chapter 3 

In a way crudely, that was his life --- always going crack, crack, crack.  Or perhaps more like a duck’s nervous quack, quack, quack.  But there was always a crack a cleavage, a break, and somehow he was always responsible for it.  He was never conscious of it happening at the time.  The exact moment could only be traced back --- or, sometimes, foreseen --- but at that infinitesimal moment when the break, aayyiiieee, the crack came:   never!

He left some girls (not so many as he would like to boast or pretend to have had to his friends by his non-committal silence when the subject of girls and prostitutes was brought up) --- before that rumble near the school, over a girl, in Zamboanga.  He would like to think he left them, but now looking back and being true to himself, it seemed they had drifted away when that crack came.    

And as for Myrna, that moment came some two years ago.  They were standing by the side of the Liberal Arts building, in half darkness, the concrete parade-ground walk hard and firm under his feet.

“I have mother’s jewelry and some money I saved in my handbag,” she said. She smiled, so sweetly, and her face seemed to light up in the half darkness.  It was as though she had smiled into his face, sending radiation of light into his with her love and trust in him.

He wanted to ask what she was doing with her mother’s jewelry, with the money.  But then it suddenly came to him that her reply might force him to a commitment, irrevocable and implacable --- to say yes to her.  So, instead he said, “Won’t your mother be angry if she discovers the loss of her jewelry?”

“Does it matter when we are gone?” she said.  And he saw the light in her face begin to dim.  Still, she looked radiant standing there before him in her green-and-white school uniform, so beautiful and desirable.  He ached wanting her.  But was he ready to pay for tonight’s and all the night’s screwing for the rest of his life by running away with her now and eventually marrying her?

He tried not to look into her face when he said, “Maybe we should think more about this.  Why don’t we talk about this again tomorrow?”

Finally, the light, the glow in her face, dimmed:  but oh!  she was so beautiful still.  And then, suddenly, quiet and pitiful, she stood there with her mother’s jewelry and the little money she had saved in her bag.  She did not say anything, although her eyes said, painfully, to him --- or so he imagined --- “You goddamn coward!  You pitiful (how ironical), goddamn coward!”

And then crack, crack, crack!  And nothing he could say or do afterwards would change that scene or bring back the light, the radiance in her lovely, innocent face.  Crack, and that finally was lost.  O that I shall die!   

And then there was Baby.  He called her Baby, although her real name was Concepcion.  She was a quiet, silent young girl, very dark, not so tall as Myrna, but more vivacious, easily excited: more soft in your arms, liquid-like, the moment you touched her.  The two of them were in the unlit operating room of the town hospital, in the darkness, and she was in her immaculately white nurse’s uniform, since she was on night-duty. 

“You mean do it here?” he said, incredibly, holding both her hands in his and looking round for the operating table.  He hardly could see it in the darkness; and there, in the unlit operating room, only her white nurse’s uniform reflected the shafts of faint moonlight coming through the windows.

“Why not?” she said, as she withdrew one hand and quickly thrust it inside his pants.  She was panting then, and he thought he saw her red lips parting, hot, moist, falling like dewy rose petals.

But he was not ready:  trembling and scared that if he gave in he would have to be tied up with her every moment for the rest of his life.  Or, perhaps he wanted to show her he was much more gallant than other young men, mas galante; and had more dignity by refusing her:  to quell her soaring passion on the operating table.  “What if the head nurse sees us!” he whispered, stalling for time.  “She comes in here during her rounds.”

Really, she did not say anything, but in the closeness of her mouth and her breasts he felt her silent laughter begin to rise, to tremble as much as he trembled then --- and to soar up her throat before breaking with contempt and hate for him.  This he had not expected.  And now, viciously, he heard her say, although she never said a word above a hiss, heard her say, spitefully, lashing her hiss-words like a horse-whip across his face:  “Miss Lydia Tamparong!  She lays more men here on the operating table a night than there are patients operated on by Dr. Carreon in a week!”

He lost her.  He tried to capture the falling petals, to open her red roughed wet lips with his, but catlike she withdrew; hiss-falling away silently, invisibly, wafting down in the air-current of her hissing when he tried to kiss her again.  And he swore just as silently:  Dear God!  Dear, dear God!

Chapter 4 

He heard this story from strangers, and his friends, and cousins:

In his home-town, Zamboanga city, the Moros stripped a taxi-driver naked and tied him up by his thumbs to an acacia tree on an incline of the National Road; so that when you came up the road you could not help but see the corpse suddenly come up to you like a ghoulish vision in a nightmare.  And the taxi-driver hung there for some two weeks, rotting fast under the tropical sun and terrestrial rain, until the rotting smell enveloped the small barrio along the road like a fog, omnipresent and pervading; and they said that when there was a strong easterly wind the fetid smell of the decomposing body floated like a dark cloud over to the monastery of the Sisters of Lourdes down the road, away from the heart of the barrio.  The sisters would then close all their shutters, their capped heads popping out and withdrawing abruptly from the windows like the small, brightly-colored swamp violin-crabs in their mud holes, and the noise of the shutters being closed sounded like small thunder-claps and echoed throughout the monastery and the barrio. 

And the barrio people would clap their hands because they knew they could now take off their handkerchiefs from their faces and walk about the National road without feeling like gangsters or bank robbers, and they clapped too because they knew that the image motorists and passers-by had of their barrio as an enclave of thugs was lifted when they took off their masks or handkerchiefs.  And so, they were very happy whenever the easterly wind blew.

But the body of the taxi-driver would have remained there until the worms and the crows had completely stripped it to its bones had it not been for the barrio fool, the only one who had not worn a handkerchief, who went to see the barrio leader one morning and said, “I think there is a man rotting on the acacia tree.”

The barrio leader, as well as the other folks in the barrio, had almost forgotten about the taxi-driver, since the easterly wind and the handkerchiefs had kept away the smell and made their lives bearable if not almost normal again.  “A man rotting on the acacia tree?” said the barrio leader, sitting on the bamboo porch.

And the town’s fool said, “Yes.”

The barrio leader, gazing towards the huge, fat cockroaches with shiny bellies and spiny legs on the bamboo-strip railings of his porch, said absent-mindedly, “What will you do about it?”

And then the barrio fool said, “I think I will cut down the acacia tree.”

“Can you do that?” the barrio leader asked the barrio fool.  Slowly and deliberately, he collected a wad of sputum in his mouth and spat it at the fat cockroaches.

“Si, señor, I think so,” said the barrio fool.  “If you’ll lend me your axe…”

The barrio leader lent him his axe.  And off the barrio fool went, without once looking back, climbing up the incline of the National Road, with the axe swinging over one shoulder, and then when he got there he started chopping at the acacia tree as if his very life depended on it, and stopping only when he had cut down the tree.

However, since it was the barrio fool who had cut down the tree, no one believed the putrid smell was gone.  So even to this day, they said --- and this the young man Alberto Gonzales was not able to verify, however --- anyway, they said the barrio folks there still wear handkerchiefs over their faces or strung about their necks as though the whole barrio were stricken with an epidemic of goitre.

Chapter 5

On many occasions he had come face to face with violence.  If it were maize it would be growing out of his mouth and ears already.  But not once had he run away from its stare --- although he had always been soused, more drunk than a Norwegian sailor in the old Zamboanga night-market --- ah, yes, not even when a Moro toughie launched at him with a kris (a corrugated-edge sword), and he had stood there smiling, immobile, both hands stretched out before him, palms up, twiddling his fingers, cajoling and mocking the Moro to come closer and stab him.  He was so numb with caña rum, having guzzled it from morning till night, he felt dazed and his feelings were deadened.  The Moro toughie launched at him with his kris, but Alberto stood there without moving; not a twitch came to his face as the kris’s curve passed a hairbreadth from his stomach.  The toughie halted before him, transfixed, eyes wide open in disbelief, his jaw hanging.   Then, spinning on his heel, he fled toward the Moro village of Rio Hondo; as Alberto tapping the spikes of his shoes hard on the pavement pretended he were running after the Moro toughie, and shouted after the Moro at the top of his lung:  “Hoy!  Hoy!  Hoy!  Run, run, run, you unwashed arsehole of a Moro pig!”

That was what the Visayan should have done:  run like a squealing pig instead of getting himself cornered at the ruins of Pettit Barracks.  At one time an American garrison, before that the ancient fort of the Pillar, the oldest Spanish fortress in the Zamboanga peninsula, whose main pueblo of Zamboanga over a hundred years ago was known as Leal y Valiente Villa, the ruins were isolated and secluded from the heart of the present-day city, partly spilling onto the southern coastline.  It was unlikely that anyone would pass by the ruins at such a late hour, although pairs of lovers might, but, unconcerned and afraid of scandal, the night lovers would rather seek the pleasure of the flesh than go to the assistance of someone in trouble.

Indeed, it was foolish for the Visayan to get himself into an obvious trap.  Alberto and three men had chased him out of a local night club, down the main asphalt street, past the Pettit Barracks arch (it’s still there to this day, looking lonely and abandoned), and across the abandoned lot lush with bougainvillaea bushes and yellow Dulce Marias vines.  As the Visayan ran into the bushes, he became entangled in the Dulce Marias vines, while the bougainvillaea  thorns held him fast in their grip.  Desperately he sprang, leaping vainly, pieces of cloth tearing off like feathers of a rooster caught in a thorny thicket.  They jumped on him, crashing onto the bush, fist flailing.  The Visayan tore off his shirt and again sprang, freeing himself finally, and ran toward the small clearing hidden from sight by the pillars and columns of the Pettit Barracks ruins.  And that was not what he should have done, got himself hemmed in by the huge pillars and white columns while the encircled him, pack-thirsty for his blood.

There was a bright moon, and the columns cast long shadows on the turf.  It was a beautiful, quiet night.  The men unbuckled their leather belts, wrapped one end round their hand, and with the metal buckles swinging and glinting under the moon, they moved slowly toward the terrified Visayan.  Alberto stood back under a pillar and saw him cringe, crouch, in the long shadows of the columns and the moving shadows of the men.  And then, Alberto heard a crack as the metal buckles struck the Visayan’s skull, and followed by a series of thud that were like the sounds you hear when men with 2” X 4” wooden poles are killing a mad dog in the neighborhood.  When the thud-sounds stopped and it was over, Alberto came up to the Visayan lying shirtless on his stomach on the clean turf, without a wound save for the cuts made by the bougainvillaea thorns.  However, in the moonlight he saw the welts beginning to rise all over his back, and the thud-sounds of the metal buckles rang in his ears, just as if they were lashing at him with their metal buckles.  Silent and unmoving, the Visayan lay with one side of his face against the turf.  Then he made a sound, alien and unhuman, like a gurgling of an underground spring.  In that instant, Alberto saw a lump of coagulated blood shot from his ohed-mouth onto the clean blades of grass cushioning his head under the moonlight.

Ah, Dios mio!   But Alberto had seen more blood when the American mestizo was stabbed in the back with a tres-cantos file knife by the dwarf of the town.  Although the American mestizo was nearly two meters tall, they said that the dwarf jumped on his back, wrapped his stunted crooked legs round the mestizo’s waist, stuck to him like a blood-sucker, and, both hands gripping the knife firmly, plunged it with all the strength he had in his long, muscled, hairy arms into the back of the tall mestizo.

When the dead body was taken away by one of the mestizo’s younger brothers (he had three, but none was so tall as he), nobody had thought of washing away the pool of blood left on the pavement under the lamp post.  Dark and viscid, the pool of blood remained by the side of the street near the gutter.  It was a large pool, almost a meter in diameter, and Alberto could not imagine how a man, even as big as the American mestizo, could shed so much blood from a small, though deep, wound in his back.

Someone pointed toward the gutter, where a streamlet of blood had flowed, and said, “Look!  There is more blood here.”  They followed the man who had spoken and walked some distance alongside the gutter, tracing the blood flowing with the water into the open drain.  And then they retraced their steps back to the pool of blood under the lamp post.  Several drunks were standing there talking in very loud voices, and one of them, with both hands jerking above his head, was laughing and dancing on the street.  A companion of Alberto told him to shut up, but the drunk went on laughing and dancing, and the companion, cursing, knocked him down with his steel chain.  Then the rest of the gang started to kick him with their steel-tipped boots, and a stranger in a dark shirt, a grinning skull printed on the back, said, “Let’s roll him into the gutter!”  So, they lifted the drunk from the street and pushed him into the gutter by the pool of blood.  The other drunks fled, and Alberto and his friends, with the stranger in the dark shirt following behind them, went to a tuba store and drank and ate asocena, a stew made from dog’s meat.  And when it was late evening they began to sing and dance inside the tuba store, and to thump the brittle sawali-framed walls with their palms and fists, until the wife of the man who had knocked the drunk down with his steel chain came in and, with a coconut-palm broom, drove all of them home.

Chapter 6

There they were then, not more than a day ago, sitting at the dining table.  Father looked up across the table and said, “So you will leave tomorrow for Cotabato.”

“Si, papa,” said Alberto.

Under the glaring bulb, her face contorted like a child about to cry, mother reached out and patted the back of his hand.

“Por favor,” he said.  “Please.”

“It is the best thing to do,” said father.  “You are no longer a small boy.  It is time that you learn how to work, to be on your own.”

“I was only going with my friends,” said Alberto.  “I didn’t know there was going to be a fight. Truly.”

“It does not matter now,” said the father.  “Does it?”

He heard his mother say:  “O, my poor boy!”

Chapter 7

In the dim yellow light of a gas lamp, with moonlight streaming through the broken windows and doors with their whole panes and panels gone, the young man Alberto Gonzales lay on a borrowed mat on the floor beside a geodetic engineer.  “You may borrow my rubber shoes tomorrow,” the engineer was saying.  “Is this the first time you ever worked in a surveying company?”

“O, o,” he said, turning his head on the mat toward the other man.  “I thought I’d be working in an office, not in the field.”

“You’ll need my rubber shoes tomorrow,” said the geodetic engineer, whose name was Reynaldo Costelo.  “Do not be ashamed.”

He could see only a faint profile, silhouetted against the lamplight, and lips which moved, slowly and steadily, like a clam on the shiny, wet market tables in Zamboanga, he was thinking; in my own home town, where the concrete tables are black and shiny with fish slime and guts.  That was not more than a day ago.  And yet incredibly enough in that short time and less than an hour’s flight he had been transported from civilization to a veritable jungle in Central Mindanao.

“Will you not need them, too?” said Alberto Gonzales, now, to the geodetic engineer, lying there too on a mat, on the foot-smoothed floor of the old, run-down, big house which the townsfolk said had been built during Spanish times, in the 17^th century.  “My leather shoes will do tomorrow.  They are not new, anyway.”

Said Reynaldo Costelo:  “I have an extra pair.  And our feet are of the same, so you can use my rubber shoes.  Anyway, I’m staying behind to examine our record books and aerial photos taken this week.”

All of a sudden, he felt no longer alone, in that big, big, ancient and dilapidated Spanish house, which was their main quarters in Pikit, the oldest town, he was to learn, in the Moro province of Cotabato, Maguindanao, island of Mindanao; where he had arrived with the party chief a little before twilight and knew not a single soul.  He turned his head and stared into the dark.  “Thank you, Reynaldo,” he said; “for lending me your mat, too.” 

The next day, a little after dawn, Alberto Gonzales and four other young men went down the dirt road toward Pulanggi River.  It had rained during the night till just before dawn, and pools of water stood in potholes in the road which went straight as a plumb-line between rice paddies.  Under the filtering sun the murky pools all looked like miniature wells, so he and the men could not tell how deep or shallow any of the potholes were as they went along the rain-washed dirt road.  Jumping and hopping over pools of water, they made their way on the even and flat patches of the road, as though they were skipping over invisible ropes strung before them. But tiny rivulets of water from the paddies eroding the road crisscrossed like bloodless veins and exposed arteries, and it was impossible to avoid all of them.  After a while, whenever they lifted or set their feet down on the dirt road, a whoozing sound emanated from the canvas cover of their rubber shoes --- like this:  s s s s s w w w w w h h h h h – w w w h h h o o o o o – sssooowwwwwhhhhhh!

Then, with their rubber shoes soaked and heavy with rain water, Alberto and the men no longer avoided the potholes but went on quickly, walking straight in the middle of the road as though tracing a dry and smooth pathway.  As they came to a village with a few clusters of squat nipa-thatched huts, shadowless under the cloud-veiled sun, a strong and foul smell abruptly engulfed them, grasping their throats with invisible fingers, and up-ending their stomachs.  They all halted, transfixed there on the road, heads flung back away from the wind as they held their breath; then one by one they began to fall away from the road and lean on its shoulder over the canals:  coughing and vomiting into the rainwater of the rice paddies.

Cupping their hands over their mouths, Alberto and the men half ran through the village.  As they passed by the nipa huts, squat and fragile, Alberto saw row after row of dark meat covering the nipa-thatched rooftops, and in the meat were white living things, swarming and wriggling, which seemed to infuse life and motion into the nipa huts.

No one spoke until they reached the bank of the river, where a new village appeared along the shoreline and where small carinderias … eateries, with half-empty jars along the walls, extended from porches hugging the roadside.  The river was swollen from the night’s rain, and water from the river and fields swirled under the carinderias.  Around their wooden posts, loose reeds and the coconut-palm fronds were held by the swift current, while behind them mudfish poked their tiny mouths above the foam in search of food.

While waiting for the flood to subside before crossing the river, the young Gonzales and the men sat in one of the carinderias.  They munched on biscuits and native cakes, washing them down with native black coffee.

Alberto wondered about the other village which, isolated and seemingly empty, reeked of rotting dark meat.  Turning toward the Moro interpreter Ismael, he said:

“What was that rotten smell in the other village?  The one we passed by earlier.”

“Mudfish,” said the Moro interpreter.

“What do you mean, Ismael?”

“Those were rotten mudfish,” he said, “on the roofs of the huts.”

“What?” said Alberto, incredulous.

Without looking at the young man, the Moro Ismael said:

“That is their food … what you saw there on the roofs of the huts in that village."

“But they have worms in them!  How can anyone eat them with all those worms, ay, even maggots, swarming all over the rotten fish?”

This time the interpreter looked up at Alberto.  “They purposely rot the mudfish,” he said casually, as though he were talking to a neighbor in a tuba store; “so maggots will grow in the rotten meat.  It is the maggots they like to eat.”

Alberto looked back at the Moro interpreter, staring firmly through his plastic-framed spectacles.  Either he is lying or he is making fun of me, he thought.  But what if he’s telling the truth, that the Moros there really eat rotten fish with worms and maggots in them?  The young man fixed his spectacles on the bridge of his nose, shifted his eyes toward the posts under the carinderia, where the water level had gradually lowered and nearly came to the bottoms of the posts, and then gazed toward the flood-swept rice stalks, lying out behind the trees skirting the fields.

One of the men leaning against the bamboo railing of the carinderia turned to the instrument man and said:

“The water is no longer high in the river, Alfonso.  Shall we get our things ready?”  

“We’ll wait for a little while,” Alfonso told the man.  “Then the river will be safe for crossing.”  To the Moro interpreter:

“Have you already hired a banca --- canoe --- for us?”

“O, o.”

“We will leave in a few minutes then,” said the instrument man Alfonso, drinking off his coffee.  He went down the bamboo steps onto the muddy dirt road, and gazed toward the Pulanggi River, where some flotsam choked the river banks still.  But the river was no longer swollen by the rainwater from the hills and fields, and the current midstream was not so swift and onrushing with tree-trunks and coconut palms as it was earlier that morning when the men came into the Moro village.  Then he added:  “Better have the banca ready, Ismael.” 

When they reached the other side of the river, the sun was shining through the trees on a meadow which stretched out to the edge of the trail, and in the distance the face of the mountain was flooded in yellow and orange.  Fastening lunchboxes to their waists and lifting their surveying instruments on their shoulders, Alberto Gonzales and the men started across the meadow.  All of a sudden, thousands of tiny yellow butterflies swarmed around them, the wings spotted dark-brown like innumerable pairs of irisless eyes; the butterflies flitted around them, above their knees and waists, and over the bushes and green mounds of wild campanilla  vines, like a great wave of vibrant motion.  The entire meadow, shaded from the sun on its east fringe by old, gnarled acacia trees, was inundated by the sea of tiny yellow butterflies, and beyond, near where the trail began on the slope, the sunlight now and then splotched the exposed patches of soft green, as the tiny creatures shifted direction in flight.  The men cut across the meadow toward the mountain trail, their feet and ankles wet with dew, and the spotted yellow butterflies never left them.  When Alberto turned back he saw a strange sight:  all the men (and himself, too, he would later be aware) were visible only from the waist up, seemingly suspended above the meadow, the lower parts of their bodies hidden underneath the sea of butterflies.

The trail to the mountain of Pulanggi was narrow and slippery, a gash in the grass-matted floor of the forest covered by scabs of rotten foliage from the giant trees.  Newly cut saplings along each side of the trail and protruding roots, fresh with latex still, stabbed their sides and pierced the soles of their rubber shoes as they climbed the trail.  Whenever thick overhanging bushes held up by rattan vines and climbers blocked their way, the Moro interpreter Ismael walked in front of the men, slashing and hacking at the climbers with his all-purpose bladed tool, an old US government issue bolo --- long knife, cutting a tunnel through the clusters of leaves and underbrush.  Through this tunnel Alberto and the other young men crawled for almost an hour, and the dampness soaked their maong jackets, while the saplings and climbers lashed and scratched their faces and the backs of their hands.  And then the tunnel disgorged them, bleeding through tiny wounds and their faces covered with swollen leeches, onto a clearing on top of Mount Pulanggi.

They sat in the clearing in pairs and with lit cigarettes stabbed at the fat leeches on each other’s face and hands. Alberto was fascinated and his pride swelled, for a city man not knowing how to get rid of them would have panicked.  Under the lit cigarettes, the leeches, which earlier were so invulnerable and impervious, became helpless and dropped off in blobs on the ground, staining the soil with human blood; it was as if the men were shedding their blood in an ancient ritual of human sacrifice.

Above them, framed by the soaring walls of giant trees at the edge of the clearing, a patch of sky hung like an inverted ocean. Then the sun came peering through the frame of treetops and through the light-dappled leaves, and in a little while the patch of sky screamed with eerie sounds as flocks of hawks suddenly soared out from the canopy of the wooded forest and from rotten holes of dead trees.

Lying on his back, Alberto watched the hawks gliding with the wind currents.  While he watched the birds, the men cut round-wood for the triangulation tower and started to put up its base.  He watched with great concentration and awe, until without his really knowing it he could see the feathers ruffle in the gust of wind, distinguish the different shades of colors on their bodies, the length of their wingspans, the different screeching strains in their voices:  all these came in such detail that he could identify each of the more than thirty hawks and could tell when any of them glided out of the patch of clear sky above his head.

When the triangulation tower was half finished and they were having lunch out of their lunchboxes, Alberto said to the men: 

“I never saw so many hawks in my life.  And they were not even scared of us.”

“That is nothing,” said the instrument man, Alfonso.  “We saw tigers, elephants, and very big snakes in Vietnam.”  Pointing with a forefinger toward a spot some ten feet away, he said:  “Sometimes we saw sabre-toothed tigers that close, you know, suddenly materializing there!”

“You are just joking,” said Alberto.

“O, o --- ba, Alberto.  You ask your cousin Francisco.  He was with us in Vietnam before the Tet offensive.”

“Ah ------ yes,” said Alberto.  He recalled the story his cousin Francisco told him while flushed with beer and animated by memories of pearly skinned Vietnamese prostitutes and drinking wine on French-styled verandas in Vietnam.  It was less than a week after Francisco had come home on leave from Vietnam.   They had gone to this old bar in Zamboanga City, more for sentimental reasons than for its beer, which was warm and stale.  He was so impressed then that in his mind he could see the rainforests of Vietnam and the mountain trail where the tiger suddenly appeared before his cousin and his companions:  a solitary tiger, as large as a calf, and not ten feet away.  “When we are in the jungle,” cousin Francisco had told him, “our Vietnamese guides walk ahead of us, thrashing the bushes with sticks, shouting at the top of their voices, and making very loud noises with empty cans.  This is to drive away the wild animals hiding in the bushes.  But if unfortunately you find yourself face to face with a tiger --- like that time in Ailao --- you don’t move, not even a muscle or your eyelids; not even a strand of hair.  Then you wait, and pray that the tiger has just had his lunch and is very full, because then the tiger will side away and disappear into the jungle.  That is what happened to us that time.”  Alberto was envious of his cousin and felt slightly annoyed when later he saw his other cousins and some relatives, mouths agape, listening so intently to his cousin Francisco.

“But the hawks are beautiful,” said Alberto to the circle of men in the clearing on Mount Pulanggi.  “I mean, as a boy I only saw them when they were after a helpless chick, circling round until suddenly the would drop and sweep down, striking with their gaff-like talons, then flying away with the shrieking chick while the mother hen ran about, feathers all ruffled, looking for her lost brood.”  He paused, a little embarrassed, for exposing his soft self, then went on:  “Here, though, they are just freely gliding with the wind, not a threat to a helpless chick or even to the mother hen.”  He stopped then, for he knew his thoughts were becoming too profound and such would be out of place here with these men.  But to himself he added:  Here in the forest, they no longer are intruders --- or worse, predators, but the king of the sky. 

“They are just killers to me:  ruthless killers.”  The instrument man Alfonso had not ceased eating, hardly even for a moment to pause for breath or to speak, shoveling food into his mouth with his bare hands from the aluminum lunchbox.  As he spoke rice grains and pieces of fish occasionally spurted from his mouth.  “We had a hen coop before in the province, and one night a hawk broke into the coop and killed all our hens, including the rooster.  Killed all our hens not because he was hungry --- for one hen would have been more than enough food for him --- but he was just mean, really mean and ruthless.  Son of a mother whore!”  The instrument man sat with his legs crossed before him.  He was short and had Spanish mestizo features.  A stubble of beard, which grew overnight, giving him the appearance of always needing a shave, covered his chin.  He stopped eating for the first time since he began speaking and stared up at the hawks, swearing at them in Tagalog, his native tongue:  “Anak ng putang ina!”  “Son of a mother whore!”

“I don’t know, Alfonso,” said Alberto, squatting beside him.  “Here the hawk would probably not do it … I mean, kill just for the sake of killing.  In their own habitat, hawks, like other living things, would not kill save for food.”

“Not only hawks,” Alfonso continued, and began to eat again from his lunchbox with his bare hands, shoveling the food into his mouth once more, while his eyes seemed to spin in their sockets.  “But animals and human beings, too.”

Alberto had read a short story (was it Steinbeck’s “The Hawk”?) about a vicious, mean hawk, which clearly proved what he had said.  Lonely, away from his flock, and out of his natural habitat, the hawk became blood-thirsty and killed for the sake of killing.  In such an environment, a solitary hawk turning into a vicious, ruthless killer is not at all unexpected.

Since he did not wish to argue with the instrument man, then their team chief, for he disliked argument for the sake of argument, Alberto said:

“Why are the others not back yet?  I’m so thirsty already.”

“I think they had to go all the way down the path,” said the rod man, who sat by the surveyor.  He was called Dante, a handsome young man with curly black hair, strong-limbed and barrel-chested.  “That is where we saw the rattan vines.”

“It will take a long time if they depend on those rattan vines for water,” said Alberto.  He had diverted the conversation from becoming too deep and intellectual, and for this he felt pleased and diplomatic with himself.  This was no time and place to show he was superior intellectually, nor would there ever be such time, so long as he was not soused.  “You can hardly get a trickle out of those rattan vines.”

The instrument man, with his mouth full, said:

“The water is very clean, fresh.  Have you ever drunk water from rattan vines, Alberto?  My first time was in Vietnam.”

“No, never,” said Alberto;  “but right now I could drink dirty water from a mudhole.” He was not really irked, not so irked as his voice sounded, because being a new member of the team he knew he must tread softly, calmly; rather, he was pleased with the knowledge that one could get water by cutting rattan vines at an angle with a sharp knife, a knowledge that  could mean survival in the jungle.  It may not be so bad here after all, not so bad as I had imagined, he thought, if I am going to acquire such knowledge, old and common to the natives, but unknown to city dwellers like myself.  He paused, then, Assuming, of course, there is not something bad like that fight where Nanding nearly killed the salesman with his tres-cantos file knife.  

He had had no part in the stabbing of the salesman, but his mother thought he had somehow done something … perhaps wished the knife into the man’s heart … anything, as though the tres-cantos knife would plunge truer with two men holding it.  The truth, however, was that he had met his friends at the school dance and happened to be with them when one of the three salesmen from Manila was stabbed at a gasoline station.  The fault or mistake of the three salesmen, as strangers and Tagalogs, not natives of Zamboanga, was their arrogance and bragging, which they flaunted like a swagger stick during the benefit dance in his home town.  When one of the salesmen had the insolence to draw a handgun, all the arrogance and brashness of that salesman, and his companions too, had flapped like dirty linen before Alberto and his friends in their home town.  Before the implacable curve of the tres-cantos knife finished its deadly plunge, it drew a stream of shrill words, which shrieked in Alberto’s head still:  Dios mio!  No, no, no!

A laborer named Toti and the Moro interpreter Ismael emerged from the fringe of the vine-matted forest trees, dragging rattan vines behind them.  Alberto was the first to rise and meet them in the middle of the clearing.  “Hoy, hurry up!”  he cried; his voice cracked in his dry throat.  “We’re so thirsty already.”

The laborer Toti and the Moro interpreter plodded across the clearing, like a pair of working carabaos … water buffaloes … pulling a wooden cart behind them.  Their shirts were wet with the dampness of the newly cut rattan vines swinging on their shoulders.  Beaded with moisture, the vines swung like uncoiled springs and glistened in the sunlight.

“It was very far, where we found these rattan vines,” said Toti, leaning forward, his shoulders hunched against the weight of the vines.  “Aahhhh-ah … very far from here.”

Panting, his breath from his lungs whooshing through his mouth, the Moro interpreter Ismael said:  “There is much water in these vines.  It is not easy to find this kind of rattan now.  It is only here on Mount Pulanggi.”

Alberto slapped the aluminum lunchbox against his thigh, shaking the cooked rice grains loose onto his pants, and held it before him.  “Come on,” he said; “give me some water! … Hah?”

The laborer Toti heaved the rattan vines off his shoulder and dropped them abruptly onto the ground.  He picked one up and with his bolo, cut off its tip in one swift clean stroke. In the instant the bolo cut through the rattan vine, beads of water oozed from its tip, dew-like and crystal-clear, fusing together until the beads formed a tiny flow of water which trickled into his lunchbox like the tap-tap-tap of raindrops on a tin roof.

“Son of a mother whore!” said Alberto, tilting his head back and drinking the fresh water from his lunchbox.  “Nothing nothing beats this water … not even a cold mug of beer.”  The water dripped from the corners of his mouth down into his chin and onto his neck and chest.  With his tongue he turned the water slowly in his mouth and then held it for a moment there before slowly swallowing it in one smooth single gulp.  Its freshness and coolness contracted his throat.  Days later the aching coolness of the water from the rattan vines would come whenever his throat was dry, until the time came when he could reproduce the sensation at will.  He was pleased and delighted that his body would respond to the urgings of his mind.

No prodding’s of his mind, however, could erase the fear of height for a long while, no matter how hard and long he concentrated and told himself, “It is just in your mind, only there, and it is not real.”  It would be some months and some triangulation towers later before this fear would dissipate, lifting in flutters out of the recesses of his mind like the spotted yellow butterflies he had seen vibrating in a mass of color in the yellow light of the sun over the meadow early that morning.  At first he had to pull himself up from one wooden crossbar to the next slowly and cautiously, the round-wood shaking under his weight, before he reached the top of the tower.  Once his fear was gone, the climbing came easily and smoothly, without conscious effort.  He would even lie on his back across the bars more than thirty meters up on the tower; in fact, he would even sleep on the top of the tower, lying on his back with the round-wood bars pressing against his spine, rather than exert himself coming down to lie on the ground with the men for siesta.

But there on Mount Pulanggi, one of his first towers, he steadied his feet on the round-wood poles and hooked his arms round the crossbars before looking down at Alfonso and the laborers below.  And then he looked around him, searching for the hawks he hoped he could see much closer from the tower; but the hawks were gone except for a few perched on the giant dead trees beyond the forested slope and the brush hills.  When he looked down again at the recorder and the laborers, he saw at the foot of the triangulation tower armed savages, heads uncovered, mute and solemn as the dead trees beyond the clearing.  Their long, antiquated Japanese rifles (ping-pang rifles, he thought, because of their echoing sound) and lances pointed menacingly upward at him.  And then one looked up, neck stretched, but the savage neither spoke nor otherwise made a movement from where he was; there was a quality of frozen animation in him and the rest of the savages.  Later, coming down from Mount Pulanggi, Alberto would wonder how they, the Moro savages, could have come through the bushes and the matted climbers --- those same tough vines he and the laborers had earlier hacked their way through with bolos --- without making a sound:  how they suddenly emerged from the fringe of the forest onto the clearing without any of the laborers having noticed them or heard even a slight rustling of leaves:  and, even more incredible, how he who was on the top of the tower and looking down had not seen a ripple on the top of the bushes or a throbbing swing of the vines.

“What did they want, Ismael?” he asked when he came down from the tower.  The savages had disappeared, vanishing as quietly as they had come and without stirring a wave on top of the bushes.  “Did they tell you what they wanted?”

“Nothing, sir,” said the interpreter, Ismael.  Stolid and impassive his face remained, and as brown and dark as the soil.  “They were just passing through.”

“Are they Moro outlaws?” asked Alfonso.  Already his lips were white, bloodless, the color of deathly fear; and it was in his eyes, too.  “Ismael, are those the savages you told us about last night?  The ones who live in the mountains of Pulanggi?  And are feared by everyone, including the lowland Moros themselves?”

“They are the ones, sir.”  As before Ismael’s face remained impassive and dark; then he said, quietly and softly: 

“They were wondering perhaps what you were doing, what maybe you Christians were putting up here on Mount Pulanggi … although they did not really say this, for while everyone is afraid to speak to them, they also seldom speak to anyone.”

There was really nothing in his voice or eyes, and if Alberto, Alfonso, and the others had not seen the Moros themselves, they would have had doubts that the savages had truly stood by the tower or ever existed.

“Did you tell them what we were doing here?” said Alfonso.  “That we are doing this for the watershed in Liguasan Marsh?”

The Moro interpreter did not say anything.  His face was flat and expressionless.  Like those savages of Pulanggi, Alberto thought, you can never tell what they want or what they are thinking.  Ay, who can tell what goes on in their minds?  Then Alberto turned to Alfonso and said:

“What shall we do now?”

“Let us finish the tower quickly,” said the instrument man, Alfonso.  “It is better we leave before nightfall catches us here on Pulanggi.  But we must hurry, hurry,” said Alfonso.  “Oy, hurry, hurry up now!”   

Before those savages come back or ambush us along the trail in the dark, Alberto thought.  O, Dios mio!

The sun was still high in the sky when they finished the triangulation tower, taking only half the time it usually took to put up one of similar height, structure, and material.  But when they re-entered the tunnels of foliage and climbers they had hacked through earlier that day, the sun abruptly disappeared.  Under the bushes and the trees, the forest floor was damp and soggy; dead leaves and scabby branches, rotten, perforated by worms, covered the floor of the forest like a thick wet sponge.  With each step the men’s rubber shoes made squeaking sounds as the water soaked them, and in a while the lower portion of their maong pants became heavy and made swishing sounds whenever the trouser-legs brushed against each other.  There was no way to stop the swishing and squeaking sounds; not until they reached the beginning of the narrow trail and the late afternoon sun came out in splotches of light through the high treetops.  And still, Alberto and the men knew they were not entirely out of danger from the Moro outlaws.  Perhaps the Moros had allowed them to pass through the foliage- and –climber tunnels so as to give them a false sense of safety before suddenly waylaying them along the trail.   And would it not be ironical, thought Alberto, to be murdered now when we are almost out of the forest, where those Moro outlaws live like fish in water, where no other human beings could survive more than a day with the leeches, bugs, and gnats, and where any civilized being would be thoroughly out of his element, lost among the rattan vines and underbrush?

So, Alberto, Alfonso, and the other men never left the trail, preferring to step on the protruding roots and sharp-pointed shoots that stuck out of the ground than to make even muffled noises among the branches and tall grass beside the trail.  They even tucked in the empty lunchboxes under their belts so as not to make any clanging sound, for the aluminum lunchboxes, if they were hanging from their waists, might accidentally hit a branch or trunk of a tree; Alberto thinking: And make a racket like rolling empty petrol cans down the trail.  O, o, to be found by those Moro savages because of the noise of those empty lunchboxes.  It would be absurd if these lunchboxes, which hold the food that keeps us alive, here on the mountain and wet forest, were to be the cause of our death.

As he stumbled down the trail, Alberto thought that the Moros were probably lying in ambush to cut off their cojones … balls.  He was afraid.  He had not been so frightened before, not even when that salesman had pulled out his handgun and a surprise stare came suddenly into his eyes as the tres-cantos file knife plunged into his breast.

All the men were afraid.  Finally, when they reached the meadow where they had seen the spotted yellow butterflies that morning after dawn, the sun had completely gone from the treetops and over the Pulanggi mountain range, and already long shadows covered the meadow.  The clayey soil along the river bank where the men stood was viscid and soft and showed in patches of red through the balding grass turf.  The men did not stand along on the bank, everyone was trying to get on the motorboat.  Incredibly, only the instrument man, Alfonso, seemed unperturbed, although earlier that afternoon he had rushed the work at the triangulation tower --- like a man whose lease in life had depended on finishing it right away.  He hung back on the river bank, and his lips twisted with scorn when the rod man Dante nearly overturned the motorboat in his hurry to get on.

“Putang ina!” he swore.  “Mother whore!  You are like a child … all of you behave like children, hah!”

“Everyone is afraid,” said Alberto; “terrified.”

“Do you think once you get into that banca you’ll be safe already?” he asked, standing by the river bank and making no attempt to get on the motorboat.

“We shall be far away from here, anyway,” said Alberto, getting on the motorboat himself.  “Get on, so we can leave, Alfonso.  Now!”

“O, o,” he said; “but the savages are not the only ones to run away from.  You have the whole God-forsaken Moro land to be afraid of, the bad things lurking in it … and what you cannot see.”

Then Alfonso got on the boat, and Toti started the motor.  In his hurry to speed off, Toti forgot to straighten the rudder, and the motorboat swung around and rammed the bank.  Clods of loosened earth pelted the water and stuck on the prow.  “Putang ina, Toti,” cried Alfonso, biting his lips and popping his eyes at the laborer.  “If those savages don’t kill us, you … you certainly will.”

As they went down the river, the beginning of twilight came silently like a wind-blown dusty veil.  The quietness engulfed them and seemed to muffle even the monotonous drone of the motor.  Beyond the prow of the boat the water ahead lay still and thick in the dusty light, like dark oil exuded from the earth’s entrails.  And then from a distance they saw it, a still, unearthly whiteness in the yet unsettled day.  It ran nearly half a kilometer on one side of the bank, starboard:  a white amorphous mass of phantom-like clouds.  “What is it?” somebody said.  “It cannot be clouds, the mass is too low and incredibly white.”

Alberto Gonzales sat up straight as a pole on the motorboat, stock-still, his mouth gaping.  Then as he watched a deafening roar rose from the white mass, just as if a crowd of people had jumped to their feet and clapped their hands all at the same time; then a soft ripple ran over the surface of the white formless mass, running over it like a wind above the curls of a foam-crested wave, running undulating until it caught itself in a tremendous flapping of white wings.  And then the whole white mass soared and whirred up into the dust-colored sky, thinning away, wheeling.  For a moment, some fragmented sections hung motionless in the air, so that he was able to distinguish the great catala white parrots:  because that was what they were.  They shot up into the violet dust of the sky and disappeared completely from sight, drawing with them their flapping-sounds.  Upon the river silence fell again, quietly as a shroud falls in a current of wind, and at last beyond its bank the last burst of daylight settled into twilight.

When Alberto turned toward the bank from where the great white catala birds had come, he noticed that the trees along the shoreline were completely bare:  their leaves and bark had been completely eaten away by the white parrots.  Silhouetted against the sky, the denuded trunks and stark boughs rose above the stunted undergrowth of the mangrove swamp like black skeletons.  Leaning back, lips clipped shut, he was struck dumb by the thought that for the once luxuriously green and thickly foliaged trees the white mass of the great white catala parrots meant:  certain death!

In the twilight, squinting behind his spectacles, the young man Alberto tried not to show awe nor astonishment in his face, just as he had not shown fear of the Moro savages there on Mount Pulanggi.  As far as he could tell, Alfonso and the men were only a little bit affected, while the Moro interpreter Ismael, who had seen this sort of death in the mangrove swamp not for the first time (for was he not as much a part of this land, this primeval land, as those Moro savages up there in the mountain range of Pulanggi?), had not even uttered a word or a sigh of surprise. 

At this point, Alberto expected any moment to see the Moro savages through the gnarled mangrove trees, shaking their lances and shooting at them with their Japanese ping-pang rifles.  Perhaps one or two savages would open fire and put a neat, reddish hole into one of them:  this wasn’t unlikely.  For the white catala parrots could have been frightened by the sudden arrival of the Moro outlaws.  Alberto blinked, wiped his spectacles, and putting them back on stared through the black skeleton-like trees:  but no Moro savages appeared on the edge of the mangrove swamp.

Alberto felt a dryness come to his throat as he realized there was nowhere to run away to from death in the wildness and primeval land of Cotabato.  Because death was not the preserve of those savages; it was everywhere --- in the hawks and the white catalas, in the forest, indeed, all over in this fecund Moro land itself --- there was no escape from it.  He would have to contend with it so long as he was in the hinterlands, in the wet forest, and in mountains of this Moro primordial land.  For escape, he thought, staring at the leafless, bark-stripped trees, could be found only in oneself here.

An acrid taste came to his palate, for a thin film of blood had dripped upon it; and he realized that he had bitten his tongue, unconsciously, to stop the scream from tearing through his lips. 

Chapter 8

Pikit was the oldest town in Cotabato, they said.  And the townsfolk said too that hundreds of years ago a Spanish ship had dropped anchor in the Pulanggi river, and, while the awed Moros watched, Spanish soldiers in iron clothes (mail coat) came down her gangplank and discovered the town behind the cogon grass and under the great balete trees.  The Spanish soldiers’ faces were white as paper, with straight, high noses and glistening, unstained white teeth which bore no reddish stain from the juice of  mamà … betelnut chew.  The Spaniards apparently had not stayed long in Pikit, for Alberto had not seen a mestizo or mestiza in town since his arrival some three months ago.  This was not at all like his home town, Zamboanga, where the Spanish conquistadores (and licentious friars) had sown so many seeds that mestizas bloomed  wildly like bougainvillaea flowers, and the old people spoke fluent Castellano and the streets were named after saints or places in Spain.

Not so long ago the commercial bus never stopped in Pikit; not even long enough for its cloud of  dust to settle back on the highway.  Instead, it disgorged its passengers at the nearest small village, and they had to walk about two kilometers to the town proper carrying their baggage on their backs.  Those who refused to get off, or asked for a fare refund, were kicked off the bus by the conductors, divested of their luggage or cargo, and were forced to walk barefoot to the nearest barrio where they bought slippers or rubbers.  

If a bus stopped in Pikit, they said the Moros there deflated the tires and with wooden clubs smashed the lights and windshields to smithereens.  Then market-goers and store-owners stripped off its wooden parts and burnt them for fuel, the townsfolk dismantled the chassis and engine and sold the metal by the kilo in Cotabato City over a hundred kilometers away.  Only the skeleton of the bus was left on the road to rust and corrode under the sun and rain, and for the naked children to play all sorts of games on.  But what the children loved to play most was being grown-ups, replaying the parts the townsfolk had in dismantling the bus.

Up along the road and just before the market-place, an abandoned truck chassis, or what was left of it, was covered with vines and climbers whose tentacles wound round and intertwined with its steel and iron frame.  They grew thick and luxuriously green, and here and there flowers bloomed as though on an abandoned and forgotten grave.  The flowers were orange, yellow, and red, and early in the morning their tiny petals glistened under beads of dew and were wonderful to look at.  Long before the Cerdeza Surveying Company men came, they said the bus had been hastily abandoned on the highway when a datu … chieftain … from Matalam ordered the Christians down and raked the side of the bus with bullets.  The automatic carbine went tat-tat-tat-tat and made holes in the side of the bus as big as thumbs.  A four-year-old child abandoned by the mother died there on the bus, his head blown off and his scalp plastered on the wooden backrest of his chair.

At six o’clock every evening, the sari-sari stores and carinderias along the road were closed and bared with wooden boards.  No one walked there after this hour, and the policeman on beat changed his uniform into civilian clothes and drank with his buddies in one of the tuba stores far from the town proper.  And then the rats and tomcats emerged from their hiding, and the dogs scavenged the garbage dumps for crumbs.  Only Datu Mantel, they said, walked the main road, his .45-caliber handgun hanging low from his hip.

One night a drunkard lost his way home, and on the main street Datu Mantel shot him neatly between the eyes.  Like the bodies of other murdered men, the drunkard’s corpse was not found the next day, and the chief of police did not send a policeman after the datu.  Because one evening, a week before the murder, while the two of them were drinking in a bar, Datu Mantel slapped him across the face and challenged him to draw his gun.  The chief of police knew that with one hand Datu Mantel could draw and at the same time cock his .45-caliber handgun while it was still in its holster, as though it were a toy gun.  Said Datu Mantel to the chief of police, “Now I am the chief of police.”  That was how, they said, Datu Mantel became unofficially the chief of police of Pikit without an appointment from the governor.  And the next day, the townsfolk saw him wearing the khaki uniform of the police chief, although he never wore a badge.

There was no place to go in Pikit after nightfall, and the one movie-house opened in the morning and closed in the afternoon.  It showed double-program war features.  In one war film, Fernando Poe, Jr., the Golden Boy of action pictures, with automatic machine gun, mowed down hundreds of Moros on a slope.  Upon seeing this massacre on the picture screen, Datu Mantel stood up from his wooden bench, drew his .45-caliber gun, and promptly perforated the picture screen.  “There!” he said to no one in particular; “you are now dead!”  Everyone scampered for safety, and the movie-house owner stopped showing such films again in Pikit; thereafter, they said, he showed only American war movies.  When the fans of Fernando Poe, Jr. demanded to see their movie idol, the owner of the movie-house said they all knew he was shot dead by Datu Mantel and now lay buried in the hills of Pulanggi.

Chapter 9

Alberto and the other surveyors used to eat at the carinderias in the town proper, until some Moro savages crisscrossed their lances before the door of a carinderia, where the surveyors had their lunch, as they stepped out with toothpicks in their mouth.  But that was not the end of that, because a few weeks later, they were eating supper in an out-of-town family carinderia when the proprietor, a Christian, whispered into Alberto’s ear.  Beside him the instrument man Alfonso stood up, drew one side of the curtains, and, peeping through a crack, he saw along the feeder road Moros with lances and rifles.

The surveyors waited for hours in the carinderia for the Moros to leave, but the Moros did not go away.  Alfonso, the rod man Dante, and the laborers then spread out newspapers on the floor and slept on them, waiting for morning, while Alberto sat in a chair and stared at a phonograph in the sala.  The phonograph had not been played for a very long time and was covered with an embroidered white cotton cloth.

“The phonograph gave us beautiful music before,” the proprietor said, pacing the floor and glancing toward the road.  He had not sat down or left the men alone in the carinderia.  “My carinderia was always full of customers then.”

“What happened?” said Alberto, half-asleep, gazing toward the phonograph.

“The Moros burnt down the electric depot,” he said, still pacing the floor and, once in a while, crooking an arm behind him.  “Ever since then, we have not played the phonograph.”

A little after dawn of the next day, little chinks of orange light broke into the dining room.  When the men peeped through the curtains, the Moros had gone.  Walking down the feeder road, the surveyors noticed fresh gobs of buyo mascada spittle:  they were like blood-droppings along the sides of the road.  The Moros had squatted along the road, waiting to ambush them, till a little before dawn.

Chapter 10

Alberto Gonzales and his men had no idea why the Moro datu had spat at the laborer-driver Teng.  Probably they would have sympathized with Teng, even risked their lives if necessary, for there was always a deep sense of camaraderie among fieldman --- ayyiieee, even though Teng was a complete fool, with the brain of a sheep, and even after that bad thing not a month ago, when a handful of Moros with barongs … long knifes … had hacked to death a government sanitary inspector in his own house, which was near their main quarters in Pikit, while everyone was at the school benefit program.  The morning before he was murdered, the government sanitary inspector had injected antibiotics in a sick Moro child, who was dying of gastro-enteritis.  In the afternoon, the Moro child began to have spasms and died a few hours later.  And when the sanitary inspector, who was called Mr. Dominguez, was murdered that night, it had not come as a complete surprise to the Christians living in Pikit, although Mr. Dominguez had lived in the Moro barrio for ten years as a sanitary inspector and was even an honorary member of the Muslim Council of Elders.  The Christian barrio folk believed that they could not truly trust a Moro, not even if they had him already eating out of the palms of their hands.  What was that saying?  thought Alberto.  There is no good Moro like a dead Moro.

If the Moros would murder a man who had done only good for them, he thought, what do you think they would do to one who perhaps had insulted them?   He knew, really, what they would do:  cut off his ears and balls and put his penis inside his mouth.  That was what the datu would do to Teng, exactly what the Moro savages had done to the other Christians.  Surely he knew what the Moro datu would do to Teng, or to any one of them.  He of all the others in the surveying team in Cotabato, he told himself, knew this very well and clearly.

He hoped that here in Buluan he had not shamed himself before his men.  Cobarde --- the word sheared him in two.  It was important now, more than at any time before that day, for him to show that he was a man, not a coward, a datu himself who could lead them in this savage land.  Because, a week before, there in their quarters in Pikit, Engineer Morales had spread out a map on a table and, pointing out several towns and villages where the triangulation towers were to be built, had said:

“You pick the men you wish to work with you.  From four to six men, those that you already worked with in Pulanggi.”

For a moment, he had been too happy and exalted to say anything.  And then, realizing the enormous responsibility of his job, his being a team leader also like  Alfonso and Reynaldo, he had felt that his head was light on his shoulders.  Slowly, not even surprised that his words were making sense although his mind was numb with pride, joy, that he too would have his own men, his own group, he said:

“I would like to have Toti, Ramon … “

“Here,” said Engineer Morales, pointing to an X on the map.  “Put up a tower here in Buluan.”

“Yes, engineer,” said Alberto.

And so, it was important that he should not fail here, his first assignment, and this time with his own men, who must see in him, he told himself, not only resourcefulness but bravery too.  Abruptly he shut off his mind, closing it with an invisible door, slamming quickly against it as though it were a furnace whooshing with heat waves and tongues of fire.  And yet, he was seared with inchoate guilt.

And so, now, here in the Moro village, Alberto told himself he must not do anything to anger the datu and start something which, in this Moro land, could only be stopped by much more grotesque and ghastly violence.  He and his men had been running the traverse on the dirt roads, trails, and over cogon hillocks: dragging the steel tape chain behind them, halting every fifty meters to mark the end of the tape with a wooden stake and measuring the contour of the land with a plumb bulb and a DKM-3 transit instrument.  But the sun, always scorching and relentless, had flogged the men with its rays of light; the men were like flagellants repenting forgotten sins, as beads of sweat oozed from their pores and heat-welts swelled under their maong jackets.  Throats parched and lungs aching, they came down a cogon hillock and stopped before a well in front of some Moro nipa huts.

Alberto Gonzales, the Moro interpreter Ismael, the laborers Toti and Ramon, the laborer-driver Teng, and the rod man Dante stumbled toward the well.  Submerging their heads together in a cluster into the water, ignoring completely the foul stench coming from the rotten frogs floating on its surface, the men drank the water from the well.  No one remembered to purify the water with chlorine tablets they had taken along in their lunchboxes, or to dip their canteens into the well, because the men felt that if they waited a moment longer they would all succumb to thirst and die in this God-forsaken Moro land.

Putting a tablet on the tip of his tongue, the rod man Dante swallowed it without water.  At this instant, Teng raised his head from the well, water dripping from his hair and face, and, spinning on his heels, swung a hand flat across the rod man’s stomach.  Right away, even before the hand left an unmistakable reddish imprint on his stomach, and before the resounding blow faded, Dante flapped forward, his Adam'’ apple going up and down like a float-bulb in his throat, and spat the chlorine table out on the ground.

“What are you doing?” said the rod man, Dante.

The laborer-driver Teng leaned there beside the well, laughing, his bullet-shaped head bobbing up and down on his narrow shoulders, while a thick streak of saliva dribbled down the corners of his mouth.  He said:

“You are really gago, a fool!”

Choking, his face livid with rage, Dante swore:

“You mother fucker!”

“Ha ha ha,” Teng laughed, jumping up and down by the well, and clapping both hands against his flanks.  “Look at his face, hoy!  As if it’s a huge ripe tomato from Capanduan.”

“You son of a mother whore!” said the rod man, Dante.

“Do you not know?” said the laborer-driver, Teng.  “You have to put the chlorine tablet first in the water … ha ha ha, wait for three minutes or so for it to dissolve and purify the water, and then drink your water.  Ha ha ha ha ha ha.”  He started running around the well, jumping up and down and clapping his hands against his flanks, laughing aloud by himself, as though he had gone mad from thirst.

A few meters from the well stood two nipa houses, one with sagging walls and the other with fresh nipa shingles and newly-cut posts.  And there was this Moro who came up to them and said, “I own this deserted hut, but I am sick in the stomach and now I live there in that new hut.”  Through the Moro interpreter Ismael, he told Alberto that he had just moved to the new hut because he would get well only if he lived in a new hut.  In the old nipa hut he owned, the Moro said, lived the evil spirits.  There were no evil spirits in the other hut, since it was a new hut.  He would stay there until he got well. And he added:

“You may stay in my old hut if you do not believe in the evil spirits.  You are Christians and do not believe in these things we believe.”

Alberto and his men said, “Yes, yes, yes.  We’re not superstitious.”  Now that they would have a place to sleep, Alberto told the men to bring the bags and the surveying and carpentry tools into the old nipa hut.  And then, later, at the supper table, none of them touched their food, because of the putrid stench round their mouth.  The laborer Ramon and the rod man Dante brushed their teeth many times that evening, but the stench of the decaying frogs clung to their mouth still.  That night the men went about the hut smelling like dogs which had scavenged the town’s garbage dumps.

Early the next day, after breakfast of broiled mudfish and steamed rice, they started putting up the inner tower.  Carabao-drawn carts hauled lumber up a path passable only by wooden-wheeled carts to the cogon hillocks.  The lumber came from a lumber mill, a square structure of reject lumber and nipa shingles, a few kilometers away along the dirt road, which cut through the tiny village.  The cost of the lumber was exorbitant, but the datu who owned the carts also owned the only mill in the village, and, besides, only his carts could follow the path to the cogon hillocks without being ambushed by outlaws, who, the surveyor learned, were his (the datu`s) own men.  Robbing bastard ! thought Alberto, but without a word of complaint he paid him the equivalent of three times the cost of the lumber and four times the cost of carting.

On the first day, the laborers worked leisurely on the inner tower, strengthening it with crossbars and guy wires.  Then that night the mosquitoes came, first in small numbers, and then in droves:  large carabao mosquitoes, ash-colored and fearless, besieging the men until the next morning and the following afternoon.  Alberto and the laborers retreated into their mosquito nets not only during the night but also in the morning and during siesta when they were not working on the triangulation tower.  Because whenever they stood still, even for a second or so, during the night or day, in the tiny village or in the nipa hut, cooking breakfast or supper, even lunch, while the fierce sun blazed over the nipa-thatched roof --- the carabao mosquitoes relentlessly attacked their arms and feet.  Unbelievably, a dozen, even more, would at one moment alight on them and sink their needle into any exposed part of their body.  And then the men wrapped themselves in thick cotton blankets and wore long-sleeved shirts and thick socks and walked like mummies or zombies in the hut; but the mosquitoes sank their needle through anything.  Alberto and the men clapped the mosquitoes between the palms of their hands or pressed them against their besieged flesh.  There was no need to be quick with their hands; the mosquitoes were so relentless and fearless in their attack, they would not fly off when the men lowered a hand or a rubber slipper and squashed them underneath it.  As the men withdrew their hand or slipper, a crimson smudge of blood would appear on a spot on the arm or leg.

And then, one late afternoon, the outer tower almost completed, the Moro who owned the old nipa hut unexpectedly visited the men in the hut.  Alberto and his men (his men, his own, he would later recall) had already fled into their mosquito nets.  Squatting on the bamboo floor, legs crossed under his rump and hands cupped over his knees, the Moro spoke in his own tongue, in deep, guttural Maguindanao dialect.  Alberto understood not a word of what the Moro said, but whenever the Moro stopped talking, he spoke to him in his own dialect, Chabacano, which he never used even with his own men, and after a while the two of them seemed to carry on a conversation, Alberto talking inside the mosquito net, through the flimsy flap, safe and secure from the swarm of mosquitoes, while the Moro squatted on the floor, naked to the waist, proud and dignified, like a noble savage.   Contemptuous and cynical, too, thought Alberto; for not once did the savage move, not even a muscle, to kill a mosquito or even to drive them off.  These same creatures, Alberto went on thinking, which had even ignored the smoke we had made by the triangulation tower --- ay, not even nature herself, since they besieged us even under the glaring sun.

Perhaps right now he is just observing me, thought Alberto.  No-no, not just me; but us, the other Christians.  Just as Ismael, our Moro interpreter, had observed and watched me a day after we started building this tower here in Buluan, a triangulation tower of lumber, more sophisticated than the others we have previously built of roundwood, say in Pulanggi.

“Engineer-sir,” Ismael had said, “why have you come here?”

I’m not really an engineer but a triangulation-tower builder, Alberto thought.  “Like all the others,” he said, “I came here because of a job, because of money.”

“No, engineer-sir,” said Ismael.  “You are not like them.”  He stopped tying the planks, which were to be pulled up to the unfinished inner tower, with one end of the rope that went over a round-wood pole laid across the last parallel bars in the tower.  He held the other end of the rope tentatively in his hands.

“What do you mean, Ismael?”

And the Moro interpreter said:

“I was watching you, engineer-sir, the day we saw the white catalas.  You were somewhat bothered, and yet none of your laborers, not even the instrument man Alfonso, paid any attention to the birds.  You are too sensitive for this work, so what do you seek here, engineer-sir?”

But I’m not an engineer, Alberto thought, now, stretching his numb legs.  I’m just a surveyor.  He started through the flimsy mosquito net flap.  How noble he looks!  Thinking then, And a good man too.  For did he not offer his hut for our shelter, even without our asking him?  Then he flinched, put his weight on one side of his buttocks, easing the numbness on his other leg and thinking quietly:  But there is that bastard of a datu, that hijo de cabra … son of a goat …, who fleeced us of all the money we have for lumber and use of his carabao-drawn cart, who would even steal from his own mother.  And what about those lumber-thieves, to whom I gave some lumber so they would stop stealing while we are putting up the tower; so that we could finish it and get away from all these needle-snouted mosquitoes.  Maybe Ismael is right.  “You don’t have to give them any lumber,” the Moro interpreter had said.  “After we’re finished here with the tower, they will steal it anyway.”  “Precisely,” Alberto had said.  “But giving lumber away to those Moros will stop them in the meantime from stealing it and make them feel not guilty for what they have already stolen.”   “And what good will that do?” said Ismael.  “You will only make them feel worse by showing this kindness, the next time they have to steal your lumber.”  And yet, when the Moro stood up, uncrossing his legs, Alberto Gonzales felt a kind of emptiness, a hiatus, as though the empty space where a moment ago the Moro had squatted and had spoken quietly in his guttural dialect Maguindanao was not there outside the mosquito net:  but inside himself, in the very core of his being.

In spite of the carabao mosquitoes and lumber-thieves, the men finished the inner and outer towers one afternoon.  The completed triangulation tower, with its outer and inner frames, held firmly by innumerable web-like guy wires, soared some thirty meters into the clear sky.  Driven by easterly gusts, patches of cloud floated above the tower, which was silhouetted against the sky, and capped it with amorphous coronets before drifting and diminishing into strips of wreaths.

“It is a beautiful tower,” said Alberto, standing before it, his head craned back, still sweating from climbing down some twenty parallel bars set about two meters apart and held firm by crossboards.  “Is it not, Dante?”

“O, o,” said the rod man beside him.  He stared up the tower, his eyes sweeping upward until the tower soared and came to a tapering point against the sky.  “I hope the Moros don’t destroy it before Alfonso comes to do the `observation,’ ” he said.

“But the tower is beautiful,” said Alberto again, not listening, deaf to the words of the rod man, Dante.  “It would not matter then, really, if it were destroyed.  It is beautiful now.”

The laborers brought the packs and equipment down from the nipa hut to the wooden cart drawn up alongside the path.  As the heavy equipment and tools were brought in by the laborers, the big laborer Ramon hauled them up onto the cart.  Below, on the dirt road, a Moro datu walked up the incline quickly, disappeared a minute at the foot of the hill, and suddenly came up climbing the path and halted before the laborer-driver, Teng.  He stopped so close to Teng it was as though he were about to embrace him, but abruptly he swayed back on his heels, inhaling deeply, and then as he lurched forward his head jerked on his shoulders, his eyes popped from their sockets, and, simultaneously, a wad of buyo mascada --- betelnut chew --- burst through his lips and splashed all over Teng’s face.

“Udder of your great mother-whore,” said the Moro datu after spitting.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, my datu,” said the laborer-driver Teng, white and rigid, with the buyo mascada coming down his face in thin reddish streaks of sputum.  Again, the Moro datu spat on his face.  “You pig-eating Christian!” he said, livid with heat and anger.  “What do you mean?  You, father of unwashed arsehole, tell me what do you mean?”

A stupid grin creased his face as Teng stood there by the cart, not even outraged, the splatter of  the buyo mascada coming down his chin like little drops of blood.

Suddenly, the datu gripped the carved handle of his barong, and as he drew it all the way from its wooden sheath, Alberto climbed up the cart, thinking fast:  If he hacks Teng, we’ll have to kill him; that’s the only way to stop him.  But that would mean too that we’ll never leave his village alive, because of his men and the Moros here.  Alberto clutched the tripod firmly in his hands, its sharp metal-tipped legs pointed outward, as the datu then drew back his arm --- Dios mio!  Not that that bugger of a Teng deserves our protection, but we have to protect ourselves too.  A chill rushed through his spine.  Hijo de gran puta madre! … Son of the great mother whore!

But the datu went past Teng and lashed at the bamboo railings and wooden bars instead, the blows sending chips of bamboo and wood flying here and there.  Swinging his barong like a juramentado, a Moro amok, he jumped up onto the cart and began to hack at the carpentry tools and surveying instruments.  Then he jumped off, his long knife cutting down invisible victims, for his arms never stopped swinging, even for a second; and while jumping down from the cart, he spun in the air like a macabre dancer of death, abruptly ceasing the death dance when his feet touched the ground.  Still, he waved and swung his knife-hand wildly, and as he sprinted toward the laborer-driver Teng and the other laborers, the barong twirled above his head and flashed in the sunlight.

The laborer-driver Teng did not move, standing there before the datu.  Then, with the spittle of the buyo mascada dripping from his chin still, he leaned forward and reached out both hands as though he were about to touch the datu:  his hands rose slowly before him, like a priest giving his blessing, until the hands seemed to confirm the supplication in his voice, saying:

“I did not mean any harm, datu.  There is no harm in talking to you.”

“Run, run, Teng!” said Toti behind him, retreating toward the cart and pulling out a tripod from the top of the toolbox.  “Bilat sang ina!” he swore in Visayan.  “Cunt of your mother!  Run now!”

Teng still did not move, arms extended before him, supplicating, trying to reach the Moro chieftain with his hands and voice:

“Please, please, datu.  I only wanted to talk to you.  Really, datu, I meant no harm.  Please, please, understand.”

Toti went behind the datu and raised the tripod in his hand, while the rod man Dante sprang up onto the cart, picked up a wooden stake, and jumped off behind it.  He said:

“What are you waiting for, Teng?  Run, run!”

“Get out of the way, Teng,” said the big laborer Ramon, lifting a toolbox over his head.  He flung the toolbox crashing onto the ground.  “Fool!” he said.         

The datu grasped the barong in both hands and held it steady above his head and shoulders, while the sun flashed and glittered on its blade.  And just when he was about to bring the barong in a deadly curve that would have clearly severed the laborer-driver’s head from his shoulders, the Moro who owned the old nipa hut appeared on the footpath; or rather, Alberto and his men heard him speaking loudly in a guttural voice, and the datu answering in the same inflection and tone, until his, the Moro’s, and the datu’s became one, inseparable.

No one knew what the Moro said to the datu except the interpreter Ismael, who would tell them nothing then, or even later back in their main quarters in Pikit.  There on the cart Alberto stood, surprised and unbelieving, attributing this favorable change to luck, rather than to the intercession, the daring, of the Moro savage, for he knew that in Muslim tradition and custom the poor Moro was imprudent in defying the centuries of habit and servitude in which his kind had been entangled and imprisoned; Alberto thinking, We must get out of here now while we still have a chance.  Get out now before the datu changes his mind.  I don’t know why the Moro did what he did --- he, of course, should not have even spoken to the datu --- I mean, nobody expected him to do that since he is just a poor Moro, not the datu’s equal!  He’s a fool all right!  Then he said:  “Get on the cart.  Come on, bilat sang ina!  You, Teng, get on the cart now!”  The rod man Dante jumped onto the cart, and the other laborers scrambled up on each of its sides, swinging themselves up, scraping their shins against the bamboo rails and tumbling among the surveying equipment and tools.  Sheathing his barong, the datu went down the footpath, walking rapidly.  Then he disappeared behind the hill and a minute later emerged on the dirt road, a dark blob under the white glow of the fiery sun.

Later, while driving on the highway to their quarters in Pikit, the commercial bus going very fast, the laborers thumped and pounded the sides of the bus with their open palms and fists and sang loudly against the wind.  Alberto could hear Teng singing with the other laborers in back.  He was singing a tavern song at the top of his voice:

While the cups are always full to the brim,

Maiden that’s a virgin who knows how to pipe,

We pass a life of gaiety and fun,

With one pretty maiden instead of the wife.

Listen to him sing, thought Alberto Gonzales.  As if nothing had happened back there in Buluan.  You would think he would clamp his mouth shut this time, even only for delicadeza.  But what would you expect from un sinvergϋenza?  O listen to him sing.  Like a devil of an Ilocano.  Turning his head back, Alberto said harshly, “What happened between you and the datu, Teng?”

“Nothing much, boss,” said the laborer-driver, Teng.  He had merely wanted to talk to the datu, make him understand he knew about the lumber and that it was useless to steal it.  Later, after the DKM-3 transit observation, they could have all the lumber and even the guy wires they wanted to steal.  He said, “What I told him was that I saw his men steal our lumber.”

“Why did you say this?” said Alberto, the veins in his neck swelling.  For God’s sake!  What was he trying to do?  I mean, does he really think he could get their sympathy, their honesty, those Moros who knew nothing but being born wood-smugglers and lumber-thieves?  Balls!  He’s a real fool! 

There was a chance, Teng explained, that if he had been able to make the datu understand, there would be no need for the datu to fool them.  What Teng wanted was for the datu to talk to them, since once they began talking to each other the Moros would no longer hide the lumber under the datu’s house.  “Well, boss,” he said.  “I know that the lumber they stole was the same lumber they sold back to us.  They just hid it under the house of the datu.”

Shit!  Thought Alberto, choking in anger, his veins jutting out like exposed roots on each side of his forehead and along his neck.  He was doing his best to get us all killed, that’s what he was doing --- getting us all killed.  He’s a goddamn fool, all right!

But it was the laborer Toti, sitting in front of the bus, who cursed him before Alberto could say a word:  “Bilat sang ina mo!” he swore in Visayan dialect.  “Don’t you know you could have got us all killed.  Yawa! … Devil!”

Sitting there on the bus, speeding toward their quarters in Pikit, Alberto Gonzales recalled how the barrio fool had cut down the acacia tree on which the Moros had hung the taxi-driver, after cutting off his tongue and testicles, in his home town Zamboanga, and the folks there who went on wearing handkerchiefs over their faces long after the putrid smell of the decomposing body was gone, since no one believed the barrio fool.

Chapter 11

If Engineer Morales, the project engineer and party chief, was in Manila, Alberto and his men would go to Cotabato City.  The men said, “When the cat is away, the mice will play.”  But the prostitutes there cost more than those in the hinterland towns, for their legs were whiter and their hair smelled of Halo shampoo instead of coconut oil.  They lived in broken-down nipa-and-sawali houses, with wooden porches, on a swampy lot behind the Lady of Lourdes church at Philip II street, on the outskirts of the city, which was called the interior by the derelicts, thieves, and the lowest scum of the earth who lived there.  Long wooden planks connected the houses in an intricate mesh of bridges which swung under one’s weight and dipped onto the stagnant murky water that came from the bowels of the swamp and the entrails of the city’s sewerage.  Sitting on benches out on the porch, the prostitutes whistled at passers-by and stuck their tongues out.  The passers-by who stopped were brought into the tiny rooms protruding from the walls like stables and were stripped naked and sometimes divested of all their money as well as their clothes.

“Have you done this before, sir?” said an old laborer, short and stocky, who desired tall, long-legged prostitutes.

“O, o,” said Alberto, sitting beside him on a bench against the wall of the sala and looking at the whore he had just laid, his face empty, eyes unblinking.  “In all the places I go --- in Manila, Cagayan, Cebu – I do it at least once.  There are things you believe you have to do once when you get to a new place.”

“This girl is special,” said the laborer, squeezing the whore’s thigh.

“Do you believe like having to bite a stone when it is your first time in a place?” Alberto went on, face blank and empty still.  “You know … to drive away bad luck, evil.”

Turning toward Alberto, the laborer grinned from ear to ear.  His cheeks abruptly collapsed, and his toothless gums, dry and hard, clapped behind his bulbous lips.  Under thick eyebrows, his pea-like eyes shone and peered out from their sockets with childish laughter.  He said:

“You lied to me, sir.  You told me this girl you had was walang kuentang - kuenta … nothing, but putang ina!  look, look at her shapely beautiful legs.”

The short and stocky laborer took the tall, long-legged whore into one of the tiny rooms.  It was identical with all the other rooms of the whorehouse.  The walls were brittle and woven out of sawali strips.  On top of a small altar was an oil lamp, its wick short and brittle, which was the only source of light.  Above the altar, the icon of the Heart of Jesus overlooked the flea-infested bamboo pallet in one corner of the room.  After a while,  Alberto heard a creaking sound which was then drowned by the whore’s shrill screams.  He ran to the room, followed by the prostitutes who, while waiting for clients of the flesh, had sat with him on the wooden bench. 

One frame of the sawali-framed walls was completely gone.  Below, in the muck, was the old laborer.  He was neatly impaled upon one of the stakes supporting the wooden-plank bridge, his arms spread-eagled, one leg crookedly twisted over the other, and his face buried in the mud.  He was naked.  The wooden stake had pierced through his chest and more than half of the stake covered with mud and blood had gone through his back.

A few days later in their quarters in Pikit, the geodetic engineer Reynaldo Costelo, team chief of the old laborer, asked Alberto:

“Is it true he was pissing in the room when he fell from the whorehouse?”

“O, o,” said Alberto.

“He must have been very, very drunk,” said the geodetic engineer.  “How did it happen?  I mean, not everyone who is pissing in a room after screwing crashes through a wall and gets himself impaled on a stake ….  Like Dracula.”

“He did not believe `in biting a stone.’”

“Stone … what stone?”

“Nothing nothing … just a private joke,” said Alberto.  Then he explained:

“The old laborer must have leaned against the brittle sawali wall.  And since he was very drunk, he put his full weight against it and the old, brittle wall collapsed and gave way like crackling matchsticks.”

“It’s a gory way of dying,” said Costelo.  His hair stood on end along his arms and a shiver ran down his spine.  “to be impaled on a stake just after you had screwed a prostitute.”  He paused, then, “I bet you, Alberto, his black soul must have flown down straight to hell faster than a jet plane. --- The dirty old man!”

“But he died in complete euphoria!” joked the young surveyor Alberto, mischievously grinning and batting an eye.  “I would not mind dying so myself.”

Chapter 12

As the young surveyor Alberto Gonzales and other young men came up a hill, the empty water canteens banged against the aluminum lunchboxes hanging by the waists of the men and made this sound:  clang, clang, clang.  “How much farther, Alfonso?” he said.  “I thought we were very near already.”

Panting, chest heaving, Alfonso said:

“You know these natives.  When they point with their nose, it is yet to cross some three to four mountains.”

“We have been walking for hours already,” said Alberto.  Then he said:

“How do you stop this noise, this racket?”

“Why don’t you throw your canteen away?” said the instrument man Alfonso, laughing behind the surveyor.  His voice broke with his laughter.  “After all, it is empty.”

Alberto swore loudly to himself.  His muscles ached from the climbing, and beads of sweat ran down his face, flanks, and legs.  Raising his head, flinging it back over his shoulders, he shouted toward the hill:

“Son of a bitch!”

“Oyoy, yoy, yoy.”  Without slackening his steps on the trail, the laborer Toti raised his head, the muscle in his jaw knotting, and shouted at the top of his lungs toward the hill.  Like this:  Oyoy, yoy, yoy.

“Son of a mother whore!” said the instrument man Alfonso, walking at the head of the line of men, his wide shoulders and long trunk supported incongruously by short, stunted legs.  “Don’t be noisy!”  But he was screaming, drowning the Oyoy, yoy, yoy under his own shrill voice.

“Oyoy, yoy, yoy,” said Toti, shouting toward the green hills still.

“Don’t be noisy, you son of a whore!” said Alfonso, louder, his voice booming from his lungs and over-sized chest.  “Oy, oy, oy.”

Walking leisurely behind Alfonso and Alberto, the rod man Dante sang the song “If I Had a Hammer,” changing words to fit in to their kind of work in the triangulation tower:

If I had a hammer,

I’d hammer in the morning.

I’d hammer in the evening,

I’d hammer all day.

Out here in the mountains,

The mountains of Co-ta-ba-to.

I’d hammer in the morning,

I’d hammer in the evening,

Oh, yes, I’d hammer all day.

They went on, climbing the slope of the hill through the winding narrow trail, the empty canteens swinging from their hips and making this sound again:  clang, clang, clang.  Alberto saw some pygmies coming down the hill in single file toward them:  small-framed and short-legged, dwarf-like; thinking then, If we continue at the same pace, we’ll surely meet them face to face at the fork of the trail and may accidentally bump or brush against them.  And being ignorant and primitive they may think it is done intentionally.  For the Negritos were cunning and fearsome; no tribe would intentionally seek to quarrel with them, because of their legendary poison-tipped arrows and their capacity to disappear quickly into the bushes.

The pygmy group coming down the trail was led by an old-looking, pigeon-chested man with an impassive, hairless face.  They were no more than four feet tall, clad in rags, and had bows and arrows protruding from their backs.  With the Negrito leader were an old woman, probably his wife, two young women, and three naked children.  But the young women were of the same small frame and short stature as the children, with equally narrow hips and long hair; the only difference was a slight sway of the hips as the two women walked up the trail --- a characteristic of all women, whether pagan, Muslim, or Christian.

Alberto and the men slowed their pace and  came face to face, briefly, with the Negritos at the fork.  No one spoke or said anything.  Alberto,  with the other Cerdeza Surveying workers, and the Negritos went past each other without a nod or a grunt passing between them.  Cautious and concerned not to offend the other, they all looked down at the ground, for out here in the Moro hinterlands they knew that looking at strangers was more often than not taken as a challenge or an affront; usually settled by the shedding of blood, or one’s life.

Climbing an incline on the hill, Alberto glanced back at the Negrito leader, who was at the front of the single column on the winding trail.  From behind, the Negrito leader was naked except for a dirt-smudged G-string which hugged his crotch tightly, raising calluses on both cheeks of his buttocks like nodes on a piece of wood, while his back, buttocks, and limbs were covered with dirt and slime --- as if someone had painted him over with charcoal dipped in sump oil.  The dirt on his skin was so thick, you can plant camote tubers on it, as a folk saying goes, thought Alberto.  And how can you tell their sex without looking at their rumps?

In a short while, the Negritos disappeared down the other face of the hill, as quietly as they had appeared:  short limbs shooting like pistons under them and without a trace or sound.  Recalling the equally sudden appearance of the Moro savages on Mount Pulanggi not so many months before, Alberto felt bare, exposed to any and all danger lurking in the thick undergrowth and behind the climber-matted giant trees.  Slowly a children’s song seeped into his mind:

Negritos of the mountain,

What kind of food do you eat?

What kind of food do you eat?

Negritos of the mountain. 

They were going up the slope of another hill, bald and strewn with ashes because of slash-and-burn farming, locally called kaingin.  Some half-burnt cogon stalks spiraled up in clusters, sea urchin-like, from the ash-covered soil.  However, while going up the bald face of the hill or slipping on it, the men never grabbed at the cogon-stalk clusters, because of their razor-sharp grass blades which could easily cut through even a laborer’s thickly callused palm. 

Near the top of the bald hill, the laborer Toti tripped on a stump and tumbled down the slope.  He had been carrying the provisions, including half a dozen chickens on a bamboo pole over his shoulders, and when he slid the weight on the pole shifted abruptly to one end and the pole, a lever now, tilted him over backward.  Thus, Toti was suspended for a few seconds on the edge of the slope, teetered back and forth like a pendulum, and, at one moment, almost recovered his balance.  Hold it, Toti, thought Alberto.  Don’t, don’t fall and lose our provisions, for God’s sake!  But then the chickens got loose, and as Toti bent to retrieve them, he keeled over backward and rolled down the hillside, and the provisions and half-dozen chickens came tumbling down with him.  A cloud of dust and ashes trailed him down the hill too, lifting only when he hit a stump which broke his fall near the foot of the hill but almost crushed his ribcage, too.  Rising slowly, his face and limbs plastered with ashes and loam, Toti looked like an incongruous miniature of a Negro standing upright at the edge of the kaingin:  his eyes and teeth shone through his ash-smudged face, while in his hands he proudly clutched three of the chickens.

“Whore of a mother of  Teng!” said Toti, referring to the laborer-driver, who was left behind in their camp in Pikit.

Bending over with laughter, Alberto said:

“What has Teng got to do with it?”

“He did not tie the chickens very well,” said Toti, staggering to his feet, and going up the slope he slid on the ash-loam and fell down again.  Then, “Now this is all that is left for our week’s provisions.”

On top of the hill, looking down the slope, Alfonso shouted:

“You look like an American Negro.”

“Whore of a mother of Teng!”  Toti still held the chickens in his hands.  Covered with dust and ashes, eyes popping out of their sockets, he said, “Son of a mother of all whore mothers!”

All the way to Mount Calo, Alberto and the instrument man Alfonso and the men laughed as they recalled how Toti rolled down the ash-covered kaingin and how his eyes and teeth shone white like a Negro’s.  This made them forget that they had lost all their week’s provisions except for a few chickens, some gantas of rice, and a bag of salt.  It was half-past midday when they saw some banana and papaya trees growing wild on a camote patch, and beyond it was a stump-studded hill, with half-burnt logs strewn like giant toothpicks, their tops pointed downward along its slope, and on it was an abandoned small nipa hut beside a huge rock and overlooking a ravine. 

Alfonso said, “Let’s stop here already.”

“We can put up our tower beside the hut,”  said Alberto, starting up the hill to the small hut and squinting behind sweat-beaded eyeglasses.  “We are high enough, I can see.”

Sprinting, with long strides, the laborer Toti ran up toward the small nipa hut and climbed on top of the huge rock beside it.  He looked down the hill, over the half-burnt logs, mould-covered and rotting, to the clumps of balete trees,” he said.  “They are in the way of the sight of our transit.”

“Take Ramon with you,” said Alberto, clasping a shrub and pulling himself up the slope.  A lump of soil gave way under his feet, rippled down the hill, and diminished in a whisper of rolling pebbles.  “There in the bag are the axes.”

After the laborers brought the bags and surveying instruments into the hut, Alberto and Alfonso and the rod man Dante cleared the area about the hut of small trees and thickets.  Under the sun, sweating and panting, Alberto felt exalted and happy.  He wished to share it with the others, make them smell and breathe it, too, and call their attention to him.  To myself, he thought then:  Myself, to me!

Alfonso was hacking down a tree, and the rod man Dante, holding a rope attached to the tree, stood precariously near the edge of the ravine.  The tree had to be pulled that way to stop it from falling on the small hut and crushing it like a matchbox.  Alberto took the rope from Dante, who objected, saying:

“But boss, it is dangerous; the rope may suddenly give way.”

“That is all right,” said Alberto.  “I’ll look out for myself.”

Indeed, if the instrument man Alfonso miscalculated how much he should hack off the tree for it to fall by a tug on the rope, and if Alberto pulled harder than necessary and there was an abrupt slacking of the rope, he would go over the cliff to certain death in the ravine thirty meters below.  But the greater the risk, he thought, the more attention I would get.  What is important then is the exactness of my own calculation, that the force I will put against the rope to bring the tree down the ledge is just enough; not more nor less.

“Are you ready?” cried Alfonso, holding a bolo … an all-purpose long knife … above his shoulders.  “Alberto ------ “

“O, o,” shouted Alberto, straining against the rope, muscles taut, his face craned toward the tree.  “Go, go, go, Alfonso.”

Alfonso struck the tree with his bolo, the fresh golden chips flying off the trunk like miniature saucers, and as the tree started to lean toward the hut he shouted:

“Pull, Alberto.  Putang ina, pull!”

And so, Alberto pulled at the rope, and almost simultaneously, the tree swayed away from the small nipa hut; and the rod man on the ledge watching him and Alfonso standing by the tree knew it would not crash onto the small hut.  But Alberto kept pulling hard at the rope, waiting for that sudden slackening which he must anticipate or else he would go tumbling down to his death in the bottom of the ravine.  Then he felt the rope become slack in his hands, and while Alfonso and Dante were watching him and waiting for that moment when the tree would come crashing down, in that hiatus, that emptiness, he heard Toti and Ramon down the other side of the hill furiously hacking at the great balete trees, seemingly with no effect, the impotent axes going crack  crack  crack!  And their clear, resonant sounds dying, fading away slowly.  At this moment, Alberto felt himself falling, as though filling that hiatus, but he knew he had not miscalculated and so let himself fall sideways and started to roll freely down the slope of the hill, crashing against the brush and sapling, all the time aware that Alfonso and the rod man Dante stood there watching him in awe and were afraid for him.  Rolling and tumbling over and over, Alberto loved the attention he was drawing and even pushed himself further by doing a somersault once, twice:  knowing that they were not aware that there was no danger now and that really he could stop it any time now made him more exalted and happy now.  It’s enough, he told himself.  His face a little bit lacerated by whipping branches and his clothes torn and covered with dust, Alberto halted his fall, stood up, and looking up toward the crest of the hill, smiled at the two men.  Again he heard in the distance the impotent axes going crack  crack  crack!

Later in the afternoon of that day, Alberto was not surprised that Toti and Ramon could not get the great balete trees down with their axes; as if he had all the while expected them to return to the small hut with their axes broken at the handle.  

“There’s nothing we could do,” said Toti, shirtless and with sweat dripping from his forehead, armpits, and legs, his rumpled hair tossed over one eye.  “The balete tree is very hard.  I even broke my axe.”

Glancing at the broken axe, Albert said:

“Leave it for tomorrow then.”

“That balete tree is really very hard,” said Ramon.  His muscles were taut and twitching in his arms, and his chest heaved and fell rhythmically underneath his wet, dirty shirt.  “I don’t think the two of us could do it.  Three men extending their arms could not cover its entire circumference.  Here, I also broke my axe.”

Alberto reached a hand out for the axe, turned it in his hands, and, after inspecting the broken handle, returned the axe to the laborer.  “O, o, tomorrow only,” he said.  “We’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”

At sunset, while Toti brought in a dry log and set it down under the small hut and Alfonso, squatting, started a fire under it, Alberto went up onto the rock beside the hut and gazed down the ravine and across to the mountain ranges.  The sky exploded behind a prism of kaleidoscopic colors, and in a little while the whole horizon was aglow and incandescent in the last burst of the sun.  “My God!” he exclaimed, and then, still gazing across at the mountain ranges, he thought, deeply and seriously, to himself:  “Surely, there is a God, or how do you explain this?”  Alberto told himself he was an atheist, an unbeliever, yet for a minute, perhaps more (he could not tell), there on the rock he stood, transfixed, until the burst of the last light over the mountain ranges dimmed to grey and he became aware once more of the solitary, small nipa hut and the laborers there.  Thinking abruptly, It was silly, really, to be so sentimental, and went down the rock.  He did not tell anyone about it, not even Alfonso, when he came back to the small hut and sat with him by the smoldering log.

Thick smoke from the slow-burning log curled up through the bamboo-split floor and filled the single room of the small hut, driving the bugs and mosquitoes against the nipa-sawali walls.  Squatting round the smoldering log with Alfonso were the laborer Ramon and the rod man Dante.  By a shaky old table, away from the others, Toti stood, quite busy, slicing pieces of meat for supper.  In the half darkness he had to feel the thickness and width of the meat with his hands.  His back was turned to the men under the small hut, but they could see his shoulders rise and fall and imagined him cutting the meat, just as if they could see the knife in his hands cutting the meat.  Near the smoldering log and bent over the curling smoke were sticks stuck in the ground with pieces of meat, roasting slowly by the live coals.

The meat was quite reddish, like beef’s or deer’s, and Alberto wondered where the men had got the meat way up here in the mountains.  They had not passed by any house, much less a market-place, on their way to Mount Calo.  And their main provisions had been strewn and splattered on the slope of a kaingin that morning.  Luckily, they had been able to save some chickens for tomorrow’s breakfast and the bag of salt, which actually was a staple in the jungle, because salt could preserve long enough for their survival any game killed or trapped.  It also substituted for water when they became dehydrated under the oppressive tropical sun, and out here being without water for hours was worse than being without food.

Here on Mount Calo, Alberto and the men were sitting in the last light of day one moment and the next they were in the dark of night and deafened by the sounds of night things.  As the flames from a fire-pit leaped and danced, a reddish glow lit the faces of the men squatting by it and the smoldering log:  they looked like ghosts with blood-stained features. 

Alberto cringed and shrunk away from the fire, because in that instant a thought crept into his mind:  Are we not all ghosts here, invisible and ethereal, and suspended in the air and the atmosphere, materializing only when a flame with its reddish hue touches our ghostly face, like the flame from the fire-pit and smoldering log, giving life to the ghosts as blood to human beings?  Years later he would think quietly that perhaps he and the others were there only temporarily, occupying a space in time but not in place, for this would soon be gone and no trace of their existence would remain.  They had only indented the cosmic cloud that filled space, and as they moved, the gap was filled and refilled by the same cosmic cloud they had displaced; so that their existence was only in time and not in space:  thinking then, Ay, soon all this will be gone, the glowing fire, the curling smoke that drives away the bugs and night things, Alfonso, Ramon, and the rod man squatting there under the hut and Toti slicing pieces of reddish meat, and the huge rock from where I thought I saw God!

The sizzling of the meat in a pan halted his thoughts, and Alberto was almost tempted to shake his head and dislodge the pellets of thoughts clinging to the webs of his mind, right there before his fellow-surveyors, as though those thoughts had body, their own corporeal existence.  Strangely, the slices of meat had turned the oil into a red pool in the pan, for while the meat was being fried it shed off its reddish hue; and unlike pork or beef, the meat did not exude any delicious aroma.  What kind of meat is that?  he thought.  Where did it come from?

But he did not ask anyone.  There were many things these months he wished to question or share with the men: thinking, But here in the hinterlands, in this savage Moro land, you do not talk too much nor ask too many questions, not out of respect but more out of tradition, custom, just as when you see something strange or mysterious in a strange place you are not supposed to point out with your finger and shout, “What is that?  Dios mio, look!”  This was supposed to bring evil or harm to the group by the spirits residing in those strange things or objects.  Ay, he really wanted to share with them what he had seen these months, and what he knew through common sense in spite of his being a city-bred young man.  Or was it all instinct, dormant before but now active and restless, resuscitated as it were by the darkness and the strangeness of this Moro land?  For instance, somehow, without having really experienced it before, he knew that the slow-burning log was to keep away the bugs and night things from the small hut as well as to protect them later on in the night from the wild boars and snakes, which shun heat and fire.  But cooking our own supper also by the same red coals of the log is surely ingenious.  And perhaps that is the primeval mind working.  He felt pleased, satisfied, of these new revelations seeping into his life.  Said he:

“You have to add more oil.  But Dante … what kind of meat is that?”

The rod man Dante did not reply, and turning the slices of meat in the pan with a knife, he swore in his Tagalog dialect:

“Putang ina!  All our oil will be consumed by this meat.”

The surveyor Alberto went on:

“But unless you add more oil, Dante, the meat will stick to the pan.”

Meanwhile, the instrument man Alfonso leaning forward on the balls of his feet peered into the pan, and made a face.  “Putang ina!” he said.  “Look!  Ah-yay, it’s turning the oil red … like it is eating the oil.”

“O, o, it’s like a sponge,” said Alberto, swaying too on the balls of his feet; then went on: “Don’t you think it is like sponge, Alfonso?”

And then, Alfonso looking up from the pan said:

“Are you sure this is beef?  Where did you get this meat, hah?”

“O, o, sir,” said Toti.  As he turned around the light from the fire-pit and smoldering log leaped onto his face.  “Dante and I bought it when we went to fetch water.”

Pretending to play along (Be dumb and stupid, he told himself), he said:

“The way that meat is eating our oil, we won’t have any left for tomorrow’s chickens.”

“But this is delicious meat,” said Toti, moving past the other laborers and peering also into the pan.  “And it was very cheap; only three pesos a kilo.  In Cotabato the meat-vendors sell it for seven pesos and fifty centavos.”  

“Son of a bitch!” Alfonso swore loudly, his voice coming deep from his lungs.

Under the small nipa hut, squatting there on the balls of their feet, the men warmed themselves by the fire like gnomes shivering from the mountain cold.  Now and then, the fire leaped under the prodding knife and its fiery tongue illuminated the men; in those instances, the lines on their faces became deeper and sharper, while their eyes glowed, reflecting the leaping flames.

It seemed, indeed, that out here in the mountains of Cotabato, strangers like Alberto and the others moved like ghosts, aayyyiieee --- yes!  like ethereal beings drifting in a fog above a meadow, floating wherever the wind blew them.  But unlike before, the young man was like a sponge, like the reddish meat taken up here on Mount Calo, as he absorbed and retained even the most infinitesimal part of what he was experiencing  or sorting out their present significance, their meaning out here in the hinterlands:  in fact, no longer was his skin a repellent, coarse covering, rejecting the feel of the atmosphere and the land.   I must submerge myself, he thought, watching the men spreading out big round leaves over the patch of grass beside the hut for an improvised supper-table.  Be a part of this land, this soil; be coarse and tough!

There was no moon, and the only light came from the flames and glowing embers of the fire-pit and the smoldering log.  Shafts of light lanced through the gaps between the men, standing side by side, and fell like luminous bars onto the table of leaves laid out on the patch of grass.  Indeed, it was quite dark, and when Toti dumped the boiled rice directly from the caldero onto the big leaves, not one of them could immediately tell it was boiled rice, although it was shiny and white.  Most likely it was because everyone was used to seeing rice on a plate instead of dumped in one big mound on the ground though temporarily carpeted with big, round leaves.

Following behind Toti, the rod man Dante brought a bigger caldero and, straining against its weight, held it by the handle while invisible steam scalded his forearm.  “Where do I set this down?” he said, his legs spread apart, unsteadily holding the caldero away from his face and arms.  He drew his face back to avoid its steam, and along his neck veins whorled like climbers on a trunk.  “O, o ------ tell me already before I drop this here.”

A short, dark figure detached itself from the circle, saying, in a high-pitched voice:

“Ah, where else, stupid!  Well, dump it there already.”

But nobody anticipated his next move, nor could they have guessed Alfonso (for indeed, it was he) would really do it even though he had in the past done things utterly savage and vulgar:  like jumping up onto his chair during breakfast in their quarters in Pikit, or hiding everybody’s share of fried eggs or their banana dessert under the tablecloth --- which was incongruous for an instrument man, and a graduate of the State university.  Because he abruptly grabbed the handle of the caldero, upturned it, and poured the soup of camote tops onto the mound of boiled rice.  And then, he bent down again, picked up the frying pan by the handle, and, as though he had not done enough mischief already, turned the pan with its oil and fired slices of red meat over the mound of boiled rice and camote-top soup.

Shit!  Alberto swore to himself.

There was stunned silence, as no one spoke or moved.  They all stood there holding the empty round leaves or concave pieces of banana bark that served as plates --- since nobody brought saucer or plate when on triangulation-tower construction in the mountains.  Someone stepped forward, leaned toward the mound of boiled rice and viands on the improvised leaf-table; and instantly, although no signal or sign was given, everyone set upon the dishes, like a pack of wolves that had cornered its prey.  Once the men had pounced upon the foods, jabbing the mass of boiled rice with their bare hands, they shed all sense of propriety and decorum.

 Halfway through supper, while the boiled rice oozed through the men’s fingers, Alberto Gonzales moved away form the circle of men and glanced down at the improvised leaf-table spread over the patch of grass by the side of the small nipa hut, where the mound of rice and viands, viscid and sloshy, soaked in the camote-top soup and mashed by everyone’s hands, now looked exactly like pig’s fodder of banana fruit and shoots which had been boiled with a wooden paddle in a huge gasoline drum, he thought.  But Alfonso, Toti, and the others seemingly do not notice that the food looks like pig’s fodder.  Of course, it was a little dark, he went on thinking, but the boiled rice, which is upland rice, shiny whiter than the lowland rice, had reflected the last glow of the day if not the yellow light of the embers.  There is no mistake.  They also can see it.  Suddenly, a ball of air rolled up his stomach, and something sour --- the acrid taste of coming vomit --- came to his mouth.

And yet no one, except perhaps the laborer Toti, expected Alfonso to mention about the meat.  It was then just too much, even in fun or as a joke.  Licking his lips and clicking his tongue, he said:

“The meat is really delicious.  Deer’s meat is really special, delicious.  Smack.  Smack.  Smack.”

“O, o, it is really delicious,” said Toti; “nothing like deer’s meat.”

Meanwhile, Alfonso picked up a slice of meat from his banana-bark plate, wiped the oil and sauce off his place with it, and, mouth wide open, head tilted back, theatrically dropped the slice of meat into his mouth.  He started to chew the meat, teeth grinding and moving sideways with his jaw, while his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.  “This meat is so delicious; is it not, Alberto?”  Holding the leaf-plate in his hands, Alfonso turned round toward the young surveyor, and his face half-lit in the faint and quivering light of the fire-pit and the smoldering log he outrageously broke with satanic laughter.

Recalling that unlike beef or venison the meat had turned the oil reddish and like a sponge had soaked so much oil, Alberto looked down at his leaf-plate, contemplated, and pretended to be amused, thinking, If I were to say yes, then they’d think I am as naïve as a provinciano.  So he said:

“You do not fool me, none of you … truly fooled me.  I knew all the time it was not beef or venison meat.”

The instrument man Alfonso threw his leaf-plate away, laughed until his head jerked up and down his shoulders, and said:

“Whore of a mother!  You are right, Alberto; so right since it is horse meat.”

Across from Alberto, the laborer Ramon stopped eating and, turning away from the food, walked off down the slope into the dark. He had not expected Ramon to reveal such sensitivity, as he was the epitome of a laborer --- strong, big, and dumb.  Or is it because, unlike the laborer, Alfonso and I and the rod man Dante have to prove we are tougher, our vitals are of stronger stuff, thought Alberto.  Some years later would he think:

“Maybe by then I was already becoming a part of the Moro land, primitive, cruel, and savage, since I was becoming like the men around me; tough and coarse.  Slowly, gradually, delicadeza and morality were shedding off me as skin sloughs and changes.  Obviously, these things were happening to me and the men in the Moro land.  Decivilized, practical, and with less moral concern, I became there then.  I would eat any kind of food, mudfish or horsemeat, whether stolen as I knew the meat on Mount Calo was, or not; it did not really matter.  Although decivilized and adaptable, I became so because of a need to survive and assimilate.  But it did not mean I enjoyed eating stolen meat, without any pang of conscience, or eating like a pig, or with bare hands like an uncivilized man as Alfonso.  Not a mere traveler or an observer but a participant, that was what I was to become then, whose spiritual faith was renewed even for just a minute on Mount Calo. Unlike a somnambulist, as people, and trees came into view, and the wind touched me, I felt and sensed them all --- I felt that at that moment there I began to keep alliances with others, to cease as an alien in the Moro land.” 

That night, in the small hut, cold and shivering, Alberto sought the warmth of the men.  With handkerchiefs or sweat-reeking T-shirts over their nostrils and mouths and wearing thick maong jackets, collars pulled over their ears, he and the men lay close together on the floor of the small nipa hut.  But he could not sleep, fearing that although he was wrapped up like a mummy, the gnats and insects might still get into his ears and then gnaw their way into his brains.

All their jackets were heavy and damp, covered with dirt and soaked with sweat which had not completely dried that day.  Lying close together, in the small hut four meters long and two meters wide, the five of them --- Alberto, Alfonso, Ramon, Toti, and the  rod man Dante --- were soon enveloped in an armpit-reeking, clammy, and invisible mist mixed with smoke from the smoldering log under the hut.  Filtering through the cracks of the bamboo-split floor, the smoke seemed to thicken with the men’s body smell and sweat.  However, they could not put out the fire, for the mountain cold would gnaw into their bones and the snakes and wild pigs, fearing nothing but the fire, would leave the brushwood and rush into the small hut.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Alberto heard a pack of wild boars grunting, clashing, in the camote patch down the slope.  Perhaps the fire was dead, the log no longer burning.  For a minute, the thought of a snorting, grunting pack of wild boars breaking through the fringe of the forest through the brushwood and scrambling up into the hut passed through his mind.  So vivid and real it was that Alberto, shuddering, turned instinctively toward the small open doorway and gazed out into the empty, ominous darkness.  Still cold and restless, he could not sleep, though he kept his eyes closed and moved closer to the men for their warmth.  When finally sleep came an hour or so later, he sank numbly into its depth until the first light of day slanted through the open door and fell in strips of yellow across his face:  waking him up.

The morning was not so glorious and iridescent as the sunset he had seen the day before.  Even the famed sunset at Cawa-Cawa Boulevard back home in Zamboanga, he recalled, had not moved him so much, startled and whetted his senses; nor had it made him think, he shyly admitted to himself, that sure there must be an Omnipotent Being, whatever one calls him!  If only for that moment, yesterday’s sunset had shattered his disbelief of God’s existence.  He stood on the rock beside the small hut and inhaled deeply, his lungs bursting with fresh mountain air, and pushed his shoulders back as he gazed toward the rising fog above the ravine.  Stolid and strong, the giant trees there and the huge balete woods below the mountain slope reached out in fingers of foliage toward the sky in the windless morning.  On the slope, a great expanse of green lay fresh and glistening under the morning dew, while beyond, bathed in yellow and orange, the brush patch grew timidly stunted in the clayey soil that swept down opposite the hut and broke off about half a kilometer away on the fringe of the new woods.  He wrapped his arms around him, shivering, his breath visible in the air, and shaking his head he thought:  Dios mio!  It’s so fresh and clean!

On the small burnt-out patch, Alfonso and the rod man Dante leaning backward as they staggered down the slope turned and waved at Alberto; he responded by smiling and waving back, saying, “Look out!  There might be some snakes there,” even as the two men disappeared at the edge of the ash-covered loam into the stunted bushes to defecate over a boulder or rotten log.  Watching his words become visible like his  breath in the cold air, he thought:  After relieving themselves, they will pull off leaves from nearby bushes and wipe their arses and jerk up their pants.  If they are not careful, the leaves may be of the atong-atong brush and in less than a minute welts will appear all over their buttocks.  Grinning sheepishly, he wished Alfonso would wipe his arse with itchy leaves:  thinking then, And that will surely stop his boasting about being a veteran of Vietnam.

But later Alfonso and the rod man Dante came out of the bushes grinning from ear to ear, seemingly mocking at his unfulfilled wish, apparently happy and relieved that they had done their morning thing.  Meanwhile, under the small hut, Toti banged the huge log, which had burnt the whole night, with a branch and beckoned the two men with the other hand to come and get their breakfast.   

Alberto jumped down from the rock, skirted between the rows of boulders, and skipped over the black stumps protruding from the abandoned kaingin.  He said:

“Hoy, Toti!  Hide my food.  The glutton of an Alfonso is coming.”

“Your mother is a whore!” shouted Alfonso, shaking his fist.

“He is coming; hide everybody’s food, hoy!”

Still shaking his fist and plodding up the slope ahead of the rod man, Alfonso swore:

“You, Alberto, you fucking tower-builder.  Your mother is a whore.”

Alberto went down the side of the slope crab-like, and his feet dislodged lumps of earth as he slid down the forgotten, loam-covered, slash-and-burn farm.  Panting and chest-heaving, he swung his arms level with his shoulders to keep his balance, and his breath whooshed from his lungs like smoke in the chilly mountain air.  Running, he chased his breath-smoke, which billowed and twirled before his face, until he finally caught his breath in the warmth of the smoldering log, under the small hut, huddled with the men, squatting and eating breakfast.

They were squatting in a circle by the embers of the log, smoking, their hands cupped around lit cigarettes, when the laborer Ramon came up with two half-naked tall men following behind him.  Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, the two giants halted some distance away from the small hut as Ramon went on, bent his head under the wooden beam, and squatted too with the men by the slow-burning log.  Toti poured him a cup of coffee, and the big laborer reached out both hands and his stubby fingers went all the way around the tin cup.  He sipped his hot coffee slowly, quietly, his huge round face like a rock-crusher over the small tin cup which had disappeared in his big hands.  And yet, a moment ago, coming up toward the hut, the two native giants looming behind him, the big laborer had looked puny and dwarf-like on the slope.  He said:

“They are Manobos.  They said they can cut down the balete trees.”

“Manobos?” said Alberto.  “There are no Manobos in these parts.”

Said the big laborer, looking up from his cup:

“They came from Davao … over Mount Apo and across the mountain ranges to Mount Calo.”

“Will they cut down those balete trees?” said the instrument man, Alfonso.  “I thought they are superstitious.  You know, they believe there are gnomes in balete trees.

Said the big laborer Ramon, still looking up from his cup, his voice calm, steady:

“They are wood-cutters, they say.”

Alberto gazed toward the wood-cutters, these pair of giant Manobos, standing there half-naked and bare-footed in the cold.  They have trekked across the highest mountain in Mindanao and over the mountain ranges, he thought, and down the great chasm that separates the provinces of Davao and Cotabato.  He looked past the two Manobo giants and across the great chasm, invisible under the fog, beyond the mountain ranges and onto the peak of Mount Apo, which soared above the fog and island-clouds.  Where no one could survive, thinking still, much less in bare feet, half-naked and exposed to mosquitoes and leeches; ay, not even a wild animal could climb that great mountain and over those ranges and across the great expanse of a chasm that separates two diverse, impenetrable provinces.  Then Ramon stood up and, with the two Manobos, went down the clump of balete trees at the side of the hill.  The other laborer, Toti, who had moved the pots away from the hot coals of the smoldering log, began to gather the empty leaf-plates and left-overs of breakfast and fling them by the side of the small nipa hut.

It was pleasant working in Pulanggi under the sun in the cold in the early part of the morning, cutting down trees that might block the sight of the DKM-3 surveying instrument and doing something they could finish by themselves.  Alberto loved to see the trees go down, smashing through the vines and onto the thick underbrush, and enjoyed swinging the bolo as well as Alfonso or the rod man Dante and feeling the bite as it cut into the fresh wood.  Sweating and his muscles aching, he realized that it was the manual work that made the day pleasant and bright; really, he loved the manly work and seeing the immediate result before him:  lines and lines of trees lying across the crushed underbrush and the transparent light filtering suddenly through the now open space onto the gum-smelling, newly cut woods on the clearing.

The two Manobo giants were indeed very strong wood-cutters, because before midday the big laborer Ramon strutted up to Alberto and Alfonso sitting by the huge rock and said:

“It is finished already.  Those Manobos were really fast in cutting down the balete trees.”

“True,” said Alberto.  “I thought it would be a day more before all those trees would be cut down.”

Alfonso said, unsmiling, “Putang ina.”  His lips twitched, the corners of his mouth jerked and his cheeks swelled into pallid bumps of dough.  “Your mother is a whore!  And you even broke our axes, and you were not able to cut down a single tree.  Ay, putang ina!”

“We could not do anything with those trees,” said the big laborer Ramon, laying the two axes on the ground; “they were too hard and big.”  Then he wiped the palms of his hands against the dirt-smutted hips of his maong pants and turned them up before him, reddish and blistered, saying, “Look at our hands; the skin has all peeled off!”

“Those Manobo wood-cutters were really very strong, sir,” said Toti, who also had broken one of the axes the day before.  “Very good wood-cutters … as if cutting big trees was nothing to them.”

Standing up from squatting on the ground and gesticulating an arm before him, his voice shrill and squeaking, the instrument man Alfonso said:

“That is right!  Because you don’t know how to cut down trees.  It is not in the strength, but how you swing those axes of yours.  You both are gago, dumb!”

The big laborer Ramon turned on his heel and walked off toward the small hut without looking back.  Those who were sitting on the slope stared past the burnt, black stumps to the underbrush below the forested hillocks; while Toti went off to follow Ramon, who was now halfway to the small hut, and Alfonso was saying, swearing to himself, “Putang ina, putang ina, putang ina!”  Looking down at the felled trees, the rod man Dante said, “That is good, so we can leave right after lunch.”  Alberto Gonzales went on staring after the laborer Ramon:  thinking then, Alfonso has no manners at all.  Really, no delicadeza.  That was truly uncalled for.  So he is a relative of the owner of the Cerdeza Surveying Company:  so what!  Does that mean he can insult, be dirty-mouthed, and hide our eggs for breakfast and our bananas for dessert?

Since there was no more clearing to be done and the balete trees, finally, were cut down --- Not by brute strength alone,  Alberto thought, but by technique the Manobos had acquired from their fathers and forefathers, although Ramon and Toti, being modern carpenters and living in a modern world with all the technology that modern science could offer, should know more, ay, should have cut down the trees faster and quicker than an ignorant, wild native --- there was now only lunch and repacking their things before leaving Mount Calo for their quarters in Pikit, Cotabato, and afterwards for drinking and serenading Nenita Initan .

Before midday the fog lifted and the sun shone bright and gentle onto the clearing.  The men were eating lunch with their bare hands from wide leaves used as improvised plates and throwing the bones and the tough horse meat, unchewed, on the ground beside them.  They ate under the shade of the sun-dappled trees, and even at noon the mountain air was still fresh and clean.  So, they were surprised when a moment later the flies came, black and ugly, with shiny beady eyes and straight short hair covering their bodies.  The black ugly things landed in the water containers, covering the water surface with their ugly, fuzzy bodies.  They picked at the boiled rice and horse meat, and then they swarmed on the faces of the men.  The surveyors and laborers all fled to the small hut, and yet not even the thick smoke from the smoldering log or the glowing embers in the fire-pit could keep the ugly black things away.

 And later, as they came down the woody slope through the same vanishing gash of trail they had climbed two days ago, coming down to the lowland, and civilization too, the young surveyor Alberto realized it was the men (he also as well as the others, and as equally involved) and their excrement --- la mierda --- that had brought the black, ugly flies to Mount Calo.    

Chapter 13

Deep in the heart of Liguasan Marsh were dead things.  All around Alberto and his men in the banca … canoe, the dark surface of the water stretched quiet and stagnant for a great distance.  And driftwood and mangrove trees rose from the bowels of the marshes without ruffling the stillness of the murky water.  Without speaking, the men rowed out of the bowl-like expanse of water.  The paddles fell softly and little ripples broke shyly alongside the banca.  As it moved silently toward a narrow channel between tall, gnarled dead trees, not a single fish broke the surface of  the dark water and not a bird flew or was to be seen on the leafless branches of the trees.  No living things were seen or heard; there was not even the humming of flies and mosquitoes.  It was indeed strange.

The men rowed on through the narrow strip of water, hemmed in by the giant trees.  The roots twisted and whorled out from the trunks like lifeless limbs.  The trunks soared branchless for some thirty meters straight up to the sky.  Above the river and the men in the banca, the treetops on either side of the river wove themselves into a canopy of leafless branches.

The men rowed on, paddles falling dull and muffled as they sliced through the smooth surface of the water.  Dark and stagnant as oil, the water seemed crusted in immobility and silence.  Meanwhile, the dark gnarled trunks and mangrove stumps passed in steady, smooth precision of dead limbs and bodies.  From the dead trees and lifeless things evil spirits seemingly watched them through omniscient, immortal eyes.

“Are you sure this way will lead us out of the marshes?” asked Alberto, sitting bolt-upright at the bow, his voice croaking in his dry throat.  “O, Ismael!”

“Yes, engineer-sir,” said the Moro interpreter, without halting his rowing, leaning forward at the stern against the wooden paddle.  “There is a river beyond here, at the end of the old swampland.”

The rod man Dante turned his head to one side and, his voice dry and croaking as Alberto’s, whispered:

“I don’t trust this Moro.  He is leading us deeper into the marshes, Alberto.”

“Shut your mouth before he hears you,” said Alberto, hissing into the man’s face.  He stared sternly and hard at him.  “Go on and paddle.”

But the rod man would not be quiet.  “Hoy, there’s nothing here but dead trees!”  he said.  “I’ve not seen anything living yet, not even crabs or fish.”  He pulled the paddle out of the water and lay it across the banca, and as he started to rise on his feet, the Moro interpreter, head craned up toward the top of a tree, said:

“Ssssshhhhhhh-ssssshhhhhhhhh.  Do not move and do not speak.”

They saw it then, its huge wings half unfurled, perched there atop the tallest tree in the mangrove swamp.  Rising branchless fifty meters or so, the trunk was white and barkless, and on the treetop the great bird,  a Philippine monkey-eating eagle (the biggest eagle in the world, they say), with his dark beak curved down razor-sharp before his great chest, was staring down at them.  Even after the men had passed under the great tree, they felt its eyes, bloodshot and beady, following them out of the bowl-like expanse of dark water.

They went down the small waterway with banks overgrown with mangrove trees.  Alberto and his men sat still and quiet in the banca.  Only the Moro interpreter Ismael went on rowing with his paddle, his arms swinging back and forth, rhythmically, by his flanks.

At the mouth of the river, the canopy of interwoven branches swept back, and suddenly the sun broke through the sky and spangled into tiny beads and pearls on the water.  Alberto put a hand over his eyes, squinted behind his spectacles, and said:

“That was the biggest monkey-eating eagle I ever saw in my life.  Do they really grow that big?”

In front of him, without turning around, the rod man Dante said from the bow:  “I thought that any moment the big eagle would swoop down and carry us all off the canoe like chickens in its talons.”  He stood up and rowed hard and fast.  On his forehead beads of sweat broke, and he said:  “But how does the monkey-eating eagle survive there, without any food or other living things?”

“Yes, Ismael,” said Alberto, jerking his head over one shoulder toward the Moro interpreter.  At the stern, the Moro squatted with his bare feet set firmly on each side of the hull, looking straight ahead past the men toward the bend of the river.  “How can that monkey-eating eagle survive there in the mangrove swamp?” asked Alberto, straining his neck and speaking above the shoulders of the other laborers.  “We saw no living thing there, not even fish in the swamp … or those ever-present flies on the water surface.”

“You thought you saw a bird, engineer-sir.”  With eyes fixed in their sockets, Ismael stared past the men.

“What do you mean, Ismael?” said Alberto and his men.  “What we saw was a monkey-eating eagle.”

Alberto was still looking over his shoulder at the Moro interpreter.  Never had the Moro spoken to them this way, and now that he did,
Alberto was surprised at the authoritative voice and posture.  Which he must have kept in reserve, thought Alberto, for times like this.  But Ismael spoke naturally, there was no mockery in his voice and his firm posture remained the same.  He had not even moved at all from the stern.  He squatted there with his bare feet on each side of the hull, as his ancestors had done before the Spanish conquistadores and Christian missionaries came to this fecund land, instead of sitting, like the surveyors, on wooden boards laid across the canoe.

“It was not a monkey-eating eagle that you saw,” said Ismael, with the same serious, solemn voice.  “There was nothing there.  You only thought you saw something.”

The young surveyor Alberto and the men of the Cerdeza Surveying Company stared at him in disbelief.  Then they spoke simultaneously at him, saying they all had seen the big eagle and how could all of them be mistaken?  Definitely, they said, it was not a spirit --- if so, that it was a spirit, then how come it was possible for them to see it?  Ismael insisted they were wrong, that they only thought they saw a monkey-eating eagle.  It was just in their mind, just their thought.  The rod man Dante stood up in the banca, gripped the wooden paddle and then unclenched it in frustration:  for all his anger he still had the sense to fear any Moro in his own native land; even a thin and nearly toothless one like the interpreter Ismael.

    Now Ismael paddled harder and faster, his muscles rippling in his sinewy, thin arms.  In anger and frustration Dante sat back on the wooden board, leaned forward, his back bent, and rowed with all his strength.  The corners of his mouth twitched.  Alberto turned around and gazed down the river and toward the bank at the thick undergrowth lining the shore. 

At a small village near an old bridge, Alberto and his men rode in their service motorcar to Pikit.  They drove for several hours.  As they sped toward Pikit, dust from the road powdered their hair, faces, and their thick maong jackets.  After a while, their eyebrows and eyelashes turned roseate color and he and his men, ay, even the Moro interpreter Ismael, looked like Martian creatures we see in comic books.

The men were happy now that they were out of the marshes, with the dead things left behind them.  The service motorcar, and the road, and the houses along it told them they were out of the marshland.  For the first time in days, they saw the sky and the sun.  A wind rippled the talahib grass, the cotton-tails waving and undulating like puffs of cloud that had fallen down out of the sky.  “We are out of the marshes,” said Alberto in the motorcar.  “Finally.”  He stared out of the window, and the two laborers by the window peeped out sighed, and said, O, o.  Who would think we are really out of the marshes.”  And then they all looked in front of them and watched the dusty road fleeing in a winding endless pink ribbon under the searing wheels of the motorcar. 

Chapter 14

Alberto leaned back in the front seat of the speeding Land-Rover, beside the laborer-driver Teng, with one arm resting on the window sill.  He said:

“Ay-yay-yay.  At last we will be sleeping in a foam bed instead of on the ground like in Salaan or in Tuburan.”

Sitting on top of the carpentry box, his head bobbing up and down, sometimes bumping the top of the motorcar as it ran through potholes in the wheel-rutted road, the laborer Toti said:

“Are you sure we have rooms reserved in Tacurong?  If there are no rooms for us when we get there, Teng, I’ll surely castrate you:  ca-cabon kita, eunuch.”

“Don’t you worry, Toti,” said Teng, looking away from the road.  And then, laughing, his voice shrill, he went on:

“I even have a honeymoon suite reserved for you, ha ha ha.”

“Bilat-sang-ina-mo!”  Toti swore in Visayan.  And then to tease Teng, knowing that a girl had rejected the laborer-driver’s amorous advances, he added, “Go and screw your girl Inday.”

Looking back along the road, Teng squinted and knitted his eyebrows.  “We will see,” he said; “we will see, we will see.”

At the back, the wooden carpentry tool box and the steel case of the transit bounced on the floor and knocked the sides of the wagon.  Clumps of tall talahib grass along each side of the road swept past, their white puffy flowers blurring cotton-tails, while behind them marshy lands spread in flat, unchanging scenery of scrub and sparse, high-branching trees, and once in a while the marshy flatness was broken by a distant hillock and a nipa hut or two under the tapering tall trees.

The rod man Dante was saying:

“Pity Engineer Reynaldo.  He is in Liguasan Marsh putting up a tower.”

“Why did Engineer Morales send him there?” said Alberto seriously:  thinking,  Not even the Philippine Constabulary rangers dare to go there with you as security.  Those who are murdered there by the Moro outlaws are merely dumped into the marsh, and the huge waterlily leaves hide them there for eternity.

“Engineer Morales is angry with him,” said the laborer-driver Teng, one hand on the wheel and the other holding a lit cigarette.  “It was something that happened when they were together in Vietnam.”

“Fuck him!’ said Alberto, with heat and anger, spitting the words out through the car window and thinking still:  A grotesque burial.  For thee the worms do not eat you, but tiny-mouthed gurami fish nibbling slowly, slowly, at your bloated body.  “If the Moro outlaws don’t get you, the carabao mosquitoes will … ten times bigger than the ones in Buluan.”

“Reynaldo has malaria,” said Teng, as though he had not stopped speaking nor inhaling at his cigarette.  “He got this when he was in Vietnam, and was sent home to recover from malaria.  Cerdeza was doing some survey work for the Americans there.”

“O --- yes,” said Alberto Gonzales; thinking:  He’s a good friend, the only person who is sensitive and sane here.  Was he not the only one who offered to lend me his mat and rubber shoes on my first day in Cotabato?  Ay, over six months ago.  “And sleeping there in Liguasan Marsh will surely bring the attacks of shiver back.”

“Even Alfonso already has the `shivers’ ,” said the big laborer Ramon, speaking for the first time since they left the highway and came onto the wheel-rutted dirt road, when he had put a handkerchief round his nose and mouth to cover them from dust.  Talking through the handkerchief still, he went on:  “And Pablo and Glorificador, too.”

Alberto pushed his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose, squinted ahead through the windshield, and thought to himself:  A real tongue-twister, Glory be to the father, glory be to the Son, and glory be to the Holy Ghost.  “Who is Glorificador?”

“He’s a new man,” said Ramon, tucking in his long hair under the handkerchief, tightened its knot at the back of his head, and wiped the dust off his hair with his hands.  “He was hired only recently,” he said.  “Engineer Morales told me when we went to Tacurong looking for our new quarters.  He said he will be our new instrument man.”

After a while, Toti said:

“Hoy, hoy, Teng.  You are really sure of those foam beds, hah?  If we don’t sleep on foam beds tonight, we will castrate you.”

“Mother fucker!” somebody said.

Splotched with dirt and mud, which had dried up during its bumpy cross-country, ten-hour ride, the Cerdeza Surveying Company Land-Rover turned off the dirt road onto a side street and came into Tacurong; a cloud of dust trailing behind it.  Alberto Gonzales and his men were powdered with dust, and streaks of dirt lined their faces, so that when the Land-rover halted at the market-place it was as if a circus truck had come in with tattered canvas and dusty chassis.  At the market-place, however, not one of the men or women so much as glanced at them; the market-goers, shoving and pushing, were not even looking at one another as they met outside the stalls.  Some Moro women spat betelnut mascada … chew … on the dusty road.  It was just as if Alberto and his men had dropped unexpectedly on an indifferent, alien planet.

The thick, trailing cloud of dust had settled back on the dirt road, like the pall of late afternoon shadows over the Moro primordial land.  Alberto gazed down a winding path onto a short, narrow bridge beyond which was a two-storey structure, unpainted, which looked as though it had sprouted overnight and had been left there forgotten in the middle of a dry, treeless grassland.  Down the winding path they rode, and, as the Land-rover wagon completed a sharp turn, Alberto noticed a pair of outhouses, roofless and patched with flattened cans or cardboard, squatted, incongruous and obtrusive, in the middle of the stream in front of the structure.

And then they went across the bridge and halted in front of the coarse two-storey structure of wood and cement.  So this is what it means, Alberto thought.  This is all it has come to, your expectation of sleeping on a foam bed, in a suite with hot and cold shower, after having slept on the ground in the mountains without a shave or a bath for more than a month.  “And is this the hotel?  Are you sure, Teng?”

“Yes, boss,” said the laborer-driver Teng, nodding, his voice apologetic.  Because the project engineer Gonzales and he had looked at this place a month ago, while it was yet being constructed. “O, o. Indeed, this is the place.”

Through a square gap in the face of the building, the proprietor emerged and approached the Land-Rover.  He was a huge, fat man in camiseta de chino … sleeveless shirt, with his face and arms round and bloated by advanced beri-beri, and his swollen toes and insteps bursting out underneath the rubber straps of his old wooden slippers.  He wiped the palms of his hands, wet with sweat, behind the back of his pants.

“We are from the Cerdeza Surveying,” said Alberto.

“O,o,” said the proprietor.

“Our jefe, Engineer Morales, came here about a month ago.”

Said the proprietor,  “You are upstairs.”

The two of them entered the building. From the head of the stairs, with the proprietor beside him, Alberto looked down an empty hall about twenty meters long by eight meters wide.  He could see from one end of the hall to the other, without a thing obstructing his vision, for there was no dividing wall, apart from a partition separating this side of the building from the other; not even a post or temporary beam for future rooms, although the hall was a part of the building where in rooms were to be constructed opposite each other with a narrow corridor cutting through it:  like in some hotels in Midsayap or Kidapawan.  At the rear of the hall was a large window, extending from one end of the wall to the other, without a shutter, overlooking the narrow bridge and the pair of outhouses.  Under the window was a single bed, and its unused mattress lay twisted on top of the spring-frame.  There was no sign of furniture anywhere in the room, not a table or chair, nor any other bed except the one by the window, so that the whole atmosphere gave the place a feeling that it had never, until then, been occupied.

“Are there no rooms?” he said.  His voice was calm, quiet too; there was even a touch of timidity there, even embarrassment, as though he had accidentally burst into a woman’s bedroom, a relative’s or even a sister’s (he had three:  all very tall and slender, the eldest ten years younger than he and the two others five years apart, exact to the day and hour in machine-like precision) and found her naked.  The he said, “I thought there would be rooms here, separate rooms … like in hotels.”

“We were putting up the posts, the dividing walls,” said the proprietor.  “Look!  Down there … at your feet.  There are nail-marks in the floor still.”  Alberto then looked down, yet not comprehending anything.  The proprietor went on:

“We had to take the posts out again.  A family came and wanted the place immediately, two days after we had begun putting up the posts and some of the dividing walls for the rooms.”

“Again?”  Alberto asked, puzzled, uncomprehending still.

“O, o,” said the proprietor.  “We have to do it again and again.  You know, it is not the first time; as other families have come before them and left, and we have put up the walls every time a family leaves and tear them down when another family wants the place.

“In fact, the last occupants here left only yesterday, and we had barely started putting up the walls when I remembered you were coming today.  So this morning,” he said, “we again tore down what we had put up yesterday.”

Still puzzled, Alberto said:

“Why don’t you just simply leave them, the posts I mean?  O, o, the posts and the walls, and then finish the rooms later.  Instead of doing it over and over … putting up and tearing them down again without any result.”

“It is not that simple,” said the proprietor.  “We wish, however, that this would be vacant long enough for us to finish the rooms, before a new family moves in.”  He paused and gazed down at the nail-marks on the floor, which were close to where he stood.  He wiped his huge hands, which perspired a lot, on the hip pockets of his pants.  But his swollen face never changed, not even a shadow passed it.  Then he said, “I get confused sometimes trying to keep up with them.”

Later that night a shrill stream of chanting came from the other side of the partition, where some Moro merchants were staying.  It seemed to seep through the gap between the top of the partition and the ceiling, curdling, until finally it permeated the entire hall.  It was like singing and yet not signing, the implacable stream gurgling from the throat of the invisible chanter --- like the sounds that wailing dogs would make if words were also formed, infused, into their wailing.  “Aaaaahhh-hhhllllll” … until it seemed to coagulate even the dark itself, the human and yet inhuman sound rising in an inimitable shrillness.

Unlike most hotels on the island, no meals were served in the hotel in Tacurong.  A carinderia catered for the hotel’s guests, but one had to walk daily half a kilometer from the hotel to the outskirts of the municipality.  And so, at lunchtime, Alberto and his men would be seen walking under the blazing midday sun toward the carinderia.  It was a very hot ten-minute walk in their maong jackets.  They did not ride in their service wagon so as not to attract attention and be different from the men of the town, for everyone here walked.  Also, when Alberto and his men walked down the road they kept their eyes straight before them, looking neither to the right nor to the left. They feared that they might unnecessarily or unwittingly create misunderstanding:  an unintentional or accidental “stare” is considered a challenge in these parts, or anywhere else in this Moro land.  Alberto and his men had no wish to offend any of the townsmen.     

It was for this reason that until a week later Alberto and his men had not noticed the army barracks across the road, a few meters from the market-place and the checkpoint.  It was only one morning that they noticed the barracks, or rather first the dark green-colored camisetas and underwear hanging from the barred windows and on clotheslines against the unwashed walls of an old, dusty building --- the kind that soldiers were fitted out with by the Philippine Army.  And yet, they would not have noticed the barracks, no, not if Alberto and the laborers had not gone inside the grocery store.  Because hollowed out of the rear wall of the store was an unusual door, one without any lock or shutter, which provided an easy access to all the food shelves in the grocery store.  Now and then, men in khaki pants but naked to the waist, with cans and boxes taken from shelves tucked under their armpits, disappeared through this door.

Out of curiosity, Alberto peeped through the door into the half-darkness.  In a while he saw quilts and mattresses cluttered on the floor, and half-naked men either sat or lay on them.  There was no light inside apart from chinks of sunlight filtering through a pair of barred windows facing each other on opposite walls; but at the end of the barracks was a table with a man in full uniform sitting behind it:  detached and officious, and directly above his covered head was an electric bulb hanging from the dirty, cobwebby ceiling, its cord sooty and black with age.  This end of the barracks was the only lighted place in the whole building, and the electric bulb hung there, lit day and night, covered now with fly-specks and smoke, giving it a certain kind of detached seclusion.

He turned away from the door and spoke to the grocer:

“You have a unique door here.  But is it not a little inconvenient for your business?”

“Not the least,” said the grocer.  “The soldiers can come in any time they wish, for the door is never locked; does not even have a lock, never had one, since there’s no need for it.”  Behind the counter, half-hidden among the boxes of soap and milk, the grocer stood, his eyes clear and limpid, while all else was either dusty or dirt-stained:  a flour sack hung from his neck and covered his chest and rotund belly, but his face and arms, exposed, were powdered with flour, lending him a quality that was melancholy and yet comic.

“And the door …,” said Alberto; “was it always there?”

“No-no,” said the grocer.  “Where the door is now we used to have before a blank wall.”  He looked again at Alberto, and when he saw his puzzled face, went on as though explaining to a child:

“The soldiers suggested we put the door there in the wall, since it was so inconvenient for them to go all around the building to get into my store.  This system has worked very well, sir, so well that the main door at the other end of the barracks is now barred with wooden planks, unused and forgotten. And this door here now serves all the purposes of the main door.”  He picked half a dozen cans of sardines from the shelf and placed them inside a box with Alberto’s other groceries.  The grocer pushed the box toward him, and drawing a hand out from under the counter he turned his palm up.

“It is indeed convenient,” said Alberto, putting some bills in the grocer’s hand.  “For the soldiers, yes.  I see that none of them has paid you for a single item they have taken from the shelves and carried into their barracks through the door.”

His face masked with flour, the grocer placed his other flour-powdered arm upon the counter.  Leaning forward he opened his mouth, but no words came through his lips; instead he turned abruptly around and went on with his work of minding the store.  With his men carrying the groceries, Alberto then left the store.  Outside, the soldiers’ camisetas and underwear hung from the barred windows and on the clothesline:  dirty green and heavy in the wind.

One afternoon, the project engineer and party chief Morales came to the municipality.  On the bed by the window he sat, and strewn before him on the uncovered mattress were pieces of paper; Alberto sat on one side of the bed, facing him.  After studying the maps on the bed, the project engineer said:

“How are you doing with your triangulation tower?”

“All right,” said Alberto.  “We are putting up another one in Mamali II, not far from here.”  With his forefinger, he pointed out the spot on the map. 

The project engineer Morales picked up a brown envelope beside him and drew out some bills.  “When you are through with the towers here,” he said, “you may go back to Pikit.  Ah, here’s some money for lumber.”  Then, for the first time, he raised his head while his hands gathered the pieces of paper and maps, saying, “Send Toti to Salaan tomorrow to fix our tower.”

“Fix?  We just put that up a few days ago,” said Alberto.  “I do not see why we should …” he stopped.

“The inner tower must have collapsed last night,” said the project engineer, Morales. “Alfonso came back this morning, because he could not do any ‘observation’, he told me, if there was no inner tower to set up the DKM-3 instrument.”

“That is impossible, engineer,” said Alberto, his eyes flipping toward the Ilocano’s face, dark and impassive.  “Perhaps it was the wind …,” he explained.  But even this was no explanation, for there had been no wind during the night.  “Or perhaps the Moros have stolen its guy wires, like in Buluan and Pulanggi.  That’s it, Engineer Morales.  Only by taking away its guy wires would the tower collapse …. Not even a strong wind, not even that can blow the tower down .…”

Terribly disappointed more than anything else was Alberto, for he had expected praise from his jefe, was even glad to see him; but not this, since the triangulation tower was the strongest and most dependable tower he had built of the six or so towers of round-wood he had put up in Cotabato.  Instead, the tower had collapsed last night, and with it all the good feeling he had for that tower.  He indeed was terribly disappointed:  thinking, Son of a goat!  I myself computed that tower, even used a slide rule, and even climbed the tower myself.  And even hammered the wooden crossbars myself, not to speak of marking the exact spot for the guy-wire stakes which I could have driven into the ground myself, if only to be sure that the tower would be the strongest and most beautiful in Cotabato. And yet, all the computations and calculations and strong materials and the rolls of guy wires could not even keep the tower up for merely twenty-four hours, nor wait even a second for Engineer Morales to pass the tower before collapsing.

“Alfonso said there were some guy wires he saw attached to the outer tower,” said the project engineer Morales, calmly, without haste or anger. . “Maybe you did not put enough …” On his hands the pieces of paper and maps lay dead, as though a little squeeze would crumple them into ashes.  Still his head was raised toward Alberto, and he spoke again as he had spoken earlier:

“Avoid mistakes … they disrupt our schedule.  They are the worms in our plan … in our project here.  You know, if no one makes mistakes --- and the science of surveying cannot afford to make any --- then our schedule will run smoothly.  We must keep up a schedule, or nothing will work; nothing, I say.”

At this point, Alberto Gonzales leaned forward on the edge of the bed and peered into the other’s eyes, plunging his soul into their abyss, searching in their depth for the thing that had shackled the engineer’s life with ritual and aphorism and made it routine and unimaginative, closed and not open-minded; like the stiff schedule Morales kept for the watershed project in Cotabato. Blind to everything and anything that would disrupt his schedule, the project engineer, indeed, was, just as he was blind to what had strangely caused the tower in Salaan to collapse in spite of man’s labor and his science.  Alberto leaned back, not out of repulsion, for he had none for the engineer, but he was afraid that in his attempt to strip the engineer’s soul he too had bared his own.

That was then already Saturday, three weeks after their arrival; the project engineer left that same afternoon for Pikit.  The next day, Sunday, Alberto and his men went to the outskirts of the municipality to copulate with the town’s prostitutes.  The place was some hundred meters from the carinderia and behind the Redemptorist chapel.  Old and dilapidated, the chapel loomed like an old shadow in the sun:  its paint was peeling off and the stained-glass window panes were broken and covered with cobwebs:  its old stone foundations, damp and greenish with moss and cracked by vine roots, protruded from an oddly clean and well-kept lawn.  A gravel road leading to the chapel was also the road one took to reach the interior, the prostitutes’ haven.  Wooden planks, chipped and broken, were laid across the ditch to the road, and these in turn were miniature bridges that went through the whorehouses.

When Alberto Gonzales and the men went into the interior to copulate with the town’s prostitutes, the Redemptorist priest was standing on the road in front of his chapel.  The priest’s habito lay loose and crumpled over his greasy, fat flesh, and his hairy arms were clipped to his sides like a corpse’s standing upright in a small coffin.  His face was blank and had remained so since early that morning, for it was his habit to stand in front of the chapel every Sunday and catch the men on their way to the whorehouses.  Standing in the middle of the road, the priest was not a hindrance to any of his church-goers, since for sometime no one had come to the chapel to pray (though for a while some of the young men would drop in out of curiosity) or to hear mass; thus, his face would be blank until some men would turn to the gravel road, whereupon the priest’s bulbous lips would jerk toward his eyes --- as they now jerked, as if he were smiling, when Alberto and his men went past him.

Alberto and his men went to the whorehouse, which was not far from the chapel.  They all sat at a long narrow table in the middle of the kitchen, where some nine little rooms were somehow hollowed out of the walls.  A flimsy, veil-curtain hung from each door.  A prostitute sat on each side of Alberto and his men, but the laborer-driver Teng had three girls of variable ages and shapes.  And on the table two cases of beer had been simultaneously opened, and in a corner the empty boxes were neatly piled one on top of the other.  The bottles of warm beer which were topped with froth when they were first opened littered the table.

They all drank off their glasses.  One of the two prostitutes emptied a beer bottle into Alberto’s glass, while the other, smiling, leaned her head on his shoulder, and, holding the glass in her hand, raised it to his parched lips. The other prostitutes, bare-shouldered, their breast cupped underneath the laborers’ callused hands, aped the pair at the table in the same mock servitude.  After a while, Toti, Ramon, and the rod man Dante and the other laborers took the prostitutes into the rooms.  They all marched, no, drifted into them, the men and the prostitutes, as leaves caught by the current in a stream.  Pushing the veil-like curtains aside, they disappeared into the rooms like penitents pushing away the dark curtains of the grilled windows of confessional boxes, and, kneeling before the rank, sweaty flesh of their naked confessors, the men, panting, expiated their sins.  And they need this too, thought Alberto then, realizing it was two months since their last fornication, ay, and his too; accumulated and preserved for this cleansing, crotch-retching.  So do I!

It was nearing midday, that Sunday morning.  The men were back at the table, drinking, their hands stroking hairless thighs.  Coming out of one of the rooms, arrogant and proud, the laborer-driver Teng had his arms around the three prostitutes; his face was white, angelic, with drops of water coming down his tuft-bearded chin.  This was the third time Teng had emerged from the room, and each time he had taken two or three prostitutes with him.

He is not human … like a satyr, thought Alberto, or he’s faking; showing off his virility, like an exhibitionist his penis, and a flagellant his wounds.  He said:

“You look satisfied, Teng.”

“I had a good fuck,” replied the laborer-driver, looking like a beer-drunk who had just pissed in a public park.

“That’s good,” said Alberto.

“How about you?” said the rod man, Dante.  “You have not used your girls yet.”

A change had come over the men.  A bridge had been crossed and communication was easier among them.  Through this strange expurgation and crotch-retching, they had become one:  a sort of macabre communion with a prostitute’s flesh.  Glowing and almost fearfully angelic, their faces were turned toward Alberto, who rose from his chair, took off his plastic-framed spectacles and put them in his shirt pocket, already feeling naked without them, and the two prostitutes (virgins, he told himself, for he had read somewhere that women were eternal virgins), assisted him toward the door of the nearest room from their table.  He halted before the veil-like curtain, and put one hand behind him, the hand curving away from his flank with hardly any movement, until it touched the prostitute’s round and firm rump.  The other prostitute, left, turned away, giggling, and the firm-rumped prostitute parted the transparent curtain with her hands.  On each side of the room was a plywood-bed, almost bare but for a thin quilt full of holes and crawling with bedbugs.  Alberto stripped himself before the prostitute, exposing his body with thin hair under the armpits and flabby muscles round his beer belly.

They came out of the interior in the afternoon, the same way they had come in.  The wooden planks, old and narrow, swayed a little under their feet as the men passed close to the houses, joined and bridged in an intricate mesh by these wooden planks; the houses, and not a few huts, were made of flattened tins, and hard cardboard, and walls of sawali.  Sometimes, they went under the drooping porches, where the pimps stood in the door, alert for new clients, and the prostitutes picking lice from bowed heads sat on the steps.  Then, the men were out of the interior, stepping down the wooden plank, out of the shade, and into the sun.  Again, Alberto saw the Redemptorist priest; he was standing on the road before the chapel still, immobile, as though he had never moved at all since they had seen him that morning.  When their eyes met the Redemptorist priest jerked up his bulbous lips, as he had done that morning; only this time Alberto saw him actually smiling at him and his men.

The following weeks they worked at the triangulation tower in Mamali II.  Alberto and his men would visit the whorehouses behind the chapel still, but not quite so often as before, and seldom all together.  Only Teng went there nightly, for he had made one of the prostitutes his mistress as well as his washerwoman.  To a tuba store near the hotel the other laborers went every afternoon after work; for three days they stayed out long after dusk, talking and drinking.  Abruptly, one afternoon, they stopped going to the tuba store, for one of the Moro merchants staying on the other side of the partition of the hotel had gone down to defecate one night and was found dead, wedged between the posts of one of the two outhouses, three days later, after the couple living downstairs complained to the proprietor of the putrid smell.

Then unexpectedly, a little after dusk, Alberto’s best friend Reynaldo Costelo, a geodetic engineer, on his way to their main quarters in Pikit, dropped in at the hotel.  Costelo had a few men with him:  only three laborers but the best triangulation-tower builders of the Cerdeza Surveying Company.  He had built a tower in Liguasan Marsh, where unidentified natives, bellies bloated and faces and limbs pock-marked by tiny fish teeth, were often found wedged underneath large waterlily leaves along the banks.  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Costelo said:

“Could you let us stay for the night?”

“Of course, Reynaldo,” said Alberto.  “You can even take my bed; it’s the only bed here, as you can see … with a mattress yet.  I will sleep on the floor … no problem, as you are my guest, friend.”

“We were left by the bus,” said Reynaldo;  “we walked all the way here.”  He paused, then jokingly, with kinks of laughter in the corners of his eyes, said, “Are you not going to feed us first?”

“I’m sorry …,” said Alberto, smiling.  “I’m so happy to see you I forgot about supper.  Come, it’s supper time already.”

 In the carinderia, Alberto, Reynaldo Costelo, and the laborers ate noisily.  There were no other customers, and so they talked among themselves at the top of their voices.  Alberto and his men received the new comers into their bosoms, as though they had left the island and had now returned after many years.  A certain feeling of comradeship, even of nostalgia, dominated the group and relaxed the men for the first time in weeks.

After supper they came out of the carinderia and walked silently in the dark street of the town.  While they were turning round a corner at the market-place, suddenly a shadow detached itself from a dark alley, loomed ominously for a second, and then just as suddenly disappeared in the darkness.

“I think I saw Alejandro,” said Reynaldo in a tremulous voice.

“O, o,” said Toti; “if I am not mistaken, it is indeed Alejandro.”

“Alejandro?  What about …,” said Alberto, his myopic eyes wide and unblinking behind his spectacles, as he tried to make out shadows inside doorways and dark alleys.  Turning to Costelo, he said, “What is it, Reynaldo?”

No one said anything, nor did they stop walking down the road toward the dark buildings, neither did they hurry down the empty dark streets, with the stores on either side already barred --- although it was only an hour or so after nightfall. 

And then Reynaldo said:

“He followed us here, this Alejandro.”

“Bilat siyang yawa!” the laborer Toti swore in Visayan. “Cunt of the devil.”

Back at the hotel, Alberto and Reynaldo sat on the edge of the bed.  The huge room still had no chairs or stools, but now a solitary table stood by the bed and in the center was a lit gas lamp. The men usually sat either on the floor or on their mats, which no one bothered to roll up when they got up in the morning.  By the mats laid along opposite walls of the hall were the laborers’ belongings; directly above them shirts and pants were hooked on nails, while on short clotheslines wet camisetas and underwear hung heavily.  Sitting on the edge of the bed, its mattress not covered by any cloth or sheet, Costelo steadily stared toward the end of the hall, his face pale.  Beside him Alberto calmly said:

“You will be safe here, Reynaldo.”

“I don’t wish to trouble you, friend.”

“No-no,” said Alberto; “you sleep in my bed tonight.”  Then, “Where do you think Alejandro is now?”

“In a tuba store,” said Toti, walking about the room and occasionally glancing toward the door.  “Drinking … to have courage.”

From a corner, where the yellow light from the gas lamp faded, the big laborer Ramon said:

“I saw him earlier with some friends.  Ever since this afternoon he and his friends had already begun drinking.”

Reynaldo Costelo did not move on the edge of the bed.  When he spoke his pale lips could hardly be seen in the yellow gas light:

“He will come here, after he has drunk enough.  I am sure he will come here and make trouble, o, o, pa.”

“You stay with us here, Reynaldo,” said Alberto.  “Both of us can sleep in this bed.”

Getting up from his mat in one corner, the big laborer Ramon lumbered flat-footed across the hall to the bed.  He said:

“He is armed with a pana … an arrow with a slingshot as a bow.  A very crude weapon, but it can kill you.  Once I saw Alejandro target-practicing at a block of wood when we were in Mlang; he was very accurate with it.”

“You must not leave the hotel then,” said Alberto.  “He maybe is even waiting for you at this moment downstairs.”

From the table the gas lamp threw a small circle of bright yellow around its sooty glass, and just a little beyond this circle of light, where the brightness had turned pale, Reynaldo sat framed against the window. The laborers Toti and Ramon sat close to the geodetic engineer Costelo on the edge of the bed, anticipating some trouble from the other laborer who had followed the geodetic engineer up to Tacurong.

And then, all of a sudden, they saw the figure of a man move out of the darkness from the remotest corner of the hall --- although he could have stood there the whole night and no one would have seen him if he had not moved; even if the four of them had been looking straight at him all at the same time.  A moment later, seeming to float out of the darkness, the figure walked toward them:  it was the former laborer, Alejandro.

In an instant, Toti stood up from the bed and, without turning his head toward the geodetic engineer, said, “Don’t move, Reynaldo .…”  Already he was walking toward Alejandro, having decided that he would speak to the enemy (who was like himself, a laborer too, but he under Gonzales, his team chief) until the defender and the enemy met in the center of the hall.  At one moment, the two of them became one; but Alejandro turned away, abruptly, insolently putting his back to Toti and the others, and cut across the other end of the hall, and before their eyes disappeared down the dark stairs.  The other laborers had not moved, but remained by their mats or quilts along the walls.

Then without warning, through the gap above the partition, a shrill scream of chanting flowed into the hall, as the Moro merchants begun their chanting, chanting of the Koran, to Allah without end from dusk to dawn.  Alberto and his men had heard this chanting every night for weeks, but now combined with the ominous presence of the avenging Alejandro it seemed more eerie and weird. 

Alberto brushed his long-uncut hair from his forehead, fixed his glasses on the bridge of his nose, and looked at his friend, who perhaps would be dead before the night was over, with an arrow through his heart:  an ancient weapon to kill a modern geodetic engineer, from one of his own men, a mere laborer whose mentality was not much higher than his own ancient arrow-armed forefathers.  The geodetic engineer had insulted and shamed the laborer by treating him as a servant, ordering him to buy his toothpaste and cigarettes, and now Alejandro wished to defend his honor, which he did  not have until he acquired it by ceasing to be a menial laborer and becoming the enemy.   

The big laborer Ramon said:

“Is he alone?”

“No, he is not alone,” said Toti.  He sat back on the mattress, the bed springs creaking under his weight, and clutched the edge of the bed.  “I saw some of his drinking companions downstairs.”

“Is Alejandro coming back?” said Alberto.

“After they become drunk,” said Ramon, “they’ll come back.”

His legs crossed under the bed, leaning forward, Alberto said, “But he is loco … crazy.”  Turning to the other laborer Toti, he asked, “Did you not warn him?”

“O, o,” said Toti.  “But he is from here, and has many friends.”

Coming up toward the bed, the laborer-driver Teng showed them an axe he held in his hand.  His face twisted as a sour smile cracked his cheeks, and then like a stone-savage, he said:

“I have an axe.”

Alberto, and Reynaldo, and the two other laborers, Toti and Ramon, sat there in the bed, waiting.  Again, the chanting broke through the gap between the partition and the ceiling into the hall.  Alberto recognized the voice, implacable and tremulous the same haunting voice they had heard all these weeks, which was like singing and not singing.  In the Moros' room some men and women were talking from one end of the room to the other in loud and harsh voices.  And yet, the tremulous chanting never ceased, even while the others talked at the top of their lungs.  Leche!  Don’t these Moros sleep at all?  thought Alberto, uncrossing his legs under the bed and sitting up straight on the mattress.  And yet at five every morning they’re all up, getting their goods to the market.  He stopped then, the thought breaking like crystals.  Because he saw Alejandro moving out of the half-darkness at the head of the stairs to the other end of the hall, where the tools and surveying instrument were kept, while his two companions, almost of the same build and height, looking like twins, remained, not moving, by the head of the stairs.

Without a word the big laborer Ramon sprang up from the edge of the bed and rapidly walked across the length of the hall toward Alejandro.  When Ramon reached the center of the hall, the other laborer Toti rose and followed him, his limbs working like a pair of mechanical rods --- looking much shorter and smaller behind the big laborer.  Not looking back, Ramon went on, seeming to move not by his own volition but by some kind of an invisible force; and upon reaching Alejandro, he struck him with all the force he had in his big, clenched fist.

On top of the carpentry boxes Alejandro fell, as Ramon, arms working like pistons, hit him again and again.  But Alejandro gave no sign of resistance, even as the blows fell he did not make a sound:  not a whimper escaped from his lips as the piston-like fists pounded his inert body.  Then, he turned on his side on the carpentry box and, bending his elbows, covered his head with his arms to protect his face; and then, he bent his knees up, too, drawing his bare feet as close as he could to his buttocks, so that when he finally stopped all motion he looked more like a child, bundled up, sleeping peacefully in his crib, than a man consumed with hatred and vengeance.

Leaning over the inert body, Toti passed his hands swiftly over its limbs, like a mugger searching for a drunk’s wallet.  When Toti raised one hand straight up above his head, a knife was clenched in it.  In an instant, Alberto sprang from the bed and cried across the hall, “No-no, Toti! --- Don’t!”  and as he ran down the hall (room), a bunch of half-naked Moros from the other side of the partition, armed with stones and sticks, clung to the top of the dividing wall.  Swearing and jeering at the top of their lungs, hands and arms shaking, waving wildly, they shouted down obscenities at the inert body; like spider monkeys who defecate into their hands and throw their excrement at the spectators below, they flung down their foul, excremental words.  Halfway down the hall, rose a tremendous noise as the Moros banged stones and rattled the sticks against the partition wall.

Half-naked Moros jumped down from the top of the wall onto the floor, and, with sticks held up in their hands, fell savagely upon the fallen laborer.  Now and then, a Moro milling round would dart in and strike at the body with his fists.  And yet, Alejandro did not move, seemingly dead to the world, although his flesh would knead and roll under the pounding, pummeling fists, like dough on the baker’s table.  “That’s enough,” said Alberto, as he began to pull the Moros away, brutally pushing them away from the inert body.  “Enough!  I say, enough now!”

The circle of Moros round the fallen laborer broke off, and, with stones and sticks clutched in their hands still, began to mill freely in the hall.  And yet, Alejandro did not stir, just as if he had calmly gone to sleep, and was patiently ignoring or tolerating their disturbances and noise.  Meanwhile, more Moros came up the stairs into the hall, and the twins, Alejandro’s drinking companions, were soon absorbed in the crowd.  Outside of the circle of men, in the hall still, a Moro walking around aimlessly said:

“Is he still alive?  He is not moving at all.”

“Don’t be fooled,” said another.  “He’s only pretending to be dead.”

Detaching himself from the milling crowd, the rod man Dante came up to Alberto, and indifferently said:

“What shall we do with Alejandro?”

“Just leave him alone,” said Alberto, a bit irked by the rod man’s coarseness.

A middle-aged Moro, with printed malong wrapped around his waist and holding a stick in one hand, halted before Alberto, and smiling said:

“We are neighbors.  We stay on the other side of the partition.  We are merchants and we have seen you sometimes going past the market, where we sell our goods.”

Another Moro merchant, smiling too, showing his betel-nut, clayey red stained teeth, said to Alberto:

“You should have killed him!  Then you would be sure he would not give you any trouble.”

“He is one of our laborers,” said Alberto.  “I mean was my friend’s here … the geodetic engineer.”

The Moro merchants were all smiling at Alberto, although before this incident, a week ago, they would not so much as glance at Alberto or his men if they happened to pass each other at the main door of the hotel, or early in the mornings, when they by chance met downstairs on the way to the outhouses.  The hotel proprietor had come up only after the trouble was completely over, and the Moros had quieted down and were milling about aimlessly in the hall; and even he had somehow changed, as he was more garrulous now than before, talking about some day really finishing the hotel and its dividers and rooms.  And Alejandro’s two companions, walking around like twins, were apologizing for Alejandro to anyone --- any laborer of the Cerdeza Surveying Company or any Moro merchant --- whom they could stop long enough to listen to them.  The hatred and anger had fizzled out, burning out its glare by its own consuming fierceness, and if anyone had any bias or prejudice against the Moros (or vice-versa), this also dissipated, expurgated by the night’s baseness and violence.

And so, Alberto, and his friend Reynaldo Costelo, and the laborers, as well as the Moro merchants, went down the stairs and stepped out of the hotel, walked past the outhouses standing in the middle of the stream, and into the street.  It was very dark and cold, but ahead of them were already some groups of men and women in front of the hotel.  All had gone out into the night, alone or in pairs, while before this mauling incident no one would have been in the street after dusk.  And the couple, who had reported the foul smell of the decaying body weeks ago, were also out in the yard:  the woman, in a loose gown, was holding a four-year-old child by the hand.  Alberto had never seen her or her child before this night and was pleasantly surprised that a family was also staying in the unfinished, unpainted, and incongruous hotel.  Across the bridge, two soldiers from the army barracks were chatting with some natives.  For the first time since the surveyors came into the municipality of Tacurong, the soldiers were seen in full uniform and gear, instead of being half-naked in green camisetas and civilian trousers. 

Somehow, the violence an hour or so ago had lifted the fear and indifference of the municipality.

When Alberto and his friend Costelo went back to the hotel, the laborer Alejandro was still lying on top of the carpentry toolbox at one end of the hall, and his knees were drawn up to his chest and fists were cupped over his eyes --- like a fetus.

At the head of the stairs, looking at the inert body of the laborer, Alberto said:

“It is better if we leave for Pikit tonight, Reynaldo.  You’ll be safer there.  It would be unfortunate if you got hurt.  You know that Alejandro is from Tacurong, and he has his gang here.”

“O, o,” said his friend.  “I trust you, and leave everything to you.”

Alberto did not look at his friend, for although he was not quite sure, he was afraid that even in the faint light of gas lamps he might see fear in his friend’s eyes.  He said:

“Toti will come with us.  You will be safe in our quarters in Pikit.”

“O, o, Alberto.” 

Chapter 15

Two weeks passed, and yet the money for the triangulation towers, and even the laborer’s wages had not been sent by the Manila office. Then, one afternoon, a wire came saying that “melons” would be sent the following day. 

As Alberto lay in bed in their main quarters in Pikit, waiting for the “melons” from Manila, he heard Alfonso, and Teng, and the other men talking while walking down the footpath alongside the quarters.  Above their voices, soared Teng’s laughter in a hysterical stream, and a minute later, faded away, disappearing with the men down the footpath.  Sometime later, the light coming through the door of the sala blotted out and then came back, as if someone had quickly opened and closed the jalousies of a cheap pension house room.  He did not turn in his bed when the geodetic engineer Reynaldo Costelo, his first and best friend, came in and halted before the bed.  Costelo said:

“O, are you not joining us?  We are going drinking in a tuba-an … wine tavern.”

“No; you go ahead.”

“What are you going to do all by yourself here?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, why don’t we go out and visit Nita?”  said Costelo.  “Your girl friend” --- he winked at Alberto --- “might fry a chicken for us.”

“I will just lie down here,” said Alberto.  “Go ahead … I will just see you later.”

The light from the gas lamp in the sala blotted out and came on again in the door, as Costelo stepped out of the room.  Lying alone in the bed, Alberto recalled the stories told to him by the townsfolk about the big Spanish house they were now using as their main quarters.  They said the house was deserted, because ghosts haunted it.  At night, during a full moon, beautiful music would be heard coming from the big Spanish house, although the only way you could produce a note from the piano was by plucking the wires, they said, or running a stick across them; its keyboard was a total wreck.  Or a madman with a pick pounding and smashing the keyboard, without disturbing the thick dust and cobwebs on it.  If you look at it from the top of the stairs, Alberto thought, the piano looks like the fossil of a monster under a shroud.

A minute or so later, the townsfolk said, they would see a young woman, in a white nightgown and with a lit candle in her hand, go up and down the first and second floors.  She would stop by the piano, listen to it for a while, before turning away with a low, painful moan issuing  through her throat; then like a smoke sucked into an air vent, she would vanish right before their eyes. 

Afterwards, when the music had ceased a strong wind would blow through the big Spanish house, and the townsfolk would see the ghost of a man going through the books and the papers in the drawers of the tables and wooden cabinets, maybe looking for a missing note or a diary.

In the old Spanish house, now, Alberto turned in the bed and pulled out an old diary underneath his pillow.  Yellow and creased, the pages bore pale handwriting and traces of a pen.  Was this the missing diary the ghost could be looking for?  The writer had written in fine, smooth and slanting penmanship, typical of those who had studied under the American “Thomasites” missionaries.  He must have been in his thirties when he wrote his diary, thought Alberto.   Ten years from now I will be as old as he was, married, and with several children, who knows?  But where are his (ghost’s) children? 

Turning the pages at random, he came upon the last pages of the diary.  Although he had already read the diary a number of times, he was never bored with it and always found some pleasure reading it alone.  Under the faint light from a gas lamp in the sala which filtered through the door into his room, he began to read:

                   March 6, 1942.  All my vegetables surprisingly have grown and not one died.  The string-beans are beautiful, but I must put more trellises for them to climb or they’ll rot on the ground.  So with my tomatoes.  They are lovely.  The sun makes them red and juicy and big.  I believe I can be a really good farmer.

                                      April 23.  The house is so broken-down, dilapidated.  It’s in  terrible condition.  There is absolutely no way of repairing it.  I must get the lumber and posts from the shed and bring them under the house.  The window, the roof … my God!  If it weren’t summer, I should have literally buckets of rainwater over my head already.  It is only two months away from the rainy season.  I must really fix that leaking roof.

                                      May 10.  I don’t think I can work on that airfield again.  My hands are all blisters, my back aches, and I am about to collapse from the sun.  Maybe tomorrow I will not go to work.  If I tell them I’m sick, maybe the Japanese kempei-tai would believe me.

                   May 23.  It is about this time of the year we start harvesting.  Now there is nothing to harvest.  There are no men to work in the fields, everyone now works at the airfield.  Sgt. Seki and his men came yesterday and asked if I’m satisfied with my ration of rice.  I said yes, and he asked me why does he not see me at the airfield anymore.  He even threatened to send the kempei-tai after me.  I must go back to work tomorrow.  The roof will have to wait.  It is nearly finished.  I think I can get two or four galvanized iron sheets at the airfield.  Perhaps, Sgt. Seki will give some to me.  They said they’d come again tomorrow.  I had told them I had been sick.

There were some missing pages, and the next entry was dated October 17.  Holding the diary up before him, he again began to read:

                   I heard the Japanese again on the street last night.  They were going up the mountains on patrol.  The other night they passed so close to the dugout.  And this morning, Capt. Tazawa dropped in for a visit.  His men have been coming to the house for tea.  And every night the Japanese patrol passes by so close to the dugout.

What happened to the man?  wondered Alberto.  If he is alive, why is he not living in this house any more?  Perhaps he is living in Cotabato city.  Or, likely the ghost that now haunts this old Spanish house.  He had searched and searched everywhere in the old and dilapidated Spanish house, now their quarters, but he could not find the missing pages.  While searching through the house he saw bullet holes:  deep, slanted, or ploughed through the grain of wood, ripping against the run of the grain, in the window frames, door jambs, and walls, even in the hardwood posts.

He put the diary back under his pillow and lay on his back in the bed as the light waved and danced in the soft wind which came through the windows of the old Spanish haunted house.  O, o, likely he is dead, he thought.  And he is now the ghost of this big house.  Did he collaborate with the enemy later to save his neck?   Is that what the missing pages would tell me!  Or, maybe he died a hero, offering his neck to the kempei-tai’s samurai sword, rather than become a collaborator for the Japanese forces.  As he lay there, wondering what those missing pages would tell him, he felt a great sadness and pity for the writer of the diary.     

Chapter 16

Alberto Gonzales and his men were running the traverse in the cogon hills of Sampao when suddenly two half-naked savages with lances appeared before them on the footpath.  The two savages had seemingly sprung from the core of the earth itself, for no one had heard them, much less seen them before, either coming down the footpath or coming out of the thick cogon grass covering both sides of the hills.

The taller and huskier savage marched up the footpath toward Alberto, and the new instrument man, and the laborers, and the Moro interpreter, Ismael.  In front of the new instrument man he stopped, abruptly swung his arm back, and threw his lance in front of him.  The long lance pierced the hard ground, slanted, and quivered; a menace dominating the footpath, and if it had been made of steel the lance would have twanged there like a giant fork.  Then the savage started again to walk toward the new instrument man and the laborers, and as he reached his lance he pulled it out of the ground with a sudden jerk of his arm without even slowing his stride; the motion was so quick that his pulling the lance out of the hard ground and walking down the footpath became one movement to the eye.  Alberto froze and told himself they were all dead men, hanging on a tree by their thumbs, without testicles and tongue.  But after pushing aside the new instrument man, the tall savage nonchalantly leaned over the transit instrument and grasped it in both hands, shaking it off its set alignment as he looked through it.  Jinga vos nana! --- Fuck your mother!  Now we shall have to go back to where we started, thought Alberto, not moving from where he stood, too numb and dull with fear to stop the savage.  Repeat all the recordings we have done all this week and go back more than twenty kilometers from where we started, because of this nincompoop of a savage.

Meanwhile, the other savage --- very young, perhaps not more than sixteen years old --- stood beside the footpath, half-facing the men, looking at and beyond the cogon hills as if expecting some of his companions to emerge from the tall cogon grass.  He hung back on the side of the path, indifferent, neither looking at Alberto nor at any of the men; not even at the new instrument man who stood trembling, his face as white as paper, so fragile and lifeless a wind could have blown him away standing there behind the tall savage with his spear.

Lifting his head from the transit, long hair brushing his huge shoulders, the taller and huskier savage spoke harshly to the interpreter Ismael without as much as glancing at him, as though he were not a Muslim too, nor a part of this Moro land.  It was the first time, however, the savage had spoken since he and his young companion had seemingly sprung from the entrails of the earth.  And then, without any warning, he pushed the tripod off the path, and, after trampling on it and the transit with his bare feet, marched down the path and shook his lance menacingly above his head.  The other savage then joined him, and together both went a little up the footpath, and, turning toward the hillside, plunged into the tall cogon grass, and immediately vanished from sight.

While the laborers picked up the damaged tripod from the side of the footpath and examined the useless transit, Alberto took off his spectacles, cleaned the lenses on his shirt, and carefully put them back on.  His voice dry, crackling, he said:

“What did he want, Ismael?” 

“He suspected we were cadastral surveyors.”

“And what did you tell him? --- that we were not government surveyors?” said Alberto.  “And that we were not here to get his land, did you not tell him that?”  Because they were private surveyors under contract with NEC-AID to survey a watershed in Cotabato.  Alberto asked Ismael if the Moro savage had seen the triangulation towers they had built as part of the watershed project, so that they would have irrigation water the whole year round:  and part of the project was to drain the Liguasan Marsh so that much of it would be recovered for farming.  “Did you tell him, Ismael,” he continued, “that we were doing this for their own welfare?”

“O, o,” said Ismael.  “But he said, `I have seen those towers.  If what you tell me is true, then why do you build those towers in the mountains instead of in the Liguasan Marsh or beside the great river?”

It was useless, of course, to make the savage understand this, thought Alberto quietly to himself, a Moro savage who has learned from bitter past experience that the presence of surveyors soon brings Christian families into his land, who will cut down the trees and burn the faces of the mountains, where he will no longer be free to roam or hunt.  Just as it was useless to explain to the Moro datu who drew his .45 caliber gun in the movie house in Pikit and perforated the screen with bullets, because in the Tagalog picture he saw his people being soundly beaten by the Christians:  that it was just a movie, not at all real.  

Two days later, when Alberto and his men returned to their camp in Sampao, sometime before dusk, having left the new instrument man, who had an attack of the `shivers,’ behind in their makeshift camp, they found their record books and maps and notes and other papers strewn on the ground.  Their little hut had been pulled down, perhaps with rattan veins, for deep tracks and flattened brushwood scoured the face of the hill where the hut was dragged before it was pushed over the slope.  On the ground near where the hut had stood, the transit and other surveying instruments lay broken and crushed, as though someone had pounded them with a huge rock in a moment of extreme anger.

And some distance away from there, where Alberto had set the location for their triangulation tower, a section marked by a huge balete tree, the men found the poor new instrument man, whom they had left behind because of his malaria `attacks’, impaled against the tree --- a lance had gone neatly through his stomach.  How anyone accomplished this without tying him up first was a mystery to Alberto; for the new instrument man had been pinned up neatly with the lance like a butterfly on a collector’s board.  Unless, of course, there was more than one Moro savage; anyway, the new instrument man had obviously been stripped naked before being impaled against the balete tree:  not a stitch of clothing was found on his body, while the lance incongruously heightened his nakedness.

From what Alberto and Toti could see in the fading light, the new instrument man must have suffered terribly before he died, not only from his stomach wound (which is a most painful way to die), but from long torture:  because his tongue and testicles were cut off and his chest crisscrossed with cuts from a sharp instrument, maybe a kris because of the curving slants of his wounds.  But he had one consolation, he would not suffer from the `shivers’ any more, which, as Alberto recalled, was the reason they had left him behind in the camp.

It was most likely the work of the Moro savage who had thrown his lance in front of the instrument man two days before.  No doubt the manner of killing, that is, the murderer’s use of the lance, was a hint, as if the Moro savage wanted Alberto and his men to know it was his work.  If not, it is certainly a warning for us to leave, thought Alberto then.  What clearer message than a lance, a weapon used in ancient times, which is suitable and apt here in the savage, primeval land!

But Alberto and his men did not leave immediately for their main quarters in Pikit; exactly the opposite was what he would have done a year or so ago, when he was new in Cotabato.  City-bred and civilized, the young man would have fled right away; and then, somewhere in the bushes down the mountainside or along the narrow trail, they would fall into the ambush set by the Moro savage.  Now, he would instead stay there in the camp overnight and foil the Moro savage’s plan.  Unexpected and cunning he would be:  just like the Moro savage.

Fifteen meters from their makeshift camp, in the undergrowth and in man-made tunnels underneath climbers and rattan vines --- the laborers Toti and Ramon, the rod man Dante, and the Moro interpreter Ismael crouched.  For earlier he had given them instructions not to make any sound, and if the Moro savage or his men were to return and brush past where they hid, the men were not to move even their eyes.      

Still impaled to the tree, without any covering even of leaves or branches for its nakedness, was the body of the new instrument man.  In this manner, if by chance the Moro savage would indeed return to their camp, he, the savage, would believe that the surveyor and his men had fled immediately. Because out of confusion and fear had they not left their companion still impaled by his lance to the balete tree?  Still exposed to the huge, hairy flies, gnats, the elements, and to the marauding wild boars?

At this moment, gone was the Christian observance of respect for the dead and the sanctity of man’s body as the depository of his spiritual soul.  But the men and he must use all trickery, so as not to be discovered and killed.  Anyway, it was only for one night when he and his men had to be less moral and civilized!

After dawn the next day, on the trail which Alberto and his men would have taken the afternoon the instrument man was murdered --- were gobs of buyo mascada spittle.  Here and there were unwrapped coconut rice pouches, empty, with their palm strips loosened.  Alberto was reminded of that time Moro savages, with lances and Japanese ping-pang rifles, of World War II vintage, waited for them on the dirt road outside the carinderia in Pikit.  Now there was no question that if Alberto had not followed his primeval instinct and thought like the tall Moro savage, he, and his men with him, would have been ambushed as they came down from their camp.

Chapter 17

Very early one morning, in the Moro village of Sapakan, Alberto Gonzales, Ismael, Toti, Ramon, and another laborer, stood on the river bank.  Alberto spoke to the datu, who owned some motorboats as well as the land along the river, saying:

“Datu Ugtod, could you tell us where we can get round-wood to build our triangulation tower?”

“In Bakod, a small village down the river,” said the datu.  “And where do you wish to build this tower?”

“In Sampao, datu.”

“That is the hideout of the tulisanes,” said the datu; “even the PC rangers do not go there among those murderers.”

Sweating under his blue denim jacket, and his leg muscles twitching from the descent still, Alberto nodded sadly.  With the sleeves of his jacket, he wiped off the perspiration from his forehead, and said:

“I was told you have a motorboat.  How much for the use of your motorboat until maybe this afternoon?”

“It is up to you, how much you wish to pay,” said Datu Ugtod.  “But you will have to wait a little, since my motorboat is yet getting firewood down the river in Dulawan.”

So, they waited.  It was about seven o’clock in the morning, two hours or so since coming down from their temporary camp in Sampao carrying nothing but the army pack for the lunchboxes.  Already the village market was bustling and humming with market people, for it was tabu:  the one day of the week fruit and vegetables from the hills were brought down to the village.

Alberto went over to a large twisted root of an acacia tree and sat on it, leaning his wet back against its trunk.  And his men either sat on the ground, or lay on the grass in the lee of a rock or a tree, while Toti and another laborer were already lying on the bamboo floor of a small shed in front of the datu’s house.  Down in the river, clusters of hyacinth floated downstream, like little deserted islands, their invisible white roots reaching out futilely for the river bottom.

After a long while, he heard the whrrr whrrr whrrr of an outboard motorboat and saw Datu Ugtod walk up the river bank with some half-naked natives behind him.  Quietly, from the motorboat they unloaded the newly cut saplings, bruised and scarred, smelling of forest still, onto the bank under the sun.

Alberto, Ismael, Toti, and the three laborers went down the bank and jumped into the datu’s outboard motorboat.  Having attached himself to Alberto, the laborer Toti was now called in jest Alberto’s “bodyguard,” which, to the young surveyor as well as to the rest of the surveying team, was quite incongruous:  for no one was allowed to carry any firearm in this savage Moro land for his own safety --- the outlaws, with no little encouragement, would kill him for it. 

Once on the motorboat, Ismael went up the stern by jumping on the outriggers and onto the hull-board, rocking it a little:  everyone could see that he was “at home” with it.  Putting his weight behind a long bamboo pole, Ismael thrust it against the bank and pushed the motorboat out to deeper water.  After plucking the bamboo pole free and having returned it on the bottom of the hull, the interpreter Ismael bent over the Johnson outboard motor and jerked the starter rope:  the motor coughed whrroommm  whrroommm  whrroommm, and off  the boat went downstream.

As Alberto and the men made their way down the river, they watched the bank for young Mora women bathing naked in the water, or even for the much older ones who would come down to the edge of the water and, raising their malongs, squat knee-deep and bare-bottomed by the shoreline. But apparently the roar of the motor drove the young women scuttling back to the shore, and even some monitor lizards (iguanas, thought Alberto, that is what we Zamboangueños call them, hen-eating, mean iguanas) slithered back into the bamboo thickets, slimy bellies hugging the bank like crocodiles.  Later, as they passed by the bank, a middle-aged woman came down into the water.  When she caught them looking at her, lustily, she stared back at them and raised her malong, flashing her white rump at them.  Smitten with shame and embarrassment, the men became silent and for a minute or so no one said anything.  Breaking the silence, Alberto said:

“How much farther are these woods?”

“Not too far now, engineer-sir,” answered Ismael.

“Maybe there is not enough round-wood.”

“That is the business of the men in Bakod,” said Ismael, shrugging his shoulders.  “They are wood smugglers.”

This was the first time Alberto had ever heard of wood smuggler, although he came from Zamboanga where the word “smuggling” was only too familiar:  but he always thought that one smuggled only batik cloth and blue seal cigarettes, not wood or lumber.  He said:

“Wood smugglers?”

“O, o, engineer-sir,” said Ismael.  “They have no government permit to cut wood in the forest reserve, so they smuggle them out using motorboats.”

With one hand on the tiller, the Moro interpreter Ismael gazed above their heads and straight past the prow of the motorboat.  The river was choked with hyacinth, and he steered the boat into the spaces of clear water to avoid getting the weed in her propeller.  An hour later, they came out of the clusters of hyacinth, and right before them lay a small Moro village with the forested woods behind it.

After securing the motorboat on the river bank, Ismael walked up to a group of Moros under a tall bamboo house --- Alberto and the laborers following quietly behind him.  Beside the house two Moros stood, detached and silent, with white bolos hanging close to their flanks; their blades glistening under the morning sun rays.  As Alberto, Ismael, Toti, and the others went past the spectral pair, neither one turned to look at them, as if they were also unreal and imponderable.  On the footpath near the house some of the laborers abruptly stopped, but Alberto, with the “bodyguard” Toti, and Ismael went on and halted under the house.  A Moro was sitting upright on a wooden stool, rigid and half-naked, while a cavern-faced man stooped over him shaving his head with a curved bolo.  Alberto thought he heard the bolo go ssshhhllick  ssshhhllick as it cut through the cropped hair.     

Ismael spoke directly, as it were, to the plastic-like shaven head, speaking of their need for round-wood to build the triangulation tower in Sampao, speaking softly and with deference.  Sitting there erect and immobile on the wooden stool, the half-naked Moro neither turned nor spoke; he only said, “Uuaaaagh” --- and that was all, although the interpreter was a native like himself and spoke in the same tongue from the same fecund earth.  Again, Alberto, standing by the half-naked Moro, heard the curved bolo go ssshhhllick as it passed over the plastic-like shaven head, like a razor when its blade is slapped on a leather strap:  like this, ssshhhlick  ssshhhlick  ssshhhlick.

In the village, Alberto and his laborers were completely ignored by the Moros:  even Ismael had not once looked at any of them since they came into the village.  The place was seemingly empty save for the group of reticent men.  There was not even a slight chance acknowledgement, as perhaps a dog would give to another in a street.  Their existence Alberto felt had less meaning than that of the flies swarming all over the village, ugly black things clinging like black rosary beads around the dry twigs.  The sight recalled to his mind the time they were on Mount Calo, where the air from the mountains was fresh and clean, until the flies came and landed in the water containers and blackened them with their ugly black bodies.  And so, he walked off from under the nipa and bamboo house and stood beside it, gazing toward the forested slope above the village.  In the distance, he thought the lush green pulsed with life, it became more real than the village itself, while below it he saw emerging from the wall of the forest some men driving their carabao-drawn carts lumpy with newly cut saplings.  When he shifted his gaze toward the bamboo house he was surprised to see Ismael talking casually to the bald man and the group of Moros, whose existence had for a moment become unreal to him, talking as though they had known each other since childhood, while the ugly black flies became even more numerous and swarmed all over his face. And he thought he heard the razor-sharp bolo cutting the cropped hair again, though he was no longer under the nipa and bamboo house but standing beside it.  The curved bolo was going ssshhhlick  ssshhhlick ssshhhlick.

Back at last on the outboard motorboat, Alberto Gonzales said:

“Did you tell the bald fellow we would pay him for the round-wood?”

“Yes, engineer-sir,” replied Ismael.  “But he thought we were government men, and so was suspicious of us.

“Why did you not tell him we are with a private surveying firm?”

Ismael did not say anything.  After a while, as though his silence was already his answer, he said:

“They told me that in Dulawan there is an old Moro who could cut round-wood for our tower.  It is a little farther down the river.”

Alberto was angry with himself, because he had not been in command of the situation back in the village.  He wished he knew how to speak the Moro’s dialect; certainly things would have been different.  He said:

“This old Moro … are you sure he will be able to get us our round-wood?”

“Yes, engineer-sir,” said the Moro interpreter, Ismael.  “He has seven strong sons to help him.”

Now as Ismael steered the motorboat downstream he took care to skirt along the shoreline and smile at everyone who happened to meet his eyes.  The morning was bright and sunny; it was some hours before noon still.  Little shafts of sunlight pierced like crooked lances into the murky water, and here where the river widened, the clusters of hyacinth no longer choked it.  There were fewer Moro houses along the banks, and the motorboat was going faster downstream than before.

Like an endless stretch was the smooth surface of the water, and when Alberto looked at it he knew that he was also a part of this,  as was the bald Moro.  For was he not just as tough?  He too had drunk murky water from a rice paddy.  He remembered the first time:  kneeling beside the embankment, he had separated with his open palms the small-leafed algae and mosquito wrigglers on the water surface until he had created a circle of clear water; then scooping the paddy water to his mouth, he drank it out of his hands.  As a child he would have had indigestion or worse if he had drunk the water without first boiling it.  And what about that time in Buluan, when he had drunk the water with the rotten frogs floating on it?  And was there not also that time when they had eaten horse meat for breakfast, lunch, and supper the whole time they were on Mount Calo?  The laborer Toti (his “bodyguard”) had brought a hind leg up to their camp, carrying it between them on a wooden pole.  They had eaten the meat mashed with gruel like hog fodder, eating with their hands while the mashed food oozed through their fingers like vomit.  Dios mio!  He thought now, who would think I had eaten squatting on the ground --- without a fork or spoon, not even a plate, but ate like a pig in a sty.

Alberto sat up on the motorboat when he heard the motor cough out its fumes.  They slowed down as they turned around a bend, and, with  the motor shut off, came in slow toward the shore after completing the curve:  Ismael standing at the stern was steering it in.  Then the outboard motorboat jerked to a stop, ploughing her prow into the low bank and loosening chunks of black earth into the water.  The chunks of earth made soft, pelting sounds in the water, and through the crushed and broken part of the soft bank white roots showed like bloodless arteries which had been exposed by a wound.  A little way up on the path was a big rectangular house, with nipa roof and sawali walls and only two, half-open windows. 

Inside the rectangular-shaped house, Alberto and the laborers sat around a big water jar that had been smoothed out of clay and from which their old Moro host was scooping water with an aluminum cup.  Beaten out of shape was the handle and rim of the cup, unlike the jar which had become smoother under interminable and countless hands.  The old Moro drank his water from the aluminum cup with great dignity, then passed it ceremoniously to Alberto, who also drank from it and passed the same cup on to his own men. 

Meanwhile, Alberto had been looking at the old Moro’s betel-nut stained lips, wet and bulbous above the quiescent jaw --- wondering how he himself would look chewing on a betel-nut mascada.  Then his gaze flitted away toward the interpreter Ismael:  it was then that he noticed again a change in his interpreter --- just as at the small village. For he had put on a self-confident personality and become a totally different man; not his man, no longer the same Moro Ismael. 

The aluminum cup with the beaten and pounded handle was passed around, and each man drank off the water unhurriedly before refilling it and passing it on to the next man.  After all had drunk from the cup, the last one returned it to the old Moro, squatting there on the bamboo-split floor, his thighs wrapped in a malong and bare hairy legs tucked underneath his rump.  The old Moro was saying:

“But we cannot take the round-wood up to Sapakan on Wednesday, since two of my sons, including the eldest, are sick with the `shivers.’”

“When can you get it to us then?” said Ismael.  “The engineer here is building his tower, and needs the round-wood very soon.”

“When my sons have recovered their strength,” said the old Moro, “will be the time.  Maybe on Friday or the day following, if Allah is willing.”

“Then we will wait for you, old one, in Sapakan,” said Ismael, speaking almost like a datu himself; or rather, a Moro chieftain had entered Ismael’s body, filling its trunk and speaking through him as it, the body-trunk, sat there with its legs crossed on the bamboo-split floor.  “Four … five days from today, near Datu Ugtod’s house.”

The old Moro invited them for lunch.  While Alberto was looking out through the square frame of the door, a tall Moro and his younger brother climbed up the steep bamboo steps into the house.  The two of them approached the group of men, shy and hesitant, not saying anything, although the younger one puckered up the lower part of his face in the form of greeting at the young surveyor.  The old Moro handed his two sons the aluminum cup, cold and beady with water, and after each of the brothers had drunk, the younger one returned the cup up-ended over the mouth of the water jar; then the two walked off and stood by the sawali wall like sentinels in an impoverished camp. 

Outside, the midday sun was hot and oppressive; its fiery glare broke on the tops of the fruit trees and on the hump of shrubs in the lot behind the house and, beyond, dappled the face of the forested hills with a mantle of shadows.

A bare-breasted young woman brought in a bowl of hot boiled rice, some broiled catfish from the river, and three empty tin plates which were beaten and shapeless like the aluminum cup.  From somewhere near the back of the house a naked boy appeared with a huge papaya in his arms, set it down beside the clay jar of water, and left as quietly as he had appeared.  About the same time, the bare-breasted young woman retreated into the darker part of the house, her hillock-shaped rump, round and firm, swiveling underneath her malong, and her bare arms, long and slanting, swinging freely by either flank as she walked bare-footed to her straw mat.

The house had no rooms, not even a single divider for privacy, so that one could see clear through from one end of the rectangular-shaped house to the other.  Wooden posts stripped of their bark and sinewy like tendons jutted out from the four corners of the house.  On the sawali walls trousers and shirts and malongs and fishing nets and the personal things of each son’s family were hung one on top of the other, as if someone had crumpled all these pieces of clothing and nets and, without even looking, hooked them all up together on the walls.

Squatting on straw mats in different parts of the room were four other bare-breasted young women, and near the back door, an old woman stood alone, her loose and dry wilted breasts hanging like wrinkled nuts over her belly.  There were also some naked children, besides the one who had brought in the papaya, who were neither playing nor doing manual work:  they were like dark children in a picture arrested in a rare moment of immobility and somnolence.  Nearby, a young mother sitting stolidly on her rump, with her dry flaky legs stretched out before her, suckled her child from her swollen breasts.  Some of the young women leaned their backs against the walls, squatting or sitting upright on the straw mats, their breasts pointed and sharp, not even aware of their half-nakedness.  So innocent were the women that it seemed the natural thing to be so presented before strangers, even before Christians:  naked to their waists and clad only in malongs.

It is as though I’m looking all at one time into seven bedrooms, Alberto was thinking.  How do they do it, without any privacy?  In his mind he saw the old Moro’s seven naked sons and their bare-breasted women getting into their flower-printed malongs, wrapping the wide cloths around them, and copulating on the straw mats.  He blinked his eyes and shut his mind from the carnal thought, and yet found himself staring at the breasts of the young women, firm as the unripe papayas on the lot behind the house:  thinking, The old Moro’s sons must not see me staring at their bare-breasted women.  I wonder if the old Moro has read my lustful thoughts?  Quickly, he squinted as though a speck had got into his eyes and pretended, theatrically, to fix his spectacles on the bridge of his nose.

In the meantime, the laborers had opened the food pack.  They took the lunchboxes out of the pack and set them down on the floor beside the half-empty jar of water.  After cutting the huge papaya into several slices, the old Moro pushed them before the young surveyor.  At that moment, his two sons who had been standing back against the sawali wall moved silently on their bare feet and, stooping, picked up one of the tin plates on the floor, put some boiled rice into it, and moved again back to the sawali wall.  And yet, none of the young bare-breasted women got up from the straw mats to eat with them, observing a tradition as old as the fecund Moro land --- while the third son remained in the shadows in back of the house, detached and resolute like the wooden posts.

Alberto and his men opened the aluminum lunchboxes and poured all the food on a banana leaf that one of the children had spread out on the bamboo-split floor.  Using the covers of the lunchboxes as plates, and filling them with food, the men started to eat with their bare hands:  up close to their chins the covers were held in order to catch any rice grains that might fall off their mouth or hands.

The Moro’s face was creased with wrinkles, and a life spent by the river had somehow lent it the color of trodden mud.  Looking puzzled, he said:

“Ah, you are putting up a tower … and this tower, why do you build it?”

“We are putting up a watershed,” said Alberto, as simply as he could say it, so the old Moro would understand.  “ This watershed is to help all your people … all those staying along the banks of the Rio Grande.  It will help you with your rice harvest, because with the watershed you will always have enough water for irrigating your rice paddies.  And during floods of the great river, this work we are doing will control them.”

Still puzzled, the old Moro said:

“If so, why do you build the tower up on the mountains, not along the great river?”

“It is difficult to understand, I know,” said Alberto.  “But the towers are built on the mountains so it will be easier for us to see the other towers we have built before.  I mean, old one, we have this surveying instrument … we call it a DKM-3 … on top of the tower and we look through it to measure the distance from this to the other towers.  It is called triangulation, for we have three towers in the area.”

The Moro interpreter Ismael translated the words, turning the young surveyor’s Tagalog words, so alien here, into the guttural speech of this strange, savage land. 

Chewing his food slowly with his toothless gums, the old Moro said:

“Here we do not call the river Rio Grande; we call it Dulawan river.”

After lunch, early in the afternoon, Alberto and the men left Dulawan and the old Moro, and set off back up the river.  The outboard motorboat was having a harder time now going upstream, but there were fewer floating clusters of hyacinth and they no longer clogged the river, so that this time the motorboat went in a straight line --- unlike that morning when they had zigzagged to avoid hitting the hyacinth or getting it tangled in her propeller.  It was pleasant now going back to Sapakan, and Alberto rested his back on the wooden slab placed across the motorboat. He took off his spectacles, put them in his breast pocket, and put his arm across his eyes to keep off the sun from them.

His back resting on the wooden slab, Alberto felt he was about to doze off.  In a while, he thought, I will fall asleep and wake up only when we reach Sapakan.  Lying so on his back, spine flat on the wooden slab, he could feel the motorboat’s keel slicing smoothly through the water, the motor droning monotonously; and then, around the bend, the motorboat leaned first a little to one side before straightening out her prow again upstream and pointing straight as an arrow toward the middle of the river.  And then, he heard a muffled commotion at the stern which gave him an ominous feeling of being awakened by a mysterious noise, say, of thieves, breaking into the house.

Sitting up on the wooden slab, Alberto put on his spectacles and was just in time to see three young women in the water.  The young girls were completely naked, and were unaware of the men’s presence --- apparently not having heard the motorboat come round the bend.  They were too absorbed playing in the river:  giggling and splashing water at each other, and climbing and rolling over a floating log.  In the afternoon sun, the water ran silvery and smooth over their supple brown bodies.  Abruptly turning the motorboat toward the three naked women, Ismael jumped up on the stern and started chanting, his chants more like a prayer to Allah than anything:  “Ay-yay-yay-hhhyyyaaaa,” he said, running up and down the hull-board, crying in a shrill voice, Ay-yay-yay-yyyiiieeee --- like that.

Alberto wanted to stop him.  His hand was already raised in a dumb gesture, for his instinct, made delicate and righteous from childhood, cried out to stop the Moro interpreter.  But at that moment, his “bodyguard” Toti jumped up too and shouted obscenities in his dialect Ilongo, his voice cracking like a lonely woodpecker’s cry from a solitary dead tree, while the other men also jumped up on their feet and shouted more obscenities in Visayan at the three naked girls.

The young women turned their heads as one, as deer that had caught a human scent in the wind, and instinctively submerged themselves into the water, choking with fright, and tried to swim back to the shore.  Two of them jack-knifed into the water, their rumps flashing white and gleaming like the belly of a taraquito …pompano … fish as it turns over on its side in the fishing grounds off Zamboanga’s western coast; then both reappeared behind the log --- but the third girl seemed to hang suspended in the water, her hands flapping about her, not knowing what to do with herself, making frightened cries with her mouth full of water.  Now, the outboard motorboat cut in closer toward the three young women and was not ten yards away when the third one, splashing and flapping her arms about again, started to crawl toward the shore.  Upon reaching shallow water, she abruptly rose, stark naked, completely clear of her diaphanous water-gown, and sprinted quick-legged up the bank as the water fell in pearly showers from her nude body.

And, all of a sudden, Alberto also jumped up on the wooden slab and flapped his arms to his sides and laughed aloud.  He laughed at the fleeing naked young woman, laughing with his men, although his social and moral bondage held him back from barking like a dog at the fleeing woman as his men were doing.  And in the laughter, his soul for that moment was free, the roots and vines and festoons that had clung to it for almost three decades slithered down like water from the fleeing naked young woman’s slithering body.  And for the first time he felt a real kinship with all men, with the naked women and the young savages with lances who had appeared above the bank (though he knew he should fear them, these men who would kill him for less reason than that of watching their women bathing nude in the river), with the Moro interpreter Ismael and his “bodyguard” Toti, who, more than anyone, was shouting obscenities at the top of his lungs.  He was part of them, as a clod of earth is part of the river, clinging to the white roots in the eroded bank of this water here, in Dulawan or Sapakan river, which was a part of the great Rio Grande.  

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