Philippine Speculative Fiction (2 page)

Later, when I arrive at Kaluwalhatian with my bearcat, the banana heart, and the hornbill, I seek out the old mangkukulam.

“What need do you have of me, Magpanabang?” the old crone eyes me with killing curiosity.

I show her the wounded bird.

“Can you heal it?” I ask. “She has a village to save.”

She looks at it with a vacant look and then nods. Quickly, she leads the way—mysterious in its unfolding circuitousness—to her hut, which is hidden away in the unknown reaches of the
village. Its walls look flimsy, and the steam from a large
palayok
is its only sign of life. Inside the hut, I follow her as she crosses a wall of purple vapor seeping out from everywhere,
and then I gingerly pass through beaded curtains over a dark doorway. I recoil at the odor that greets me—a pungency that reeks of death and despair. The room it holds is shelved with
haphazardly arranged pots—brass, earthen, and glass—all filled with the viscera of assorted fauna and flora, and the monstrous in-betweens with their feathered petals and their mossy
eyes.

The mangkukulam places the wounded hornbill on a wooden platform near a boiling pot at the back of the hut. The bird weeps from it, its cries strange and wounding. I follow the mangkukulam with
my eyes as she darts around the room, her movements like a knife cutting through the room’s peculiar stench. Beside me, I see Makahagad slightly cowering in the thick of the strangeness that
surrounds us. I look down, carefully gripping the banana blossom with a firmness that surprises even me. When I look up, I see straight into the mangkukulam’s eyes. I flinch in the sudden
chill that has risen from the depths of my bones, and then I see her motioning for me to pass her my dagger. I unsheathe it slowly, and hand it to her.

“I need the banana heart, too,” she rasps.

I cannot fight the compelling rush I see glinting in her eyes. With some reluctance, I hand the blossom over to her bony fingers. She scurries away, and I see her cut a sliver off the base of
the banana heart, putting the rest on the platform where the bird lies. The mangkukulam takes the piece of the banana heart carefully. She squeezes it tight over the bird’s injured
wing—a mere drop of the banana’s juice straight into the hornbill’s wound.

The bird—strapped at the beak and the body—instantly swung its legs into the air with such power, unsuccessfully clawing at its captors. It takes a few moments before its rage and
its restlessness ebb away, and finally the hornbill ceases to struggle, though breathing heavily still, its eyes flitting from me to the mangkukulam and back again. The mangkukulam begins to untie
the bonds that hold the hornbill, and as soon as the raspy twines loosen their hold, the bird shudders the rest off, flaps around with angry majesty, and with its talons around the still pumping
banana heart, it bursts through the hut’s flimsy walls, and flies away into the sudden blue of sky.

“Follow it,” I turn to Makahagad. “Follow it before it crashes in the forest. Be careful when you cross the great river.”

The bearcat nods, its bristly head glistening in the sudden light from the puncture in the wall, and chases the feathered messenger steadily into the huddled canopies of the forest.

NINE DAYS PASS before I receive word from the village across the great river. After the first message, I send a reply through Makahagad. The bearcat comes back after a few
days, and soon after the hornbill arrives with another message. This exchange—of thanksgiving and felicitations—goes on for many days, and then, one rainy morning, I receive a missive
carved in the now-familiar bamboo slate:

The end of the message is signed,
Maayuput
.

The necklace mesmerizes me as it glistens in the silver daylight. I toss it around my neck, quickly fastening it. Later in the day, when I lean out of the window of my hut to see the dance of
the sun across the sky, my eyes soon set in the direction of the village across the river.

I think of that name,
Maayuput
.

BY THE WITCHING hour of the seventh eve—a time the village mangkukulam takes to sort out and clean her pots and jars in the shadow of savage moonlight—a persistent
flapping begins to echo in the dimness. The mangkukulam hears the sound and follows the scattering echo with torchlight taken from the communal bonfire. The flapping seems to come straight from a
small low-lying cloud, chirping as it goes about its way in the night sky: it seems to carry a large object, shadowed from the mangkukulam’s eyes in the deep cloak of night. The mangkukulam
follows it. The chirping cloud crosses the thicket of bananas, and soon slows down and drops what it has been carrying in the very middle. The mangkukulam does not see anything, but she sees the
cloud vanishing quickly into the distance, across the great river.

By morning light, in the haze of dew, the mangkukulam has brought the elders of the village to the middle of the banana thicket, where she had witnessed the strange vanishing the previous
evening. When we come to the exact spot, we see instead a sturdy-looking banana plant standing tall with frightening majesty—curious and familiar at once. We see birds perched and hiding
among the leaves of all the other banana plants, except for this one—and even to us, it seems to emit a peculiar kind of magic. It seems to grow even taller in our eyes. After some time, many
people from the village begin to steal away time from their chores and the ordinary grind to see the banana plant in its unspeakable splendor. It seems to inch with patient increments to the
reaches of sky.

Soon, at the sight of the new moon, the banana plant begins to blossom, and from its shadows spring a pumping banana heart. That night, by the village bonfire, I temper the tip of one of my
arrows, and with it I begin to write on a slate of fresh bamboo:

As I write, I find that I curl the twists of my
alibata
for some reason, their finish somehow elegant to the eye. That satisfies me greatly. I never usually write like
this. By the second new moon, my bearcat and the hornbill have become good companions. I tie the missive to the hornbill’s leg and strap the clay pot to the bearcat, and together they travel
and play their way through the banana thicket, through the forest, over the rages of the great river, into the village just across the divide.

OUR CORRESPONDENCE—MAAYAPUT’S and mine—soon grows deeper over many moons.

Every few days, Makatagad—which is the name of Maayuput’s hornbill—returns to my village with Makahagad, my bearcat, in tow, and with them are exchanges from Maayuput in pieces
of beautiful jewelry, or finely-ground spices in elaborate
abaca
pouches, or cashews and
pili
nuts in hand-carved stoneware. In turn, I send out with the departing hornbill and
bearcat the freshest saltwater catch or pearls or seedlings, all stored in small earthen jars.

Our villages are soon delighting over the exchanges and the friendship forged across the great river.

When I write to Maayuput, I sometimes sneak in with my missive a stash of
bulad
—delicious dried fish with the aroma craved by the gods. When Maayuput writes back, I find tumbling
into my hand from its hidden cache in Makatagad’s pouch a spool of handsome hand-spun
piña
.

Maayuput writes with a sharp tongue, but to my mind, her language spills over to me with stalwart grace. I find it uncommon, and not at all unpleasant. Maayuput writes:

I begin to treasure Maayuput’s gifts. I begin to imagine her, what she looks like. I make her a bow carved from the sturdiest
lauan
, and arrows split with my
sharpest blade. “To aid you in your hunting,” I write. I craft for her several
palayoks
, decorated in intricate geometric patterns. The village people soon tell me that I have
become very generous with my time crafting all these gifts for Maayuput—and I give them the merest shrugs. “It is my time,” I tell them, “and the rest of the world can
always wait.”

One busy harvest season, Makatagad the hornbill does not join Makahagad the bearcat in the frequent trading of messages and gifts from across the great river. This distresses my bearcat with
unbounded unease, which I find endearing. One evening, I see Makahagad scurrying into the darkness, and after an absence of five days, the bearcat returns with a message from Maayuput, to which I
make my immediate diligent response—which Makahagad soon delivers back to the village across the great river with the anticipation of the besotted.

A few days later, the two animals make their return from Maayuput’s village, in the surprising company of four small hornbill-bearcats, waddling around their parents with furry wings.

The sight delights me, and I write to Maayuput of my surprise. “I did not expect your hornbill and my bearcat to have in mind this unusual union!” I write.

“Makatagad is like family to me,” Maayuput writes back. “For this, I shall consider Makahagad family as well.”

I write to Maayuput of similar affectionate considerations, and it feels for a moment that there is no great river to divide us. I dream afterwards of village music by the bonfire where Maayaput
and I can dance to the rhythm of
ganzas
. In my dream, the details of her face slips in and out of a haze—and yet I know, with the sincerity of a quiet heart, that it is she. I wake
sometimes with a curious throb on my right foot I cannot shake off.

In the mornings when I wake from such dreams, I find myself crossing the banana thicket from the village, through the forest, to get to a small lip of rock that drops with precarious grace into
the great river. From the top of that small protrusion of rock, I could see the glorious top of the great banana plant growing in the distance, somehow still inching its way like a beautiful giant
towards the reaches of sky. I could see its gigantic heart pumping away in the full knowledge of its blooming. I catch my breath, and feel my own heart pumping with it.

I behold as well the raging waters of the great river before me, and I think of the delirious nothingness of air and distance. But distance, most of all.

ONE NIGHT, I find myself still awake even as the moon nears its terminal point across the sky. The day is already threatening to invade with its furtive lighter shades of
blue. I find my hands caressing the smooth bamboo slats of my
banig
. I think of my Maayuput’s hair when I hear the crash.

It is sudden and loud. For the moments it takes for the sound to last, the earth shudders with it. The crash strikes me like a long groan, which is followed by the sound of a slap, like an
object fallen face-wise on water.

And then there is silence.

The curious, risen now from sleep, hurry to the great river. I run with them. When we cross the banana thicket, we soon notice the absence of the great banana plant from edges of the brightening
sky. From where it had grown in the middle of the banana thicket, we see instead its great stalk uprooted, the ground around it churlish in the sudden violation.

“The great banana plant has fallen to its side!” I hear people shout.

“What happened?” some cry.

“It was the banana heart,” the mangkukulam finally says. “It had grown too large.”

We race to the great river, tracing the length of the gigantic banana plant all the way, across the forest, to the edges of the river. When we reach the great river’s banks, we find to our
amazement that the length of the fallen banana plant still seems to surge away from where we were, straight on into the distance, into the horizon. And in the middle of what had been once the
river’s depths, the banana heart lay sleeping on muddy soil—once the river’s unmeasured bottom—pumping still, gorging in the waters of the great river.

It has drank away our distance.

Maayuput
, I think suddenly.

I run back to my hut to look for an arrowtip and an empty bamboo slate. Beside me, Makahagad waits in anticipation as I write.

My
binturong
snatches the bamboo slate as soon as I finish, quickly crossing the branches of the trees with an agility I have not seen of Makahagad for some time. He
races to the banks of what has been once a great river, and with a single bound, the bearcat flits through the air, past the swirling mud and past the distance, bounding once in a while from the
great banana stalk that now bridges it. Makahagad misses his children, I think, and he misses Makatagad. Such boundless energy is to be expected.

I wait for Makahagad’s return two days later by the banks of what has been the great river. By then, the sun has dried away most of the mud that had once been the river’s bottom, and
in their place are scattered patches of green grass, fledgling in their growth, and cut every which way by generous streams—the only traces left of the raging waters. In the middle of it all,
the gigantic banana heart still pumps, its stalk now a bridge across distances, hardening in the gentle sun.