When the Elephants Dance (6 page)

“Oh, see? Now Carlito is going to find rice, and he is sick,” Mang Selso sputters.

Aling Anna glares at Mang Selso. “Why don’t you go? You are not sick.”

“Huy, huy
.” Mang Selso’s wife rolls her sleeves and points to Aling Anna. “He remains to protect us.”

“He remains so that we can protect him,” Aling Anna snaps. “Coward.”

Mang Selso stands at her words. His face is tight, and redness pours through his cheeks. “If you were a man, I would hit you,” he hisses.

“Hunh!” Aling Anna’s lip curls. “And if you were a man, I would hit you back.”

“Tigil na. Tamà na,”
Mama says softly. Stop it. Enough now. The sadness in her voice has the effect of a loud explosion.

“Duwág. Tamád
.” Aling Anna sneaks in a couple of words as she fluffs her red blanket around her, calling Mang Selso a coward and a lazy man.

“I can go in the morning,” Roman, the journalist, tells my father. “I should
have gone today instead of the boys, but I wanted to see if I could hear more on the radio.”

I like Roman. Yesterday he went out alone and found a small pheasant for us to cook and an old bag of rice. The rice had maggots and larva, and we began to pick them out, but Roman said that it was a good source of vitamins, so we cooked them in the rice and ate them. They were salty at first, but if you pretended they were pieces of steak tapa, it was not so bad. They helped to ease the hunger pains.

“Oh, okay. We shall go.” Father is happy for the offer and claps Roman on the back. “See? I have someone to assist me. Rest now, everyone. There is no need to fight. We are all friends here.”

Roman’s full name is Roman Flores; he is twenty-three years old and already taller than my father. I asked him how tall he is, and he said six feet. I have trouble making kilometers into feet. I picture six shoes, lined up one on top of the other, and this does not seem very tall. His job is to write stories for the
Manila Herald
. My mother wonders why he works because he comes from a rich family.

Roman showed me how to work his radios. He calls one a short-wave. It speaks in codes and helps him to find places where things are happening. Of course, he has no job at the present, only his radios. The box is very big, with different knobs. He also has a smaller radio where sometimes we hear the Japanese speak and sometimes the Amerikanos. Most of the time we hear loud crunching that Roman calls static.

“I will go, too,” Mang Pedro announces. He studies the ground when he says this.

“Good, Ped. That will be good.” Father nods, pleased.

Mang Pedro is a quiet man. He worked in the same factory with Father and Mang Selso. He wears small glasses, and he rarely speaks. Sometimes he claims to have visions that Papa calls premonitions. Like when he dreamed two days in a row that my sister, Isabelle, had disappeared. He even warned her not to leave the other day, but she did not listen, claiming that she was going to be a doctor and that doctors do not believe in superstitions. As always, Mama was angry at her. When she did not come home, Mang Pedro was upset. He told Papa to look for a white deer and he would find her, but even I must admit that sounded silly. Deers are not white!

Papa said Mang Pedro once owned the factory himself, but he gave it up; now he spends all his time helping with the church, although he refuses to enter. He meets the priests on the church steps to give his donation money. Once, when Mama insisted he come in for mass, Mang Pedro joked that lightning
would strike the church if he entered. Sometimes he can touch a personal belonging and gain an image. So when Roderick has done something bad, he stays away from Mang Ped’s touch.

Mrs. Yoshi and her daughter watch from their corner. Mrs. Yoshi and her daughter are Japanese, but Filipino citizens. The daughter, Mica, is Isabelle’s best friend. Mica was born in the Philippines and can speak full Tagalog. It is the most common language of Luzon, our main island, and our official national language among the eighty-seven different dialects. She knows it better than her native Japanese, which she can understand but not speak.

Mr. Yoshi was taken away to an internment camp by the Amerikanos when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Then, when the Japanese arrived and his camp was liberated, he was killed in the crossfire.

“Ate
, take this brooch.” Mrs. Yoshi holds out a pin to my mother, calling her “big sister.” It is a gift her husband gave her a long time ago. This is the second time she has offered. “I have no use for it. I cannot keep it while we are hungry.”

“Mama,” Mica protests, and buries her face against Mrs. Yoshi’s shoulder.

My mother shakes her head. “Yukino, put that away. That is all Mica has left of her father. We have other things we can sell before that.”

Mang Selso makes a face. I can see he is getting ready to throw another tantrum. “That is what I am saying. Aling Anna, you must sell something. This blanket here. You are obligated to this family. They have given you shelter. You must give back something in return. We have all contributed. We are all starving.” He makes a grab for Aling Anna’s blanket, and she kicks his hand away.

“Why don’t we send Yukino out? She is Japanese, they will not hurt her. Perhaps she can find us something to eat,” Mang Selso’s wife insists. “Yukino is the one who is obligated to us all. She must atone for her country’s wrongs.”

From the start, Mang Selso’s wife has not liked the idea of sharing our house with Mrs. Yoshi because she is Japanese.

“What a thing to say!” Ate Lorna frowns angrily at Mang Selso’s wife, forcing her to be silent. “Yukino has a right to be here.”

“Yes, you should be ashamed.” My mother clucks her tongue at Mang Selso’s wife. “Sending a woman out alone. I should not have let my Isabelle leave. Now look.” Mama’s voice cracks. “Maybe they will torture her, as they have done to my Jando. Look at his hands.”

I study my broken hands. I hold them out before me, wrapped in thick bandages. I try to bend my thumbs, but the pain shoots through me. Papa sees me and urges me to come close. He takes my hands and places them on my lap and holds them there. My nose begins to run. I think of old Mang Leo, whose toes rotted, forcing the doctors to cut them off.

“Will they cut my fingers like old Mang Leo’s toes?”

“No one will cut your fingers,” Mama says.

“No one,” Papa repeats. “Old Mang Leo had diabetes. Stop your worrying. And enough fighting, everyone. You wish to speak of obligations? I will tell you all a story about obligations: those that are thrust upon us, and those we tie around our own necks. It has to do with a church.”

“Ah, yes. And not just any church, the most beautiful of churches. The church of Santa Esmeralda in Blanca Negros. Magnificent, was it not, Carlito?” Mang Selso asks. “But that was before it sank into the ground.”

“A church sank into the ground whole? But how did that happen? Was the ground hungry?” Roderick jokes.

“What? Hungry? No.” Mang Selso puffs out his chest and dismisses my brother with a wave of his hand.

“I remember that church,” Aling Anna says quietly. She is drawing circles in the dirt with a small branch. “That was the church in which the angel came in the form of the dog to test the humility of the parishioners. One day, a young couple was getting married, and in the middle of the ceremony a large she-dog walked in. They all pointed and laughed at her. God had sent the dog to see how high and mighty these people were. When they laughed at her, the dog began to speak, and she stunned all the congregation. She said, ‘I wash my hands of you and your vanity,’ and the minute she left, the church began to crumble and sink into the ground. Isn’t that the story?”

Papa’s eyes are dreamy. He is a child again, standing before the church.

“Perhaps that particular story belongs to another church, in another town. Maybe not, maybe all of it is true. But if I am to tell the true story, you must know from the start that the church was merely incidental. A symptom, shall we say, of deeper troubles. Few know what really happened. Most have forgotten and moved on with their lives. The church was never the crux of the story. There is an imbalance here, you see? More focus on the church when, really, the heart of the story lies with Esmeralda Cortez and with her mysterious disappearance. The catalyst of her strange departure was a mere boy of seven, and that boy was me.”

I
F
I
AM TO TELL THE STORY
of the church that sank into the ground, we must first begin with the village of Blanca Negros, west of the Chico River Valley, Mountain province. There were secrets in that town, so much anger building underneath the perfect exteriors, the perfect faces, like streams of water crisscrossing in the ground beneath smooth, polished floors and sowing discord in the houses above. So much restlessness hidden by the white virgin beaches, the rich soil and rows of sugar cane. We lived in the most beautiful place on earth, yet it was just a facade. The people were not happy. That was the town I grew up in.

I lived with my father, in the upper room of a decaying house held together by chicken wire in some places, bamboo and rattan in others. It belonged to my aunt, a strange woman who in many ways resembled the house itself. Our room was nothing more than a small crawl space to keep one’s old boxes and throwaway items. That was what we were, Father and me, throwaway items.

We lived in that room under a great obligation to my aunt, Father’s younger sister, and she reminded us of this at every opportunity. Below us, my aunt and uncle occupied one room with their teenage daughter, Rosalie. In the other room my aunt’s in-laws occupied a corner, with Rosalie’s brothers, Julio and Eduardo.

I never met my mother and sister; they both died of dengue fever the year I was born. That same year, Father was diagnosed with tuberculosis and I with polio.

My earliest memory is of my hands, raw from working endless days in the bright sun, whether it be in the cane fields, in the fishing boats, or from scrubbing floors in the wealthier homes. I was never a child.

My only escape was to watch Esmeralda Cortez. She was a great beauty by any standards, and not just that of our little town of Blanca Negros. I once heard a man from Cavite say she was like a ripe plum waiting to be picked. He said that her coloring was at the peak of perfection and that to wait would be a sin because she would begin to fade. Her skin was taut, not too soft, not too tough, he explained. To select her any earlier would have been a disgrace. Any later, and one would miss such an opportune moment. She was ready, he said.

I remember studying her after this man’s words. But I could never find anything about her resembling a plum. She had dark hair that fell like a waterfall.
Her cheekbones were high and wide, so that when she smiled, her chocolate eyes tilted upward at the ends. She smiled often.

She lived in the house beside ours, and each evening in the violet-and-orange sunset, I could see her clearly from my bedroom window. Our windows were so close together that if we were to sit facing each other, we could place a small wooden plank across our windowsills and pretend to have tea at the same table. But her room was larger than ours. Five steps down placed her into a bigger work area, where she greeted her customers. She always wore a long silk robe of emerald green, cinched at her waist by a matching sash embroidered with fruit trees.

I was only seven then, an ugly boy with unruly curls and fat lips. Often I hurried home as fast as my polio leg would allow. I would leave Bonita beach with its tall thin palm trees and climb upward toward the mountains of abundant green rising hundreds of kilometers high, the airy ferns brushing against my legs, just to watch Esmeralda. I would arrive home, my chest heaving, and pull off my shirt to wipe the white sand and ocean water from my feet.

I would go to Father and quickly give him his cough medicine, then hurry back to my mat, where I could watch her. Her room alone could hold me entranced. She had an oval-shaped table with two chairs where she met with her customers. Behind this, there was a wooden armoire with the two doors thrown open. There were four deep shelves ladened with wonderful bottles. The bottles were labeled with a strip of white paper handwritten in her bold script. There were tall burgundy wine bottles and small, stout cloudy bottles, all capped with cork. The labels all began with the words
Gamót sa
, meaning “Medicine for.” There was
Gamót sa regla
, for when a woman is menstruating;
Gamót sa pagod
, herbs to cure exhaustion;
Gamót sa galit
, a potion to fix anger; and
Gamót sa selos
, to cure jealousy, to name a few.

On the bottom shelf, she had copper and silver flasks that were labeled
Kontra para sa
, meaning “To counter.”

My favorite was a copper flask with engravings along the rim, though the label confused me: “To counter happiness.” Have you heard of such a thing? A cure for happiness. A mixture to make someone sad. I only saw her use this once.

Each evening, I would take out my mat and sit cross-legged as she walked into her room. She pretended never to see me, though she wore the faintest hint of a smile on her lips. Sometimes I swore she actually waited for me. The evenings in our cordillera village were always deliciously hot, with the scent of the white
sampaguita
flowers that grew like flakes of snow around our house.
The heat remained trapped in our valley by the lush jungle-covered mountains of green on either side and the rice terraces like giant steps of velvet jade on the northern end.

I sat enthralled each time she began. First she combed out her long black hair with an ivory comb that reminded me of a fishbone. Twenty strokes on one side, then twenty more on the other. I would pin a scarf to my head and let it fall on both sides of my face and pretend to comb as she did. My cousin Eduardo played his guitar below us during this time. It was as if he quietly serenaded her. If she hummed “Dahil sa Iyo,” “Because of You,” or “Dandansoy,” Eduardo quickly played it. The little birds chirping in the banyan trees joined in every time.