Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(55)
Narra, jackfruit, and mahogany trees, laden with dye-producing bark, leaf, and fruit, blazed our trail like a parade of welcome offerings. Yellow bursted more yellow, red gave way to deeper red, and green and brown bled into each other like brother and sister from an earthen mother god. Seeing light dispersed in this new fashion, I thought perhaps I’d been color-blind until now. Ten hours north of Manila, saplings grew uninterrupted, rice paddies spread, bamboo fenced houses, and pebbles scattered at the foot of colossal rock formations. Orange-bellied pitta and maya birds perched close to the highway, and rare shrews and Philippine deer roved into and out of the road, deciding the stop-and-go of our Land Cruiser.
How beautiful, how natural, this place called the North.
Cliffs made for roads, skirting us around mountain fringes. Tony drove the four-wheel drive with one hand on the steering wheel and the other clamped onto the gear, thrusting it forward and back, slight right and far right and left and center. Norman and Mama bobbed in the passenger seat while I flailed between bags and boxes in the cargo space. I held on to the assist handle and looked out the window. I followed egrets with my eyes and stretched my neck to see them fly from paddy to paddy. I traced rock formations on the glass window. I saw colors drip from woven blankets draped over clotheslines: umber, indigo, crimson, cobalt, saffron, and fire. Despite the rough ride, I enjoyed this new scene, this new space, this place that Norman called home and had described as captivating.
Cordillera, Cordillera.
At times the vehicle stopped, the engine unable to take the bash from the rocky road. Then once more we would resume our journey, the engine grunting. Again and again: stop, go, stop, go. And again and again: mountain, carabao, chicken, goat, tall tree, short tree, and then a man or woman in loincloth and feathered turban appeared and disappeared, rolling away before I could even name them.
And as we slowed after a kilometer-long stretch of undeterred speed, as if on cue, Norman said with uncanny sweetness, “Abra.” In Spanish, meaning open—or, in this case, a clearing between mountains. The sound of the name rolling off Norman’s tongue indicated that he was nearing home. He kept saying it. “Abra, Abra.” He repeated the name as if to command the ridges to part, to give way and let us in, as if he were really saying, “Abracadabra.”
The land listened and a river appeared. Tony turned off the engine, rolled down his window, clicked his tongue, and summoned four boaters to the side of the truck while handing them a twenty-peso bill. The stick-thin men motioned our vehicle onto a raft made of tied-up bamboo and several canoes. Instead of crossing a bridge, the Land Cruiser traversed from bank to bank on a rough-and-ready buoy. We floated on, bobbing along the forty-five-meter-wide river, trusting completely that a platform of sticks on a film-thin keel could bring us through the blue—from evergreen there to the evergreen yonder. This was the closest I’d been to a body of water. Maybe I will like it here. Maybe this is better than the mansion—my first thoughts of life outside, my first thoughts of escape.
Like Elma and I used to row with invisible paddles in our cardboard canoe, Norman and Tony high-fived each other and pointed at marvels near and far. “There! Look there! See!” They called out words in a northern dialect and met each advancing motion with glee. At the raft’s first touch of land, Tony turned to Norman and shook his hand and said, “Welcome home, Gov.”
We arrived at a place they referred to as a “safe house,” an abandoned Spanish colonial home with a terra-cotta roof, half-hanging shutters, and a metal roll-up door—a cross between a romance-era carriage house and a storage unit. A man in military pants and a basketball jersey walked toward the Land Cruiser with his rifle hanging from his shoulder. “Gov,” he said, saluting to Norman. He unlocked the metal roll-up door and pushed it up, banging on it once and saying, “Bulletproof.” He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.
The first floor contained about eight worktables—two-meter slabs of reclaimed wood on what looked like repurposed plumbing and bike parts welded together. From the floor rose towers of paper, new and old, printed and blank. Then next to them sat tin vats of rugby glue, and clay pots and glass jars of dye—the same reds, yellows, greens, and browns from the trees that had blazed our trail to this place.
We walked up a spiral staircase made of the same metal as the door. On the landing stood and squatted about thirty armed men in military pants and shirts that appeared to have been rummaged from Goodwill. They scattered throughout the second floor, some jeering with each other, some smoking, some looking out and guarding windows, but all at attention to whatever or whoever occupied the front of the room. I walked behind Norman and Mama, while Tony and his men tailed behind with our suitcases and crates of guns. The crowd parted wherever we stepped, saluting and giving thumbs-up, their congeniality serving as some affirmation, some warmth, some flesh, some soul, in the midst of silver and steel.
Then there, there he was.
“Father,” Norman and Mama said, reaching to shake his hand.
The man set down his tin cup, got up, brushed off biscuit crumbs from his army pants and white polo shirt, and shook their hands. “Welcome, comrades, Ka Norman and Ka Estrella.” Then he turned to me and made the sign of the cross on my forehead, as priests did for children.
“Father Balweg, finally, we are together. You, your militia, us, and our team—we will win Abra. We will govern it and make it ours again. We will win it back for the people of the Cordillera,” said Norman, scanning the room. I had heard of the name Balweg—Conrado Balweg. I’d seen him on the news and in chapters preceding the appendix of history books. No doubt, the man who just anointed my forehead was the same rebel priest who led the Cordillera People’s Liberation Army, a heavily armed communist guerilla group from the Tingguian tribe of the North. Mr. Santiago talked about him in class.