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| DEAN FRANCIS ALFAR |
| Salamanca |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS STORY. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
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| An Excerpt From the Novel Book One Gaudencio & Jacinta Seven years after the complete destruction of Manilaville in Louisiana, the dissolute author Gaudencio Rivera decided to settle the matter of his incoherent sexuality and beget a child. His sudden announcement—made during a dinner party held in Los Angeles—was greeted first with laughter, then moments later with stupefaction, when a minor earthquake struck to seal the veracity of his declaration. As the small party sat under the shuddering table watching the room sway, Gaudencio told them that there came a time in every man’s life to part the gossamer curtain that separated childhood from the real world; that in his case, the moment had been too long in its postponement; that artists—especially gifted writers like himself—while often able to crystallize miraculous observations of mundane things, were sometimes blinded to more important matters; and that, ultimately, women were necessary to continue humanity’s existence, even if, occasionally, men proved to be better bedmates. Inez Villacorta, a rising poet new to the group and thus very careful to keep her poise in such illustrious company, matched the motion of the undulating earth with her half-glass of Reisling and asked Gaudencio just who the lucky woman would be. “Are you hoping it’s you?” asked Mario Katigbak, the watercolor painter of sad and strange children, as he kept track of the conversation from his kneeling position. While Gaudencio could have had any of the women who rapturously orbited his brilliant star, he told them that he had elected to return to Jacinta Cordova, his wife of eleven days, whom he had abandoned in the pouring rain one night many years ago. When the temblor subsided, his friends congratulated him on the courage of his convictions, and converted the remainder of the party into a despedida, a send-off for the man whom each person in attendance wanted to sleep with for one last time before his return to the Philippines. He politely declined every offer, showing a strength of character he had thought long gone, but agreed at last to Marco Drilon, choreo-playwright and tattoo artist, who begged to be told about Gaudencio’s inscrutable wife. That night, over five bottles of wine, Gaudencio told Marco the story of his life up to that point, refusing the implicit offer of sexual congress when he finished just as the dawn became the next day. The first two things Gaudencio Rivera was made aware of—within hours of arriving by carabao-drawn cart at the secluded town of Tagbaoran on the island province of Palawan—were these: that the most beautiful woman in creation dwelt by the river, and that it was pointless to even dream of being loved by her. He was informed that her name was Jacinta Cordova, and that her beauty was of such purity and perfection that the walls of the house she lived in had turned transparent long ago, to allow both sunlight and moonlight to illuminate her incandescence. The man who told him this—old, stooped, and possessed of an explosive whooping cough—threw in a trembling imprecation against the vagaries of youth, laughed, then insisted that his geriatric appearance was just a trick of light. Gaudencio raised an eyebrow at the absurdity of the old man’s words and focused his mind on his personal situation. Fleeing from a bittersweet love affair in Manila that had abruptly blossomed to involve his lover’s intolerant family, he had gathered his books and journeyed as far as his meager savings could take him. With what little money he had left, he needed to secure lodgings, find some sort of employment, and get some food to sate the gnawing emptiness of his belly. And though he was possessed of the sexual appetite of any healthy twenty-year-old, he felt that he had no time for the exquisite Jacinta and her see-through walls, no matter how tempting the unbelievable story sounded to his ears. Gaudencio cut a striking figure as he struggled across the tiny dirt paths of Tagbaoran, pausing occasionally to wipe the sweat from his brow with an embroidered handkerchief. His broad shoulders and high forehead impressed the locals with their intimations of strength and intelligence, while his long eyelashes softened the roughness of his features, a legacy of his father’s line. His eyes, though, were what truly caught everyone’s attention: dark pools that offered no reflection of what went on inside him. He introduced himself to an old woman who was chewing cashew nuts, and asked her if the town needed a teacher. “This is no place for one such as you,” Herminia Cruz told him, spitting into the earth with a passion that underscored her words. “We already have a teacher, a missioner. Besides, most people decided to stop giving birth after she turned twelve.” “I’m not sure that I—” Gaudencio began. “There seemed to be no point. Anyone born after would be monstrous,” Herminia said as she shook her head. “Sometimes beauty can be a curse.” “What?” Gaudencio asked. “This is no place for you,” she told him again. “Better to go back to the world you know. There is nothing for you here.” “But there must be something I can do here,” Gaudencio said, fighting the exasperation that welled up from inside him. “And are you talking about Miss Jacinta?” “Obviously,” the woman replied, fixing him with a gaze. “And you, no doubt, have come from some faraway place hoping to win her.” He felt blood rush to his face. “No, no. That is not the case at all. In fact, I only heard about her when I arrived. She has nothing to do with why I’m here, in fact, I—” Herminia clucked her tongue and Gaudencio felt a sudden revulsion grip him in the instant before it slipped back between her missing teeth. “I know the kind of man you are.” “Thank you for your time,” he told her as he stepped away. “You will fall in love with her and you will fail,” Herminia Cruz called after him, bursting into ebullient laughter. “You pull your trousers down and squat when you relieve yourself, just like everybody else.” He turned back to her and briefly entertained the notion of hurling his valise at her wrinkled brown face, but instead forced a smile and walked down towards the largest building in town. Jacinta Cordova was a firm believer in modesty, and did everything she could to comport herself in a manner that was beyond reproach, especially since the walls of the house she lived in were transparent. She had adjusted as best as she could when her unearthly beauty came into full force on the eve of her twelfth birthday. That midnight, she had trembled and closed her eyes as a potent radiance burst from her skin, transforming all the walls inside and outside her house to a material that resembled the finest glass. Despite her natural shyness, she bravely ignored the incredulous stares and shocked comments from the townspeople of Tagbaoran who came to witness the see-through miracle she had somehow provoked, and blithely continued to maintain her small backyard garden of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. The strange incident did not make much of an impression on the sole person she lived with, Apolinaria Vergara. Apolinaria, her old aunt and only surviving relation, was deaf or blind as the moment suited her, preferring the routine of endless cycles of prayers to conversation with her niece. She had long conceded the passage of years and was convinced that she would die without knowing a man’s touch; instead, she was determined to reach such a state of spiritual purity that the missioner’s God of the Old Testament Himself would come down and take her to dwell in Abraham’s Bosom, bypassing the unpleasant experience of mortality. She kept this ambition secret from her niece, afraid that her goal might be mistaken for the sin of pride in the course of any verbal explanations. Thus, Apolinaria passed the days and nights unaware that her only companion had somehow achieved a supernatural state herself. For the first few years, a crowd would gather daily to point and speculate, but as time passed, the townspeople realized that their own lives needed tending, and began limiting their excursions to weekly, then monthly, then annual expeditions, as well as a number of communally-selected feast days of beloved saints. When word of her timorous wonder began to spread, dozens of men—young and old and in-between—came to woo her, but she ignored them all, training her eyes on anything but what was outside the walls, and listening to the repetitive prayers of Apolinaria, whose quest to attract the attention of God remained constant and true. Jacinta was perplexed by the men’s heartfelt claims of her outrageous beauty, since she eschewed vanity and did not think herself at all beautiful. In fact, in the rare moments when she dared look at herself in her small bedroom mirror, she saw only the same face that she had known for the longest of times: a small heart-shaped face, eyes perhaps a little too large for her head, and the most boring black hair that trailed down her back when untied. And she certainly was not inclined to return the love of just any man who came to her. She found it curious that strangers claimed to love her, when she had not uttered a single word or so much as even glanced in their direction. She felt that love was destined, and would strike as true as unexpected lightning on a clear day or never come at all. That night, when the man would become her husband arrived in town, Jacinta surreptitiously scanned the growing darkness for the usual unwanted eyes, and, finding none, quickly changed into a sleeping garment. As she began to fall asleep she wished, as she had wished countless times before, that it was the roof that had become transparent instead of her walls. At least she would have been able to see the stars in the night sky and watch their unquestioning stillness. Gaudencio soon regretted his choice of abandoning Manila when he found no work that suited his nature. He had been of the mistaken notion that the remote town of Tagbaoran needed a teacher, but soon found that the Baptist missioner Mrs. Helen Brown already fulfilled that role. Years before, during the time of the Americans, education had been high on the list of the government’s priorities. When Mrs. Brown first arrived in Palawan from Kensington, Pennsylvania—before the Pacific war that she fought to ignore—she felt that her family name was a clear sign that God meant for her to go to land of the brown-skins and proclaim His means of salvation. Her enthusiasm began to wane when she first saw Tagbaoran, with its odd collection of wooden houses and children who ran barefoot, trailing snot from their noses as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It did not matter that everyone was clearly impressed by her white skin, her lilting language, and her prim trousseau. Inside her secret heart was a whirlwind of dismay that no arrows of prayers shot to God could assuage. She arrived a young woman with impossibly blue eyes and hair the color of corn; but with startling rapidity obvious to her students and their parents, she began to fade until, after some years, she became an albino, with the sole exception of her eyes that did not turn pink, but were watered down by her nightly tears into the weakest blue. When she began to notice the gradual decline in the number of students enrolling at her little schoolhouse, she first attributed it to her own faith’s deterioration and was paralyzed by shame. She was afraid that someone, a parent, would come up to her and say that they did not want their children to listen to the words of a woman who had lost her reason for existence. The day came at last when absolutely no one showed up. Mrs. Brown decided that if she ignored the evidence of absence, then no one could possibly blame her, and thus began to teach English and arithmetic to an empty room. She also began to nurture the impious notion that perhaps there was another cause. As she lived next to the school and relied on the established kindness of people who delivered the food and materials she needed and paid for, she knew almost nothing about what was happening in the town. It was only much later, in the company of the storm-tossed mongrel Shiro, that she would determine that the reason for the lack of students was simply that Jacinta Cordova’s beauty had discouraged everyone from even trying to have children. Gaudencio found Mrs. Brown repeating the multiplication table by herself, keeping rhythm with an elongated ruler that she struck against the blackboard at the end of every equation. He sat down quietly in the seat closest to the door and waited for her to end the cycle of numbers, not wanting to disrupt the attention of her invisible audience. When at last she finished, he made his way to her table, put on his biggest smile, and introduced himself as her assistant. “My assistant,” Mrs. Brown said. “Yes”, he nodded, and proceeded to praise her devotion to her calling, emphasizing that all of the Lord’s servants deserved some help from time to time. “But I don’t need to rest,” she told him, rubbing her hands to remove the chalk dust that had accumulated from the morning’s monologue. “Let me help you in some way,” he said simply. “I can teach writing and art. I graduated with honors from Santo Tomas in Manila.” “I really don’t need any help,” she replied. “But thank you for your concern.” She pointed with the ruler to the door. “Now if you would kindly excuse me, I have a class to complete.” Gaudencio begged and pleaded to no avail, exhausting all his charm in a futile attempt to persuade Mrs. Brown. “Please leave, sir.” Gaudencio stormed in anger to the doorway, turned to her, and said, “Well, I can see the reason you don’t need help. There’s no one here.” Mrs. Brown regarded him with a smile that froze the floating dust motes. “No,” she said, turning her back to him and busying herself with the lined lesson plan on the table in front of the blackboard. “They’re just a little tardy.” Two months later, during the dry season, Gaudencio’s money ran out, evaporated by the unrelenting heat of his pride. He finally accepted the fact that a more manual form of labor was his only remaining option, and resigned himself to the inevitable pull of agriculture. The first opportunity he found was cutting the stubborn blades of talahib in a wild and dense field four cigarette sticks away from his residence. The work was punishing—the grass grew easily beyond a man’s height, and its blades were as sharp as the bolo he was lent. At the end of each day, he found his hands covered by many miniature cuts, acquired from the task of slashing the tough plants and carrying them in bundles over his shoulder, back and forth, until his employer was satisfied with the quantity that would then be used as silage or thatching. It was tiring, but the small sum he received was better than nothing. As he walked, he would carefully negotiate the rows and groves of trees that towered high above him, heavy with coconuts. Part of him was convinced that one of great green nuts would fall on his head and kill him on the spot. “Don’t be stupid,” his companion, Cesar Abalos, said. Cesar was handsome and swarthy, with arms corded by years of heavy labor. “Don’t you know that coconuts have eyes on their asses? They look down on the ground and usually choose where to fall.” “Why aren’t all of these coconuts harvested?” Gaudencio asked, shifting the weight of his burden to his other shoulder. “Some of them are for the market, for eating or drinking,” Cesar replied. “But most of these ones we pass are for copra.” While continuing to walk, he explained how the coconut palm resulted in drupes, the green fruit that grew in the axils of the tree; how each fruit usually contained several nuts; how underneath the husk of each nut was a very hard, thin, and brown kernel which contained the coconut milk; and how the albumen transformed into flesh as the fruit matured, which was how copra came into existence. “It seems that the work involved is mostly breaking up coconuts and drying them in the sun,” Gaudencio said, stopping in his tracks. “Mostly, yes,” Cesar replied. “Copra, copra,” Gaudencio repeated, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “So, you want to rest for a while? There’s a small stream nearby. We can cool off.” The two men dropped their bales of cut grass and picked their way to the batis. Cesar stripped down to his underwear and waded into the water. Gaudencio watched him from the water’s edge, lit a cigarette, and fought the sudden pang of desire that coursed through his body. “Who should I go to?” he asked the half-submerged Cesar. “For what?” “For work,” Gaudencio answered. “Copra.” “Don Salazar,” Cesar replied. “Are you planning to ask him for work?” “Maybe.” “I see.” Cesar dipped his hand into the stream and sent an arc of water through the air towards Gaudencio, followed immediately by a flurry of aerial cascades powered by the splashing of his muscular arms. At that moment, all thoughts of copra vanished from Gaudencio’s mind, replaced by the fury of his stoked appetite. Without a word, he bared himself to the inevitable episode that awaited consummation in the cool waters of that hot and dry day. It was while working for Don Salazar’s copra factory that Gaudencio first encountered Jacinta Cordova. While assigned to a distant grove, he abandoned his companions for a solitary smoke when the lunch hour came, bored by the unvarying stories they passed around like colds: the possible whereabouts of the lost American B-24 of the 19th Bombardment Squadron that vanished as it flew from Puerto Princesa three months before the Japanese surrendered; the man who turned to stone after defacing the petrogylphs inside the caves at the Tao't-Bato; the capture near Coron Island of a pair of weeping dugongs whose flesh tasted better than beef; the sterling properties of Luis Santiago’s undead rooster which had dominated cockfights for years until a priest from the Prefecture Apostolic of Palawan intervened; the vigorous campaign of President Magsaysay against the Communist-led Hukbalahap guerrillas; the surreptitious open-pit cinnabar mine that foreign quicksilver prospectors sacrificed goats to; and the marvelous glass house that used to attract so many visitors. He began to walk, allowing his feet to take him where they would, and thought about how much he missed Cesar’s company. He soon found himself crossing a stream similar to the site of their unrepeated frenzied activity. In the distance, through a grove of coconuts, he saw something shine brightly, and his curiosity was aroused. He quickly made his way across the shallow water, and realized that he had discovered the famous glass house of the most beautiful woman in Tagbaoran. Through the transparent walls, he observed an old woman, eyes closed, on her knees in prayer. For a moment he believed that the rumors of impossible beauty were gross exaggerations, and thought about how credulous provincial folk could be. But as he made his way around the house, careful not to be seen, he saw the back of another person—definitely younger than the first woman he had spotted earlier—moving about in the kitchen area. Throwing caution to the wind, he walked closer for a better view and caught the full force of Jacinta’s gaze when she turned around and saw him. At the moment that their eyes met through the see-through walls of the inconceivable house, Gaudencio dropped the cigarette in his hand as he was devastated by exposure to Jacinta’s luminous beauty. He felt an almost unbearable torrent of words rise up through his body: inarticulate syllables swiftly welled up from the soles of his feet; combining into nouns at his knees, verbs at his loins, adjectives and adverbs by the time they reached his heart; joined by prepositions and conjunctions from his hands and arms; becoming phrases, clauses, then whole sentences when they reached his head, threatening to erupt not only from his lips but also seeking immediate egress from his eyes, ears, and nose; before finally causing his hair to writhe as whole paragraphs, chapters, short stories, novellas, and novels recoiled backwards, suffusing his entire being with the terrible power of unspoken expression. For Jacinta, an invisible bolt of electricity struck her where she stood, causing her to gasp once before the energy arced from her hands to the cooking pot she carried, causing the clump of string beans that she had been planning to prepare for supper to explode from the intense heat, releasing pods that left contrails as they flew with untoward vigor. For a brief moment the pods set the air in their immediate vicinity on fire, as they spun like miniscule planets through the supercharged atmosphere, before being extinguished by the flood of tears that surged unbidden from Jacinta’s eyes, rushing outward in a fine spray that evaporated with a gentle sibilance, leaving only the scent of unexpected love and longing to linger in the air. Their first reaction, when they regained control of their trembling bodies, was to flee from each other’s sight: Jacinta, through the kitchen door, into her bedroom, and under her thin bedcovers where she found herself mouthing Apolinaria’s prayers with a fervor that could be mistaken as true faith; Gaudencio, back across the stream, into the coconut grove, and several kilometers nonstop to the room he rented, where he savagely seized a pen and a sheaf of paper, and began to write the words that struggled to be free, filling up every piece of paper he owned; and when those were exhausted back-to-back, he wrote on the walls and on the floor and on every single inch of the bed he slept in, not sparing the sheets or the single hard pillow that had been witness to his earlier drought. Hours later, when he finally stopped writing, he realized that his manhood had been painfully erect all that time. Continued... This novel won the Grand Prize in the 2005 Palanca Awards |