Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café

1

LEON’S LUCK’S BEGINNINGS

Leon Puts His Pants (And Mountains) On

It is dawn. Leon laughs inside a dream. There are mountains outside, green jungly mountains outside his sleep. His sister Silvestra brings them in, together with his pants.

Look, Leon, here are the mountains. See how the sun is about to zip them open. Get up, Leon, or they won’t film your life for you. Not ever.

Leon burrows deeper into the mat. My sister is such a widow. And my mat smells like mutilated destiny. But I shall wake and take the mountains and the pants, for they have to film my life for me.

Our shack is beautiful, Bestra, no pinpoint lighting at all, it looks more cheery and expansive than it really is, which is as small as the parts they give out on last shooting day. If this weren’t Bacong, Negros Oriental, Southern Philippines of the late 1800s I would say they were using vaseline on lens as in prurient photography. But it is Bacong, my birthplace, a small undistinguished seaside town a morning’s walk from Dumaguete, and the time is the late 1800s. The color of the day is sepia, like all other days. So I shall take the mountains and put them on together with my pants, and I shall attempt not to laugh ceaselessly, dear sister Bestra, o darling would-be-widow, and I shall step out into the cool ground before our shack without benefit of breakfast, for I have to help say mass with the Castilian priest who whips my ass, this brown posterior ever tardy for sepia mass at sepia dawn.

Leon Puts His Pants (And Mountains) Down

Our seaside town is extremely cinematic, chirps Leon, more so when it’s early in the day in the late 1800s. Leon chirps up at the birds as he ambles down the road to the church. The birds chirp down at him from the limbs of a pink-flowered acacia, Samanea soman, whose seed had fallen off a friar’s pouch many years ago. The padre was reliving his memories of Mexico in a post-vesper constitutional down this road. He did not notice the seed falling off. But when he discovered his pouch open he collected his memories of Mexico and put them in, drawing the strings tight on the matronas of Acapulco as he decided to go back to the church.

They had built the church of limestone and mortar from dried reed cuttings. They had built it facing the sea, sealing the walls efficaciously with eggwhite and old Sunday recollections of Barcelona, Zaragoza, Badajoz, knowing with a deep Recollect zeal that the church they built fronting the sea had to withstand eight tremors, eleven conflagrations, innumerable Muslim pirate forays and two vivid attacks of Negros Oriental measles.

At sunrise the church facade would face up to another onslaught — from the morning rays creeping up over the hills of Siquijor Island across the strait, fine golden antennae of an eternal insect clawing its way up over the island’s hump and then shooting out with the speed of sorcery against those walls, suffusing everything with a pagan glow, each rock, each crevice, seeking to exploit the tiniest rupture in the facade of zeal. Across the strait? Hah! The morning sun, needless to say, was no match for Old World memories. NADA PODER. Not across the strait, not even from Siquijor …

Leon stops, takes a whiff of the sea air. The insect sun gives him a playful sting in the face. This tickles Leon, he begins to come. Laughing, he comes. He rubs his hand against his crotch, rubbing the come to bigger and better areas inside his pants. He doesn’t care much about the pants anyway. As long as it doesn’t soil his fresh mountains, Leon would never spoil a come.

Hey, I see you doing something perverse out there, hey, in the churchyard, even!

The yell comes from the belfry. Paquito the dwarf points an accusing dwarfish finger at Leon below him. His dwarfish figure isn’t exactly etched elegantly against the sky, but still makes for a fine expository portrait as he dangles amid moss and mortar. At times Paquito the dwarf is Leon’s best friend. This time the dwarf doubts that. He doesn’t like seeing strange perversities happening at daybreak. Even if they prove late enough for dawn.

Leon grins up at Paquito. I can’t explain this to you now, my friend, the day is colored sepia and the sun stings me to such playfulness. But I have come, and now should cleanse myself. I take off my pants and mountains and run my bare bottom to the sea, wash and salt myself, back up into the daybreak wind for a moment’s drying, wriggle saltily into my attire, compose myself. I then walk into the sacristy, where Padre Salsa awaits me.

Of Mahogany, With Inlaid Mother-of-Pearl

The tree is thirty-eight years old, its heartwood streaked reddish-brown, the color of deep Malayo-Polynesian blush. Erect and unforgiving it stands on a thickly-mulched gully as one tendril of a rainforest. One morning in late summer, the year the monsoon failed to stir a fear, a group of men waving sharp axes surround its thirty-eighth ring.

Mahogany, the men say. Mahogany, they nod to one another.

Mahogany soon crashes down upon two young fire trees and several tiers of worthless underbrush. A wild chicken scurries off from under the crumpling, and two of the men give chase. They come back empty-handed, grinning and shaking their heads. They wave their sharp axes, nod to one another, and work on the mahogany. Other men join them, in other times and other places, and it is only a matter of time and place before the thirty-eight-year-old tendril tree becomes a ship captain’s table, a widow’s set of chests, 214 yoyos of varying circumferences, over a hundred spinning tops, and two dozen walking sticks of assorted lengths, spirals and handle designs.

Old Man Inocencio, master woodworker of Zamboanguita, labors over several of the walking sticks. He flutes one to an elegant tip the size of a Zamboanguita maiden’s navel, which he crowns with a strip of brass. The curved handle he flares into an angel’s outsized wings. Along its tapering length he lays in mother-of-pearl diamonds to frame the grooved spirals. Over time, over place, he produces a sleek dark beauty which sings unmistakably of heartwood origin when thrust on earth or sliced through air. This he then presents to the Castilian priest who pours font water on his grandchild’s head, that Sunday when little Inocencio Tiempo III is converted into a faithful little tropical royal subject of Mother Spain.

Inocencio Tiempo El Tres! bellows Padre Salsa with his right hand carving clear across the apse to claim the little dark planet.

A counter-offer, Padre! bellows Inocencio Tiempo El Primero. An extension of the hand. To cleave through ecliptics.

Gracias! bellows Padre Salsa, accepting the cane.

Arraguuuuuy! bellows Leon, tasting now the tempered heartwood on his salted bottom.

Sursum corda! bellows Padre Salsa, whipping again.

Arrraguuuuuy!" bellows Leon, his brine breaking up.

Twitch, Tic, Dimpling

Sisa, fisherman’s daughter, listens impassively as Leon recounts his morning’s whipping. Bellowing both voices with exaggerated climatic contrast, he alternately assumes the friar’s typhoon girth and his own slim bamboo heroics.

Sisa found Leon amusing, his laughter Bacong’s most robust. To look at her though one would think she remained indifferent even to peals of bells of sorrow. If the fishermen all went out on a quarter-moon night and ringed the sea with lamps one would look out at them from shore and wish for no other face beside his but Sisa’s. Entirely calm, the color of fresh tidal wrack and seemingly as soft, unveiled by the quarter-moon then framed by the ring of lamps at sea, the face would be Sisa’s, infinitely placid, fringing some secret shore of impassivity.

Sisa attracted Leon. His laughter would pitch at its most robust and Sisa would still stare out to sea with a calm that came close to idiocy. Yet invariably Leon intimated a flicker in her eyes marking a genuine sense of appreciation, and beyond that, as stage mother, a cold if benign intelligence within her mantling its control over the warmth of external displays, e.g, flutter of the eyelids, cough, twitter, smile, quaking of the cheeks, creasing of the brow, twitch, tic, dimpling, paining, stammer … Sisa forbade them all, from the tiniest crack of recognition to the most intimately desperate stutter. She refused to try to talk, thereby dignifying her dumbness. She looked at other faces, Leon’s this moment, then looked out to sea.

Leon never knew her to be sad. Leon thus loved to tell her stories, time and again believing he came close to pricking her repose.

She sits under a coconut palm looking out to sea. Leon stands before her, all traffic in performed emotions. She looks at Leon’s face, his bustling line, allows it to become a thread weaving around some special recollection of delight (or so thinks Leon), then looks out again to sea. Leon continues in mime while Sisa messages the bright contours of the islands across.

Cebu and Siquijor. Leon gazes across the strait, waves at the islands, and becomes Cebu, a busy shrimp with a distinctly mandarin look, then Siquijor, a sorcerer’s hat tossed into the ring of fire and magic. Leon mimes, Sisa looks at him, absorbs him (thinks Leon), then looks back at the islands. She seems to find Leon’s own insular version and the islands themselves equally funny. To what degree she chooses not to show. Leon tires and sinks to the sand, laughing.

Botong, Enteng, Nanding

Botong, Enteng, and Nanding are scurrying down the beach after hermit crabs when they chance upon Leon and Sisa under the coconut palm.

Aha, Botong says, spreading his hands.

Uhuy, Enteng says, pointing a timid finger.

Ehem, Nanding says, folding his arms.

Leon looks up at the three, his confreres, mimes their subtle greetings and sinks lower into the sand, laughing. Sisa looks at their faces, then Leon’s, then the sea’s.

If you don’t mind, says Botong, coming closer, we would like to take a look, Leon. We know it happened, heard it so, but I for one do not believe there had indeed been thirty-two!

Please don’t mind, Leon, says Enteng. If only to settle our suspicions. Padre Salsa has great difficulty lifting the host, what more bringing up an arm, weighted with a mahogany cane, thirty-two times! But that is Paquito’s report, and all islanders know dwarves cannot lie and are proficient with numbers. Still …

Leon, our dear friend, says Nanding. I’m sure Sisa will not mind looking at the welts herself, they should be like islands behind you now. Is it why you burrow so into the sand, or is it to ease the pain …?

The friends laugh and Leon laughs loudest without meaning to, thereby innocently depriving his friends of comic authorship. But they continue, darting glances at Sisa’s calm beautiful mute face while advancing menacingly at Leon sinking in the sand.

Come, come, Leon, off with it and show!

The most we’ve confirmed has been twenty. But thirty-two!? Ahhh, an experience!

Laughing, Botong finds his hands settling on Leon’s waist. Laughing, Leon bounds up in a spray of sand, two grains of which strike Sisa’s soft unruffled cheek. She looks at the boys, feels the pair of grains on her cheek, looks out to sea.

The boys race across the beach, doubling over occasionally with choking laughter the way boys do when they race across a beach with purposes in mind of attacking and defending a pair of pants. Thus they race and choke, bounding farther away from Sisa the fisherman’s daughter who stays rooted in the shade of the coconut palm, eyeing the lovely secret forms of her kind language across the sea.

While across the beach the boys race, farther and farther away, till they reach the sleeping figure of Anatalio of the Civil Guard stretched on the sand across a boat’s shadow. Leon does not see him. Laughing, he stumbles on the figure. Anatalio of the Guardia Civil wakes with a start, finds Leon sprawled over him.

He had been dreaming of lying in some dark cell with the mayor’s buxom wife breathing heavily above him, rats streaking past his toes which moves him to try to double up but he can’t because the buxom woman is performing her buxom passion on him, breathing heavily in the dark dark cell. And now suddenly there is blinding afternoon light, brilliant expanse around him, and a young man, aha, it is Leon the good-for-nothing, the laughing prankster devil, now gasping his laughter beside him.

Anatalio of the Guardia Civil grabs the lad’s head and pushes it deeper into the boat’s shadow, banging it on the prow. Stunned, Leon struggles up, as his friends Botong, Enteng and Nanding scurry away like the rats in the dream’s dark cell. Leon prepares to race away too but now Anatalio of the Guardia Civil catches him by the neck and drags him back to the boat’s shadow. Anatalio of the Guardia Civil reaches for the short paddle and whacks Leon on the back, but the paddle is not as short as we think so a part of it touches the islands on Leon’s behind, howling him away.

Arraguuuuuy! Leon screams inside himself, no, it cannot be, not two whippings in a day! Squirming from his captor’s grasp he reaches frantically for support. His hand grips something solid on the prow, but when he struggles to right himself up the object comes down heavily on them. The anchor strikes Anatalio of the Guardia Civil on the elbow, dropping the paddle from him. Anatalio of the Guardia Civil howls deep into the boat’s shadow, a long ludicrous silent howl that is the privilege of those struck by anchors on the elbow. Leon retreats a few steps, his own behind still smarting. He turns to run, but something in the borderline nature of the howl attracts him. Anatalio of the Guardia Civil is bent over the sand clutching at his anchored elbow, his face tracing the vague boundaries between funniness and pain. And Leon is moved to come back, pick up the fallen paddle, and whack at the upraised butt of Anatalio of the Guardia Civil. Leon relishes the blow, recognizes a fresh coloration in the interminable silent howl, and whacks again. Anatalio of the Guardia Civil is stunned by this turn of events. He tries to remember back into the dark cell and the buxom heaving above him, but finds only an incandescent dullness on his weighted elbow and a bright new pain in his behind. Leon smacks again and again, in measured relish now, till he arrives at a number.

Thirty-two! Leon screams triumphantly out to the wind and the sea. He flings the paddle away and begins to trot across the beach, waving his arms and shouting the number above the surf’s own interminable pounding.

While cowering behind a palm, Botong, Enteng and Nanding turn slowly to one another with incredulous looks. They look at the fallen Anatalio of the Guardia Civil clawing at the sand deep in the boat’s shadow. They look at Leon racing away, shouting the number and laughing himself hoarse. They look at the precocious image now forming of themselves turning slowly into silent sphinxes in a tropic setting. They turn as one and look out to sea.

Coming Down to the Pure Man on the Night of the New Moon

Poor Bestra, sighs Leon as he trails off from the beach to follow the path leading to the foothills of Mt. Talinis. My poor sister, now we are all in trouble. First your husband Melecio had to get into a scuffle with the very very mayor himself on account of the missing tail of a roasted pig, and now I paddle the behind of a member of the Guardia Civil. Oh, what is to happen? Poor Bestra, you have lost both of us to the foothills.

Doubtless we shall stay there enchanted, while you tend our shack, our garden, our pigs, with your widow fingers, all alone, and the Guardia Civil will come demanding for me, and search the shack as if one look would not do, and stomp on the garden as if I could be part of the loam, and thrust a rifle butt into the pigslop as if they fought with snouts, and scream for me, and look up at the darkening sky, and curse at the gathering fireflies by the old banyan, and become convinced I was not there nor anywhere near, and turn to suddenly remember Melecio, how he helped roast three sucklings on the last natal feast for the mayor’s wife then got drunk on coco wine and snapped off a suckling’s tail, which so incensed the mayor since his buxom wife would eat nothing but tails so that he stormed to where the help were helping themselves to the coarser parts of their roast and washing that down with coco wine and Melecio, very drunk, proudly admitted to the deed wherefore the mayor launched into an angry speech touching on poor Melecio’s genealogy, which was quite a tall though heavily encrusted tree, giving Melecio time to raise the coco wine to his lips exactly when the mayor opted for a grave political mistake by crowning the tree with an oblique if orchidaceous reference to Silvestra, causing the very drunk Melecio to launch the coco wine from his mouth into the mayor’s face whereupon the Guardia Civil pounced on him with their snouts, hogtied him, and slopped him into their barest cell, from where a very sober Melecio mysteriously escaped a week later, some say with Silvestra’s help, but there was no telling, and besides he was never to be seen again, for Melecio had gone up to the foothills and hidden himself in the thickness of mystery’s beginnings, and it was said he dug wild tubers for food or that Silvestra came to him with sucklings’ tails for she had the skill to go places unseen, she was just suddenly there, perhaps bringing food and favors to Melecio and listening to him tell of his search for the banana’s charm, a drop so sweet from the tip of the newest unfurled leaf coming down to the pure man on the night of the new moon, entering the pure man’s waiting mouth and feeding him special skills, that if he were so rewarded he would not have to dig for tubers or wait for his wife to come up unseen with food and favors, no, he would have the skills and he could go down to Bacong marching proudly to where their shack stood by the old banyan where the fireflies were beginning to gather, he would surprise the Guardia Civil who had made a mess of the shack and the garden and the sty and who were now in fact eyeing Silvestra with rage as she tells them no, Melecio is not here either, I have not seen him nor Leon for that matter and you will never see them until they show themselves to you with the banana’s charms fresh in their mouths and they will come marching proudly here to surprise you with their many skills that will have you trembling in your beds tonight and other nights and you cannot tell your wives why and all because Leon my brother has gone to Melecio my husband and found him and joined him to dig for tubers and wait for me to come up unseen bringing them food and favors and Melecio will tell Leon that together they will stay enchanted in the foothills and there will be no sighing for poor Bestra because together they will try to be the pure men on nights of the new moon, seeking the sweet sweet drop.

Melecio’s Stories

Four months now I’ve searched for it, Melecio said, "waited in different places for the sweet drop. Four different nights. You