From here to there!

By Jing Villamil

 

SHE speaks just a few words, if at all, choosing these slowly; but with her body, she provides a more quick and graphic illustration of what she means to say. To tell “I feel nothing, I am emptied”, she mimes a cave curving inward from her chest to the hips. At the same time, she sucks her cheeks in. The dark shadows under her eyes don’t help any to lighten her epic imagery. I see my interviewee suddenly emptied, sunken unto herself.

It was eerie. At the same time, it was mesmerizing. Throughout the interview, Manta would use her face, fingers, palms, and the rest of her body, to draw a larger-than-life picture of her words. Guided by her gestures, I would guess the words Manta was still aiming for, and I would almost always guess right.

It was a running joke in her family, that she must have been born with a perpetual short-circuit. That instead of her brain sending its message directly to the speech-framing neurons, the message gets sent instead, first, to the nerves of the muscles then forwarded to bone and ligaments! As a child, when Manta saw a rainbow, she opened her eyes and mouth wide, she upped and joined her hands into an arc, she hopped on the tips of her toes – a ballet of awe and joy. Only after this impromptu dance would she shout “bow” for rainbow.

She could easily be mistaken for a brain-damaged retardate, if only she were not a prodigy musician, mathematician, linguist, interpretative dancer. But before becoming this heady, dizzying drink of academic and non-acad accomplishments, she was nature’s mixed brew . . . half-Chinese, one-fourth Filipino and one-fourth Spanish and Irish. Thus, barely past five feet, she has the petite body and smooth creamy skin of the east. After which, her blood surges with wild gusto to the west! She grows fine, curly reddish-brown hair down to the waist, a high-bridged nose, freckled rosy cheeks, and deep but wide brown eyes framed by near-translucent lashes and brows. And two dots of the deepest dimples at the sides of her full Pinay lips.

It was this unearthly combination that made Manta so “pansinin” (noticeable). Not only intriguing to the eye, but utterly endearing, someone to protect and to hide far and free from flesh-tearing carnivores, especially those two-legged beasties lurking within sniffing distance of late-blooming beauties.

And so from here, Manta’s story begins. . .

During her senior year in high school, on her way to promenade practice, she paused while toeing a leap from the low fence to a high stone bench. But for what are elevations, but to fly from here to there? To where one falls deeply into love?

(To be continued.)

{AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story was written and published 12 years ago. It is owed to a reader friend whose lovely life this truly was. It is too long to be a short story, and too short to be a novel. It was submitted to a network for drama adaptation, but was hastily withdrawn per request of Manta herself.)

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