From here to there! (Part 5)

By Jing Villamil

 

CHUCK would go on making beautiful music with his band. God really does work in so many strange, wondrous ways. He gifted Chuck with the perceptive ability and facility to create music as he saw, or heard or felt it in his mind’s eye. God’s creations speak to only a few, and when they do speak to you, you do not turn your back from the privilege, the pleasure of re-creating the conversation.

Only this time, Chuck’s music does not run. Neither does it leap and soar across mirrors of water left by the rain or streams overflowing. This time around, it plucks the sinews of the heart, and retreats just before the jaws tighten and the tears fall. It tells of pain, grief and anger directed at one’s self, then it goes on to a whine of lost chances. And ends with the throb of the pulse, slowing, slower, slow.

One night, two years after they parted ways, Chuck slouched tiredly home after his band’s stint at a bar. He passed by Manta’s and his favorite ice-cream parlor famous for its fa-fa (fantastic fabulous, her words) concoctions.

He perks up. He follows his nose to the source of the unmistakable fragrance of a presence. Of mountain fog, crushed flowers, and baby talc. It was his turn to receive one of those great shockers! Manta!

Chuck and Manta are back in each other’s lives; but not in each other’s arms. Not yet.

Guarding over her (Chuck speaks to her with his eyes: “but that was what I used to do!”) is a rich young man of Influence whom one must know if one must survive the artist’s kind of life. Especially when one composes or arranges beautiful music, or if one’s band must have a place to play in nightly, regularly.

For a week, Manta was a special guest of the city, as one of the performers in a charity event. So, Manta insisted to have Chuck among the local celebrities invited to their late evening after-performance sorties. Manta learns Chuck and his woman had split ways without trekking to the altar.

Chuck learns Manta is as elusively single. Manta would proudly describe Chuck’s special influence over her as “pinalaki niya ako” (He brought me up). Likewise, Chuck would own-up fondly and yet wryly “pinalaki ko siya” (I brought her up). To the unknowing other guests, it appeared they were just affirming a friendship rooted from childhood.

But, they have so much more than friendship. When they happen to touch hands, a live current sparks and singes through them as fiercely as before. Though they avoid probing deeper into each other’s eyes, they spend most of the time searching for the other from among the crowd. And at parting time, their eyes would follow the other’s retreating back as lovingly and longingly as if years had not passed.

They were surely not fooling everyone, themselves included.

Manta would flee from the sham and would pound the piano keys till her fingers numbed. Chuck, would hunch back to his band. This time, he drowns himself in his music, each performance turning from disturbing to frenzied to manic as dusk moves deeper into dark, and dark cracks towards another dawning.

He was handling poorly his own particular hell on earth. And neither was it heaven for her.

What stopped them from reaching out in love and absolution? Perhaps, when one is young, one feels the rest of tomorrow extends almost forever from here to there. One feels one has all the time to wait. One feels one has all the rest of that time to begin again from whence they left off. But this time, surely minus all the pain, the anguish. His eyes beg her: “I am so shamed. Give me more time, please, to be as brave as you.” Her eyes answer: “I wait. Do not rush.”

However, to one’s dismay, one can be so wrong about time. So very, very wrong. It waits . . . for no one.

Shortly after Manta went back to the metropolis, Chuck dropped by the house of the man of influence. This has since been one of his habits every time he missed Manta. He would search around the host’s house and his eyes would lock on to something which would remind him of her – a picture, a card. A “simpleng kaligayahan” (a simple joy) to last him for days.

Chuck and his host would drink. And having drank, would proceed to be drunk as well.

Later, the host would claim he simply made a boast that, soon, Manta would be his wife. No one can testify to the truth of his boast, not even Manta who would deny it vehemently. The host would also later claim that after he boasted thus, Chuck suddenly upped and left, plunked on his helmet and roared noisily out of there on his big black bike.

From the host’s house at the outskirts of the city, Chuck would drive away with crazed speed. He would zoom past other vehicles heedlessly. And he would beat the traffic lights with almost just an inch to spare.

Except, he runs out of inches at the last road crossing nearest his home, where no woman waits for him.

The light changes to red. He brakes. His engine was still too fast. It sent him flying. His helmet, expensively thick, was not thick enough to keep his skull in one piece. It could not keep his brain, and all beautiful music within, from spewing out to the asphalt.

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