Gone for a walk!

By Jing Villamil

 

THIS story was a whisper, told loudly above engine roars. Once upon a summertime, once upon my island.

It was told by cousins, doubling as backseat drivers, while I was battling the narrow unpaved road hugging the island’s many bends, the mountain on one side, and a deep plunge to the sea on the other. Thus, the story was told screamingly loud; whispers would not do! What more, Uncle Willy’s jeep was with unreliable brakes! But the twin threats to our lives seemed miniscule, well worth the icy bottle of soda or beer or the tall glass of halo-halo topped with thick wedges of leche flan and native ube, at the other end of the road!

Cousins would jump onboard just to escape the glorious boredom of too much sun, sand and starfish! And more often than not, we would chance upon this woman on her way to or from town, an hour and a half away by brakeless jeep, a half-day if one walked. If offered a ride, she would look at you, then through you, to beyond you. She would always be barefooted, and would be wearing a clean, faded peasant dress.

Hers was this whisper of a story, told loudly.

Her mother gave a fatherless birth to Angela. Her father was someone whom her mother met while in freshman year in Manila. He must have been fair, handsome and somehow gifted with an artist’s hand or a singer’s voice. For Angela grew up fair and beautiful and with a voice to stand solo in the church choir! And hands to do wonders with coal and colors.

Her mother would not allow her to cross the seas however. One unclaimed pregnancy in the family was one too many. So, at seventeen, Angela was employed as laundry girl to the lord of their land, a married but childless Spanish mestizo. Who had a dashing bachelor for a brother. Who visited now and then from Manila.

When Angela came home pregnant, the mother insisted that the lords do right with her daughter. In all fairness, the brothers did. The mother wasn’t clear on whoever did the impregnating, though the younger brother married Angela in a simple ceremony.

When the child was born, Angela sang more angelic! The rafters of the church would seem to burst with the trilling of her voice! And her coal and colors swirled ecstatic from nature to paper to canvas! One would be hard put to separate dawn from drawn. Angela saw beauty in everything, and everything became things of tangible beauty through her fingers!

Then stories filtered out through the great walls of the lords’ house, that Angela suffered bruises and bumps too often to be believable as mere accidents of falling down the stairs. Or bumping corners.

The brothers said Angela was losing her mind. They sent Angela home to her mother to heal. They kept her child.

One day, Angela went to visit. She hummed her child to sleep. As she hummed, she danced out of the child’s room, out of the house, out of the walled yard. Then she was gone round the bend!

Angela and her child went missing for a week. When Angela was found wandering around high up the mountain, the child was gone! Angela’s mind was gone, too. But, she had long gone round that particular bend.

Gone, too, were Angela’s sandals or slippers. Her feet developed a special friendship with the ground – dried or mucky, sandy, rocky or weedy. She did nothing since then but walk barefoot to town, and back. A half-day to, a half-day back.

Sometimes, I stop walking off my pandemic stress, from one end of the house to the other back and forth, to ask the strip of sky looking in through a window: is she walking those bends today?

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