Manila Days
  • Home
  • About
  • Starts and Ends here
  • American mission

Orange Jesus and the acacia diwata  

9/24/2012

Comments

 
Picture
A stained glass Jesus greets you as in the airy sanctuary of Ellinwood Malate Church. He’s draped in orange and big as five people on top of each other. Light streams though Jesus as he stops on a dirt path near a clump of bamboo. You get the impression that he’s just left the nipa huts in the distance, and at the moment he sees you, he opens his arms wide, and says “Come unto me!”  That’s the caption under his feet.

The Orange Jesus seems impervious to suffering. He isn’t hangdog with a crown of thorns, or butchered on a cross, or holding his bloody heart, or slumped on his mother’s lap. And he’s not even sweaty in all those clothes. He’s pale and unscarred, with a mild “don’t worry” expression. He visits me in my sleep, or when I wake in the middle of the night, or when I pray that I’ll find something I lost before daddy knows I lost it. Orange Jesus appears shimmery and see-through. His voice has the timber of all the voices I know melted together. When he comes, I feel quiet with relief. “Come unto me,” he says. But he never says where we are going. 

I love Orange Jesus with his arms wide open. “I am with you always, even to the end of time,” says Rev. Geconcillo quoting Jesus. Everyone says he is with us everywhere, which you have to wonder about, since there is only one of him and lots of us. And grandmother in the States, is he with her when she’s cooking candied orange peels for us at the same time I’m going down the water slide? Is he only with people? How about the maya birds that scatter around us, and Melting Snow our outside cat, or camias and avocado trees?

Does the Orange Jesus like to play Tarzan vine with us? The acacia rustles gently in response.

“Ssst,” Boy calls. I get up from the carabao grass, brushing off little bugs, and wander over to the crooked wire fence that separates our compound from the rambling old house where the Monteclaros live.

“Halaka,” he hisses once he has my full attention,
“Seguro may diwata sa acacia mo.”
Boy has a buzz cut, a long face with hollow cheeks. We don’t know how old he is because he doesn’t go to school. He says his uncle flew to the States by holding onto the wheels of the plane. His eyes get big in his thin face when he’s telling these things. Sometimes we’re a little afraid of him.

I look at him quizzically. I thought diwata only live in balete trees. The spirits cajole you into visiting them and then don't let you go home. Are they in acacias too? At first I don’t mind, but then I feel them buzzing. It's not the sound of a cloud of saints or angels, who make little tingting sounds. 

Daddy has an office on the ground floor that opens out into the yard.
I open the screen door and stick my head in.
“Daddy,” I say carefully, not to worry him.
“Yes Kerry,” he doesn’t look up.
I edge in. We’re not supposed to bother him in his office unless it’s important.
“Daddy, Boy ses dere's spirits in da acacia.”
There’s a brief silence.
He looks up and the light bounces off his black framed glasses. Now he is a pastor, not just my father. 

“No Kerry, there aren’t spirits in trees.”
It’s a gentle answer, but it’s final.
“OK,” I close his screen door slowly and turn to the big tarzan tree. 
How am I going to avoid them?

It’s a gentle tree, really. Would Orange Jesus pull me out? I gingerly scratch its bark and frondy leaves rustle as though they are purring. Small ants, itchy worms, and grimy bugs nestle in its yellow fuzz flowers. It’s not tidy. But it doesn’t fuss when we climb up to its paunch and swing on the Tarzan vine. I squat on the edge of our cement walk and send the acacia a single thought: “If you love me, don’t let them take me.”

But I wonder. When Orange Jesus says, “Come unto me,” does he also mean the acacia's diwatas? Are diwatas afraid of him because he'd chase them out? Where do the diwata live if they don’t have a treehouse? Doesn’t Orange Jesus also love diwatas? Maybe they’re just in a bad mood because they were here first. Why is there a war between their nations? Why can’t diwata and Orange Jesus like each other and share the tree?

Comments

The fruit of the camias tree

9/20/2012

Comments

 
Picture
Genesis 3:3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

A narrow dark path leads from our missionary compound to Ellinwood Bible School, an aging, blue two-story building full of pretty Filipina deaconesses. The first floor holds classrooms and the cafeteria. On the second floor, the girls sleep in crowded gloomy dorm rooms, their beds draped with mosquito nets. It must have been a grand building once, but now the rusted screens are mended to keep out flies. Feral cats breed under its crawl space. Our community cat Melting Snow bore her kittens there, feasting on rotting garbage, bloody napkins, and the gentle devotion of homesick girls. My 27-year-old mother walks this path after breakfast each day to teach Christian Education curriculum. 

The deaconesses are sincerely pious in a girly way. They gently cup palms to their mouths when they giggle. They tweak our cheeks more tenderly than the matrons at Ellinwood Church. When mom turns 28, then 29, a flock of deaconesses in gray and white uniforms cluster up our concrete stairs to serenade her in sweet harmony:  

“Once again has come your birthday,
Once again the time is here.
What a lovely gift from Jesus,
He has kept you one more year.
Happy time, your birthday,
Happy time is here.
What a lovely gift from Jesus,
He has kept you one more year.” 

I see the deaconess when they sing, or come to visit in our sala, and at graduation, when they will fly away. Then they change from plain sparrow clothes into soft organza ternos capped with stiff butterfly sleeves. Some wear the old fashioned paneulo shawl over their camisa and drape a transparent juci tapis over their saya. These girls come from far away provinces, and maybe, says my mother, they have carefully laid away their mother’s only best dress for this moment, their glory day in Manila before returning home. So, oh, how they flutter and preen at their baccalaureate, swirling delightedly around the humbly decorated hall. This is a vision of the angels that will greet us in heaven and I hide behind my mother’s skirt, stricken shy. 

But no matter how they dance, my anxious affection for Ellinwood Bible School is not directed at them. 


It is wholly fixed on the camias tree that beckons from the end of the path at the edge of the Bible School yard. Clusters of green fingerlings dangle from its twisted branches. Tiny camias sprout off the black trunk like whiskers. Camias taste like the South China Sea—sour, wet, and crisp. Like the green sea, they’re translucent. When a sun shaft hits the wizened branches, the fruit light up like Christmas bulbs. 

If you have the eyes to see, you can tell that the camias is a solitary tree. It’s gnarled and shy, with branches curled close to the trunk. It stands apart from the other trees. You wonder if they gossip about the little camias, rustling their leaves high above the galvanized roof of the Bible School. When my mother passes the camias on her way to teach the deaconesses, it is just an ugly ordinary tree. She doesn’t know it is the source of my anguish and desire.

How many times must they tell us not to take and eat of the fruit? The irritated Bible School janitor circles the trunk with old barbed wire. We really try, we do, but if you have a salt-and-sour tooth, then green mango can satisfy, or the dry flesh of santol, or a handful of little sineguelas. In the end, your mouth whines to crunch on camias till your lips pucker. When we are denied the trunk, my scraggly clan of camias-eaters scale onto the ledge of the elementary school and steal camias higher up. We fill our pockets, sneak down to the kitchen for sea salt crystals and crunch our stolen treats until we’re sick, clutching acid stomachs. We suck our dry sandpaper tongue and can’t eat dinner. 

I tell you, my desire for camias is a getter of wisdom. I knew from an early age the hidden mystery of the Fall. When mom reads the story of Rapunzel, and I hear that while she is still inside her mother's womb, her mother has naglilihi for fruit in the witch’s garden, I know the craving cannot be denied. Her husband must bargain with the witch for the price of their child. 


But think: Eve didn't crave the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She was not naglilihi. She was not even considering merienda.  Before God mentioned it and the cunning serpent psst her,  she didn't even noticed the tree-in-the-middle-of-the-garden. So, why did she desire the fruit? Because of God's negative advertising. Really.  I know how it is to be tested. If you can't have it, it tastes more delicious.  And then you really wonder, how did the serpent and the Garden's angels know the fruit was tasty? When God sent the humans away, the angels guarded the entrance with flaming swords. But you wonder what they did on their day off, when they had Garden to themselves.


Comments

No trees of this western world

9/15/2012

Comments

 
Picture
No trees of this western world are as fertile or fierce as those of my first home, Manila.  We were chary of the vicious bamboo, with leaves like knives, fine hair splinters, and a habit of hissing on windless nights. We were deceived by the narra, stiff as an aristocrat whose bark bled like menstrual blood. And we were forgiven with fruit: sampaloc, papaya, mangoes, bananas, lanzones and the plump avocado who splattered her soft green bombs throughout  the entire side yard. 

 But the acacia, the acacia, an enormous mouth of a tree, gobbled up the sky.  In dry season, fine filmy strings dripped like saliva from its branches. At the end of each string curled a terrible basil, furry black "itchy worms” that left insatiably itchy welts wherever they touched skin. The strings were a hanging mine field.  We prayed for those moments when light escaped through the canopy and ran down the lines setting the entire lattice alight. Then, we'd wind our way effortlessly through the treachery.

That Saturday began in a usual manner. The trees calmly chatted with their neighbors while gaggles of  birds landed and whooshed through their hair. Just a stone's throw away in the high school yard, Sousa’s marching music blasted the hot morning air, announcing ROTC practice. The high school boys, certain of their beauty in crisp khaki and black shoes, goose-stepped to the captain’s orders. Their secret girlfriends watched from the fence, giggling into their hands as the boys marched past the grand acacia that swallowed a swath of the high school yard.

I was five. My siblings and I were the neighborhood American kids, everywhere noted, then ignored. I wandered past the high school fence on my way to Reyes Sari Sari store for a sipa and plastic balloon, when–it was the next second– something magnificent happens you cannot pray for. You meet the wild angel who annunciates Mary. Huge wings scattered the acacia leaves above us. The girls gasped, “Ang ganda!” They marveled softly in Tagalog: parang Carmen Miranda, from Manila zoo, kaya. She must have escaped and wandered with increasing weariness over Manila's galvanized rooftops. 

Oh, I loved her, swiftly. My smallness matched her height. She was my annunciation, regal and strange, her head and bill streaked yellow, maybe green, blue. Fear not. Wide winged, the mal'ach bird shifted slowly on her acacia limb.  What? Fear not what? I whisper.

By then, others had seen her too. The ROTC boys gathered at the thick acacia trunk and peered up into the leaves. One boy gave a shout, picked up a small stone and whirled it at her. She gave a small screech and flapped, but did not fly. Pain sliced my heart. And I knew immediately, the way creatures smell terror, that panic had crippled her instincts. Inspired, another boy joined him, then another, another, until pandemonium broke up the military practice. They circled the tree, whooped and threw. Wet stones landed near by and blood splattered the shiny green leaves around me. Her blood was a fire engine red.  

I was only five, small and not brave. I knew – don’t make a fuss in public. "Please," I pleaded as the pastor of the big church walked past, "Please tell them to stop!"  He shook his head sadly. 

Dazed, the bird shifted, one foot to the other. Under my breath, I begged, Fly!  Fly, don't stay here, go up to the roof of the church where they can’t reach you! But she smelled her own death. She raised her brilliant bill up towards the crown of the tree and screeched just once. Then she drew up her strength and let go, out over the school yard, wide angel wings over the Quonset roof, toppling down.

*****************************************
I collect bloodied relics of her execution in a cardboard shoe box under my bed.  For months, during siesta, I scoop out the box, slip off the cover and whisper to her stained leaves and stones.  The old rocks sop up my sorrows, but her blood cries out.  One night, four, she presses up through the mattress into my dreams, flapping her wet matted feathers, beak half gasped. I jerk awake, Ay, I can’t save you, Ay!

When we pack up for the ’68 winter of our American discontent, I find the dusty old box  mouldering under my bed, spiders' abandoned nests among the stones and the leaves crumbling at my touch. She is distant, sad. “I won’t forget,” I whisper. In the dark earth at the root of the acacia, her elements join the soft bones of fallen fledglings, turtles, ducklings, and our Siamese, Saksit. Through my life she haunts me until she changes back to the angel. I will tell you that story later.


Comments

    Kerry (Kathryn) Poethig

    We were "fraternal kids", Americans in the Philippines from Magsaysay to Marcos. I thought our story needed elaboration.

    Picture

    Archives

    January 2017
    November 2014
    November 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    September 2012
    February 2012

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Arrival
    Christmas
    Days Of Rage
    Dreams
    Early Years 1957 60
    Exile
    Food
    Fraternal
    Furlough
    High School
    Lesbian
    Malate
    New York
    School Days 1960 67
    Theology
    Trees

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from Jeff Kubina, digipam, Neville10