Mangosteen

a short story by an Ilocano writer.

BAUKO IS a remote mountain town up in the wilds of the Cordilleras. It is some five thousand feet above sea level, and thick fog covers the towering mountain slopes every day, even in mid-summer, and the golden sun hardly be seen at high noon.

Of all stories - love stories - worth remembering my Father told me, not one can surpass the poignant story of a ravishing and winsome mountain lass by the name of Maila.

Maila was a Kankanay, one of the principal tribes of mountain Province. Indeed, Maila was a bundle of unsurpassed pulchitrude and vivacity, possessing a pair of bewitching dimples in her rosy checks, deep as the ravines surrounding her father's luxuriant mountain clearing up in Bauko.

The epic story of World War II would be incomplete and colorless without this beauteous mountain lass Maila, Father would tell me with a sparkle in his eyes, because Maila was everything to him during those dismal , difficult years of enemy occupation.

Father was a guerillero during the war. He was not a professional soldier, he repeatedly told me, since before the outbreak of the Pacific War he was still young, vibrant and innicent, and was bent on his studies at the U.P. in Padua Faura.

Those days were the golden days of the Commonwealth under the tutelage of the charismatic political leader, Manuel L. Quezon. Padre Faura then was quiet and shady with giant acacia trees, branching towards the sky on both shoulders of the street, affording cool shades for the boisterous groups of colegialas heading towards the big and spacious corridors of the State University and the Ateneo.

Father joined the army probably because of compulsion of maybe he was afraid of those slit-eyed Japanese soldiers. In the mid-thirties, the cream of the Filipino manhood was called to undergo compulsory five-and-a-half-mo the training in a care all over the islands; Father was among them, although he opted to take summer infantry training in Camp Murphy, the premier army camp I those days.

Prewar trainees and cadets of the ROTC units of Manila's colleges, were on the list of the Japanese Empire and sure death was the penalty for being one of them.

Why and how bphe came to Bauko, he did not tell me, but guerilla rose in those difficult years lived anywhere in the wilds of Northern Luzon.

Perhaps the dense mountain growths of the Cordillera ranges provided safe sanctuary for them. They were wanted by the Japanese forces for sure and once the were caught, they were herded like animals to a monkey house with grills and baked under the burning sun to be skinned alive or tortured to death by all kinds of painful methods as by bayonet thrusts, merciless clubbings and by water cure. Japanese soldiers were no better than barbarians in Marco Polo time.

"I had a co-guerillo by the name of Lacuasan," Father would recall. "This man Lacuasan was as my age and was a native of sturdy Kankanay stock. Most of the time he wore a g-string and was armed with a hatchet and a spear. He had a perfect physique, with bulging muscles throughout his whole anatomy -- easily he could have competed with Charles Atlas or Henry Liederman.

Lacuasan was a runner, a courrier, of the famed 66th Infantry, the guerrilla outfit composed of mountain tribes -- fierce-looking Kalingas and half-civilized Bontocs and Ifugaos, much-feared headhunters of the mountain provinces. Lacuasan was fast moving in spite of his size Climbing treacherous and slippery trails like a deer, he knew every bend and waterhole in the vast plateaus of Bauko.

The 66th Infantry was commanded by a greying American officer, Major Parker Calvert, a West Pointer, who refused to follow the surrender orders of General Wainwright following the fall of Corregidor.

It was Lakuasan who invited Father to his mountain clearing atop a lonely knoll in Bauko. The hut he owned was a small one, surrounded by a wide swath of camote patch; around the hut were chayote vines laden with fruits. Below the clearing was a picturesque valley where a meandering river curled it's way with water sparkling with foam and the pine trees roared when the north wind passed by.

"I believe you feel sad and lonely," Lacuasan told Father. Although Father carried a higher Rankin their outfit, Lacuasan simply called Father by his nickname, Andy. Father liked it that way.

There was evening when Father and Lacuasan spent their time keeping away the seeping cold and wetness of Bauko weather by sipping tapey, the homemade rice wine of the natives.

This liquor was made with fermented rice, sweet varietals of the upland strains, sprinkled with binubudan, powdered rice with crushed ginger and yeast. Some was fermented and brewed using sweet upland corn.

"Have you ever visited our ulog before, Andy?" Lacuasan asked, his eyes sparkling like two tiny stars. Father shook his head, his curly hair waving in the cool breeze like young bamboo swaying with the wind in an August storm. Father at the time looked like a Robinson Crusoe, marooned on a lonely island in the South Pacific. He had gone a year without a haircut and was looking shabby with a long beard that covered the contours of his mouth.

"Come," Lacuasan said, "let's pay a visit!" The ulog was a square matchbox construction of bamboo, wood, and cogon with no opening except for a door to one side and reached by a movable staircase used by the maidens of Bauko every night. Here these young unmarried girls would sleep. Young boys, barely in their teens, frequented the ulog in the evenings to express their love to the maidens whom attracted them the most. If the young girl favors a relationship, she'd invite the boy to come up where they'd sleep together using a common pillow made of hardwood as big as the girl's thigh.

Sexual contact was strictly forbidden and a boy had better think twice before making ungentleman like advances towards the girl he loves. Bauko's young men are well disciplined so that mashing and even kissing and petting are absolutely taboo.

Lacuasan had to brief Father before an encounter with the girl he planned to date overnight. At first, Father was uneasy because he was completely ignorant of the customs of the places. But, with much tapey in his blood, he regained his courage and bravado.

Young Filipinos, they say, are fast lovers and Father did not find it hard to start. That was how he came to meet Maila. To him, Maila appeared a different breed from the rest of the girls; she was clean and neat and properly dressed in the native costume. Her hair carried a special scent like the ilang-ilang flower nipped as a bud, and a carnation petal adorned her way brownish hair. Her skin was flawless, reddish-white, and she looked like a goddess standing atop a boulder caressed by the sweet mountain air.

Maila was a half-breed, American blended with Igorot blood. Before the Great Wr she was a senior in a high school ran by Belgian sisters in Baguio. She spoke English fluently with an accent, and it was not long before Father learned that this mountain beauty was indeed very bright and intelligent. Father also found out that she was a student writer, the editor of her school paper, The Baguio Breeze.

Father was deeply impressed during the first meeting with Maila. From the start, Father enjoyed her company because, besides being a good conversationalist, she was adept at literature and could recite pieces of classic poetry from Walt Whitman to Tagore. Father fell in love with Maila on that first evening, their very first encounter.

Maila laughed loudly when father proposed to her. "You're a lowlander," she said. "I hail from a land above the clouds. How can that be possible? Shal, I stoop so easily li,e a giant from the sky to love a man from a civilized world? I'm of Igorot stock, looked down on by you lowlanders."

"No, we can never meet, " she signed heavily. The dimples in her cheek sparkled like bonfire and were very attractive in my Father's sight. "You forget that we come from two different worlds, two different spheres."

A big lump in Father's throat rendered him speechless. He knew he loved Maila and nothing would keep him from loving her more He was the type who never ran from a fight. He came from a family of hardworking peasants, unafraid to face adversity or anything that taunted his pride, courage, and honor. Now was his chance to try his luck in love. Maila was the answer to his dreams and imagination.

"Love has no boundaries, Maila," Father replied, "No, not even gaps in culture, origin, heritage, creed, skin or social status are barriers to it." Maila stared at Father hard and long. She smiled shyly and Father understood that Maila loved him too. She then stood up and muttered, " Andy, here in Bauko, we possess a priceless tradition of honor. If a suitor defeats a girl in a selected competition then she is conquered. Tomorrow, as soon as the great sun rises in the east, challenge me to a race. We wil, run uphill." She pointed to a treeless hill not far from where they stood.

"I gladly accept your challenge, Father replied, his voice a little louder than usual.

The early morning was murky in Bauko. Thick fog enveloped Lacuasan's hut atop the knoll. All around, there was an endless sea of mist. In high spirits , Father trodden the dewy grass like a colt prancing in pasture. The sun shone metallic dull and it's faint beams peeped through a thin veil of mist in the eastern horizon. He stared at the sunflowers and carnations scattered in abundance over the slopes of the Bauko mountainsides.

Maila appeared suddenly at the base of the barren hill where the race was to be held. Lacuasan was to draw the starting line. Pulling his pistol from a leather holster tucked in his waist, he advised the competitors to be ready and with the bark of his gun they were to climb the hill as fast as they could.

When the gun barked, Maila darted towards the summit like a frightened deer, her legs appeared like rapid clogs spiking furiously upwards. Meanwhile, Father sped up like a jet hitting fist-sized boulders with lightening ferocity. Father knew he was exhibiting now his prowess in the century race back in his high school years when he romped away with a gold medal in the pre-war national athletic meet in Manila. The Bauko beauty gasped for breath but she was no match for the lowlander, this soldier of fortune who had drifted up to the Bauko highland to hide from Japanese hounds.

"I surrender to you, Andy," Maila calmly admitted, breathing hard. "I didn't know you were a sprinter for the first caliber." She knelt down to catch her breath.

"And so?"

"Of course, the jog is up and I am now yours," was the curt reply. That was how Father won the the heart of Maila. Gasping for breath, Father walked slowly towards her. Clutching her by the shoulders, he gazed into her eyes. They held hands as they ascended a promontory. At the summit stood a solitary pine tree casting it's shade over a clean boulder. Here they sat together.

The sun now shone clearly and resplendent. The flowers around them bid a joyous celebration. Lacuasan followed them and congratulated both victor and vanquished and to Father for winning the heart of the fastest girl in Bauko.

IN EARLY DECEMBER, a runner from Volckmann's headquarters up in Kapangan visited the two guerrilleros. He handed Father a field order instructing them to report to headquarters for further duty as the forces of General MacArthur were fast approaching the beaches at Lingayen. In January, the liberation forces tangled with the Japanese army everywhere in Luzon. The Allied Forces surrounded the enemy in the mountain provinces by placing the infantry divisions to route Yamashita's forces holed up in Kiangan. Father and Lacuasan returned to their respective outfits to join the bloody encounters with Japanese soldiers in Bessang, Lepanto, and Kayan, the last being but a stone's throw from Bauko. In late August, the Americans issues an ultimatum to Yamashita's forces to surrender. That after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where thousands of Japanese were killed by atomic bombs. Yamashita had to surrender unconditionally.

The GIs boarded the jeep with Lacuasan at the wheel. Father waved at the Bauko beauties as the jeep moved away. Maila and the others waved back. He caught Maila's eyes supplicating. She had not stopped crying since their hands parted in a muted farewell. Looking back once more, he thought he saw Maila's lips, parted, imploring him to return. But the jeep made a sharp turn at the fork in the road and they were met by a strong wind from the vegetable fields lining the road, accentuating the fact that the poblacion was already behind them.

With the surrender of the wily Tiger of Malaysia and his forces, after the last prisoners of war were settled in camps in the lowlands, Father and Lakuasan hurriedly left for Bauko for a brief respite. Maila and her friends arranged a homecoming celebration for the two soldiers. That night the moon was big and round and the cool Bauko air hovered over the schoolhouse where the lively event was to be held.

On a clear Sunday morning, after the sun had dissipated the thick fog enveloping the Bauko skyline, Maila and her friends stood in front of the schoolhouse to bid Father and Lacuasan goodbye. The two GIs had a new assignment somewhere in La Union.

"Of course, I shall return," Father calmly told Maila, clutching her cold hands tightly. His lips quivered and Maila, shaking with grief, placed a lei of fresh everlasting flowers over Father's neck. She was sobbing so hard as Father consoled hee by lightly patting her back.

This short story is authored by Yolanda V. Ablang taken from Ilocano Harvest (a collection of short stories in English by Ilocano Authors). Edited by Pelagio Alcantara and Miguel S. Diaz. Published by New Day Publishing, 1988, in Quezon City.

Photos are not mine, but taken from the Internet, including australianmuseum.net.au

Filipino women were on equal footing with men.

“In most aspects of life, pre-colonial women enjoyed the same rights, privileges, and opportunities as did men,” wrote activist nun Mary John Mananzan in her essay “The Pre-colonial Filipina.”

She also recounted how if females were to marry, they didn’t lose their names, and in fact, among the Tagalogs, if the woman was especially distinguished (in class or achievement), the husband takes the name of the wife. Females were also made to take charge when it comes to finances and landholdings, and contracts with Chinese merchants even required to have women’s signatures because women were proven reliable.

During that time, virginity was also not seen as a value that should be upheld. In the essay, Mananzan explained how when the Spaniards came in 1521, they were appalled by the freedom that women had, a freedom that did not coincide with their idea of how a woman should behave. Hence, the Spanish worked to transform Filipinas into how women were in Iberian society — sheltered and reserved.

Ancient Filipinos celebrated a woman’s first menstruation.

The Boxer Codex, a Spanish manuscript detailing the lives of pre-Spanish Philippines, includes details of how when a woman got her menarche or her first menstruation, she underwent a ceremony known as “dating,” where she was blindfolded and secluded in a windowless space for four days.

Once her menstrual period was over, she was led to a stream for a bath but her feet were not allowed to touch the ground, so she was either carried or made to walk on an elevated pathway.

When she returned home, oil or musk would be put on her body, which was then followed by two nights of singing. During this time, only females were allowed to be around her.

This ceremony also marked the woman as someone who can now be married.

Women underwent cranial reformation to be deemed beautiful.

Cranial reformation, a process by which the skull is made to be reshaped, was a type of body adornment in pre-colonial Philippines. Anthropologists during the excavation in Butuan City in the mid-70s found that the skulls were made to slant backwards. This then made the chin assume an upward position, which elevated the stance of early Filipinos.

Cranial reformation was done by wrapping the head of an infant with a cloth or attaching small wooden boards around an infant’s head, and then gradually taking these off upon maturity. The anthropologists at Butuan did not find any of these for male Filipinos, only with females, which contributed to their theory that the process was possibly done for beautification.

References:

“Kasaysayan: The Earliest Filipinos” by Cecilio G. Salcedo, Wilfredo P. Ronquillo, Eusebio Z. Dizon, and Fr. Gabriel S. Casal

“Isabelo’s Archive” by Resil B. Mojares [accessed online]

Pre-colonial inhabitants were already literate.

In 1663, Spanish missionary Francisco Colin noted that “the people cling fondly to their own methods of writing and reading. There is scarcely a man, nor a woman, who does not know and practice that method, even those who are already Christian in matters of devotion.”

Those who were living in coastal communities were said to be the most literate among early Filipinos — the Ilocanos, the Pangasinense, the Pampangos, the Tagalogs, the Samar-Leyte groups, the Negrenses, and the Butuanons.

However, as soon as the Spaniards introduced the Roman alphabet to the early Filipinos, the latter were made to look inadequate, which helped the Spaniards’ argument that the Filipinos at that time were not civilized.

The earliest form of Philippine literature was the riddle.

In author and professor Damiana Eugenio’s essay, “Riddles to Tease and Teach,” she asserted that riddles were among the first and most common use of words. “Like proverbs, most are characterized by brevity, wit, and felicitous phrasing, and as such are effective ways of transmitting folk wisdom to succeeding generations,” she wrote.

Eugenio adds that riddles have been found in every ethnolinguistic group across the Philippines: bugtong in Tagalog and Pampango, patoto’don in Bikol, burburtia in Iloko, pabitla in Pangasinan, kabbuni in Ivatan, tigmo in Cebuano, paktakon in Hiligaynon, titiguhon in Waray, antoka in Maranao, and tigum-tigum in Tausug.

Nonsense words were also coined just so it can go well with a particular rhythm. A riddle was found with the title “Kukurukutong,” but this was only a fictitious name for a person that was used to rhyme with the sentence “Bumubula’y walang gatong.”

The earliest coin was made of gold.

It’s no surprise that most pre-colonial Filipinos had no knowledge of money, but instead were trading through gold. In author Angelita Legarda’s essay “Small Change,” she noted that early Spanish chroniclers noted that Filipinos then were already experts at evaluating the quality of gold.

Coin specialists have also found the earliest Filipino coin, which was “a small gold piece no larger than a pea, shaped like a rounded cone, with a character stamped in relief at the base,” and called it ‘piloncito.’ They called it such because the gold bits looked the same as the sugar receptacle called ‘pilon.’

Further proof that the gold bits were indeed the coins used by early Filipinos surfaced when the largest piloncito was found to weigh 2.65 grams, which is equivalent to one ‘mas,’ the standard weight of gold that was used across Southeast Asia.

When someone dies, they make the corpse “smoke” strong tobacco.

When a person died, the family members constructed a chair that they then attached to the stilts of the house. The corpse, whose body was wrapped in a blanket, would then be placed on the chair, as if sitting.

The corpse was then made to “smoke” tobacco to avert bacteria from entering the body. One end of the tobacco would be inserted into the mouth of the corpse and then someone would puff the smoke into the dead body’s mouth. Water boiled with guava leaves were then used to wash the skin, and the washing continued until there was no fluid coming out of the corpse’s body.

On the third or fourth day after the washing, the dead body would be placed under sunlight and everyone in the community would help in peeling off the skin of the body before they’re put in a coffin.

***

Excerpts from CNN Philippines articles from October 16, 2018.

References:

"Kasaysayan: The earliest Filipinos," by Salcedo, Ronquiilo, Dizon, and Casal

FEU’s Golden Rule

Past UAAP season’s presented a peculiar conundrum: the challenge to unite the FEU crowd behind one color. In an arena where archers are always green and eagles always blue, our green and gold proved equally popular.

I recall one specific game in 2014 at the Araneta Coliseum that left me with a particularly bitter taste of envy. The FEU Men’s Senior Basketball team competed against Ateneo’s Blue Eagles. It was a trying game for our side as the opposing team’s sixth man chanted in deafening unison while the expansive blue clad crowd drowned our fans who couldn’t even muster a united color bloc. The FEU crowd was an unfortunate kaleidoscope.

This season, we attacked the situation with a plan. FEU will own the gold. The campaign was established: ALL GOLD FOR ALL GAMES – a simple poignant message that hit social media and stuck. FEU will insist and own the gold. Banners were hung in each campus bookstore publicizing the season’s golden rule. It was an added bonus that the Cheerdance Competition’s choice of color fell in line with the campaign.

We all witnessed a gilded compact mass stretching 360 around the stands of Mall of Asia (MOA). And in this finals, there were no boundaries between FEU and USTs outside the celebratory cries that echoed as each team scored. During the final game, FEUSCO distributed countless hand-cut pieces of neon green fabric that undulated across our side from courtside to the rafters. Countless FEU smart phone touch screens glowed green during the final minutes of the game with cosmic verisimilitude and in the collective knowledge that this was our time, at long last, once again.

TAMS 2020

The success of our unity was not in vain. The TAMS Bookstore had decided in August to donate Php 20 of each shirt sale to TAMS 2020, the university’s initiative in collaboration with the World Wildlife Foundation to double the tamaraw population by 2020, and to save our mascot from extinction.

Sales began in August with the Pep Rally and by the end of the Men’s Senior Basketball team’s first round, the TAMS Bookstore had raised a measly Php 8,400. The second round proved more fortuitous as school spirit escalated and the bookstore counted over 2,000 spirit shirts sold in its stores system wide, more than quadrupling its TAMS 2020 donation to just under 44,000 pesos.

When FEU secured the UAAP’s most coveted prize, the Senior Men’s Basketball championship title, the TAMS Bookstore’s suppliers, anticipating our victory, produced tees celebrating our success with fresh designs. From December 2 until our campuses closed for the holidays, the bookstore’s donation amounted to an incredible 106,000 pesos, with a total donation amounting to 160,660 pesos.