Kanlaon

Every day, her bed is made and the towels are replaced.  Yes, even if she ends up leaving the room for only half an hour to have breakfast in the restaurant on the 4th floor.  She keeps the DO NOT DISTURBED sign on the door handle as long as she is in the room; she takes it off when she leaves.  And that’s when the unseen spirit slips in, changes or smooths the bedsheets, arranges her books neatly on the bedside table, makes sure her slippers and shoes are lined up and pointing in one direction, towards the wall.

Every day, self feels a terrible anxiety:  time is passing!  She should have revised her novel by now.  Instead, she feels she is missing something.  She should either have gone to the uma (as they refer to the farm here) or visited another town or taken the jeep to the plaza.  She stays in her room as long as she can, so that when she finally emerges, she is amazed that the world is so beautiful, the breeze so warm, the trees so green.  She looks out at the same rooftops, every day.  Every day she has to stop, linger at the view (which is nothing spectacular, really:  just lines of low-roofed houses, palm trees, ending up in the pier)

With a shock she realizes that she is doing the same thing she did during her trip in December:  that is, she reads as if she is sleepwalking.  During the first week of this current trip to Bacolod, she managed to read only 60 pages of Sepharad.  And the book is nowhere near as dense or cryptic as Saramago’s The Cave was.  Back home, in California, self reads 60 pages a day.  What can be happening to her?

On this trip, self took tricycles and jeepneys and had massages at odd hours and ordered pots and pots of brewed coffee from Room Service and watched The Good Wife and Glee and watched Joan Rivers dissect the gowns worn by actresses to the Golden Globes and wondered at the groundswell of Oscar buzz surrounding a small British movie she had managed to see with hubby in the few weeks she was home for the holidays, The King’s Speech.

She tries to go to the Balay Daku often.  Earlier today, she took a jeep and as she entered the tall, green gate a guard greeted her and she kept on walking and looked up, up, to the very top of the house and it looked like a snapshot.  Everything was exactly the same as it had been when she was four, five, six.

In the Balay Daku, on shelves in the glass-fronted cabinets, are pictures of Dear Departed Sister.  Pictures of Dear Departed Sister’s children.  Pictures of self’s brothers and their children.  But none of self.  None.  Not even one of her as a young girl, when she spent every summer in Bacolod.  The irony is that, of her entire family, self has spent the most time in Bacolod –  not, of course, as much time as Dear Departed Dad, who grew up there, but certainly more time than Dear Departed Sister, or any of her brothers.

Perhaps she gave up her birthright when she went to America and married a man who wasn’t from this province or anywhere near it, who in fact wanted to get away from the Philippines because he hadn’t been altogether happy when he lived there.

Every day, she thinks and dreams and wonders what is happening to her, what gave her the stubborness and will to resist everyone who tells her to quit and get herself over to Manila where she (everyone seems to think) belongs.  Even better, she should get herself back to California, because she has no idea anymore how to behave.  She is lost, a foreigner, an American citizen.  Her home is there.

Here is what self read a moment ago on p. 131 of Sepharad.  It’s about a real person, Willi Munzenberg, who escaped from a prison camp at the very start of World War II, accompanied by two other men who he thought were friends but who, it turned out, had been sent by Stalin to the prison camp where Munzenberg had been incarcerated, sent there with the express purpose of killing him.  The two helped Munzenberg escape from the camp and, together, the three headed into a forest, from which only the two emerged.

Self loves this passage because she thinks it captures something Munzenberg must have realized only very close to the end (Another reason self loves this book:  it has helped her discover real people, people like Sanz Briz, who during World War II was a minor staff member of the Spanish consulate in Hungary:  he issued, on his own authority, Spanish passports to thousands of Jews, thereby permitting them to escape Europe with their lives.  Self looked up Munzinger and landed on Wikipedia):

All his life was a game between show and inevitability, between veiled power and the weightless splendor of appearances, and in the end he was invisible, erased from history by the same powerful people he served so well, the ones who in early June of 1940 hanged him from a tree in a forest in France.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.