By the last month of 2019, the forecast for the coming year, 2020, had already been released. The diviners whose marketing skills had become more elegant than their foretelling abilities had assured and reassured their clients that the year about to be with us would bring in fortune and good fate.
There were warnings. What is a forecast without the shadow of ill omen? And yet it was precisely on the doomday aspect of prediction that the soothsayers built their armors of defenses—metal gadgets that could dissuade and persuade the hidden forces around us to change course in our favor or to follow a course that would be good for us. For us poor worshippers at the shrine of fortune telling, there were the plastic versions of these devices—inferior simulacra—but “potent enough,” the soothsayer with a studied shiver, and in call-center English, whispered to the ears of the desperate and the merely curious.
But we know what happened some two months into 2020. The world was placed in a lockdown.
The divination was not divine enough. The geomancy or earth magic now available in malls and beauty parlors proved ineffectual before a virus. Something unseen was threatening the seen. How could we miss that?
With the big cities closed, residents who were migrants opted to go home to the province. This was an impulse that did not belong to the present dispensation. In songs, poems and memories, the province or countryside was the pristine place—the rivers clean, the trees and grasses greener, the food fresh and abundant. Forgetfulness preyed upon us because presently provinces had been the seat of poverty, where the employment was scarce and the opportunities limited.
But to home we did go.
Then came the truth: the provinces—the towns and villages—did not want us who travelled from the cities. When before we were bearers of gifts and tidings, we became carriers of infection. We had to be isolated, checked, and numbered. Announcements online tracked people through mobile phone numbers divulged by either their friends or families. When “caught,” many were placed in quarantine areas situated outside cities and towns. Those who did not manifest symptoms were allowed to go home and ordered to follow health protocols in distancing and avoidance. In some places, a rectangular tarp were hanged outside the gate of the home where a person or persons were quarantined.
At a certain point, I wanted to go home to my birthplace. This was the town of San Fernando, Ticao Island. I wanted the seclusion. Called “isla” by those who lived on the mainland Masbate (also an island), Ticao had always been viewed as different and distant.
My brother, Manong Pempe, who was a young activist when martial law was declared in 1972 had to travel to San Fernando and there waited for a few days to see what would be happening in the country. He recalled how he was welcomed warmly by everyone—from the mayor to the policemen. Kinship went above politics. But that was a long time ago.
In April of 2020, the people of Ticao were guarding, it was told, the islands. There were no real boundaries unless you think of the wide expanse of the sea and the seashore. Every outsider was viewed with caution.
I gave up on my plan to be there, to stay for months, even to teach in any local school.
There was also something I could not just tell anyone about my wish to escape the lockdown by going to a small island: I wanted to explore the enchantment of the place once more.
I believe in enchantment in that I believe in the many unseen forces in our lives. I believe also that if I went back to the wellspring of all my memories, I could be free of the anxieties of any kind of affliction.
Memories being unseen are like all enchanting elements that are also unseen, but felt and could be summoned.
How would the New Year come upon me if I were on the island of my birth? Would the magic of another year dawning, itself an enchantment, be enough for me to see the past again, the home free of any virus that the world did not know would kill millions?
Death is, by the way, also an enchantment, as Life, the most regular, is.
Weeks before the end of this December, news from the island came online. It was about the killing of some five or seven men and women. As with news like this, the tendency was to look for who to blame. The suspects had always something to do with the left, the right, the center. The body killed or mutilated could be attributed to a point in ideological space.
We had to find the perpetrator or the world would not go on. That is the essence of loss.
It is several days before the New Year. I am at home in Naga, my place of isolation where each day I, like the rest of the Filipinos, wonder if the virus would catch me. Already, a good friend is in the government hospital. His wife is there. Their home has been marked. A mutated version is troubling the world. Except for scientists and people looking through powerful instruments, we do not see this plague. It holds no form; it assumes no shape. We see it in survival, as well as in deaths.
Soon, a new year will be upon us. Soon, we will be enchanted once more by the idea that the world has aged another year, and we are still breathing.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com