Iwas trying the gray rattan chair with metal legs on the porch of my hotel room, one night, in Iloilo. The river across the esplanade was catching the moonlight and it sent shivers of silent ripples across the thick mangrove guarding it.
It was early summer. And because it was just March, when the real constant heat was yet to be born, there was a slight chill when the horizon darkened. And that night, I discovered the phenomenon of the absent wind.
It was unlike any wind because there was no predictable origin and it seemed to have any direction. It started right above my head, swirling around, and moved as quietly as it came. From afar, a tall tree started to bend from its lean trunk, the small crown moving as if a mighty hand had touched it and crumpled gently its dark, green leaves.
I kept looking at this tree because around it, the other trees, with heftier bodies, and the bushes and shrubs, remained unmoved.
Still, it is a quiet wind. Soon, a slight breeze touched my cheeks as the whiff began to swell into this wind that wrapped around my face. I could not breathe for a moment, as the thick air grew and grew over my face. Like the first wind, it did not come from anywhere; rather, it appeared right where it touched me.
This went on and on and not even the moon over the river, now bearing a magical sheen, could steal these winds that have no ancestors, and no distant cousins. They were born anywhere and they leave and —I assume—die, sometimes briskly, most of the time courageously fading away, into the nothingness. I beg your indulgence: I do not mean anything poetic or philosophical about this “nothingness”; it’s just that these winds do disappear into the ether and are never “seen” again. And when another of this sort of wind appeared, I knew it was this kind of wind, the one I called “the absent wind.”
I needed more explanation just so that I would not be scared when an absent wind became impatient with me.
Here is the myth of the Absent Wind: A long time ago, all winds were assigned a provenance and an area of disappearance. They had to be predictable in order to protect the human groups that depended on the heat, the chill, the air, and the wind. But not all creatures of the Great God were obedient; some were born not to follow rules. Some were born to boast, to be bags of wind so-called. One day, this Great God ordered all breezes, air, fog and mist to report at the Great Hall. There the Great one once more reviewed the rules of engagement for all these elements. The winds in particular were instructed once more, how they all should begin from a source that was not only known but also predictable. But, at the porch or by the window when I opt to open the house to the energies of the sun, the moon and the stars, there are winds that burst upon you, or materialize right in your face, or past your body. These, I would find out later, were part of the clan of the Absent Wind. These were the fogs and mist, the breeze and strong air that did not attend the announcement on the rules of engagement for them vis-a-vis Nature that, while predictable, still is answerable to us when it releases errant winds of destruction.
The absent wind, however, is generally benign. It is a wind of memory. This function I would discover one day while I was rummaging through my old books. As I held one book, its cover a bit tattered on its edge, an absent wind skimmed over a page. Other pages opened and soon, there was a flurry of small notes and one photograph on the floor.
The photograph turned out to be my brother’s. He looked cool. He was the handsome one in the family. He passed on quite young because of cancer. We were all devastated. After he was buried, I could not sleep without the lights on. It was not because I was scared of the ghosts and other phantasms in the dark but because I equated the dark with death, of passing on.
We, of course, have never forgotten about him. But, as with all etiquettes on death, we remember but rarely need props to remember all things. We do not need photos to memorize the faces of those who we loved but are not with us anymore. And yet on that day the photo was seen, I had the urge to ask myself if I still knew how Manong Pempe looked. Or, whether I would recognize him at present.
The absent wind had brought me the photo and I looked at it over and above all other items. Love alone, I told myself, does not allow to mark in our mind indelibly images of our kin and other beloved; a technology that ably supports mind as storage can help us remember our loved ones. It is a must to be able to see the photo of my brother to assure myself that I still knew his face.
Soon, I was relying on the absent wind to blow off into our living room or revive from other documents, lost letters, small notes from former students, photographs. The effect brought on by the absent wind stopped being confronted with icons of death and disappearances; remembering is benign, memories are constructive and not destructive.
One day, the absent wind brought inside my home feathers of birds. Huge and tiny feathers, the latter can be explained by little birds; the former a puzzle. Could these feathers be signs that Angels are visiting me? My conclusion: The Absent Wind is really an Archangel lost in the space of good and evil and good again.
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