1.
I sat on a fallen tree at the edge of the village. The hot field stretched before me up to the horizon, and the brightness of the sun hurt my eyes. Once in a while, I would take a swig of ginger broth from a bottle that my sister prepared for me earlier that morning. She had been awake all night, hovering over the various relatives who had converged on the village for her wedding. It was to be grandest wedding ever seen in this corner of the province, and all around her, relations and friends chattered in various accents, a tribute to the size of my grandfather’s clan.
But I found the crowd incomplete until I had seen the arrival of my cousin Ofelia from the highlands. I nagged my sister for confirmation that Tia Elena was bringing her down for the wedding. I had not seen her for four years, but memories of the games we played sat very clearly on my mind.
At the age of nine, she still cries a lot, my aunt had written ahead of them. She inherited her father’s sadness, it seems. I found those phrases strange because the Ofelia I remembered had a bright smile as she waved goodbye to us across a flooded stream. We visited their farm in the mountains one rainy season, and we left for the lowlands just as the monsoon weather was gathering strength. Everybody knew that the coming rains would bring difficulties, but even in the face of such hardship I had never seen her cry.
At around noon, when most of the broth had disappeared down my throat, my vigilance was finally rewarded by the appearance of a horse-drawn calesa in the distance. I raised my arms in greeting, feeling a little foolish under that hot sun. As the carriage drew abreast I ran alongside the horse, still unsure whether Ofelia was in the vehicle or not. I saw a woman in black with a sad but smiling face, and I recognized Tia Elena, the woman with the Castilian face who was the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish soldier. I shouted happily and she waved her arm in recognition. I ran dangerously close to the horse, and the cuchero waved me away with his horsewhip.
“Where is Ofelia? Where is Ofelia?” I kept shouting against the noise. Tia Elena smiled and moved aside to show a shy face hiding behind her shawl. I saw the tear-stained cheeks flushed by hours of travelling. I saw the round, innocent eyes that registered fear of the strange surroundings, fear of this boy running wildly alongside the carriage. The sight of her tears suddenly drained my energies and I slowed down to a trot. I watched the calesa as it entered the village with the tearful Ofelia burying her face into her mother’s lap. On all sides, people gathered by their windows to watch the new arrivals come in.
The whole clan gathered before the house to welcome Tia Elena and her daughter, who had to travel the farthest just to attend this wedding. Even without that distinction, my aunt would still occupy an honorable place in the guests’ table because of her Iberian looks. Her aquiline nose stood apart in a sea of flat noses, her white skin was a sensation in the brown world she was born in. She waved wanly to the crowd as she alighted, with pale Ofelia clutching her hemline.
I made myself as conspicuous as possible, hoping for an expression of recognition from my cousin. I am here, my beaming face was virtually shouting, remember the time we risked a spanking by burying ourselves in the rice granaries?
The crowd parted and allowed them up the stairs, my mother and sister leading the way. As she went past me, I tugged at Ofelia’s sleeves. She looked at me and raised her arms defensively, and then she moved to the other side of her mother. The rush of relatives pushing upstairs then hid them from view. I sat on an empty bamboo bench and drank the rest of my sister’s ginger broth, crushed by the rejection.
I did not see them for the rest of the afternoon but later that evening, Tia Elena came down to help with the cooking. Her soft, Mediterranean face lit up when she saw me and she wiped her hands hastily and planted a kiss on my cheeks.
“How you have grown,” she said. Her face reminded me of the picture of saints in the nearby chapel, although hers was sadder. Years later, I would learn that Tia Elena’s looks were the blessing and the curse that brought her isolation from the rest of her family. Half sister to four brothers and six sisters (my mother among them), she was always a curiosity being shown off by my great grandfather. Her father was a soldier from Castille who had been exiled to the Philippines for minor thefts. On the last months of Spanish rule, he was assigned to a detachment that gave token resistance to the advancing Americans. Passing by this village half a century before my generation, he met my grandmother, then just newly widowed, and he stayed just long enough to get her pregnant. The resulting child was a sensation in the village, envied by her sisters and brothers, a white child whose only maternal inheritance was her dark hair.
“Where is Ofelia,” I asked. She smiled uncomfortably, the lines around her mouth showing clearly by the light of the stove.
“I am afraid she is not well. The crowd makes her feel uncomfortable. Go find out how she is. I left her sleeping in your sister’s room.”
I went upstairs and tiptoed past relatives resting in hallways and under tables. I listened closely in front of my sister’s room and when I heard voices I pushed the door open. Four or five women were already asleep in various positions around the room. In a corner I saw my sister cradling Ofelia like a baby, talking to her softly and swaying as if to lull her to sleep.
“When is mother going to be finished?” I heard Ofelia ask. At that moment, my sister saw me and she motioned for me to come in. Ofelia raised her eyes and looked at me suspiciously.
“You remember your cousin, don’t you?” my sister asked. “He told me about the games you played up in the mountains. Would you like to play with him now?”
I edged closer to the two of them. “How are you, Ofelia?” I whispered. “I watched you come in this afternoon. Did you see me run with the horse?”
By the light of the lamp, I saw the fear creeping back into her face. My sister hugged the girl closer and I stood up to leave the room, but then she addressed her next question to me.
“When is my mother going to be finished?”
I knelt down once more beside her, thankful for her acknowledgement of my presence.
“She will be here soon. You should see the buntings downstairs. Paper lanterns that glow in the dark, lamps that rotate by themselves. Things you never see up in the mountains. Would you like to see them now?”
My sister saw the chance to be able to return to her preparations. She helped Ofelia to her feet and, to our surprise, she allowed us to lead her towards the door. As all three of us stepped around the sleeping bodies, I held my cousin’s hand and I shuddered at its coldness. I felt an intense desire to turn around and do a foolish dance, to fly through the air and do handstands, anything just so I could make Ofelia smile again the way she was smiling across that flooded river ages ago. Instead, I walked her across that creaking house, trying to understand her fear in the dark, wondering what it was that made her grow old.
2.
Before dawn the next morning, a procession of gaily-coloured carriages set out in the dark for the wedding ceremonies in the central part of town. I sat next to Ofelia by the window, our chins set firmly on the hard bamboo sills. Before us, lanterns shone at various heights, throwing our front yard into a kind of light that I had never seen before.
“So many people,” Ofelia murmured to herself. She clasped her hands in veneration of something that she would remember for a long time. Below us, Tia Elena waved at us from a one-horse tilburin. A few yards away, my sister sat resplendently in her flower-bedecked calesa, while mother fussed over her in the cramped space of the carriage. In one corner of the yard, a brass band hired at great cost from a distant town stopped tuning up and started playing its softest tune. The first of the vehicles started pulling out of the yard, which emptied fast as the onlookers scampered after the procession. Even the drum major got the drift of things and waved his musicians into the street.
When the last spectator disappeared around the bend, I looked around and saw that, save for the cooks downstairs, only Ofelia and I were left in the house. I helped her down from the bench and we went to the kitchen, where the tables were set and waiting for the guests to return. The house felt strangely quiet after the commotion of the last two days.
“What new games have you learned since we last played?”, I asked.
“I am good in hiding”.
“That is an old game. Surely you played hide and seek even before we knew each other.”
“I like the hiding without the seeking. I like dark places, places where old clothes are kept, places that smell of cobwebs.”
“We have a granary like that under the backstairs. I hide there whenever I get in trouble.”
Ofelia’s face lit up for the first time. Emboldened, I led her past the kitchen and we went down the back way. The sun had just come up from behind the mountains and the crowd was trickling back into the front yard. I felt a delicious feeling of escape as I led my cousin to a small door barely visible under the bamboo ladder. The door met an obstacle on my first push but it yielded after a few more tries.
I pushed Ofelia into the darkness and I was surprised at her eagerness to be swallowed by the gloom. We went past the stored odds and ends until we reached the corner where the unhusked rice was stored knee-deep against the wall. She sat on some empty sacks and I sat across from her, trying to imagine what to say next. In the darkness I heard Ofelia sigh and I knew from the muffled sound of it that she had her head on her knees.
“Remember the last time we did this in San Alfonso?” I asked, but no answer came. For the next hour or so, nothing I said could elicit a response from Ofelia. Occasionally, she would sigh and shift her head a little, but she gave no indication that she was aware of my presence. Finally, I reached out to assure myself that she was still there and I touched an unresponsive shoulder.
It is not surprising, the way she had turned out, I remembered my mother whispering to my sister. Her father’s family had this malady that set them apart from others. Her uncle was an addled priest who once shocked his parish by preaching in his underwear. Her father, a goat-farmer from San Alfonso, killed himself by jumping from a palm tree after the maggots ate half his brain. Tia Elena may be the fairest among us, but her luck ran out the moment she met Ofelia’s father.
Above us I heard the slippers going slap-slap against the bamboo floor. At the same time, we heard the brass band approaching with a lively tune that brought both of us to our feet. We scampered back to the opening and ran towards the front yard, forgetting to close the granary door behind us.
We came into the scene just as the wedding carriage was pulling into the yard. My sister’s resplendent wedding gown occupied a large part of the passenger seat, almost obliterating the happy groom beside her. My sister’s makeup had by now been messed up by countless kisses but her big smile shone through. People stepped forward to help the newlyweds get down from the unsteady two-wheeled vehicle. A few squeals went up as my sister’s gown got caught in the carriage’s various protuberances. As her feet touched the ground, a large cheer went up, and then things started going wrong.
A well-meaning old man named Gabriel stepped forward from the crowd and lit the first of several fireworks. As the missile shot up with an angry swish, the crowd broke into ooohs and aaahs. The noise startled my sister and her groom, who did not expect this part of the celebration. Nevertheless they joined the crowd in applauding the first explosion that spread like an oversized umbrella in the sky.
I looked at Ofelia to see how she was taking the noise. I was gladdened to see her upturned face with a half smile on it, but I saw, too, that her hands were clasped together so tightly that the knuckles and fingers seemed bloodless.
Gabriel, the well-meaning fool then lit his second rocket, but he moved back much too early. The missile shot up at an angle, hit the awning of a second floor window and then arched back towards the ground. It went past the horse, which caused the animal to bolt upright, knocking most of the wedding group to the ground. The errant rocket then richoceted madly around the yard, scattering people and furniture around like paper toys. And then, with a deafening explosion, the firecracker ended its journey a few feet from where Ofelia and I stood frozen.
As a delayed reaction, I threw myself to the ground, my head reeling as if the rocket exploded between my ears. A continuous high-pitched scream filled my head and I must have spent several minutes rolling in the ground with my hands on my ears.
Eventually somebody helped me to my feet and for the first time I noticed the absence of Ofelia. As the stunned crowd sorted itself out I ran from group to group calling her name out. Somewhere along, a distraught Tia Elena joined me and we went through the whole house and yard but the search turned up nothing.
“The granary,” I shouted to my aunt. I ran to the back of the house and into the still open door, groping my way towards the corner where we sat but I found the spot empty. I burrowed deep into the pile of rice but Ofelia was not there. I went out and rejoined Tia Elena, who by now was becoming hysterical.
A woman was shouting from the backyard. She remembered seeing a girl running through the back gate towards the woods. “She was as pale as a sheet”, the woman said. Tia Elena pleaded for some people to go with us and we ran towards the trail that led to the hills at the back. A few yards on, we reached a fork in the trail.
“Somebody go down that track towards the river,” a man shouted. “We will cover the trail to the hills.”
Instinctively, I turned left and joined the group heading for the river. Tia Elena, unfamiliar with the terrain, hesitated for a while and then ran after me. We fanned out into the meadows sloping towards the river, calling out Ofelia’s name until we reached the edge of the water.
In the heat of summer the river had been reduced to a weak stream and we all jumped into the shallow water. We scanned the deeper parts of the river while others climbed into the clearing at the other side. We were into the search only a few minutes when somebody ahead shouted: “I found her. She’s here.!”.
Tia Elena ran forward and screamed. Ofelia lay motionless with her face down on waters two or three inches deep, her slippers floating serenely beside her feet. A dozen hands shot out and lifted her from the stream. To everybody’s relief she gasped and coughed convulsively the moment she was turned upright. Tia Elena asked the men to set her face down on the sand and for the next ten minutes, she massaged the water out of her lungs. A trickle of blood flowed from her left ear and her knee was bloodied by several falls.
She kept her eyes shut tightly even after she had gained full consciousness, and no amount of pleading from me or her mother would make her release her clenched fists. I kept calling out her name, but the sound of my voice seemed to be pushing her deeper into her hiding place.
We carried her rigid body back to the house, where the celebrations had been set on hold because of the mishap. Gabriel sat crying like a child beside the stairs, still clutching his unused rockets. A man was offering him beer to calm him down.
My mother came forward with some towels and they wrapped the pale child in it. My sister had by now slipped out of her wedding dress and she helped carry Ofelia into a bedroom. I tried to get inside before the door could close but a neighbour pulled me back.
I stood by that doorway for a long, long time, my hands still clutching the slippers that I found floating near Ofelia. Muffled explosions were repeating themselves at the back of my head, explosions that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I started counting them. When I reached a hundred, I understood that they were ticks in a gigantic clock, and that they were counting down the last few moments of my childhood.
I arranged the slippers very neatly by the doorway. I looked around and saw people trying to recover the remnants of the broken buntings. I wiped the tears from my eyes, and then went downstairs to the bowels of the granary.