Negros
By Eileen R. Tabios

Daaaaaa - deeeeeeeee! Daddy, daddy, Daaaaaa- deeeeeeeee!"

...there was my father's asawa ordering my father and I as we were half-way up the mountain to hurry in a voice loud enough to carry to Manila. We broke into a run, wondering what disaster had befallen the household.

My mother did not look dignified yelling down the mountain. Her hands flapped like the wings of chickens we chased for dinner, her blouse escaped from the waistband of her skirt, her hair streamed in all directions from her loosened bun and her mouth thinned around a circle of prominent teeth. She screeched from the balcony of our house which stood on top of Mount Asawa. She, most assuredly, would have been dismayed if she realized that her voice topped that of Auntie Feling's whose water broke when she was visiting the previous month. Clutching her belly, Auntie Feling's exhortations to call the doctor had been audible even to the traffic on the road circling the bottom of the mountain.

Mount Asawa was actually a hill, but everyone was accustomed to calling it a mountain because of its name. The other thing about its name was that "Asawa" could have meant "wife" in Tagalog. Thus, my father's friends always enjoyed a rollicking good time discussing the many ways to "Mount Wife" when they first heard of it.

Anyway, there was my father's asawa ordering my father and I as we were half-way up the mountain to hurry in a voice loud enough to carry to Manila. We broke into a run, wondering what disaster had befallen the household. My father had gained weight over the years but he easily ran ahead of me—his quivering backside, encased tightly in brown polyester, looked like the rump of a fat water buffalo.

As we burst into the house, the servants were running through the living room, much like the time Mama stood barefoot on the sofa and screamed with regard to the unexpected visit of a neighbor's pet monkey who slipped in through an open window, "Ayyyyyyyy-susssss! Everyone get that lice-ridden creature before he tracks his diseases through the house!"

This time, my mother was instructing all the servants, "Black, black, as much black as you can find!" before dashing off towards the servants' quarters.

"What's going on here?" my father demanded as we followed my mother. We entered Manang Inday's bedroom where we found the maid lying on her bed, clutching her knees to her chest, mumbling and shivering despite the heat.

"Ever since we arrived in this city, I've been haunted by floods, neighbors who eat the evidence of their depletion of my chickens, a roof that won't stop leaking and a different ghost showing its pathetic presence every month!

"Ayyyyy-susssss!" we finally deciphered some of Manang Inday's mutterings. "I am freezing!"

My mother started layering the clothes bundled in her arms over Manang Inday as my father and I watched, open-mouthed with amazement. I reached for my father's hand, which returned my clasp firmly.

"Her body has been taken over by a mamau," Mama explained, her perspiring face looking back at us and inviting us to share in the horror of the matter.

" Mamau-a ghost?" I repeated, concerned and moving behind my father. My father closed the cavern of his mouth and snorted.

"Another ghost? Why did we move to this place," my father complained, releasing my hand as he disgustedly flung both of his up in the air. "Ever since we arrived in this city, I've been haunted by floods, neighbors who eat the evidence of their depletion of my chickens, a roof that won't stop leaking and a different ghost showing its pathetic presence every month! Are these mamaus breeding behind the chicken coop?"

Then my father laughed at the ceiling, apparently thinking he inadvertently displayed some wit. I smirked, too, as his lack of fear made me unafraid.

"Well, and what does this ghost want this time," my father asked after he stopped barking to himself at the sight of Mama's frown.

"Have you no respect? The body of Inday, who could never hurt a soul and, undoubtedly, was just minding her own business, has just been invaded by an unwelcome visitor from the other realm!" my mother, her hands on her hips, chastised my father.

"The other realm?" my father mocked in a high-pitched tone. As the warning look became murderous on Mama's face, he calmed himself, smoothing back the sparse strands over his glistening scalp. He sat in the lone chair of the room that, next to the servant's bed, allowed for a direct look into Manang Inday's grimacing face. He pulled me to his side and whispered, "We're in this together, buddy. Let's discover the surprise du jour!"

Du jour was French and meant "of the day." My father loved to teach pieces of trivia that he thought I would not learn otherwise from the nuns at my elementary school.

"...Nana Sitang said that if ever a ghost takes over the body of someone in our household, we should cover the body with black material because black feels more comfortable to a mamau."

"All right, let's hear it," my father said, sinking his chin into his chest with the demeanor of preparing for a long, tedious story. His profile was that of a multi-bellied Buddha in a yellow, short-sleeved golf shirt. "But first, why did you cover Inday with your slips? Isn't it better to cover her with a blanket than your underwear?"

My mother dropped her eyes and blushed before she responded, "My slips are black. Nana Sitang said that if ever a ghost takes over the body of someone in our household, we should cover the body with black material because black feels more comfortable to a mamau."

I remembered Nana Sitang's visit to our home and the conversation turning to the nature of ghosts. But Nana Sitang could not explain why black was more comfortable to mamaus or why the comfort of ghosts was significant, only that she had managed to pick up these gems of wisdom from her village's witch doctor when she was a teenager. Of course, she had cackled through tobacco-stained teeth, this was before Nana Sitang's parents discovered and put a stop to her visits to the witch doctor who also dabbled as the bookie at local cock-fights. Before my father could remind Mama of these points, we heard a slight scuffling noise behind us.

"Oh, good, Neta, you found more black," my mother said to one of the servants who stood just beyond the doorway, her head tilted away from looking into the room as if there was a disease she could catch by just looking. Manang Neta blindly held out a bundle of clothes. Sighing, Mama allowed Manang Neta to avoid entering the room and went over to take the pile from her hands.

"Hey, that's my jacket," I piped up as I noticed one of the articles of clothing my mother was layering over Manang Inday from the results of Manang Neta's forage through the closets.

"Shussssh, boy," my father ordered. "Why do you need a jacket when you live in a tropical country?"

"But it's American and from Uncle Cosmo," I mumbled to myself, ignoring his lesson that I lived in a "tropical country" and wishing only to retrieve the jacket my favorite uncle had sent me for my tenth birthday. My jacket was black with a picture of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy on the back.

The ghost made its request in what my father called "a whining, toadying tone that no self-respecting ghost would ever use because real ghosts should have no reason to behave towards humans in a servile manner!"

"Okay, Gloria, what does this ghost want?" I could tell my father was losing patience by the way he emphasized his words. Since we moved from Manila to Baguio City three months ago, we had been visited by three ghosts, including the one who inhabited Manang Inday's body.

The first was a dark shadow that hovered outside my parents' bedroom window and pleaded for any old clothes that they could spare. The ghost made its request in what my father called "a whining, toadying tone that no self-respecting ghost would ever use because real ghosts should have no reason to behave towards humans in a servile manner!" In disgust, my father threw out his old bathrobe but refused to let my frightened mother empty the drawers for more clothes to dispense out the window.

"It's only a loko-loko from the neighborhood trying to stiff us," he said, waving at her to return to bed and slamming the shutters closed. However, since my parents' bedroom overlooked the air over a steep-sided valley created by one side of Mount Asawa, we have never determined how a person could have managed to throw a shadow from right beyond my parents' bedroom window.

The second ghost appeared a month later and took the shape of my father's old bathrobe floating beyond the bathroom window when my mother had to exercise an act of nature in the middle of the night. With one frayed sleeve pointing at my mother, the mamau chastised my parents for their selfishness. The tunnel-like darkness of the empty sleeve reminded her, my mother later said, of the throat of a shark who had opened its jaws at her when she was a little girl swimming in the seashore by the fishing village where she was born. My mother decided to make a generous donation to the local orphanage the following day, much to my father's dismay.

"You weren't there!" Mama replied heatedly over breakfast after my father berated her for confusing dreams with reality. I sneaked a forgotten mango slice from my mother's plate as I waited for my father's response.

"Of course I wasn't there! Since when have I ever accompanied you to do your Number 2? It does not smell sweet, madam!" my father roared back, stabbing his fork in the air and breaching one of my mother's rules of never pointing an eating utensil towards the direction of another. But my father's anger did not accomplish anything as my mother proceeded later that day with her gift to the orphanage.

Finally, the ghost discovered that one can breathe more easily through a nose and, after a few times of becoming accustomed to this notion, used Manang Inday's mouth for speaking.

"Susmaryosep! Don't use that tone of voice with me," Mama snapped back at my father as they discussed the third ghost. "You can listen, too, with your elephant-sized ears as I question the spirit."

By expressing "Susmaryosep" instead of the shortcut, "Ayyyyy-sussss," I could tell my mother was really agitated. "Susmaryosep" is short for "Jesus, Mary, Joseph" whose names my relatives frequently invoked in moments of stress.

My mother bent over Manang Inday's quivering face. Poor Manang Inday, I thought as I always did whenever I happened to pay attention to her. Her face bore a distinct resemblance to Uncle Fillmore's bulldog: the same mournful brown eyes surrounded by drooping lids; the slack, multi-layered folds below the chin; and a bulbous forehead. Uncle Fillmore also had noticed the resemblance upon acquiring the bulldog, and so named it after Manang Inday, much to the distress of his wife, my Auntie Feling who surely must have busted one of Uncle Fillmore's eardrums with her views on the matter.

"Now, now. You should be warmer now," Mama crooned, her face about an inch away from the bump protruding from the tip of Manang Inday's nose. "Who are you and why are you visiting us through poor Inday's body?"

Manang Inday started to act like a fish, disconcerting my mother and causing her to move closer to us. The servant's lips kept shifting as she breathed through her mouth. Finally, the ghost discovered that one can breathe more easily through a nose and, after a few times of becoming accustomed to this notion, used Manang Inday's mouth for speaking.

"Is that you, my little garbage can?" Manang Inday, or rather, the mamau, asked. It had to be the ghost because the voice did not sound like Manang Inday's voice. The voice was melodious instead of Manang Inday's that has reminded many listeners of the braying of a discontented goat.

"Is that you, my little garbage can?" the ghost repeated lovingly.

"Yes," Mama could manage only one word through the surprise, then the prolonged wince contorting her features.

"Mama, why is she calling you a garbage can?" I asked the question, as well on behalf of my father as, both wide-eyed, we looked at her.

The mamau's voice was full of mischief, courting us with the manner of sharing confidences.

The mamau laughed with Manang Inday's face: soft rolling peals that sounded like the hymn being outlined on air whenever the bells tolled from the church another hilltop away.

"My little garbage can, this must be your son, Matthew," the ghost said. "Well, I'll tell you why, my sweet boy."

I scowled at being called "sweet" but leaned closer with my parents toward Manang Inday's body. The mamau's voice was full of mischief, courting us with the manner of sharing confidences.

"When your mother was a little baby, I helped take care of her. We would spend many afternoons in the shade of the biggest star apple tree in your grandmother's yard. There we would sit, I rocking her back and forth while I feasted on my little bags of sweets.

"Oooohhhh, I had such a sweet tooth," the ghost said with an air of self-congratulation. "I always carried around bags of churros, susporos de casuys, palitaos, polvorons, maja blancas, maruyas and bibingka. My favorite was puto maya; I loved to watch my mother make it with sweet rice, coconut milk, brown sugar and grated coconut meat. My, my, they were so delicious!"

Here, the mamau interrupted herself with a few choice smacks with Manang Inday's lips. My mouth also started to water.

"One day, your mother started crying and crying. I kept rocking her and patting her on the back but she wouldn't stop bawling. Then I noticed her small chubby hands reaching into my bag of sweets. Your Mama wanted some, too.

"Well, she was just a baby and couldn't have eaten the snacks with her soft, little gums. So, after much thought, I chewed and chewed a tiny piece of my favorite puto maya and then fed the result to her. She loved that so much. And that's how she became my garbage can. Because I would chew sweets and feed them to her, directly from my mouth with a kiss."

"Eeeeeeeuuuuuuuwwwwwwwhhhhhh," my father cried out before we both burst in laughter and pointed our fingers at my mother who was standing still with a pained look on her embarrassment by starting to straighten her blouse and smooth her hair back into her bun.

"That's why you're a garbage can, because you ate her leftovers when you were a baby?" I wheezed between my laughter.

Cross-eyed, he started whispering in a sing-song, "honey honey bun bun." Choking on my laughter, I bent over and crossed my legs as I felt my bladder begin to expand.

"Aaahhh, but Matthew, she was my little garbage can and I so loved my honey honey bun bun," the ghost noted, screwing up Manang Inday's lips into a grin wide enough to display the blackened fillings in all of Manang Inday's cavities.

My father elbowed me to look at him. Cross-eyed, he started whispering in a sing-song, "honey honey bun bun." Choking on my laughter, I bent over and crossed my legs as I felt my bladder begin to expand.

My mother cleared her throat and asked in as business-like a demeanor as she could manage, "Auntie Lina, why are you here? What can we do for you?"

"I'll tell you, my darling, but before I do could you please bring me something hot to drink? I am so co o o o ld," the ghost replied and made Manang Inday's body shiver exaggeratedly.

Mama quickly called for Manang Neta. Manang Neta showed the back of her uncombed head again as she still refused to look into the room. "Yes, Ma'am?" she squeaked.

"Heat up some Campbell's," Mama instructed.

"Yes, Ma'am," Manang Neta squeaked again and ran away to the kitchen.

"Campbell's soup? How kind of you to share such luxuries as American food," the ghost said gratefully.

"But now, let me tell you why I'm here. Do you remember, my little garbage can, your distant cousin, Eliel?"

"Only vaguely, Auntie Lina. Doesn't he now live in Negros?" Mama asked, referring to Negros Occidental, the country's primary sugar-growing province.

"Yes, yes. Things are bad in Negros for your cousin's family. My heart breaks to see Eliel so skinny. He refuses to eat because his children do not receive full sustenance from the little that he can offer them. Yet he's the one who must remain strong to be able to harvest the sugarcane and do any other work required to feed his family," the ghost nodded Manang Inday's face up and down as she sighed.

"That is sad," Mama said. Solemnly, my father and I nodded our heads in agreement.

After she emptied the bowl and emitted a loud burp, Manang Inday's body sat up on the bed with a startled look on her face, the layered clothes flung off in a disarray around her.

"Well, you and Andrew are doing so well here in Baguio City, two well-educated professionals that you are," the ghost continued. "Congratulations, Andrew, on your recent promotion to Senior Vice President at Banco Baguio! My goodness-you've become such a big-shot banker! And, Gloria, to be principal of Baguio High School—what a coup!"

"You don't have to explain, Auntie Lina. We will be more than happy to help," my mother quickly interrupted. Mama later told me that hearing the mamau recite our family's good fortunes made her uneasy. "Never take blessings for granted, Matthew," my mother warned.

Unlike with regard to the other two ghosts, my father did not utter a single word of complaint over my mother's offer to provide assistance. He only pulled me closer and looked sadly at my mother.

After my mother agreed to assist Uncle Eliel, the mamau did not speak again, despite my mother's questions and other attempts to engage her in conversation. She only indicated her presence by intermittently making Manang Inday's body relapse into a fit of shivers until Manang Neta brought the soup. The ghost still uttered no words as she finished a bowl of Campbell's noodles in chicken broth. After she emptied the bowl and emitted a loud burp, Manang Inday's body sat up on the bed with a startled look on her face, the layered clothes flung off in a disarray around her. When Manang Inday brayed at us familiarly like a goat, then we knew the ghost had departed.

*****

Before we emigrated to the United States three years later, Uncle Fillmore and Auntie Feling agreed to my father's request that they provide assistance to Uncle Eliel and his family. But until we left, Mama dispatched a servant with packages of food and money every six months to travel the hundreds of miles to Negros which was located on the southern part of the Philippine archipelago.

As I helped my mother the day after the incident to pack the first set of provisions to Negros, Mama mentioned that she doubted that the mamau was actually Auntie Lina because she inhaled and drank the soup so loudly.

"Your Auntie Lina never would have slurped. She was a lady," my mother emphasized, her hands patting at the bun on her head to ensure that it had trapped all the stray strands of her hair.

"Yes, Mama," I agreed dutifully, and then asked, "But Mama, why did you consent to helping Uncle Eliel if you didn't believe that the ghost was Auntie Lina?"

"Because Negros is Negros, my son. And I had no doubt Eliel's family needed help. The ghost was just reminding me, that's all," Mama replied before turning aside and bending down to look at something in the rug.

The sacadas were treated the worst among all workers, usually assigned the most menial and harshest jobs such as cutting the cane.

She would have been upset if she knew I saw the teardrop sliding down her nose, I thought as I allowed her to pretend to rub away at an invisible stain on the rug.

Later, as we were packing to leave the country, my mother stumbled across a shoebox of correspondence from Uncle Eliel. She read from some of them and gave me the first letter Uncle Eliel wrote to her. Mama said I should bring the letter with me to the United States so that I will remember those who are left behind. My letter said...

"We are so grateful for your help. We ate meat that day, the first that we have had for over a year. We usually eat only rice and vegetables, sometimes with fruit and, of course, we have our water and salt.

The last time that we ate meat, we found some frogs in the fields. We put on pieces of old clothes—of course, all of our clothes are old, heh-heh—and kerosene in a bottle to make a light. Then we went frog-hunting at night. But, more often than not, we are too tired to hunt at night. When we get back to our barracks, it is late and we are so tired that all we can do is sleep."

My Uncle Eliel's letter mentioned other things but I usually thought about how his family did not have much to eat. Many years later, I conducted some research as an aide to a United States Senator who was being lobbied by Amnesty International regarding certain labor incidents in Negros.

I learned that about 70% of the province's sugar-growing land was located in haciendas, a remnant from Spanish colonial days which has been compared to American Southern plantations before the United States' Civil War. The workers' houses were typically rough-hewn wooden shacks, with no more than twenty-five square yards of floor space. Most families possessed only sparse furnishings such as thin straw sleeping mats and a few utensils. Many haciendas also contained barracks that were partitioned by cardboard walls to house sacadas, seasonal farm workers, from the poor of neighboring provinces. The sacadas were treated the worst among all workers, usually assigned the most menial and harshest jobs such as cutting the cane. I remembered my mother telling me that Uncle Eliel originally moved to Negros as a sacada and never managed to earn sufficient money to leave what he thought would be a one-year posting.

I learned that most hacenderos belonged to a tight-knit political oligarchy. Some were absentee landlords, enjoying the fruits of their wealth in Manila, Hong Kong, London, New York and elsewhere outside of Negros. Some paternalistically defended the hacienda life as the best way of life for the people of Negros who, some hacenderos said, were unable to become self-proficient. At this notion, the representatives from Amnesty International scoffed before adding that, in any event, truly benign dictators would have been less inclined to ignore the widespread hunger and illiteracy surrounding them.

I learned that the landless comprised as much as 98% of Negros' population and that the province's poverty rate exceeded 80%.

I learned that the land reform promised by Corazon Aquino when she overthrew Ferdinand Marcos never materialized and that the landless and impoverished continued to provide fertile ground for labor and political agitation, driven not only by communists but also local priests and nuns responding to the grinding poverty afflicting their flock.

I learned that Negros Occidental was a microcosm of the extreme economic and political inequities that affected the entire Republic of the Philippines. I grew to picture it vividly in my mind as a place where darkly-windowed luxury cars drove around malnourished children too hungry and deprived of energy to do anything but mimic puddles on the dirt.

Finally, to finish my research, I tried to live on water and salted rice for as long as I could. I did not last long—a failed experiment that also made me recall the aftermath of the ghost's visit to my home in Baguio City. I remembered once more my consternation over how Uncle Eliel and his family would have hovered on the brink of starvation without my parents' aid. My childhood sense of security had been uninterrupted until my exposure to Uncle Eliel's dilemma as he worked the sugarcane fields of Negros. It was the first time in my life that I felt the ground shake beneath my feet. Uncle Eliel was not a stranger to my family; he was family. I never met him but for a long time after the mamau took over Manang Inday's body, I felt Uncle Eliel's presence every time I sat down at our dining table.

Ahhhhhh. Delicious, isn't it, my little garbage can, my honey honey bun bun? I would hear his voice behind me as I ate. When I turned around, there would be no one there or only one of the servants looking quizzically at my frightened expression. I came to imagine Uncle Eliel as a diaphanous, floating face with an elongated chin exaggerating the size of his mouth, an open chasm trickling saliva from one corner as he coveted my food. I lost weight that year. It was also the year when, with hunger as my teacher, I first learned how to faint.

*****

Previously published in Bamboo Ridge #69, Spring 1996; Mobius, The Journal of Social Change, Fall 1996; and the anthology Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America (Anvil, 1997).

© Eileen R. Tabios

top | about the author