CHAPTER 1

OF MEMORIES AND RETURNS

As soon as the aircraft landed on the tarmac, Bulan knew this place was more present and real because he left it. He understood all its possibilities through his absence. The first glimpse of his homeland through the window was both familiar and strange. He remained seated while his kababayans elbowed each other to get their luggage from the overhead bins. Scenarios that were about to unfold once he disembarked the aircraft ran in his mind like an audit.The dilapidating airport built by the dictator over four decades ago will welcome him back like an old friend who had already resigned from the world with no more inhibitions. It already accepted its sad fate like providence.  At the height of the cold war, diplomats and Hollywood stars flew in and out of this terminal at a dizzying pace but now no savvy international traveler would want to even transit through it because of its humiliating state. The stench of urine from the public toilets lingers in the hallways, ceiling panels hang haphazardly and its walls are grim like a lunatic man bathed in motor oil wandering endlessly in the streets. There will be an immigration officer who will irately stamp his passport while he pretends not to take notice because he knows it stems from capricious jealousy. He is one of the lucky ones who managed to get out of the country. Next are custom officers who will open up his luggage and confiscate gifts meant for his family and friends. He will not even dare to argue with them because no one can win with aspiring kleptocrats. 

Bulan was last to unboard the plane. It was the peak of June. As soon as he stepped out of the jet bridge,  he felt the humid summer air engulf his entire body. His auditing of what’s about to unfold inside the airport systematically unfolded as he predicted them. It’s the same scenario over again. A farcical déjà vu but nobody was laughing. All he could do was sneer.

“How can this place be filled with men in uniform with huge bellies eating from other people’s plates? How can those people high up continue to fuck this country in the ass? Mabuhay! Welcome to the islands of the friendliest people in the world! Philippines! ” 

Regardless, Bulan was well collected and unfazed when the immigration office started asking him. He was looking at an imaginary point that passed the immigration officer. He would answer without looking into the eyes of the office. The only way for him to bear the poor officer’s existence who seemed to have internalized very well the role he has to play year after year. It did not bother Bulan anymore. He made his way to the baggage claim area and waited for his luggage.The  squeaking conveyor belt erratically stopped every few minutes. 

“How did these forsaken islands become our home?” 

The latest Tourism advertising campaign posters touting, “It’s more fun in the Philippines,” plastered in pillars to hide the cleaving wood termites had already colonized caught his attention. A band of unhappy blind musicians in a corner sing happy songs to welcome and encourage foreigners to spend their every dollar in the islands. If there was only a way for him to distance himself from understanding all nuances and political economies this place subscribed to. 

His luggages finally arrived after half an hour. Porters were extremely unhappy that day working at a snail pace and carelessly throwing luggage to blow off steam  because of a delay in salary payment. People did not budge after some luggages and boxes got deformed. They already accepted mediocrity the moment the aircraft landed. 

Although Bulan had been doing these returns since he started working in the Middle East twelve years ago and even before that when he studied in Japan and United Kingdom for over three years, every return always gave him that sense of time bending back in the horizon. He now found it a little amusing. All he could do was sneer. 

There were barkers offering money exchange, phone cards and non-metered taxi service as soon as Bulan exited the airport. They were there to convince Bulan that, as the masses, they are tied to their fortune as good citizens perpetually hustling as decently as they possibly could.  

Bulan knew he must acclimatize fast. This place kept its dignity even though it was stripped bare. This city was almost flattened during the last great war, second to Warsaw, but skyscrapers are now burgeoning on the horizon giving him a sense of a foreboding future where its people could finally claim what they truly deserve: a better life than this.

“This city is filled with good intentions but infested with cockroaches!”

“A city infested with cockroaches!,” that’s how Bulan remembered one American actress described his city.  The actress was part of a movie produced in the islands. It was about some American drug smugglers imprisoned in Thailand. The Philippines was the runway choice for the location of the film because his people spoke English. It would make filming a lot easier. The actress was later declared a persona non grata by the government because of her remark which Bulan thought was apt. All of her films were banned from being ever released in the islands and she was barred from re-entering the country. Although she made it clear that she does not have the slightest inclination to ever return.  

Bulan pushed his cart to the arrival area. Hundreds of families were waiting for their balikbayans. He looked for the huge letter ‘D’ signage because his surname started with it. That was the government’s ingenious way for families to recognize each other. A male passenger waves at his family on the other side of the road. The woman doubted if it was her the man was waving at. It took a while before it landed that it was their balikbayan. His face changed beyond recognition. He left with his youth and now returns with a worn out and wrinkled body. He is among the lucky ones because there are those who return in coffins. 

Hundreds of children were loitering around. They were waiting for fathers or mothers they do not know. They were there because they were pushed by their aunts or grandparents who look after them. They were more interested in the coming cgifts than spending time with these permanent yearly tourists. 

Bulan saw his parents standing under the letter signage motionless. He was still as if he saw his parents as ghosts. The story of how they became husband and wife flashed before him but he was not ready to commit to memory.  It’s a very slippery slope to take. He distracted himself. Seeing them as an image of how to surpass tribulations; how hurts and failures shape us when we open ourselves to the possession of the other suffice. They were gilded patron saints to all lovers who speak of the truth that for any relationship to survive someone needs to love less but longer; to love even love is impossible.

Bulan’s parents remained motionless as Bulan approached them. They are now  used to this yearly custom of welcoming him back home. This is the highlight of their year. Their loving son returns from overseas to take them to holidays, fancy dinners and provide an escape from the normality of everyday life. 

Bulan’s father waved to Bulan to gesture where they were and Bulan approached them without the hysterics of the family next to them as they welcomed their own balikbayan. Bulan’s family exchanged dignified embraces while wailing from the other family next to them tore the entire city apart. Bulan averted his look because the scene irritatingly fitted a Mexican telenovela where all of its characters are locked in a loop of misery and suffering. Scenes like that had become a regular feature of island life. Returning home has become akin to a yearly pilgrimage which has gone now for the last fifty years. A new tradition.

Bulan’s father, as soon as Bulan got near, took control of his cart.

“ Leave it to me, Papa. It’s alright. I can do it.”

“I can help you, Bulan.”

“I said I can do it, Pa.”

Bulan pulled his cart back and continued walking towards the car park.  His father attempted again to load his luggage into the car trunk but Bulan refused. 

“We don’t have money for another heart attack, Pa. Leave the lifting to me.”

Bulan’s father was struggling more each year. His father’s right hand, dropping lower than the left,  can barely lift heavy objects. The last heart attack partly paralyzed his upper half body and therapy can only do so much to revive life back to it. It also paralyzed Bulan’s bank account. 

Bulan’s mother, on the other hand, opened an umbrella, took her abaniko out and started fanning Bulan. His mother always finds ways to give him a degree of service, no matter how small they are, whenever he is back home.   

The moment they settled inside the car his father started without any perambulation his tirade about the government’s soon to implement additional nationwide taxes. Bulan pretended to listen and held his mother’s hand. The entire population was shouting through his father’s mouth. Bulan was not strained. This kind of news is no longer new. He already found ways to stoically accept them over the years. He observed his parents instead from the rear view mirror of the car. There was no hiding how years had accumulated in their foreheads. Each flat line in it corresponds to a decade of conquering strength and forgiveness. 

The choking traffic obscured the cityscape with smoke. Fumes were coming from those belching ubiquitous public transport buses made out of American army trucks that were left behind after the last war. They say the jeepney is the icon of his people’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, but for Bulan, it's the perfect symbol of their inability to progress. 

Bulan knocked back double at his car window to push back against  the street children who swarmed in as their car stopped before a red traffic light. They knocked at his window begging for money to eat. He had to turn them away because he knew he wouldn't be able to save them all. 

Bulan thought to live and die in this place. He was supposed to become an artist for his people; to speak for the oppressed and dispossessed; to speak with them until their voices were heard and matter. He was supposed to be in the company of everything familiar. He once closed his fist and joined thousands of people to protest and oust a corrupt president many years ago because he thought he could change this place. But bliss is marginal in a place like this. The next president they had was as corrupt as the last one they deposed. Life then took him to strange lands with strange cultures to take up whatever jobs were available and made him a defeated artist.

The car passed by Intramuros. The now decrepit walled city built by the Spaniards on top of an original settlement they razed to the ground. Under the sprawling golf course that now serves as the walled city’s facade are bones of original settlers the Spaniards annihilated. Bulan leaned his head on the car window while he looked at the walled city. He was not actually looking at the city. He was searching for his old self. His youth. Where did it go? He was looking at alleys and crossroads they were passing by, hoping for a brief clarifying moment, he could find his younger self out there appearing like an apparition. But it was his older self whom he saw in the passing motions, looking straight back at him with no forgiveness and acceptance.

Bulan scrambled to look for a paper in his laptop bag so he could respond to the urge of the moment and write a museum to contain his feelings.

If we are to rebuild this world, 

How could we be more truthful? 

How could we be more truly honest

To admit myths we’ve created are nothing but lies?

But he couldn’t find a piece of paper. He stopped writing for himself many years ago and had already accepted his silence as a way of being in this world. He was now simply a salaryman, waiting for paycheck to paycheck. But this is happening more often now. This needs to capture all those compulsions of transcribing life’s dictation. Bulan was ruminating that it may be through it, the many years of being away from his homeland; the many years of unknowing the point of it all, except here is here to earn and send money to his family, could finally make sense. Bulan was harboring a suspicion that maybe by transcribing all of life’s contingencies, even the smallest and possibly inconspicuous detail, it could lift how he is living his life to the best possible light and allow him to reframe it. 

Bulan’s eyes dilated. He stood up but he quickly sat down because he got off balance because of nausea. It must be the traffic or lack of sleep during the flight. He opened the car window to see the cityscape without the dark tint.  The noise coming from a road drilling machine opening the road like a festering wound escalated. He reckoned the road repair was another overpriced project of the city mayor. Everything was invasive–the stinking smell of uncollected garbage piled up in the side streets, the blaring karaoke from a nearby restaurant playing an Air Supply song about love and loss, the honking of ten wheeler trucks stuck in the traffic jam as if raging an impotent war, the touch from an old blind man selling over salted, skinned peanuts that made him feel the dryness of earth. His senses were heavily assaulted. It was becoming clearer to Bulan that there was a rupture happening inside him. What he was seeing was not a continuity of how he used to view his homeland. He was seeing his country for what it is for the first time. The chaos, the misery, the poverty and what seems to be his people’s undying litanies. He can’t breathe. He thought if forgiveness had a color, it would be blue like the moving Cerulean blue skies above him. 

A church with an unlit neon crucifix from afar caught Bulan’s  attention. If only prayers can still offer him solace but he already stopped believing in them a long time ago. All those rituals: signing of the cross, communion, listening to homily and saying peace to strangers has no meaning to him now. 

“How was it possible for this religion to last for hundreds of years when it was the bondage that tied us? When it still ties us?  How can we still believe in a foreign god? An alterity. This god our invaders turned into a white man but in fact was a Middle eastern. Why didn't they fucking teach us that? That Jesus was an Arab, not white!” 

Bulan and his parents reached their home after an excruciating traffic jam that made the forty-five minute journey into three hours.  Bulan took a long pause to welcome his home. A three story white modern house, Zen inspired, nestled on a hilltop overlooking the entire city. It was the house built by working with discontentment in a faraway place. The only new one among old crumbling houses that resent its presence because it overshadows their epic old glories. 

Bulan took his time, pausing in particular spots and looking carefully at what his sweat built. He remembered the day he received photos from his mother of this house being built. He could not contain his joy. He left his work desk and went out into the burning fifty four degrees celsius heat of summer to hide from his colleagues until he had a nose bleed. This house was the landmark to his sacrifices. It was designed by his father, constructed by ambition of his mother and financed by his own sweat.

Bulan saw a pain peeling off.  He observed it closely. The windows’ metal grills were slowly becoming rusty too but he still doesn’t live there. He was still a yearly visitor to his own home. He could not make sense of it but he gave up because that might be the inevitable consequence of being away from home too long.

He sat at the edge of his bed located on the top floor of his house. Like an uninvited visitor, the memories arrived. All the coming and going. All those different houses they moved in and out before finally settling in this house. It was too soon. His body remembers how it comforted itself. This always happens to him every year; when he goes against the world and attempts at rootedness. Even though he knows he will fail like the many failures before, he attempted anyway. Contra mundum!How else could he mount his resistance? What other ways?

They moved out of the farmland when his paternal uncles fought over how to divide their family properties even though his grandmother was still alive and healthy. They moved out when some of his uncles started pocketing profits from businesses his mother was running. His mother sued his father’s entire family and moved to the city. Court hearings dragged on and their funds ran out. Eventually, the case naturally died and with it, filial affection and devotion. They all stopped talking to each other for more than twenty years. 

Bulan etched the city in his mind while it was being transformed by glistering lights. He can sit there until the first shards of morning get through. The world could collapse; shifts its skies from black to dull gray to deep blue. The city was different at night. It refuses to die. 

“Is there a hungry child looking for his mother in the dark to suck from her dried breast? How many bodies tonight will be sold in exchange for canned tuna? Was the dead man shot in the street by a police officer really a robber as allegedly claimed or a victim of the police’s useless and senseless crusade against drugs and it was a case of wrong identity? Or is it a game of who deserves some killing when they play on duty? Who would claim that body now? Would it be washed away by the rain like a dead stray cat hit by a truck?”

Bulan heard his mother calling him for dinner from the ground floor. It was time to share his stories of how the year was in the company of strangers. How is his everyday life abroad as if there was anything remarkable about it? He took a deep breath.

The dinner was tense. The silences in between sentences were filled with pregnant pauses to the point of awkwardness. Everyone spoke in a measured way guaranteeing everyone gets a moment to speak and appreciate Bulan’s sacrifices.  

Bulan wanted to announce to his parents,  “I’m leaving Dubai even though I don’t know where the fuck I’m going and what to do with my life.” He played this many times in his head and was preparing himself for the reaction of his mother. But it never happened. He kept it to himself all throughout supper.

Bulan quietly profiled his mother and father. There were many times he wanted to return home and never leave for abroad ever again. But working overseas gave them material comfort. Bulan looked at the meal on top of the dining table. If not for it, he would have not been able to afford everything they have: the house where they now live,  the trip to Maldives last year, the Italian mixed salad with just the right amount of olive oil, lemon and salt they were having for dinner, the luxury SUV car that picked him up from the airport only senators in their country own. His parents would have been dead in the hallways of a crowded public hospital reeking with the smell of despondency. 

Bulan insisted on washing plates after dinner so he can feel a little sense of continuity. This remained to be his daily task ever since he was a kid. His mother used to tell house helps in the farmland that they should give him chores so he would not grow up like his uncles and cousins who only wait for dole from his grandmother. He must not live a life unaware of how the real world works and how people suffer outside the farmland. After he dried the plates and organized them in a rack. Bulan’s father invited him for tea in the veranda. They talked about the trip to the farmland they were about to make the following day. 

“It will be good for you to see the farmland again, Bulan.”

“I’m looking forward to it, Pa.”

“I’m also looking forward to going home. Everyone had already visited us in this house since our families reconciled but I haven’t had the chance to return to the farmland.”

“Did you regret leaving it?”

There was a long silence. 

Bulan was also surprised at his own straightforwardness. It was a narrow path he knew would end up in heartaches if he did not find ways to turn away. Why was he not thinking? His question reeked of insensitivity. He diverted the conversation to the logistics of the trip and acted like nothing was startled. 

“Do we have everything we need for tomorrow, Papa?”

“Yes. It is just your mama needs to prepare herself for a sudden avalanche of emotions associated with all the memories that would flood her.”

After they spoke about all the necessary preparations, he was left to roam the house and to memorize exact locations and angles of every piece of furniture in the house. He was left to remember how, for example, a lamp in the console was standing slightly off center a year ago. He took his time to feel the texture of cushions and compared them to how they felt. He slightly rearranged the flowers in a vase even if it was not necessary but to simply leave his mark. He imprinted everything in his memory. They will not fail him.When he’ll be elsewhere, he’ll remember this space perfectly.

He imagined his house when only his parents were there. How empty it is. How mute the corridors are that the conference of birds in hallways is the only sound you can hear at dusk.  How they are left to sample mornings by themselves as sunlight washes interior walls with a sad orange color through the ground-floor windows and dust moves and settles quickly. 

Bulan passed by his parents' room on his way up to his own room. Their door was open. He glanced at them and played in his head the heartbreak when that day of losing them arrived. He always does this–a sort of rehearsal. There was no way to know the gravity of goodbye but exacting its weight gave him a sense of preparation. At least that’s what he wanted to believe.

Bulan sat down again at the edge of his bed and looked over the city. Although he can come home anytime he wanted, his returns always made him feel like he was an exile. It was compelling to think about it that way but to live it was different. As he sat there, there was no escape for him but to interrogate his notion of home. Is this home? What is home? Part of him was saying, “Home is larger than a place. It is where one is ultimately happy.” But he was not happy where he was. He can’t figure out why quite yet but he was near. 

“This constant locating and dislocating can be tiring sometimes.”

Bulan wanted to arrest all his thoughts but to do so he must enter the many corridors of his heart. He needs to reckon with life’s kind cruelty to survive, the negotiations and compromises, the failures and disappointments of reconstructing a displaced and dislocated self. It was just the first day of his temporary return.