Posted by rache on March 16, 2004 at 23:15:33:
True Stories
By Rachael Ross
Copyright 2004 by Rachael Ross. Similarities to actual places and people is intentional. I did not name the specific Barangay where these events happened. Please do not post or repost without my permission. I’m only putting this in one public place I think; it’s mostly an experiment for me. Thanks. –rr.17mar04 Negros Del Norte
Introduction
I have some stories to tell. They are not fictional, although I doubtless added some things, and left out some stuff in the interest of story telling. I guess a little intro would be good, since I should start someplace and I can’t figure out how to say what I want without mentioning myself and some others, probably in more detail than I’d like, but…hey. Someday, maybe, when I have kids I can tell them…read these, and you’ll understand me better. Although at what age I should let my child read something like gen19 is subjective.
The Plantation
There is a large sugarcane plantation that we drive by almost every day. Hundreds of hectares of it. It grows fast and when sugarcane gets about 7 or 8 feet tall, the men go out and cut it by hand, using a big machete, called a ‘pinuti’ and then bundle it and load it on old and worn trucks to be taken to Centrales, the big sugar mill. It is hard, backbreaking work, and the men are both young and old, earning the equivalent of $1.50 a day. (80 Pesos)
There are numerous plantations, but this one in particular stands out. A large compound, with a great wooden house and numerous smaller buildings, sits at the end of a long straight road lined with tall and ancient cottonwood trees. It is beautiful, even though very rundown and rustic in appearance, with a high fence topped with barbed wire running around it. Our driver, a man of about 45 named Hendo, says that when he was young, the house was very nice. At night the compound is lit like a prison, I think, and 20-foot high steel gates are closed and bolted from the inside. During the day it looks nice, after dark, it looks terrifying.
I asked Hendo why it looks like a prison and he laughed and told me the story. But not that night, because it is very bad luck to tell such stories at night. This superstition recurs again and again, by the way. There are a lot of stories no one will tell once the sun goes down. So it wasn’t until a few days later, sitting on the balcony of a house we rented in the mountains, that I heard Hendo’s story. He and some other men were drinking ‘Tuba’ which is a kind of coconut wine, gathered every morning and sold before breakfast. It’s warm and sweet and strong. You drink it from a big glass, drinking it down fast in 4 or 5 large swallows. Very soon, everything seems really funny. Or really sad.
A German man named Schauer, if I understood Hendo’s pronunciation correctly, owned the plantation. It might have been Scheer, but I think not. This was about 40 years ago, when Hendo was a child, he said. And this German was a hard man, very tightfisted with his money. He barely paid his workers enough to survive and feed their families, but everyone needs work, so the men did it. Schauer would walk through the fields as the men hacked at the cane, carrying a short whip, using it on their backs if he thought they weren’t working hard enough. He was cruel and the men hated him.
The German also mistreated women. He was married, of course, and his Filipina wife lived with him on the plantation, with their children. But Schauer also had a Mistress in the nearest town, who was very beautiful and he visited her often. At first the Mistress’ family was happy, because this German was rich and they thought he would give their daughter money, build a small house perhaps, where they all could live.
But he didn’t. Schauer seemed to take a perverse pleasure in driving to the hovel where his lovely Mistress and her parents and brothers and sisters, and even grandparents all squatted. He would walk through the stinking and dark alleys, looking for her, because he would never say when he was coming, and the German would find the girl (she was only 18) doing someone’s laundry, or chopping sticks into kindling to make charcoal, or cooking a small bit of rice mixed with rough corn grits for their dinner. Then he would laugh at her, and berate the woman in front of her neighbors, dragging her by the hair into the tiny room where she slept, taking her loudly so that everyone would know she was a whore to this German who gave her nothing in return but a few pesos allowance.
And even that was not enough for this man. He also used the maids at his plantation. Perhaps in front of his wife even, although no one can say for certain, but that is what they believe. He liked to beat them, these maids, who were always young and beautiful. They came from towns and villages far away, where the German would send his foreman to promise a nice room and a good wage that the girls could send back to their parents.
It seemed the foreman would go to hire a new maid every few months, and no one could say what had happened to the old ones. Perhaps they went back to their families, the men working the fields thought, or the German might have sent them to Manila, to work in the fine house that he kept in Laguna. Nobody knew, and this went on for many many years.
Then a fisherman started talking about a boat that he had seen one night, on Bala, which is an island some distance up the coast from the plantation. He hadn’t recognized it because the fisherman all stay very close to their homes, so this boat had come from someplace else. It was red, with gold stripes, like a tiger’s on the bow and stern. It had a motor as well, which was uncommon in those days, even for the wealthiest fisherman. Someone who heard this story repeated it to someone else, and so on.
Now Bala is a haunted place, as everyone knows. It is half-submerged when the tide is high, leaving only trees and the largest bushes sticking out above the clear water. And at low tide, the island can be seen, rocks and mud and sand that shifts every day, so the ground never looks the same. The tree roots are visible, like thick nets and traps, twisting in every direction while coconut crabs skittle through them chasing prawns and the tiny fish that live in the mud.
No one could understand why anyone would go there. You couldn’t use your nets, they would snag and rip and be lost. It was a big mystery until some of the men who worked around the plantation heard the story. The German had a boat just as the story described, although no one had ever seen him use it. The large outrigger just floated at its mooring, day after day. One of the men asked the foreman if he had heard the fisherman’s story of seeing Schauer’s boat at Bala Island. The foreman struck the man, calling him lazy and that he should work more and gossip less.
This of course made the men working the fields wonder all the more. They were a superstitious lot, but also practical. The German was rich and one of the favorite pastimes in the Philippines is fortune hunting. It seemed entirely possible that the German had buried gold on that island, fearing that his wealth wouldn’t be safe on the plantation. The Huks, who had been fighting for land reform since before WWII, were once again active in some places. Kidnapping landlords, burning plantations, even killing a few people. Not close to where the German’s plantation was, but he would have been concerned. The communist movement too, the New People’s Army, was just starting to gain support and they were stealing from landowners to finance their revolution. Yes, the men agreed, the German must have hidden some gold on that island, trusting in the superstitions of the locals to keep the secret.
Some of the men decided to go to that island and look. They were only a few, because gold or not, many of the men were afraid. Some feared the ghosts who lived on the island, and others feared the wrath of the German if he found out. So it was only a half-dozen men, loading a small boat with picks and shovels, that set out for Bala Island.
The Island itself is small, only a hundred yards long, by 20 yards wide perhaps, at low tide. And not even half of that at high tide. It was a foolish adventure, as anyone could tell you. There were no markers to be seen, nothing like a stake, or a man-made stone to indicate this is where Schauer buried his treasure and had placed something useful to find it again. There was nothing but the shifting mud and gravel beneath the roots of the trees.
The men decided to dig anyway, however, since it had been a long trip and they might even get lucky. They argued the merits of one place over another, and finally found what was generally agreed to be the most likely spot to bury gold. They started digging, sweating in the heat and humidity, laughing and joking and cursing all the while. A few feet down they found a burlap sack, one that was commonly used to hold 50 kilos of rice, or corn. The men excavated it eagerly, using their hands now and looking at each other with greedy eyes.
The sack had been eaten through, it was torn and dirty and seawater filled the hole as they dug, but soon they’d pulled the remains of that sack free. It was filled with bones, with the remains of a human. There were bits of clothing, some corroded jewelry perhaps, of no value. It was not gold. The men dropped it and stared, wondering who would bury a body on that island, and certain now that Bala must indeed be haunted.
One man looked at the skeleton more closely and saw around the neck a crucifix. It was dirty and eaten away by the salt, but he could still recognize it, for he had known the woman who had worn it. She had been a maid to the Schauer household, one of the beautiful and innocent young women who came from their villages to serve in the plantation house. He told the other men and suddenly they began to consider that it hadn’t been gold the German was burying, but his maid. They dug another hole, and another, and still another even as the tide slowly came in. The men found a body everywhere they dug; it seemed the island was one huge grave and they were frightened and angry as they put the bones from the four women in their boat, gathered their tools, and paddled away.
When they arrived back at the plantation, in the poor ‘payag’ or bamboo and thatch house that the German had provided them for sleeping, all the men discussed it amongst themselves. The ones who had gone to the island showed the others the bones and the bits of clothing and jewelry that they could recognize. For how many long years had the German been living amongst them? Abusing them, treating them like animals and slaves in their own country, in their own homes. They had seen him abusing his servants, heard the stories about his Mistress, and felt his whip on their backs. The men grew very angry then and they picked up their machetes and lit torches of dried cornstalk wrapped in banana leaves.
The men searched for Schauer, hurting the German’s foreman badly as he tried to stop them. They found Schauer in the small servant’s quarters behind the house, in bed with one of the newest young maids. Several men wrestled him out of bed, and they kicked and slapped him, stabbing at his body with their flaming torches and cursing him, until he was outside in the great courtyard. He looked around him and saw only the hate filled faces of his workers and he tried to reason with them.
He offered them better wages, new houses, and fine clothes. He offered to give them money, because he did not understand why the men were angry. He thought it was because they had so little, while he had so much. Finally one of the men brought the bones out. They’d been put in a large sack and the man dumped them at the German’s feet. They told Schauer where the bones had come from, about how they knew he had raped and then murdered his maids, only to procure new ones for his sick pleasure. The German said nothing, he could only stare at those pale bones, unwilling to admit his guilt.
The men, the German’s former servants, fell on him then with their knives, stabbing and slashing at Schauer until he lay in the dust, dismembered and hacked and bled until the ground was black with it. The men were breathless and wide-eyed with the excitement of it, their nostrils flared with the scent of so much blood. They were covered with the German’s life and one by one they came to their senses and realized the German’s beautiful wife, who was from their own village, was standing on the balcony of her house. She had held her children and watched it all.
I thought that was the end of the story, but of course it wasn’t. It turns out there was a secret within the secret, that perhaps the German had kept for love. Or perhaps he simply hadn’t the time to tell it to the men who killed him that dark night. But the foreman knew it as well. The German had indeed raped many of his maids, enjoying such sadistic pleasures intensely, but he had not murdered a single one. The Dona Schauer, who was filled with jealousy and hated the women with whom her husband slept, as only a wife who has been treated such a way can, had killed them herself. She would enter a maid’s quarters late at night, after her husband had finished with the girl, using the foreman’s machete to butcher the young woman like a pig. She would scream and weep and cut the women in horrible ways, particularly in their bellies and between their legs, convinced that her husband had made them pregnant to torment her further. The foreman, who some say was the wife’s brother, and other’s maintain was her lover, would wrap the body in the blood soaked sheets, dragging it through the dirt to the German’s boat, while the wife would return to the bed she shared with her husband, secure in her position.
===
That story, very nearly exactly as I’ve written it, is true. The buildings exist as I’ve described and there is a small private cemetery where the German and his wife are buried, near the plantation. I have been trying to get permission to visit it. I have seen the island, but the man who’s boat I was on refused to land me there. The son of the German owns the plantation now, although he lives in Manila and he has a foreman of his own to take care of it.
===
True Love
It came to my attention one day, as I sat drinking some iced tea and typed up some notes for my husband, that a necrophiliac had been arrested. A man named Darius is the chief of police and he raises fighting cocks very near our beach house. He stops by sometimes, usually it seems when he knows that I’m alone, or as alone as I can be with 3 maids and a house boy running around. He is nice, friendly and a good person to have as a friend. Like I said, he’s the chief of police.
He was driving by and he saw me on the balcony and he stopped, honking and calling me ‘Inday’ (pronounced in-dye) anyway, that’s a friendly familiar term for a girl younger than yourself. People in the Philippines generally do not require invitations to come in, like I might have said if I was still in Seattle “Hi, come on up.” …here, he just parked and walked in. Of course you can only do that with people you’re friends with. So…I covered up my bikini bottoms, just because he is very…um, friendly. And had one of the girls get him a beer.
He sat down and with every other word Darius was touching me. Just a little, just enough to know he cared. He likes that. I smiled a lot and nodded and was glad I’d covered my thighs. But Darius, for all his clumsy attempts to seduce me, is pretty much a great source of info. I guess he has to be, given his position, so I don’t mind him that much.
On this particular day he started telling me about a young man named Borikito, which I think I spelled right. (Bore e key toe …the I always has the long e sound) Anyway, this man was 23 years old and he was getting married. He was a pedicab driver around the market. These guys pay 50 pesos a day for a bicycle with a passenger sidecar and drive people around all day picking up passengers, 1 peso a person one way. Not a bad deal, I usually give them 5 though because everyone assumes I’m rich.
Borikito’s wife was going to be a girl from the mountain. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen her before or not, but I knew the type. When we stayed on the mountain these girls would walk by on their way into town. Some of them in school uniforms, going to the high school, and others with baskets, either full or empty. The full baskets were full of things to be sold, like mangos, jackfruit, lanchonis, guava, stuff like that. The empty baskets would be filled at the market with fish, butchered pork or chicken, some rice, oil, cigarettes, you get the idea.
This girl, who’s name was Bebe, (pronounced like Baby) a very common name by the way, was maybe 18, she’d finished high school at least, but most people graduate high school at 16 here and are married with children by 17, but we’ll say she was 18. Okay? She’d been courted by a number of boys, since she was both pretty (by all accounts) and innocent, which counts for a lot. Virginity is a very real issue when it comes to prospective wives. Sometimes I think the western world lost something with the sexual revolution, puritanical me. Yikes!
Borikito though was tenacious. He did all the things a man who wants to be a husband needs to do to impress the woman he wants to marry, and more importantly, the people he wants for in-laws. Borikito started driving the pedicab, it wasn’t much, but it was a start. He also went fishing with his brother at night, getting a share of whatever they caught. When the weather was poor, he went to the slaughter at 3am, butchering pigs and getting paid with some of the meat, which he’d sell. Borikito built a little house, a payag, out of bamboo and thatch. He raised some animals himself too, a couple piglets and some chickens, and a goat that was pregnant. He was busy because he was in love.
Every weekend, up in the mountain, there is a dance. Borikito would walk the 8 kilometers or so with a friend or a brother, and meet Bebe there. She was chaperoned, of course, because these were mountain people who still had their self-respect and traditions. He’d meet the parents, calling “Mayu!” from the gate, which is like saying ‘hey!’ …I find it annoying personally, especially around Christmas. …And the father would come outside and talk to the boy.
The boy would have brought some rice cakes, or some dried fish maybe, and the father would serve some coffee, or maybe just some water, and he’d tell Borikito what his daughter had to have for her wedding. He’d say, “Bring us a goat, 2 pigs, and fix my roof.” But he’d only make the price low like that if he liked Borikito and wanted him for a son. If he didn’t like Borikito, the father would ask for something outrageous, like “…a cow, 3 pigs, and build me a house.” Although I did hear of one woman who was being courted by an extraordinarily ugly man and she kept her father raising the price and he kept meeting it until she had to marry him, and they’re very much in love now.
Borikito and Bebe loved each other already though, so it was easy for him to work hard and get what his future father-in-law demanded. His brothers helped him fix the old man’s roof, and he was very happy when he could walk up the mountain pulling the goat, some pigs, and a dog behind him. The dog was for eating, by the way. A date was set and Borikito went to work saving up so he’d be able to buy the little things he and his new wife would need for their house.
Unfortunately, a few weeks before the wedding could happen, Bebe died of a fever. I’m not sure what it was, perhaps Dengue. They did not take her to the hospital, instead she’d been treated in her home by people like the ‘hilat’ who is like a chiropractor, if your bones are bad, or your muscles messed up, the hilat fixes it. There are also witch doctors, and people like that, herbalists who know what plants do what. Well…The girl died. And Borikito was just shredded by the experience. It really broke him inside.
The girl’s brothers built a coffin and they bought ice to put underneath her. Her sisters washed her and put Bebe in her best dress. Her uncles and aunts and cousins all came and there was a collection taken, to help pay for food and to get a priest to perform the burial. Her brothers built a thatched roof and three walls around it, and that was where the coffin was, sitting on a pair of saw horses. People would stay up for 3 days watching over her. Usually the men at night, her brothers and male cousins, and they would drink and play cards. The church let them borrow a statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, and they placed food around it so that rats and evil spirits would smell it and eat the food and not Bebe.
After 3 days it would be time for the funeral and a long procession would walk the 5 miles down the hot dusty road to the town cemetery. Nobody would talk and everyone they passed would stop what they were doing and look. There was no laughing, no crying, just the sound of shuffling feet as that small hand carved casket passed.
The cemetery is above ground; composed of small holes of concrete that are sealed up when a body is put inside. Then another one constructed behind it, or aside it, or on top of it. Until the place looks like a haphazard collection of white rectangular blocks stacked by a giant 3 year old. Everything is painted white and just outside the gates are vendors selling fried fish and pork, boiled peanuts, rice balls, soda’s and cigarettes. There are also vendors selling headstones, while you wait. Usually the family will buy a small brass plaque that is engraved, or hire a sign painter to print on the grave itself. There are dogs everywhere, running around, barking, fucking, dying.
They buried Bebe after a short ceremony for which the priest received 500 pesos, about 10 dollars. That is the biggest expense, the cemetery fee is only 200 pesos. Burial consisted of covering the hole with cinderblock bricks and cement, a few days later someone would paint it white.
Darius told me that the night Bebe was buried, Borikito went to the girls grave, bringing along his hammer, and broke through the fresh cement. He removed her coffin, opening it there in the cemetery, and lifted her body out. The young man carried the woman he loved so much back to the little house that he’d built for her. He undressed her, bathed her from a small bucket of water, and then he had sex with her. Several times during the night, Borikito made love to his dead fiancé.
Darius told me this in the most vulgar terms, I think because he wanted to see how I would react. Darius himself was outraged by it, telling my with his voice and eyes and body gestures how the idea sickened and angered him.
I thought it was beautiful.
I didn’t tell Darius that, however, nor have I been in the mood for a long time to pretend I share anyone else’s opinions. So I made no comments, positive or negative.
The boy had been found out by his neighbors who had told the girls family. Her father and brothers found Borikito already in Darius’ jail, which was probably lucky for him, as I do believe they would have killed the young man. As it was, Darius gave them a chance to beat him.
It is an interesting fact that victims in the Philippines are allowed to confront the criminals who caused them injury. Even before any trial, before guilt is proved. The jails here are like zoos, like petting zoos, and in Borikito’s case, Darius kept him handcuffed while Bebe’s father, mother, brother’s and sisters all took their turns slapping and punching him. It is also safe to say that Borikito did not get a lot of sympathy from his cellmates. There are only 3 cells in the jail here, but they are all large, and they are all overcrowded.
I asked Darius if I could see the boy, making up an excuse that it would be useful to my husband’s work. Which it might be, I don’t know if I lied or not. Darius smiled and he was more than happy to bring me to his little jail so I could see this ‘bugu’ (boo-goo) or crazy, necrophiliac.
Of course I don’t think Borikito is a true Necro, he just lost it, went a little crazy, he didn’t make love to Bebe because she was dead. That small fact was incidental…well, okay, she was dead so he did it…but you know what I mean…someone is reading over my shoulder…Anyway, he didn’t choose to do it because he wanted a dead woman. He chose to do it because he couldn’t deal with her death, she was still alive in his heart, if not in his mind, while he was doing it.
I put on some jeans and a t-shirt, because I’ve been to the jail before. The first time wearing short shorts over my one-piece bathing suite, and even that was a little too provocative for those guys. It isn’t like they lock the murderers and rapists up in some big penitentiary upstate, or over in the middle of nowhere like Walla Walla, in the Philippines, they stay right there in that little police station until someone decides to move them someplace else. And that can take years…
Kind of a side thing. You can give stuff to the prisoners, it’s like a zoo, like I said, and as you walk by some of them line up and hold out their hands for money or cigarettes, or food. Most of them are polite, although they look terrible, and very grateful. So the first time I’m there, even before I really started getting the language down, I go in these shorts up to my ass and my bathing suit and I’m like ‘okay, no big deal’ I gave some guy a cigarette and stood there talking and smoking with him for a minute and I ask him what he did. But he doesn’t speak English too well, so I give another guy a cigarette to translate, and I’m enjoying myself, and then I find out this guy I’m talking to raped and killed his two younger sisters. I said “Sisters?” and the guy said yeah… (and you don’t want the ages, this ain’t that kind of story) …So I said “why?” and he says something and the translator says, “What do you mean? He doesn’t understand about ‘why’” …so I said “Why did you kill and rape them, what did it give you?” and they translate and the guy says “Oh, it just give him happiness. He was very happy when he do it. Like this…” Then the translator starts making like he’s jerking off and the other guy nods, laughing and does it too. “Happy!” he says, just jerking off and thinking about his dead sisters.
Okay…Anyway, I go to the jail, Darius tells his guys to bring the boy out, which is a real treat because I don’t have to talk through bars. And I have to tell you, this guy is sweet. He’s just…he looks like a young Filipino Tom Hanks, a young one, like in “Joe Versus the Volcano” except he has brown skin and he’s been pretty beat up. I brought him some gasava, which is …ah never mind…I brought him food and some cigarettes, and he sat down.
“You want to hit him?” One of the policemen asked me, I swear to God. I just ignored it, but I was really pissed by it. This guy just needed some humanity, you know? God, I mean I write tough sometimes, and I even act tough, and I’ve been abused and liked it, but not this guy. I wish I could tell you we talked, that I’d really gotten in his head, you know? But we didn’t, not really.
I asked him how he was, and he was okay. I asked him if he needed anything, he said no. I asked if his family had come around, they hadn’t. He was totally miserable; he just wanted to be dead. And not because of the beatings and the abuse, but because he loved that girl so much. It was in his eyes when I asked about her. I said, “What do you remember most? What do you always think about.” And it was like the sun caught on fire all of a sudden; he just looked…at peace. He found that place, where she still lived, remembering her. He didn’t tell me what it was.
That’s enough true stories I’m really burnt right now. I want to think.
rache18us@yahoo.com