Green Sanctuary

Antonio Enriquez
Zamboanga/Misamis Oriental

Pikit was the oldest town in Cotobato, they said. And the townsfolk said
too that hundred of years ago, a Spanish ship had dropped anchor in the
Pulanggi River, and while the awed Moros watched, Spanish soldiers in iron
clothes (mail coat) came down her gangplank and discovered the town behind
the cogon grass and under the great balete trees. The Spanish soldiers’ faces
were white as paper, with straight high noses and glistening, unstained teeth
which bore no reddish stain from the juice of mama (betelnut chew). The
Spaniards apparently had not stayed long in Pikit, for Alberto had not seen a
mestizo or mestiza in town since his arrival some three months ago. This was
not all like his hometown, Zamboanga, where the Spanish conquistadores (and
licentious friars) had sown so many seeds that mestizos bloomed vividly like
bougainvillaea flowers, and the old spoke fluent Castellano and the streets
were named after saints or places in Spain.
Not so long ago the commercial bus never stopped in Pikit; not even long
enough for its cloud of dust to settle back on the highway. Instead, it disgorged
its passengers at the nearest small village, and they had to walk about two
kilometers to the town proper carrying their baggage on their backs. Those who
refused to get off, or asked for a fare refund, were kicked off the bus by the
conductors, divested of their luggage or cargo, and were forced to walk
barefoot to the nearest barrio where they brought slippers or rubber shoes.
If a bus stopped in Pikit, they said the Moros there deflated the tires with
their wooden clubs, smashed the lights and windshields to smithereens. Then
marketgoers and storeowners stripped off its wooden parts and burned them
for fuel; the townsfolk dismantled the chassis and engine and sold the metal by
the kilo in Cotobato City over a hundred kilometers away. Only the skeleton
of the bus was left on the road to rust and corrode under the sun and rain, and
for the naked children to play all sorts of games on. But what the children loved
to play most was being grown-ups, replaying the parts the townsfolk had in
dismantling the bus.
Up along the road and just before the market-place, an abandoned truck-
chassis, or what was left of it, was covered with vines and climbers whose
tentacles wound round and intertwined with its steel and iron frame. They grew
thick and luxuriously green, and here and there flowers bloomed as though on
abandoned and forgotten grave. The flowers were orange, yellow, and red, and
early in the morning their tiny petals glistened under beads of dew and were
wonderful to look at. Long before the Cerdeza Surveying Company men came,
they said the bus had been hastily abandoned on the highway when a datu from
Matalam ordered the Christians down and raked the side of the bus with
bullets. The automatic carbine went tat-tat-tat-tat and made holes on the side
of the bus as big as thumbs. A four-year-old child abandoned by the mother
died there on the bus, his head blown-off and his scalp plastered on the wooden
backrest of his chair.
At six o’clock every evening, the sari -sari stores and carinderias along the
road were closed and barred withwooden boards. No one walked there
after this hour, and the policeman on beat changed his uniform into civilian
clothes and drank with his buddies in one of the tuba stores far from the
town proper. And then the rats and tomcats emerged from their hiding, and
the dogs scavenged the garbage dumps for crumbs. Only Datu Mantel, they
said, walked the main his, his 45-calibre handgun hanging low form his hip.
One night a drunkard lost his way home, and on the main street Datu
Mantel shot him neatly between his eyes. Like the bodies of other murdered
men, the drunkards corpse was not found the next day, and the chief of police
did not send policeman after the datu. Because one evening, a week before
the murder, while two of them were drinking in a bar, Datu Mantel slapped
him across the face and challenged him to draw his gun. The chief of
police knew that with one hand Datu Mantel could draw and at the same time
cock his 45-calibre handgun while it was still in its holster, as though it were a
toy gun. Said Datu Mantel to chief of the police, “Now I am the chief of the police.” That
was how, they said, Datu Mantel became unofficially the chief of police of Pikit
without an appointment from the governor. And the next day, the townsfolk
saw him wearing the khaki uniform of the police chief, although he never wore
a badge.
There was no place to go in Pikit after nightfall, and the one movie house
opened in the morning and closed in the afternoon. It showed double-program
war features. In one film, Fernando Poe Jr., the Golden Boy of action pictures,
with automatic machine gun, mowed hundreds of Moros on a slope. Upon
seeing this massacre on the picture screen, Datu Mantel stood up from his
wooden bench, drew his .45- calibre gun, and promptly perforated the picture
seen. “There!” he said to one in particular, “you are now dead!” Everyone scampered
for safety and the movie house owner stopped showing films again in Pikit; thereafter
they said, he showed only American war movies. When the fans of Fernando
Poe Jr. demanded to see their movie idol, the owner of the movie house said
they all knew he was shot dead by Datu Mantel and now lay buried in the hills
of Pulanggi.