All My Lonely Islands

If you pick up this book expecting to derive unadulterated pleasure from it, you won’t be disappointed. It is a delightful read, its smooth narrative flow and sparkling prose simply take you along to witness Crisanta’s physical and emotional journeys—from the Philippines to Dhaka and back, from innocence to complicity to redemption. This book gives pleasure to the reader who wants a good yarn, but offers even greater reward to the close and careful reader, the one who rereads and is no longer in a hurry to know what happens next. The careful reader pauses to imagine being in Batanes Islands, that float calmly on a moody Pacific Ocean, which often extends its fingers in a whimsical attempt to reach the sky and tear it off like wallpaper. Or hears the characters’ voices and their quickened heartbeats as they temper a rising panic in wild Sundarbans. All My Lonely Islands is more than a book; it is a complex, multi-layered, richly textured experience.

–SUSAN S. LARA,

2015 Palanca Awards Chairman of Judges for the Novel and author of Letting Go and Other Stories

What sets Ms. Campilan’s award-winning novel from the work of her peers is its incisive, poignant take on the experience of young Filipinos struggling to find their place in the world. Crisanta, raised in a foreign land by parents who chose to work abroad, comes back and finds herself having to reintegrate to the local culture. All My Lonely Islands delves into this Filipina’s psyche, and seeks answers to difficult questions of identity and belonging.

–KATRINA TUVERA-QUIMBO,

author of The Jupiter Effect

[A] very fine jade...

–BENJAMIN BAUTISTA,

2015 Palanca Awards Judge and author of Stories From Another Time, The Market Monitor

All My Lonely Islands

VJ Campilan

Copyright to this digital edition © 2017 by VJ Campilan and Anvil Publishing, Inc.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.

Published and exclusively distributed by

ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC.

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Book design by Jordan Santos (cover) and Marielle Tayóna (interior)

ISBN 9786214201679 (e-book)

Version 1.0.1

For Mom and Dad,

for all the adventures.

Contents

prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

acknowledgments

about the author

prologue

O Sea, gloriously wrathful creature. Unfathomable tomb. Liquid garden. Life-bearer and murderer...

I must stop. I can always tell when an ode is not working. You must excuse me, I have a strange habit. I am standing on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, see, and every time I encounter a body of water, I always have to stop and address it with a lamentation or salutation. Sometimes I dig up memories of old poems, sometimes I make stuff up and I feel the water just getting angrier. My favorite, though, is confrontation with oceans and my go-to text for such an occasion is Frank O’Hara’s To the Harbormaster. It’s just begging to be recited when the waves are wide fingers trying to reach up to where you’re standing and wipe you out, Old Testament style. I don’t say my odes out loud though when there are fellow sea-starers around. I don’t want to preempt their assumptions of me. Let them think that I’m a Romantic Figure of Tragedy with my salon-brown hair flapping in unison with everything the wind orchestrates to move. Let them guess the reason for the longing in my eyes. Am I remembering an entombed lover in the depths? Am I some mad creature at night? Or I could just be a Nature Lover. Whatever floats their boat.

The reason I am standing on this cliff in Batanes, the northernmost patch of the Philippines, is because of an American. He has swooped down like a gray-eyed eagle and snatched me from my quiet apartment in Manila with entreaties of This is the right thing to do, Crisanta. This is God’s will.

I should have told Ferdinand Turner to go to heaven without me.

But desperation is desperation. It is a permanent smudge on my eyeballs. The perpetual pea under my saggy mattress. I’m sorry that I speak to you this way. I don’t know how else to approach you. I feel like you’re Aurora before she became Sleeping Beauty. You’re in the woods and you are surrounded by a supernatural light, and you’re singing a spectacularly robust song about Dreams Coming True. And I am a squirrel hiding from behind a tree, mesmerized by you. I’m waiting for other woodland creatures to surround you so I could slip among them and be unnoticed. But there is no one else at your bedside. There is only me and Ferdinand Turner. And we have no right to be in the same space as you. If you were only awake, you’d probably bat us out of your room with a broom like a housewife throwing out a pair of rats that had managed to sneak in at night. You should see the desperation in our eyes every time we come visit you. You’d turn your face away. It’s that abject.

When people have nowhere else to go but the edge of a cliff, they have few choices. Some cling to the rocks, taking to heart all that raging against the dying of the light. Some let go because that’s where everyone ends anyway, debris in the valley of death. And some, like me, sit down and write, because we’re not brave enough to live or die. We try to manage burdens by delegating the weight to a word, transferring it to a blank piece of paper, squeezed into familiar letters and corralled by margins. Like an insect you put under a magnifying lens. You pull a wing out or a tail, see if it bleeds too much.

Words. Depending on what you believe, they’re either empty air or a prophecy that shall come to pass. We try to demystify ourselves through words so we could dismantle our bones and rebuild ourselves into something less monstrous.

Yesterday, I was walking along my favorite path down the sand when I was caught in a sunshower. I love those, although my Aunt Ramona would always tell me that they bring unnatural illnesses, because various creatures are being married around the world. Monkeys, jackals, foxes, tikbalangs. My favorite explanation for it is that the Devil is beating his wife because, apparently, even the Devil’s bedeviled by a wife. But why should sunshowers be unnatural? Who says the sun and rain are not supposed to share the sky?

Sunshowers fit these islands; these islands that seem to be part of nothing but the sky and sea around them. They float calmly on a moody Pacific Ocean, which often extends its fingers in a whimsical attempt to reach the sky and tear it off like wallpaper. When we first stepped here on Basco, one windy March Saturday, our 30-seater charter plane wobbled down a short strip of runway bookended by the sea. Quaint. That should keep the pilots extra vigilant.

We came under the unreliable night and moved with the furtiveness of people with sealed letters, heavy and fat with significance, in their jackets. Except we are the sealed letters. We have come to be delivered. We lay in our beds that night with the coiled anticipation of a jack-in-the-box. We were ready to spring out onto your doorstep with our faded, button-like eyes; his seagull-gray, mine a kind of hazel.

The morning only brought us to a hospital bed. You have been on it a month, Dr. Vasquez said. A month later, and we still flock to your bedside; thick, slow, and unfulfilled. Now I sit by your window and think of how we nearly sailed across the world so we could find you here on the very edge of the country, one foot almost out the door. I’ve come to understand why you chose to settle here, though I have often wondered why we do it. Uproot ourselves, I mean. Why we feel the need to travel and wander into strange soil. Why we can’t leave things alone. It must be the world calling to us. After all, they said it had been one giant continent once. Maybe this is why we feel drawn to each other, to the lands we cannot see. We think of new places as opportunities to build new lives, but all we’re really doing is trying to find our way back.

It’s how I feel every time I watch the sun outside your window retreat behind the hills, surrendering to the blank comfort of night. For a few minutes, I can forget a river all frothy with dark brown water where a hand sticks out before submerging. Or the principal’s office. It had gray paint, Mr. Richardson’s office. Gray walls, a desk lamp, a large wooden coffee table with a glass top. A vase of sunflowers with slightly wilted petals. We evenly sat around the table like sunbeams: Mr. Richardson, Dad and I, you and Tito Diego.

You were wearing a plain blue dress with the hemline cutting across your knee. It was an awkward cut, as if the lines of your body were ruptured. Tito Diego was a blurred figure beside you. You had your hair in a low bun. You reached across the table and took my hand and told me that it wasn’t my fault.

It was an accident, you said.

You were crying, but I could hear you speak slowly as if you were talking to a toddler, each word is deliberate, an offering of comfort. And I took it because I couldn’t give you any in return. You can’t give what you don’t have, Dad used to say. I clasped your hand although it was cold and shaking. It was as small as mine, and I remembered how they had glided across piano keys like swans on an early-morning lake.

I thought of truth back then as supple, something that has room to grow. Now it’s just an old man. Cranky, balding, petulant; the jail warden who would happily open your cell and escort you to the edge of the cliff.

I smooth out the sheets around you, wrinkling them in the process. I watch you sink into another life where there is no remembering. Some words have the power to resurrect, but all I have are these that have managed to claw their way out, disheveled and emaciated. Look how they falter, their see-through shapes, the loose spaces between them. These words will not guarantee a rebirth. The minute I started writing them down, all I felt was a methodical emptying. These letters, nothing but a wisp of someone’s hair you catch disappearing around a corner just as you were coming into view. Sometimes, I look at the back of my hands to see if I’m still solid. If I could enter these pages and not get lost, or die.

Maybe this is a song to call you back. I am beside you now to ask you to come back out of the depths. Let us jump off this cliff together.

1

A BLANK BLUE sky shimmers outside your window. The white lace curtain is pushed to the side to make way for the ocean breeze. The smell of it feels clean and crisp. The radio is turned down, but I can still hear the news. A storm is coming in two days, but there’s no sign of that right now. I can hear the ocean from far below pummeling sand and rocks with consistent frenzy. I have never known it to be calm in the first place.

Outside is an image you can find in any still life painting. Meadows on top of each other with yellow-green grass. Water buffalos and cows chewing and flicking their tails in companionable silence. They chew as if they knew there is nothing else they’re meant to do. The white lighthouse all the way across to Sabtang Island looks so small from where I’m sitting, I could fit it between my thumb and forefinger. It’s a wisp of smoke from this angle, undulating under the midmorning light. A few meters from the window is the garden with its white metal chairs and frame of orchids. Across the garden is the stone road leading to town.

On the other side of the road is yet another cliff. Ferdinand is standing on this cliff, his tall frame wrapped in a black coat, double-breasted with oversized buttons and lapels. More appropriate for winter than for a cool breeze. His hands are shoved into the pockets, the hoodie draped loosely over his head. He’s looking down at the ocean, auburn hair nearly covering his eyes. He needs a haircut.

Sometimes, I pretend that I’m really here for a holiday to write beside the ocean with nothing but the indulgence of time. But you are here, and your presence weighs like a boulder on the otherwise bland whiteness of this room. I would stare at the trees in the garden, but I could still see your blanketed form from the corner of my eye like a specter with an outstretched hand.

I don’t expect your benevolence. I have returned to face your judgment like a runaway child slinking back into her parents’ house and entering through the second-floor window. At night, I listen to the whoosh of the wind swooping outside, rattling against metal gates and thatched roofs. I watch the shadows of trees shake, casting dark blotches across my bed. I imagine them assuming your form. The branches become your hands digging its way beneath my sheets, breaking into skin and veins and a lurching heart.

In daytime, I look at you under the benediction of sunlight. Once I was beside the window and I thought I saw you move your head. I spun around, but your eyes were still closed; your face was a field over which morning was spreading itself. The soft lines across your forehead looked like little streams. I rubbed my eyes, squinted back at the sun, and drank a glass of water.

I feel my heart tiptoeing up endless creaking stairs. It will be caught any moment now.

SOMETIMES, I WANT to shake you into consciousness. I want to tell you everything in one breath and then run away as fast as I can to the end of this island. I’d even walk on water just to keep going, but I am ye of little faith. So here I remain by the shorelines, staring out into the ocean. I envy its writhing, the self-assuredness in which it sweeps itself across such an expanse. It must be doing all the screaming for the entire world.

Afterward, I would go back to your room, properly chastised and licked cold by the wind, returning to the solace of writing by your window. With these flimsy words, I seek to reconstruct the juncture where all our lives met. Ghosts, cobwebs, sickly metaphors. I take them out and line them all, turn them this way and that, and wonder how such wispy things can hold up an entire decade of recollection.

I would delete pages because I would imagine you reading them. I’m afraid that you would laugh when I would be serious or you would cry when I would be trying to cheer you up. I have such lousy timing. Remember how it was when we played the piano? You would tell me, count in your head. Feel the beat. Analyze the meter. And I would close my eyes and try to feel the force and end up being too fast or skipping a rest, lunging at the nearest note like a snapping turtle. You would circle the rest on the music sheet with a pencil.

"Next time, ha? Next time," you’d say.

There was never enough time.

What I’m not prepared for is for you to wake up and not remember me at all. Or for you to open your eyes and all I would see is contempt, because maybe you have figured everything out by now. Maybe time has told you all secrets.

So when my throat tightens and my words disembowel themselves, I would look out the window and watch Ferdinand sit by the cliff. He told me the churning of the ocean comforts him. He looks like a shadow with that coat. I can imagine him falling off. An accident, a little slip. Isn’t life sometimes made up of accidents? Or serendipity. People prefer that word. One stumble and Ferdinand would be gone. And I won’t be here, and you won’t have to wake up.

Sometimes, I look at the mirror and wonder who this woman is.

IN THIS COUNTRY, the turning point in people’s lives mostly involves a natural calamity: storms, floods, volcanic eruptions. Mine was an earthquake. When you live on an island, you are aware of fragility and smallness. God has a habit of concocting a grand show for the benefit of one human. That’s what I remembered from Sunday School. God has impeccable showmanship—the parting of the Red Sea, the Pillar of Fire, the visions of Throne Rooms and Abominable Creatures—all these are characteristics of his nature for flourish. If you get to be the most powerful Being to exist, it is necessary to unleash that power with style; enough to put the humans in line, enough to show them that they control nothing with their rockets. Theirs is an open window of a planet, susceptible to meteor passersby, and only the kindness of a Greater Being prevents them from disintegrating. I suppose this is why God can afford to feel sorry for such small creatures; these creatures so easily swept away by famine and tsunamis and yet have the temerity—no, the lunacy—to step on the moon. It must be heartbreaking to be God; to know all these mortals, to see so far ahead what becomes of them, of those dreams, of their inherent sadness as species.

This is how I visualized my fate unfolding: God sent an earthquake to bring me to another country. It was the trigger button that ended with you lying on that bed. But then again, maybe I think too much of it. Maybe he sent an earthquake to remind us once again how the great mysteries of this earth are beyond our reckoning. The reasons don’t matter. We could only agree that it was an ominous start.

Before the great ’90 earthquake came, I lived in the Philippines my whole life; in Manila, in an old wooden house. The day I was born was the day I lost my mother. Sure, she went home with me and spent the week staring at the bedroom windows. She would have appreciated billowing curtains, but we had blinds instead. And then she left. She was only 20 years old and was no beauty queen based on a faded photograph. She didn’t name me, Dad did. He called me Crisanta, in a fanciful effort to prophesy my martyrdom. Because my mother clearly was not eligible for it. Aunt Ramona swore though that