Bobo could not give additional information about my parents and grandparents beyond what he had already transmitted through his cell phone. He suggested that we visit Rita at Sitio Suba. We motored to Katipunan with his wife astride behind me. It was a short ride from Bobo’s house to the national highway and about the same travel time to the junction where Bobo veered and followed the slippery trail that led to Rita’s hut. Its lone resident was not around. Rita’s house was a kitchen-bedroom affair of sawed lumber, corrugated tin sheets and woven bamboo splits. I looked around and recalled the last time I was here as a kid. There was nothing familiar to me. A hanging bridge caught my attention. I followed the footpath to the bridge. This might be the trail that went straight to my mother’s ancestral house across the river. There was no bridge then so we crossed the Ginsangaan River on foot. Crossing the river is deeply rooted in my memory because of the sihi that I used to gather as I crossed the river. The tiny white clams were exposed by shaking vigorously the water with my feet or hands, creating a turbulence that disturbed the clam’s habitat of mud and silts.
Bobo was talking to somebody harvesting corn near Rita’s hut. I beckoned him to come and to join my tour to the area where my grandparents’ house must have stood. We crossed the hanging bridge – a thing of stranded wire cables and bamboo poles. Midway in the swinging bridge, my eyes caught and followed the flowing water but the river downstream was hidden from view by a canopy of trees and luscious vegetation. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw a skinny kid waddling on flat slippery boulders and wading through streams of clear waters as I struggled to keep pace with my mother and Aunt Romualda. We were hunting small crabs and picking fresh water shells locally called suso, in the shallow river that dangerously swelled during heavy downpours.
“It must have been there,” I pointed at the patch of land not far from the river.
The fallow reminded me of the idle land not far from my grandparents’ house where we dug wild yam. But the grasses, shrubs and guava trees were taller. We located the tubers by the vines that climbed on the dense vegetation.
Bobo, who was fourteen years my junior, has not seen the house so he was of little help.
“The pit toilet must have been there,” I pointed to a spot in the riverside. I expected to see clumps of bamboos at that site but there were none. For a moment I was transported to the time when the tall bamboos cast their dancing shades on the wall-less and roofless latrine, its gaping hole covered with bamboo poles. Houseflies, lured by the fecal smell coming from the gaps on the floor, whirled around as I squatted with my ass above the slot. The buzzing of the flies blended with the murmurs of the river, the creaking of bamboo culms and the hissing of bamboo leaves.
My mind shifted to another childhood episode – a scared boy digging hard to keep up with the adults as the clan sought refuge at a bamboo grove. The boy, soaked to the bones, trembled as the raging typhoon battered the place. The bamboo grove, where was it? There were clumps of bamboos at the bank upriver, but that would be a dangerous place during typhoons and heavy rains. It must be farther away from the river but I only saw grasses, shrubs and small trees. There were also no rice paddies where I thought there should be. Time blurs memories and rearranges landscape and space.
