It was a cool December morning, that time of year when the rice stalks
burst into a soft spray of flowers to pollinate. Some did so ahead
of the others. The rice fields were dry and quails and rats foraged
the rice paddies in search of food. Instead of going to Sunday school
that day, the boy called Ya-O was busy setting up his snares to catch
wild quails. Ya-O was not his real name, but it was what he was called,
after the first syllables he uttered as a child. His snares were made
from strands of horsetail hair he had braided the night before. Each
snare was tied to thin bamboo poles five inches long which he mounted
along "highways"--the paths next to the dikes in the rice
fields quails traveled. He had been at it since six that morning and
had already mounted 30 snares. Ten more snares to go, he thought,
and that would be it.
The highways in these fields were winding. Just the same, he continued
fencing the highways to direct the quails towards the trap that was
waiting for them. He glimpsed movement among the rice plants on his
right and heard a ssssshhhhh-ing which he chose to ignore. In his
mind he was already counting how many quails he would catch. He stood
up only when he had finished tying the knot for the loop he would
trigger to trap his prey. It was then that he saw it--the beautiful
fierce snake whose venom could easily kill a twelve-year-old boy who
was small for his age.
The cobra held its head high, poised to strike. The muted thunder
of its hissing--which was what he heard a few seconds ago--had stopped.
Its flickering tongue taunted him. Suddenly, the arrogance with which
he picked fights with the bigger boys at school was replaced by a
brittle courage that barely gave him enough strength to run away,
as fast as he could, across the rice fields towards the main dike.
Throwing the materials for his traps at the snake was a feeble attempt
to scare it away. Ya-O's left foot was already on the dike when the
cobra lunged at him. It wrapped itself around his right leg in a slimy
embrace and embedded its fangs in his big toe. He saw the cobra twist
its head and knew that its poison was already making its way to his
heart. After injecting the boy with its venom, the snake let down
its guard. Horrified, Ya-O shook it off from his right leg with an
awkward jerk. As his right foot grew heavy, he felt cut off from himself.
A fence of darkness rattled down upon his entire being. His head frothed
with a mental effervescence that flicked its tongue into the corners
of his brain. He felt his bolo's scabbard thud against his thigh and
it was only then that he remembered he had been carrying it all along.
Despite his fear, Ya-O used the bolo to cut some talahib and cogon
grass which he tied into a tourniquet above his right knee. Then he
walked the longest kilometer of his life.
When Ya-O had arrived at the barangay kapitan's house, none of the
men there believed he had been bitten by a cobra. The grown-ups refused
to listen to his story and scolded him for not being in Sunday school
like the other children. Like the other children. The words were almost
as painful as the snake bite. He had just turned twelve, and wanted
to think himself a man. Above the din of the Sunday crowd in the kapitan's
house, Apo Ipe, the oldest man in the village, demanded he be shown
the alleged wound. The scent of betel nut and rice wine wafted towards
Ya-O as the boy approached him. He sat next to Apo Ipe on the narrow
wooden bench and gingerly raised his right leg to display the two
puncture wounds on his big toe. The sight was enough to rouse the
old man from his drunken stupor. Apo Ipe reached for his bayong, which
contained the instruments of his trade as a mananandok. To no one
in particular, he barked out an order for two bottles of gin. He used
the gin to sterilize his tandoks. The tandok was a carabao horn, hollowed
out from its base up to the lower half of its curve. At its tip was
a small opening with a valve made of bee's wax that closed and opened
to confine or release air from the horn.
Apo Ipe cut the skin below Ya-O's right knee in several places using
sharpened bamboo splinters. Above each cut he placed a tandok and
sucked in air through them one by one. They reminded Ya-O of inverted
ice cream cones that had bent in the heat. Apo Ipe was worried that
the boy felt no pain. Save for a few feathery strokes of feeling,
the boy's lower leg had grown numb. Apo Ipe checked the tandoks every
five minutes. After an hour of repeatedly doing so, the venom that
had been sucked out appeared as silvery bubbles that gave the boy's
blood an iridescent sheen. It was only when he made an incision above
the boy's right knee that Apo Ipe heard Ya-O scream in pain. "Be
glad that it hurts, little one. It means the cobra's poison has not
reached beyond your knee. Who would've thought that someone so young
could apply a tourniquet so expertly?"
"Ya-O, ubing ko, ubing ko!" Ya-O was slightly embarrassed
that Nanang's hysterical scream eclipsed his own. By the time the
news had reached his mother, village gossip had swollen the truth:
her youngest son had died of a fatal snake bite. She thanked the kapitan
and Apo Ipe for bringing her son back from the brink of death. She
would not forget their goodness as long as she lived.
His mother was silent throughout the walk home. Upon reaching their
little hut with the earthen floor, Ya-O knew what would happen. Once
his mother gently closed the door behind her, Ya-O took his place
at the dulang, the low slab of kamagong wood where the family ate
its meals and where he sometimes slept when the dishes were cleared.
Tatang was seated in his chair and did not rise to greet his youngest
son by mussing his hair. For Ya-O, the scene--Tatang in his chair,
Nanang pouring herself a glass of water; his older brother Fredo avoiding
his eyes and him at the radius of their silence-looked carved, fixed.
Whatever was going to happen next, however painful, would have a familiar
quality. Perhaps because he was Tatang's favorite his father would
understand what it meant to him to be singled out as a man among the
other children. Hopefully, there would be no need for him to justify
what he was doing in the rice fields that morning. He was certain
that if Fredo spoke on his behalf there was a chance his backside
would be spared from Tatang's baston. But it was Nanang who spoke
first and at that instant Ya-O knew the men in the family would refuse
to share in his triumph. "Ya-O," she said firmly, "It
is not right for you to scare us that way. If you had only gone to
Sunday school like you were supposed to, this would never have happened
and you would have spared us all from pain," she said.
Even after many months, Ya-O continued to feel a heaviness in the
top right corner of his brain which he imagined was the deadweight
of a curled and sleeping serpent. It kept him awake at night. During
the day it reached out from the darkness in his head and moved through
the house to disguise itself as some harmless object in order to trick
him. It was capable of camouflaging itself as the hemp rope Tatang
used to fasten the carabao with, and on more than one occasion Ya-O's
fingers felt it lodged in the slippery insides of a banana peel. The
only way not to provoke the creature was to keep very still. Since
it was at its most powerful in his dreams, Ya-O avoided sleep. He
also refrained from eating because it loved to appear as one of the
noodles amidst the bagnet in his favorite miki soup. It was during
this time that Tatang noticed how scrawny his youngest had grown,
and worried that the circles beneath Ya-O's eyes were too large and
dark to belong to a boy of twelve. Tatang knew that there was only
one way to cure Ya-O of the fear that gripped him: the boy would have
to kill a cobra.
The next day, Ya-O rode with Fredo on their carabao, accompanied
by their cousin Julian, who rode a carabao on his own. They made their
way to the hilly upland area, where the base of the largest hill cascaded
into a valley. It was summer and the valley looked flat because there
was no wind blowing through the dry wild grasses. On a large patch
of earth, there were stubbles of decaying rice and mungbean plants.
Aside from the hill, they were the tallest things in the area. Ya-O
fancied that he was a rice stalk a farmer had forgotten to reap at
harvest time. He couldn't remember feeling taller than he did that
day, seated on the back of a carabao holding a tagumbaw branch nearly
twice his height. Fredo had given it to him, telling him that it was
special, having come from the tagumbaw tree. The old folks in the
village believed that the pungence of its sap weakened the fiercest
of snakes.
Leaving Ya-O behind, Fredo and Julian went to the top of the hill.
Once they had reached its summit, each held the opposite end of a
150 yard-long rope. Used milk cans filled with tiny pebbles dangled
from different parts of the rope. The whirr-whirr-whirring sound it
made as they raced back in Ya-O's direction scared the snakes away
from their hiding places and onto the barren patch of earth in the
valley. Three snakes appeared on their first try. Ya-O watched as
Fredo and Julian used their tagumbaws to kill a snake each. They kept
the biggest snake alive and drove it closer to him. It was a brown
cobra two meters long and two inches in diameter.
"Ya-O, he's yours, get off the carabao!" Fredo shouted.
Ya-O froze at the sight of the cobra.
"Ya-O, COME ON! It's the only way you'll be cured!"
Ya-O alighted from the carabao slowly. He was eight meters away from
the cobra. Fredo and Julian were nearer to it, using their tagumbaws
to keep it at bay.
"Stay beside me, get ready to use your tagumbaw. Be careful.
Don't face the cobra and keep him at your side. Strike him from behind.
You can do it!"
Fredo and Julian withdrew from the cobra as Ya-O inched towards it.
He was only three meters away now, but still uncertain of himself.
"Keep yourself at his side and strike him!"
Ya-O missed twice, but each time the cobra turned to face him, he
quickly moved to its side.
"Very good! Take your time and strike him behind the head!"
Ya-O found Fredo's words encouraging.
In the pulsating rhythmn of his pagan snake dance Ya-O felt the heat
on his throat and around his knees, all bare to its embrace. It seemed
to heighten his senses and suspended the movement of everything around
him. The heat thawed his fear, making it possible for him to reduce
the cobra to the stillness of contemplation. Slowly his heartbeat
achieved a close approximation of every movement the snake made.
"Strike him NOW!"
It was then that Ya-O released his stick and struck the cobra on
its head. The snake collapsed and twitched violently before it lay
flat like a thick ribbon. Though he knew the creature was already
dead, Ya-O continued to crush the cobra until the tagumbaw's sharpened
end splintered. The jubilation Ya-O felt at seeing the lifeless cobra
was a confirmation of his manhood, and embracing it was the warm summer
air--saturated with the scent of dried grass, the smell of baked earth,
his body tingling from the physical exertion, the feel of his shirt
against his sweat-drenched skin. All these things made him feel like
a man. Then, as if to affirm his resurrection, Ya-O picked up the
carcass by the tail and swung it over his head many times before letting
it go. As he did so, he felt that for his sake nature performed a
miracle.
---------------
A.V. Gonzales wakes up every morning to a
spectacular view of Mt. Banahaw. She grows herbs in between her work
as an Editorial Consultant for Samahang Itinataguyod ang Kakayahang
Angkin sa Pag-unlad/Society Towards Reinforcing Inherent Viability
for Enrichment (SIKAP/STRIVE) Foundation and Senior Program Development
Officer for the Students' Transformation and Enrichment for Truth-Values
Integration and Promotion (STET-VIP). She is a B.A. Communication
Research and MA Women and Development graduate of the University of
the Philippines. She was Managing Editor of the Philippine Collegian
and Fellow for Fiction in English of the Iligan (2003) and IYAS (2005)
Writing Workshops.
