My husband peeled away from our group to elaborate on the directions from the phone app: the road on the upper right led to Osmeña Peak, the highest summit in Cebu and “hagkanan” (a place to kiss) for mountaineers; on the upper left, to Dalaguete, home of Mantalongon, the “vegetable basket” of Cebu and border of the eastern and western southern mountain ranges; the lower right to the highway market in Poblacion, Alegria, nearest the southern tip, jump-off for Dumaguete on the Negros province; and to the lower left, the Sangi market in Madridejos, gathering for bus travelers to or from the next town of Badian or Cebu City.
It is impossible to remain lost in this country.
When roads fork or destinations depart from maps, there is always a Filipino to give directions.
Often, we will do more than point you on your way. We will tell stories.
As the bare-chested foreigner roared off for Badian, the locks escaping from his helmet streaming behind like corn hair glinting in the sun, the older women in our group murmured, Hesus Hesus Hesus.
The married daughter of Ason mimicked her elders, piously covering her eyes with both hands but keeping the upper fingers splayed so we saw her eyes, glinting mischievously.
The joke used to be played by the late Maldo, Ason’s childless brother who raised Evelyn, who uses the peeping-tom gesture not really to mock the skimpily clad visitors who rent motorcycles to dip in the freezing Camba-is Falls of Guadalupe but to tease her elders, specially her 80-year-old mother, Ason, who still farms not just one plot but several others, scattered miles apart, near her crossing home in Tagaytay.
Tagaytay, Alegria is like many places in the country, at the crossing of place and time, between the set ways of farming and encroaching ecotourism, between the brief passages of mortals and the defiance of memories.
On the way to the Poblacion, my husband stops by his own “hagkanan,” the Tubod trickling the sweet spring waters that refuelled him on his walks as a younger man, crisscrossing the west and the east, when the top of Evelyn’s head barely reached his hip, when Maldo was still teasing his own mother, when the lilac-throated kachubongs still hung upside down like bells out drinking the whole night, and red-beaked black birds roosted in trees and squawked like a convocation of bats or uplanders choking on eyefuls of bare skin.
The waters are as sweet as ever, reported the husband.
Must be a goat fell at the Bukal source and drowned, I said as we continued on our descent.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 12, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"
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