The sound was eerie, piercing even the cacophony from the traffic below. It jarred with the mellowing light of day.
The first time I heard this sound was during a rainy weekday evening, when a girl trying to board a bus at Philcoa, a terminal notorious for pickpockets as well as flashfloods, became another victim.
Since the jeepney I was riding slowed down to pick up passengers, I saw up close the girl, who dropped all her packages on the road, dissolve into incoherence, wailing “cellphonekocellphoneko” into the darkness.
Hearing that banshee howl again, I avoided looking around. More than the monster traffic that can splatter a human being or the flash floods that can overlap gutters in seconds, the special terror that Manila traffic holds for this transient Cebuano is urban violence.
As it turned out, I could not avoid her. By the time I noticed the commuters going down the ramp give her a wide berth, the woman bearing an infant was just a step above me.
“Lecheng buhay (cursed life),” she shrieked. In the second I saw the bald crown of the baby’s head over the women’s shoulder, I imagined its owner plunging down into the void over Quezon Ave., connected to the shrieks its mother flung like a venomous thread into the rush-hour turmoil.
Seeing a man walk down to them, the woman fell silent. I passed her and made my escape. Leche, I thought. Why curse milk?
On board the MRT, the late afternoon rush hour was peaking. Standing near my train’s exit was a better option than sitting down in the crush of bodies.
At Cubao, the doors slid open to let in more commuters. Nobody ever heeds that disembodied voice soothingly asking people to wait for the next train. Reason became transgression when the voice repeated with no trace of irony, “Give a seat for the elderly, the pregnant, the disabled”.
A woman whose torso is twisted like a screw stood with the rest of us. No taller than a child, she left a gap in the throng, angering commuters making for that vacant space. No one heeded those remonstrating there was a person standing in that space, urging people to stop pushing.
An elderly man before me snapped back at the woman behind. “Leche,” he punctuated the phrase that roared out from him. I closed my eyes just as the woman shrieked back, “Don’t shout at me, gago (fool)!”
When the cursing dwindled to a whine, I opened my eyes.
What a surprise. I was not in a pen, an arena where beasts are about to tear me apart.
The week had just started in the land of milk and honey.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)
*First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 30, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”
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