A Concept of the Primitive

By Edith Lopez Tiempo

Sixteen years ago Vern Langley came to the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer and was assigned to Surigao province on the island of Mindanao. Below this southernmost island of the archipelago, the Sulu group was a scattering of islets so close to Borneo one could hear the cocks crow across the water at dawn — that is, a dawn without gales or swollen surf. Once during the two years he served in the Peace Corps he was invited with two other teachers from his base high school to give a series of lectures at Jolo Notre Dame College in the Sulu group. They were house guests at the Archbishop’s Palace, where in the four days of their stay the prelate’s cook had regaled the Surigao visitors with lobsters, blue marlin, and the giant deep-sea crabs locally known as curacha. Just before sunrise one morning Vern had stood on a beach of white sand on one of the islets near Jolo. A long stretch of dark rain forest and undergrowth loomed from the slope behind him, and all around the area the sky’s misty grey was ripped by strands from the red sun breaking through above the mountain ridge on the farthest islet. In the shelter of a grove of coconuts Pedro Santos slipped a mug of steaming coffee from a thermos. Pedro, or Pete, as he was called, had come along thinking he understood this idea of a pre-dawn tryst, where the cold salt wind nipped at the lungs, and the distant islets drummed with silence. Since then Langley had not returned to Jolo; but then there was a great deal to see and occupy him in Surigao.

From the base at the Surigao City High School Langley took long trips around the province on a circuit route attaching himself to the regional high schools, where he trained the science teachers in the principles of modern math. Every chance he got he travelled to that part of the Surigao coast famous as the site of the Mindanao Deep. The first time he mentioned the Deep to the teachers at the base high school he talked about snorkeling, and surfboards and scuba diving. He got no spoken response but heads turned around in the Common Room and black astonished eyes lifted from the desks and regarded him with cover speculation.

“Why particularly there, Vern Langley? Many others, nice clean beaches. Nearer.” Pete Santos had adopted a certain manner with him: outspoken, partly ironic, and mostly absent-minded good cheer. Vern’s own strange Western inclinations often met with Pete’s amusement or indifference but somehow he preferred the fellow’s bluntness to the careful tolerance of the others.

After the two-year stint every one in his Peace Corps group left for home. The members’ individual assignments had covered the country’s provinces from north to south where they had given, and taken, many benefits from a variety of talents on both sides. Tapping a river to raise the level of an adjacent fish pond and introducing rotary cement mixers in the barrios were fair exchange for weaving reed hats on a molding block and plaiting roof shingles from nipa palm fronds; and roasting a pig on a bamboo spit over a bed of hotly glowing coconut shell and husks was a real cultural acquisition. So his group left after two years wiser and predictably stirred up by the closely frontal acculturation.

Vern stayed on. When Pete Santos was assigned to take charge of the training in modern mathematics at the Gigaquit High School four or five towns from Surigao City, Vern got a job there as a science teacher and there he met Ester Robles. She was the pert and loquacious teacher of the fourth year communication arts class next door to his own room and at class time he usually heard her agitated coughs each time she erased her notes on the blackboard; she was allergic to the chalk used by the school. It was ridiculous, he thought, how nobody bothered to do something. He made a mental note to write to his sister Ginny for a box of the special non-allergic brand she used herself. One time, not able to stand hearing Ester’s staccato coughs next door punctuated by her rasping indrawn gasps, he scooted into the room, grabbed the eraser and wiped the blackboard clean. All without a word. Retreating from her startled face and the furtive titters of the class he put on a heavy scowl of disapproval and turned and left. Apparently the incident broke down her wall of shyness, and after class they would walk to the beach stall for the small bamboo spits of barbecued pork and squid which they ate sitting on the row of boulders facing the sea and watched the sunset smear up the sky with red and salmon and gold. In less than a year they were married.

For a while people in the school and even casual acquaintances in the town kept wondering aloud why he had chosen her to marry. In a country where girls had won five International Beauty Queen contests, the national standard for beauty was pale brown skin and a slim but padded figure — no bony knees or elbows — and facial features partly Caucasian. Ester looked like a primitive. She was dark, her nose was a tidy heap flattened and spread into two bulbous wings, and a small black pebble-like eyes bulged out from below her eyebrows when she laughed. Pete was scandalized. The day after they were quietly married at the mayor’s office, the Common Room buzzed with the news, but Pete was the first to speak out.

“Could have done much better, chum. With your Nordic good looks you could have your pick.”

Then at a nearby desk crowded with students’ composition notebooks Pepe Aguilar, who was eating a late packed lunch, put aside his half-eaten lumpia vegetable roll to mumble through a full mouth. “Ester’s a fine girl. That’s not the point. She looks aboriginal, Langley. As if she has just come down from some mountain tribe.”

In the farther half of the Common Room, Ester got heartier congratulations from the women.

And downtown a week later, when Vern was at Rusty’s Educational Supply browsing through a small collection of fiction written by national authors, the Spaniard Don Joaquin Echevarria had stopped to talk. The man owned a sugar plantation in the central Visayas but preferred to live in Mindanao. Gigaquit was his wife’s home town. Echevarria asked after the new bride and then said with charming frankness: “A good girl, Ester Robles. But not up to your own looks, Langley.”

All this was meant to please him, the local habit of the indirect compliment to the foreigner. He decided he would not explain how it was Ester’s dark and scrawny liveliness that made her more attractive than their town fiesta queens.

After twelve years and two children Vern knew people still wondered, although not aloud. They had stayed three years in Gigaquit and then Ester managed a transfer to her hometown public high school in Dumaguete City on Negros Island. He himself got a position in the Foundation University, although he got an offer from Silliman University, a former Presbyterian mission school where the students were more sophisticated. Ester left the government school after a year to teach English in the high school department of Silliman, and there she became a real asset in the classroom, where she promptly took on the authentic idiom along with the accent of her husband. She told Vern, “They say you talk like Richard Burton pretending to be an American,” at which he had smirked, “I supposed with the worst of both.” And in the next few years Ester was never happier at her job.

But when the two boys were in the grades Vern insisted she stop teaching. He knew this raised a furor among Ester’s friends, women who were teachers and bank tellers and clerks at the local government offices. But he was firm. In this country, when the husband’s income was sufficient he couldn’t see the popular practice of leaving the care of the house and the children to the yaya, a nursemaid cum housekeeper, while the wife went off to work. He knew the yayas often took the good-natured short-cut to enforce discipline. The witch will get you, the ogre in the woods, the giant kafri in the dark trees at night. And they grew up a superstitious lot; the farmers had their sacrosanct planting “rules,” the cook must not sing at the stove or she ended up a spinster, a dropped spoon meant a female visitor coming soon. Even some educated ones he knew were spooked. A chemist at the sugar central refinery had a story about a failed generator functioning the moment a pig was slaughtered near the turbines and the blood allowed to drip into the water. So, one hired a cook to double as a housekeeper, and one hired a laundry woman by the day. But no nursemaid particularly to care for the children in their formative years.

“American Ethic,” Ester explained lightly to her friends. But Vern knew she was badly disappointed and he was to learn, badly hurt.

He inherited twelve thousand dollars from his great-aunt Belinda Grey in Boston and used part to build his house and invested the rest. He had chosen a low slope for the split-level bungalow with a carport attached, and in the eyes of the town he was prosperous enough. But folks soon accepted his regular presence at the public market place, where he did his own household buying. He frequented the fish stalls for his choices of the deep-sea fishes sliced up and displayed on the counters, and haggled like a native over the cuts of beef loins and pork chops, and the vegetables brought down by the rural women from the garden patches beside the high mountain lake of Balinsasayao.

Then one day Ester broke her quiet acquiescence to the unusual arrangement. “You must know, Vern, it is very humiliating for me to let my husband go to the public market. All right for the grocery stores, don’t you see?”

“People should know there’s nothing wrong with a professional man getting his hands dirty with fish and stuff. Or a man doing chores for his wife.” He knew he sounded stuffy but he did mean it.

“You’re no longer in the Peace Corps.”

He said, reasonably, “I’m not imposing on anyone. If they learn something from the way we live, fine. Nothing to fuss about, Ester.”

“And about you, yourself?” He looked at her and she said, “Thinking about how I feel, Vern, and how other people feel?” She added, “There are certain things.”

She shut her mouth, then spoke up: “And about how you wouldn’t allow me to teach, six- and eight-year-old boys don’t need to hang around my skirts.”

“Eric and Ben are not cripples. But a yaya is not a mother.”

Right then the matter should have been closed, but he suspected it would keep coming up. Early the next morning, before six o’clock, when he was getting ready to go to market he was not too surprised to see Ester was up and dressed.

“I’m going with you.”

“Fine! But I don’t see — ”

“The vendors sell you dear — they think surely you must have some dollar income. Taking advantage, especially the fisherwomen.”

He didn’t think so and reflected a little on her real motive. Of course she just wanted to be seen to let people know she was not “maltreating” him.

At the market they were early; the fish counters were barely laid out, with only the less preferred catch from the river and the brackish water at the delta four towns away, mostly milkfish and pike, and crabs and shrimps. Ester suggested they walk over to the shore where the fishing boats were beached and buy the deep-sea fish cheaper from the fishermen who had just come in.

The morning was still chilly. They walked to the end of the seaside boulevard, and past the fearfully clean scrubbed public abattoir, to where the fishermen had just dragged their outrigger canoes from the water and up under the shelter of the coconut groves. The sun had pushed upward from the horizon, leaving a short wavery trail on the sea surface. Around the bright disk the sky was a misty reflected blue streaked with the tendrils of golds and orange disappearing in the light fast turning into a transparent white glare. Beside each boat under the coconut palms huge rattan bins and baskets squatted in a line to be loaded and transported to the market place by the waiting jeep and a couple of noisy three-wheeled motorcabs.

As Vern and Ester approached they noticed one canoe alone remained at the water’s edge, swaying as the bamboo poles it used as outriggers slapped at the water. About half a dozen fishermen in animated talk stood around it. Someone had spread a collapsed sail on the sand and one of the wives had placed in the middle of it a shallow bowl of a strong vinegar marinade; floating in it were bits of onion and small red cayenne pepper, and garlic. Then a large woman came bustling from behind Vern and Ester with a tall paper sack of hot hard bread rolls she had bought at the market bakery. “Chow!” she urged and as she bent and dumped the contents beside the bowl the men shouted their rowdy thanks. Above the hubbub that followed the bread’s arrival a stubbly faced man in the group yelled hospitably at someone who was with the others under the coconut grove loading their bins.

“Eat hearty, mate!” the man called back, too cheerily busy to be bothered with food.

By this time the fishermen on the sandy shore had squatted around the impromptu tablecloth. Intermittently they dug into the boat for a fish — the boat was full of the small gleaming grey malangsi, a local favorite for pickling — and waggled it clean in the sea water and dipped by turns into the marinade, where the fish emerged dripping, to land quickly in the famished mouths of the humans. Hands tore pieces from the crust rolls and these were chomped sandwich fashion with the fish.

Vern Langley and his wife who stood quietly nearby moved unobtrusively to the coconut grove and made judicious purchases; a medium-size tuna and a couple of red snappers from a betelnut-chewing fisherman, and a small blue marlin from a young fellow with merry crinkled eyes who had looked hopefully at them.

“Haven’t we got too much?” Ester eyed the heap in Vern’s basket.

“We’ll save the tuna for the picnic,” Vern told her

On their way back the eaters on the sand had got down to the last of the marinade and were wiping up the dregs with their fish and bread morsels.

Ester had politely avoided looking, and he made no comment. The sunlight now bathed the sidewalk on the boulevard as they walked back briskly to the market stalls for some meat and green vegetables. Then she said, “They were out at sea all night, that food must have tasted good.”

“Obviously,” he said.

The usual three families were at the picnic, their third or fourth beach picnic together since big Stephen Dorne and his tiny Filipino wife Loreta moved into town from the States. The couple could not have enough of the seaside “shindys,” as Stephen called them. Ester’s first cousin Francisca and her husband Rodrigo Solis had brought their seven-year old twin daughters, Fe and Esperanza, and the Dorne’s only child, good-natured Steve Jr., accepted Ben and Eric with fourteen-year-old condescension. This time they had all driven to Amlan three kilometers north of Dumaguete City where they had previously spotted the small cove below the highway. They parked their cars on the curb across the road from an old abandoned storehouse for copra. Below the low bank from the sidewalk the curving length of the coast was lined with clean white sand; the spot they had chosen was overhung with the leafy boughs of an old acacia. Rodrigo tramped back to his car, opened the trunk and took out a folded table, which he lugged happily down the short bank to the beach.

“Now,” he announced proudly, “we can have our food off the sand.”

Francisca had brought along the two old army blankets they had always used as a table, but which she now spread out for anyone to sit on. The twins preferred gambolling around in the sand, shrieking and chasing each other on hands and knees like monkeys and tagging each other by their pigtails. Eric and Ben stood by and mimicked the girls’ screeching. Steve Jr. was unaccountably embarrassed by all the horseplay and quickly stripped to his bathing trunks and ran out and jumped into the waves. Eric and Ben promptly followed but into the shallower water.

“He’s a strong swimmer,” boasted Stephen Sr., watching his son dig into the waves.

Rodrigo set up the table, a leafed arrangement almost twice the size of a card table, and invited the women to fetch the food from the cars. He said, “We can thank Vern for this fine idea.”

“That’s right; great idea,” quickly agreed Loreta Dorne with somewhat sheepish heartiness. “Handy,” her husband said, “made a difference. Food tasted even better.”

They were referring to their last picnic together, when Vern had brought out the split-bamboo table he had stored in the back of his station wagon and had insisted on transferring the picnic food and the plates and all the other things that had already been set out on the army blankets when he arrived.

“We really don’t want our food garnished with sand.” He had made the rather lame joke apologetically, observing the embarrassed silence before Francisca had quickly broken in. “Of course not, Vern! Why didn’t we think of that before?” Francisca did not look at Ester, who was looking at her husband in an expressionless way.

Rodrigo’s picnic table was a big success, everyone was eating in comfort seated on the army blankets and the Solis couple beamed and behaved like gratified hosts.

Other groups had taken possession of the long beach, on either side of them. Later in the afternoon people went strolling past, and the spot under the acacia was invaded by five or six of Ester’s women friends. Dorne and Loreta were introduced but wandered off after a while to join the children at a small estuary where they were scooping out gobs of putty-like clay from the brackish water. They all settled down on the sand and were soon absorbed in molding shapes from the muddy lumps.

Lying on the blanket, Vern was only half-concentrating on Updike’s Trust Me and not too interested in joining in the women’s talk, which was mostly about their jobs and their children. Ester’s lively chatter pleased him; she was quite loquacious when among her friends. He let the book fall on his chest and breathed deep of the warm sea air. Traffic on the road was scarce at that time of the afternoon. He could see well back to the other side of the highway the group of nipa palm-thatched huts on the edge of the banana grove. A dog was barking somewhere from the clustered houses. Vern felt an access of loneliness, strange in the midst of so much peace. He listened to his wife’s voice breaking into laughter and wondered if he did wrong in not taking her and the boys to the States. He no longer had his parents, but they could go visit Ginny and Robert in Newtonville. Ester would like that.

“I have a feeling for that place,” she said once when he was talking to her about Ginny and his brother-in-law. “Did you know,” she said, “Ninoy Aquino and his family lived there before he came back and was assassinated? Cory says those were their happiest years as a family.”

Becky Apostol, who was just a notch short of being a gasbag, had been hogging the conversation, and as usual her encomiums on the workload of the municipal clerks were received with much laughter. Belaboring the obvious. “What workload?” Ester chortled. “Five women sitting around in a room doing the job of one?’

I could never stand that humbug of an Apostol woman, he thought. She had dropped in at the house at least twice and the last time he had pointedly excused himself. He got the impression she came mainly to snoop. He was glad when somebody, a woman he didn’t know, snapped back, “And we public school teachers, we had three salary increases in the last two years.”

This time it was almost hysterical laughter. They were mostly teachers there and their breed of public service had always been infamous for being underpaid, and overworked.

“Lucky you’re working at all,” Becky said, “with the over-supply. And you, Ester, how do you like your jobless state?”

The supreme insolence. He wished Ester would put the woman in her place, and she did.

“I think I’ll apply as a maid at the Langley house,” Ester said dryly.

Vern sat up. “That’s not funny.”

He looked icily at them and the titters abruptly stopped.

He got up and walked up the bank, and crossed the highway without looking at them again. He stopped at the abandoned storehouse, discovering he had to collect his feelings, and realized to his surprised that he was not angry; more bewildered than angry. How could Ester say such a thing about people? Even as a joke it had absolutely no basis. He walked around the edge of the banana grove noticing abstractedly the uniform growth of all the trees in the grove, the identical growth of the maturing fruit bunched in rows on the stalks. He thought gloomily: she was not very reasonable about quitting the school job and he had hurt her. But she must surely know, it was only that he had wanted to give her his best. Now she had hurt him back. A rude thing for her to say: but the women thought it was funny. For the first time in years he felt he didn’t understand these people, they had strange responses deeper down and there they lost him.

At the close of the first semester the ornithologist from Peabody Museum came to Siliman University looking for someone to guide them through the forests of Mindanao, preferably one with some scientific training. The project was not collecting birds but picking and preserving the ticks from the feathers. Silliman could spare no one from the staff and suggested Vern Langley at the Foundation University. The team had promptly asked Vern and he had accepted, requesting only that Pete Santos be invited to join them. Pete was still at the Gigaquit High School in Mindanao and since it was the mid-year break he had no trouble getting away. Over the years they had exchanged greeting cards at Christmas time, but it had been about ten years since Vern and Ester had left Gigaquit and it was good to see Pete again.

For twelve days they led the team of two Americans and a Filipino through kilometers of rain forest in three widely separated provinces as required — Bukidnon, Surigao, and Zamboanga del Sur. At first it was fun, a kind of high-brow bird-watching and bird-hunting. They watched for the smaller species and their bird-shots got as many as forty in one day. Vern and Pete became quite good with the pincers and with pickling the ticks in the little stoppered specimen bottles of formaldehyde solution. Always careful not to be caught in the forest after dark the team camped at night beside a stream or a river tributary, and strung the bird meat through the twigs of wild guava and roasted the spitted gobbets over slow embers. Soon eating the tinned food was joyless, and after a week they also cared little for the sharp gamey flavor of the bird meat which at first they had found new and exciting. It was a real relief when the three left the Casa Blanca pension at Zamboanga City with a good batch of pickled ticks, and pronouncing themselves satisfied.

Pete and Vern found themselves with over a week’s leave remaining and the generous fee of one thousand pesos each. They decided to make use of some of the time and money. They took off for Jolo, checked in at a small pension in the town, and one early morning before dawn they made it to the islet where they had gone fifteen years before. Nothing had changed. It had taken about twenty minutes walking through the wooded slope and now they stopped for some coffee under the same coconut grove close to the beach. They soon discovered that the beach was now very much populated; small huts on stilts had been built over the water, and even before sunrise the stretch of sand was coming alive with sarong-wrapped women followed by the children with goldish brown skin and black hair bleached to a rich burnt yellow in the sun.

Vern was pleasantly surprised that it was Pete who remembered about the daybreak crowing of roosters in Borneo, suggesting they walk to the part of the islet where it was claimed the crowing could be heard.

“The sea is quiet,” Pete observed cheerfully, “we may be luckier this time.”

But they were not to hear the fabled chanticleers because they never got to the particular vantage point. Long before they reached the spot they saw lying half out of the water a strange-looking creature of the deep, a dead mammal of some sort that had been dredged up on the sand the night before. They approached and Vern got hold of it by the tail end and dragged it up on the higher ground. It was about four feet long. The moment Pete caught a good look at it he got worked up. He babbled at Vern and kept waggling his hands and spreading apart his arms in a frenzy of alarm.

“Throw it back into the sea. Far out, for god’s sake!”

It looked eerily human. Lank slimy hair fell about the flattened horse-like face and dark patches of what looked like muddy seaweed grew on the place of its body where human hair would grow. It was a female dugong, the mermaid of the old folks tales, lying there in all its obscene nakedness.

Vern was excited. “Here, give me a hand,” he said. “We should get it to a museum. The taxidermist in Jolo should get it before it starts to smell.”

Pete backed away. “It’s indecent, man — how would you like you, yourself — ” Then he said more quietly, “These people mustn’t see you messing with that.”

“What’s wrong with you? This is a rare find and you know it. I don’t know of any museum anywhere that has a dugong.”

Pete gave him a glum look and Vern said urgently, “Look, the dugong is so rare people think it’s just a myth.”

But a group of children had come up and seen the creature and set up a great screaming, and went running of to fetch their elders. Very quietly a crowd of men and women started to come up and soon there were about two dozen of them clad in ragged malong and saw-wal, and the lot of them stinking with the strong fish smell. They stood blinking and mumbling and ventured a glimpse at the untenable creature on the sand: seeing what it was, they quickly averted their faces.

Meanwhile Vern had lifted the creature so that its length lay supine on his two forearms, and as he took some steps toward the coconut grove the group fell back; the women wailed and the men looked at him in horror and disgust. Everyone whipped about without a backward glance, as from something contaminating and too crude, too uncivilized to set human eyes upon. Very quickly he found himself alone on a deserted beach. So much for getting them to help transport the thing.

Pete was in the coconut grove sitting on a fallen trunk when he came up with his burden. He laid it down and sat on the sandy ground facing his friend. He looked helplessly at the strange creature at their feet.

“I don’t understand those people, do you? Superstitious lot. What are we to do with this? We must get it to town.”

He was rather jolted by Pete’s reaction to the whole thing and he looked at him, troubled by the dim sense that he knew some things about his old friend that he didn’t know before.

Pete kept his eyes from wandering. He kept his eyes on Vern’s face. “Throw it back into the sea,” he said.