At 2AM the moon was high, spilling blue-silver light between the coconut palms. The few clouds were edged in it; the ground, the participants, including the dancers, tinted with it. It was the annual fiesta of Combalbag, the mountain citio that Emelie calls home. It started Saturday evening, with prayers and singing in the chapel. Titi Ali played his guitar. When the service was over, there were pastries and soft drinks in the rear, and beer on a table just before the chapel’s altar. This marked the beginning of seven days of chapel services, ending on Christmas.
A hundred yards away, giant speakers came to life, pounding out a disco beat that would continue for the next 6 hours. Beer and rum – 36 pisos per bottle – lubricated tongues and limbs as the dancing began. We smiled, talked, laughed, joked and danced. And we drank: fighter wine and beer mixed together; Tanduay Rhum and Sprite.
Mixed couples, groups of men, groups of women, individuals, kids, even Boboy’s 77 year-old father, cut the rug on the rocky dirt floor under the canopy of the tropical forest.
My wife, Emelie, is Secretary of the group that sponsors the event every year. She was busy all night, supervising the collection of ballots for the three young women contesting for queen of Combalbag. At the end of the night, she took the ballot money and the donations from those who paid to dance with the contestants, back to the chapel to be counted.
My job was to drink, dance and have fun, and keep an eye on our two nephews, Frederick and Gabriel. It never occurred to me that these objectives might be mutually exclusive. But the boys made it easy for me. They stuck to me like glue until they passed out in the early morning hours, sleeping on a wooden platform just outside the circle of revelers.
I drank a bit more than Emelie had in mind for me to drink and considerably less than I intended. I suppose it was a good compromise. We were staying the night at her mountain home. It was just a short walk, or roll if your legs are a bit wobbly, along a down-hill path from where the disco was being held. Gravity would pull a man there, no matter his condition. Mighty convenient, I was thinking.
What consternated my drinking muscle was the dancing. My ass never had a chance to find a comfortable niche on the bench behind Emelie and my feet and legs never stopped moving as I was dragged from the end of one song into the beginning of the next. My ticker pounded away like a jackhammer, but apparently didn’t bring enough oxygen to the part of my brain that accounts for sensibility. I was dead on my feet.
When the chance to sit down finally came, it was with a flush and in a pool of sweat. I didn’t mind. I was thinking I must be pretty cool to be so popular on the dance floor. I reminisced about dance moves from 40 years ago, when swooning was just one of the imagined affects my coolness had on the girls of that time.
Later, as we walked the path home, I was telling Emelie how all the dancing left me exhausted. “That’s because you jump around like a cow that’s just broke free of its chains” she said. Then she laughed. I laughed so damn hard, I thought I was going to roll down that hill. Leave it to my wife’s descriptive honesty to keep me grounded! English is her second language. Sometimes she hesitates and stammers to find the right the words. Sometimes they burst out in a flurry of staggering genius! It’s sure nice to have her around, even when it prickles just a little.
It was 3:30AM when we crawled into our makeshift bed on the bamboo floor of her house. The foam we slept on was just wide enough for one person, and occupied by three of us: Emelie on one side; me on the other, and Frederick between us.
At 4:30AM our pig, Cecelia, started bawling for water. She woke up all the roosters around, who set up a crowing in a chain reaction, starting with Big Red who was tied up directly under our floor. Fortunately, the cows, goats and carabaw slept through it, and didn’t add their voices to the cacophony (or melody, depending upon your ears). The dogs and cats had the good sense to keep quiet.
I must have fallen back to sleep and I woke up a second time around 6:30 . I was grateful for Frederick
After rousing, we lounged around for a little while. Then the three of us hopped on the scooter and headed down the mountain road to town and south along the highway that borders the ocean, stopping at Besa’s Café on the water, in Suba, where Emelie and I ate a breakfast of fish soup and corn grits and Derick had a fried fish cake with rice.
Life is good.
No comments:
Post a Comment