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Sunday, April 03, 2005
Tabada: Sleeping with sand
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
TAKE my word, the hardest place to sleep in is a room facing the sea.
For four days, I repeated a routine that escalated in desperation: I dusted off the bed before crawling in at night, and woke up with the rasping sand all over me.
Travel suspends beliefs. Chief amongst that is the vanity that one’s ways are best and thus, prevail. Sleep as the body timing out? Living by the sea cures you of that.
In time, I learned to shake out the grains before helping with breakfast. The first time I woke up in sand, I refused to believe, even though an invisible stream trickled from my hair into the pot of rice I was washing.
After slyly asking around, I concluded that it was only happening to me. My mother always sailed off to slumber, and docked as gently. The boys, who swam every night, plummeted in sleep once their heads touched the mats.
Not even the faintest white powdered the curve in their lashes.
I was an audience of one. At odd intervals after midnight, I would hear a roaring rush and recede in my ears. Without opening my eyes, I knew: the sea was again in our room.
Mornings surprised everyone but me with the longest ebb line. While the boys listened to their father explain about the tides’ attraction to the moon, I was brushing myself off, careful not to get sand into the pancake batter.
Resignation, of course, is hardly acceptance. I longed for home, for sleep that did not leave a fine dusting of souvenirs.
This homesickness was unavoidable, specially as a long-time friend had joined the family in this retreat.
E.’s presence reminded me that our home might never be blessed. Every summer, anticipating that E. would finally take his vows as a priest, we pushed off the blessing, wanting the benediction to come from our friend.
But after 16 years, in a search that has taken him from Cebu to Bacolod, Manila, Badian, Mexico, Davao and finally back, E. decided that he would not be serving as a priest.
What the religious lost, we gained, I shrugged. E. was still a mean cook, thus saving all our appetites in that long weekend. His switchblade was able, fashioning a barbecue basting brush from palm leaves to making a crackling bonfire in wet sand for moon-worship.
On our last evening, the tides were low. E. harvested sea urchin. While he pried one open, I scooped out red-orange meat. Mixed with the sweetness and brine was sand.
Nearshore is richest after the waters recede. Children know this, as well as residents who read the shallows to catch where the food has burrowed.
Every tiny creature surviving the dry spells is more resilient than the leviathans of the deep. The hermit crab dragging itself along the low-tide line endures by waiting out the change of rhythms: turbulence, followed by stillness; high waters one moment, just barren sand the next.
But barren is not the word I am searching for, not when I remember E. alone with his battered breviary in Spanish, the only book he stuffed inside his bag before catching the bus, the only tangible kept from the mission years.
Barren does not come close to describing our room facing the sea. When the journey is interminable, a few sandy grains reassure that there is a shore, and a meaning, punctuating all travels.
(gguu@lycos.com/0917-3226131)
(April 3, 2005 issue)
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