MY SISTER and I had a different longing. Being transients in the city, we wanted to go home. We were completely isolated—our parents didn’t know anything about us and we didn’t know about them either. And there was the food. We’d have to go home if we wanted to live.
There was only a slow death waiting for us in Tacloban.
At dusk on the day after Yolanda struck, when there was still a little daylight, we ate dinner. The rice tasted different, though. It was mildly sweet and tangy, besides. Kim told me the water she put might have been seawater because in the dark she didn’t recognize one thing from another.
At first I laughed at how seawater could permeate our lives so. I tried swallowing a few more spoonfuls but the Wow Ulam did not help. And so, instead of rationing our food, we used twice the usual because we had to cook noodles to assuage our hunger. I had to buy an egg from our landlady so that we could have a little meat.
It was our second night in darkness. We had no candles and we knew no other place from where we could buy a candle. Kim played Michael Bublé’s “Home” on her phone and I in my restlessness closed my eyes and chanted with Bublé. Outside our window, the moon shone brightly, though I could not see it from my bed. And the stars shivered in the distance.
Around 11:45, I was woken by good news that worried me more about home. I heard cries of thanksgiving from Dustin and a woman’s voice who turned out to be his mom. At first I thought it was Nanay’s—welcome news, unbelievable though it was, but then I thought, it can’t be. I woke Kim and we went outside. The door in the next room was already open and the other boarders were sitting outside tearfully looking at the happy picture of a family reunion after the storm. I couldn’t help shedding tears too. Dustin’s prediction that his parents would come for him had come true. His parents walked from the other side of San Juanico to our boarding house in Juan Luna in the dead of night just to look for him.
Now where were our parents? It was starting to look as though we couldn’t expect them to barge in like Dustin’s did. We would have to do the barging ourselves.
Dustin’s mom came with good news that the northern parts of Samar down to Catbalogan were not much harmed. It was in the Sta. Rita region, she said, that she started to see felled trees. Sta. Rita, however, was still close to us. I could not shake the image of my family being lashed by the sea. My family lived just seven steps from the shore. How could they escape when they didn’t expect anything that bad to happen?
Hegira, or the Flight
The next day dawned raining. Kim and I started walking at about 6 a.m. despite the drizzle so that we could reach Babatngon earlier and from there hire a boat to home. We each carried a bag packed with some of our belongings.
Along Avenida, we saw people with their belongings outside their homes, not staring blankly as before but starting to save what could be saved, slowly rebuilding a life destroyed in three hours. One woman was washing dishes in the rainwater; the owner of Stephanie’s Smokehouse was having the store sign packed; a man was washing away the mud from his house in Siren. And all around, there were people like us, carrying bags and moving out of the city, forming an exodus that would have been improbable and unheard of had Yolanda not come. Now the city’s true children would remain with her. For them, there was nowhere else to go home to.
We stopped, upon Kim’s suggestion, at the police station in the Abucay terminal. Several people were also either waiting for the rain to let up or resting. A woman had her two small daughters with her; she only had a small pink backpack out of which she got a milk bottle and milk powder.
She asked for water from another woman but she was given none. I asked Kim if we could give her a little of our water but she said no. We only had one small water bottle with us and she was probably thinking of the long walk ahead. The mother rinsed the milk bottle with rain water pouring from the second floor of the police station. We started walking again after seeing that.
We sang while walking but soon stopped to keep precious air. Towards Nulatula, we met Jovito Larion, a teacher in one of our town’s barangays, walking toward the city. He said he came from Babatngon and urged us to go back and catch the motorboat to home. We checked the wharf earlier that morning and there was no sign of the motorboat so Kim and I just plodded on. Other vehicles were also pushing through to the city and people were either moving in to find their relatives or fleeing the scene. This was where the deepest and the largest flooded area was: in some areas, the water level almost reached my thigh. We walked over electric wires and sacks and other garbage. We were lucky enough not to walk over corpses.
The one-lane move was strictly enforced as we passed by the slaughter area. There we bumped into people, into vehicles, into corpses. Dead bodies littered the side street. All of them were covered either by blankets or by black garbage bags. One body I saw was still attached to the bamboo pole he probably used for swimming. Another was a poor baby, hardly older than my three-year-old cousin Gwen, her hands outstretched.
And in between corpses were the remains of houses and garbage, smelly and covering something I dared not see. Even my relatively insensitive nose could smell something of the stench of corpses. People passing through the area had their noses covered with cloth. The policeman in the area had his nose uncovered; perhaps he had grown used to the smell. Behind me, Kim was breaking into a sweat and motioned as if to vomit. All I could do was ask her if she was okay. We could not stop walking.
Thankfully, we passed by a yellow Samar Bus Line bus bound for Catbalogan that very kindly took us in ‘til the San Juanico crossing. It was still a good two to three kilometers until the crossing, and although we had to stand in the bus, it was still a relief from walking.
It was almost 10 a.m. by then. We had spent near half of our ten Snow Bear candies, one of us taking one candy every hour.
And so we walked to the bridge marking Km. 899. The sun had shone by then and the heat was starting to get to us. We were walking for shorter durations and had to stop frequently. My feet, in all their numbness, were starting to feel the heat through the soles. Kim was now walking a little way behind me.
I could not slow down to keep pace with her because that would mean losing much energy. Unlike when we walked in the flood earlier, we had no motorcycles behind us to beep at us and spur us on. Every kilometer seemed a thousand miles. Each step closer to home was more unsure than the other.
We had started playing Chinese garter with the electric posts lying on the road. We passed by a bicycle parked a little way off the main road and I suggested jokingly, although there was a pea of earnestness in it, that we take the bicycle and just return it later. Kim vehemently shook her head. She was strict on her Code of Ethics. I, however, was a little more open-minded and my mind was playing more tricks than was usual at that hour. I was voicing aloud my joking yet earnest wish that a cart would be enough just so we wouldn’t walk the whole way.
Around 10:30, we passed by a house where a motorcycle was parked, which we thought we could hire to Bagahupi in Babatngon. They said they had no gas anymore but they gladly offered us water and so we rested for a while. There were about five to six men sitting outside the hut. They had all gone to Tacloban the night before to loot. One particular man was proud that he had a pisaw when he came to Robinsons, threatening anyone who came near him with his knife. One of them remarked that we were walking much slower than they did. Another man justified us by saying, “Kay waray ada kita dara. Ngan mga babaye ada hira (We had nothing to carry. They’re girls, too).”
Although they had all looted, they were kind enough to give us water and that one man was perceptive enough of our efforts that somehow I felt that our load lightened. Some structures of the heart last, even when drowned with water.
It was in Suhi, Barangay San Isidro, Tacloban, that we glimpsed the promise of salvation. We let ourselves be led to the house of a barangay councilor whom the residents said was also from Talalora.
Nay Rosing was sweeping her yard with a hard broom when we came to the gate. She did not recognize us for a while but when she stood still and looked hard at our faces and had an inkling of recognition, her furrowed brow was transformed and she gave out a sudden cry of exclamation. She hurriedly let us into their house. When she uttered my mother’s maiden name, it was proof enough for me that she really knew us and would try to help.
Our lunch was rather extravagant given the scant meals we’ve been sharing for the past two days. We had fried bangus, pork and beef steak, which came from the carabao that drowned in the storm, but the most heart-warming taste of all came from the Milo. After thanking Nay Rosing and her family and the residents who led us to them, we continued walking.
It was afternoon but feeling good after our lunch, we were able to walk for nearly an hour before we rested again. We already passed Km. 902 (with a sinking feeling, I realized that we had to rest for two hours to walk two kilometers) and were now in Sto. Niño. Every person we asked along the way kept saying that Bagahupi was near.
We passed by a big HELP sign painted in white on the road for all the choppers and the C-130s to see. A white bird kept us company on our walk; it was playing with the wind while I was just savoring the cool caress. If the wind could be tasted, I’m sure it would have tasted delicious at that moment. The veins in my body were skipping, almost lilting, as we walked closer to home.
In Bagahupi, we were able to hire a motorcycle to Babatngon port. And so we left Tacloban behind. Up until then, she had shared with our journey, letting us see her wounds, her lost children, and yet helping us when we needed it. But we had to leave her, if we were going to return and pay her back in the end.
It turns out that we had only walked halfway because according to the driver, the distance from Tacloban to Bagahupi was 18 kms. and that was the same from Bagahupi to the port. We had stopped walking at about Km. 906. We survived 18 kilometers! (Google tells me the distance we covered was actually closer to 31.6 kilometers.)
The driver was fairly positive that we would survive Yolanda, particularly in the areas not really damaged. “Mga usa pa ka tuig san-o mamunga ini nga mga lubi,” he said. (It will take a year before these coconuts bear fruit.) “Ah, sige la. Butangan la hin utan pansura, ok na. Bis ngani waray sura, basta may luto la.” (Ah, it doesn’t matter. We can have vegetables for viand. Even if we didn’t have any viand, rice will be enough).
We hired a motorboat at the port of Babatngon to take us home. Finally, we set foot on our house. It was Nanay we saw first, teary-eyed. Our folks back home, it turned out, thought that we were okay, that Tacloban would return to normal the soonest time, as it did all the other times before. It was only the day after the storm that the terrible news reached our wharf. Then on Sunday, that morning, a whole Benita-load had come to Tacloban, Tatay one of them. He carried with him food for us.
We could not bathe in water yet because we had been through cold and heat so we dipped into the sea first. How cool the sea was. And how beautiful the sunset, just behind Bacsal Island. Talalora just seemed so calm, so unsullied by Yolanda.
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, we heeded Sir Larion’s urging, and walked back to the city as Tatay was walking toward us. In that universe, we passed by the Abucay terminal again and I finally mustered the strength to give the water bottle to the woman and her hungry child. In that other reality, I wouldn’t need to hear Bharati Mukherjee saying over and over again in my ears, Owning is rebellion, it means not sharing, it means survival. Survival then would’ve meant sharing instead; that if I was so big on not looting to rob others of what little they could gain, I shouldn’t have hesitated to give the water bottle to the child whom I knew needed it more than my sister and I did.
And this brutishness that I saw in the eyes of the open-mouthed dogs and the helpless chickens lying dead in Del Pilar St. near Gaisano Central, my own brutishness reflected in their eyes when I considered going to the fray again to get food for us, this would have taken a stronger hold on me in that other universe. Had my sister not been there to help pull me back, I would have given in to it and joined the herd’s flow.
Sometime later, I heard a woman who just came back from Tacloban remark of the reek of corpses they passed along the way. She made it sound so brutish, so savage—and yet this same brutishness, this same impulse lived in each of us, and there was nothing but humanity in it all. The struggle, the despair of looting food for survival, and later looting out of sheer greediness and indifference—it was all too human. To refuse death rather than hunger. To cling to hunger as to life.
The Tacloban I saw a month later through the window of the speeding van from Catbalogan looked more indifferent to me than when Kim and I were walking away from her. Suddenly, I felt like the stranger I was before Yolanda came, only coming to Tacloban for a layover. As the van moved ever nearer to the city, I retraced the path Kim and I walked, remembering where we stopped to catch our breath, where we walked a bit faster, spurred by the others who were doing the same, where we almost crawled just to get home.
But now her remaining structures looked like foreign landscapes to me. But we did walk away from her, walked home to heal ourselves of wounds and guilt, and left her to deal with her own. Was that why she seemed to me like a freshly distant memory, a wound that, though aching when scratched, was still healing itself?
I could not tell for sure. I like to think that we are like wounded soldiers knowing each other’s pain, yet leaving each other to heal in her own time. And I have the memory of our walk to remind me that though Tacloban now seemed forbidding to me, I shared her vulnerability once. I struggled with her tensions. I suffered with her loss. There is something about a slow walk that forces you to look longer, harder and hurt deeper with the pain that you see everywhere.
From where I sat on the motorboat bound for home the next morning, the city looked leveled, sunk, one part drowned forever in the mud of the sea. But then, what I saw when I rode along Magsaysay Boulevard the day before tells me, a rainbow begins and ends with water.
A surge from the storm. An exodus for the comforts of home. A rainbow that begins and ends with the sea. I didn’t know it then but I recognize it now. These are the bonds that tie us to a city. (Ma. Carmie Flor Otego/Sun.Star Cebu)