Imperishable friend of a lifetime, he tells you later that the girl is now a whore, touched in the head, whom they call Masarap. No one seems to know what her real name was. Men can lay her for a coke, for a chewing gum. He tells you this with a peal of laugher, and your memory of her flits like far-away lightning among the ruins of his resemblance to David Hemmings in Blow-up. Lighting the cigaret away from the cigaret vendor, he accosted her. You saw instantly that her mind was as poor as her clothes and her skin. But she was pretty, and when you caught her cheap perfume you caught her youth with something like a sob. You thought of a cheap, dirty restaurant that served good clean food. Where one perceives a hit of the sacred in the way the food was prepared, the way it was arrayed in the counter, the way it was laid, steaming, on the table. And a hint that this inner refinement had nonetheless acquiesced to the principle that hunger, at some point, was all. And so, upon the threshold of whoredom both, on a sultry night in the Sunken Garden in Zamboanga where, in the early sixties, the light and the grass and the leaves were neglected, the shadows rolled and wrestled beneath a bush, awkward and fumbling and yet, somehow, unerring, flies lost to the world upon a nucleus of garbage – or else, bees drunk in their own honey. And it fouled, it stung, it kindled, it nourished – hive alive of winged envoys and harbingers to your youth of what love was, what love could be, what love could have been. What did it matter, what does it matter that she was crazy? Your remembrance of her flies in sparks and when it is over, when you have said the last word – offals in Ermita. There are fireflies in the morning, stars twinkle in the sky. from CRAZY IN ERMITA 1976
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 19:58:08 +0000
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