Growing Up in Muddas

Growing Up in Muddas by Anthony L. Tan1 I was beginning to lose my milk teeth when into the town of Muddas blew the fresh strains of a song I later came to know is called “I’ll Never Smile Again.” Together with the other ballroom dance pieces such as “Moonlight in Vermont,” it was the craze of the young and the once-young. My next-door neighbors had the penchant for playing their new records a little too loudly so that everyone without a hi-fi (pronounced “hee-fee” in those benighted years) could enjoy a little music. This was when Muddas had no electricity, and the sound of two generators in the wee hours of the morning was like the heartbeat of the island itself. I would wake up to the drone of the generators at three, or thereabout, in the morning, when through the balustrade of the balcony I would pee on the dusty sidewalk of the main street. My brothers and I slept on the balcony on moonlit nights. It was cool and comfortable, and the loneliness of the deserted night street, with the bewitching moon about to set over the mountain of Pandami Island, had a romantic fascination for me. Sleeping on the balcony was my elder brother’s idea. Not so much because he enjoyed the moon-blanched balcony but because he was excited by the happenings on the street, the midnight minstrels who passed by the 1

house, and much later by Abdul Sayid who would sing out his favorite “Around the World,” very much unlike Nat King Cole, in his drunken voice, this Abdul who had never traveled farther beyond the shore of Muddas. There were other goings-on the main street had to offer: the street hand-tohand fights of drunken, one-nightmillionaire sailors who had recently returned from Sandakan and Jesselton, and had just squandered their mercantile success on spirits in the seedy watering holes of the impoverished island; occasionally, a gunfight where one liquor-soaked combatant, shaking his right hand and itching for a draw, in comic but earnest imitation of Pinoy western movies, would shout a threatening challenge at his foe in broken Tagalog: Bumunot ka! Once, a drunken sergeant of the 81st Philippine Constabulary held the pedestrians to a standstill when, with a service pistol leveled at the passersby, he threatened to shoot anyone who moved. Even a policeman on patrol, his automatic carbine slung on one shoulder, was caught unprepared and could do nothing to stop the verbal abuse that emitted from the sergeant’s mouth. In his impeccable khaki uniform he was standing at the gate of the only movie house in town. For a quarter of an hour he held his ungallant post as

Born and raised in Siasi, Sulu, Anthony L. Tan took his MA in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English from Silliman University. For more than a decade, he was a faculty member of the English Department and regular member of the panel of critics at the Silliman Summer Writers Workshop. He authored two poem collections—The Badjao Cemetery and Other Poems and Poems for Muddas. He is listed in the Philippine Encyclopedia of Philippine Arts and Artists. Story and the notes on the author are reprinted from Mantala: A Quarterly Journal of Philippine Literature 1.1 (1997).

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soldier until his superior officer, 1st Lieutenant Diego Santander, came down from the PC headquarters to disarm and pacify him and to bring him back to the barracks. Otherwise, the street, but for the rustling of scraps of paper on windy night, would be peacefully deserted. Only Elvis, the dog of the neighbors across the street, could be seen scratching mightily, irritatingly, the fleas off his neck under the fluorescent lamp of one of the street posts. In the cloudless sky the moon would be spilling all its silver splendor and solitude over the nipa roofs, over a few galvanized ones that glinted in the night, and over the south, just under the majesty of the Southern Cross, the blueblack mountains of Pandami and Siganggang. In retrospect it was a scene that led many a meditation and fired the poetic fancy, youthful dreams of faraway lands that one day would lead to inevitable exile from Muddas. The area in front of the movie house was the gayest and most welllighted spot in Muddas. It was owned by a Chinese family, one bachelor and his two spinster sisters. With an assistant, he was in charge of operating the projectors while his sisters manned the ticket booth and the gate. There was only one screening period, and that was around seven in the evening. Before screening time songs from the records were played; and two loudspeakers, mounted on both sides of the second story of the movie house, broadcast the tunes to all and sundry, inveigling everyone to come and enjoy the show. Every note of the songs was like a bell announcing Hurry, Hurry. Clients would mill around the ticket booth and, after buying their peanuts or cigarettes from one of the many box-like stalls that

nightly blossomed on the street across, rush into the movie house with the lights still on and settle not-so-snugly into one of the long wooden benches, mindful that they would not sit on one with a lot of bedbugs. Once inside the movie house, they would wait patiently for the dark and for the magic images to appear on the screen to carry them to some places and events of their separate dreams. The bachelor was responsible for playing the songs, usually his favorite songs, or the latest hits one heard over a Zamboanga radio station. From so much repetition we kids learned to sing “There’s a gold mine in the sky far away.” But our favorite was “I saw the harbor lights,” because one night we saw a war movie where Jono Wine, a.k.a. John Wayne, the hero, and his companions were on a battleship, watching the harbor lights fade away, and the strains of the melody were in the air. Made popular by Rudy Vallee, “Harbor Lights” became our favorite also because our favorite haunt was the Muddas wharf, which was well-lighted whenever a boat from Jolo in the north was unloading cargo before it proceeded to Bongao in the south, and because there was so much longing and sadness in the song whose words and meaning we scarcely understood. Hardly did we anticipate that one day we ourselves would be on one of the boats and someone we loved would be left behind, never, never to see again. One day the bachelor fell in love with my lovely cousin who was then only a high school lass. Being a shy, secretive Chinese who could not, and did not, express his feelings openly, he could only suggest them to her by asking her what songs she’d like to listen to when he played the records

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before screening time. Soon the evening air was full of the melodies of Brenda Lee, Bobby Vinton and Teddy Randazzo, replacing those of Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis and Frank Sinatra, and “Stardust” gave way to “Moon River.” With these tunes the years moved headlong toward mid-’60s and Beatles-time, inexorably carrying my cousin to a far off city to study in college, leaving behind the man who loved her. Years later I heard he had died a bachelor, pining for lost love, without having left Muddas, for which his songs were the sounds of the island, and to which my cousin never returned. In the fifties movies were few and far in-between because the boats that carried the canned films came to Muddas from the north only twice a week, sometimes once a week. There was a time when for six long months there was not one movie shown in town, not because there was no boat, but because there was no electricity. The movies were mostly old westerns with the likes of Durango Kid the masked cowboy in black, and his sidekick named Smiley; Lone Ranger, Silver and Tonto; Gene Autry, the singing cowboy and his guitar; Alan Ladd and Glenn Ford, who was remembered as the fastest gun alive. The rest of the movies were war pictures about the last war, the brave Yankees and the brutal Japanese and barbaric Germans. One criterion of an excellent war picture was the absence of women because their presence obstructed the on-going bloodbath as the main actor had to spend some time to talk to her about something we did not understand. There were a few romantic pieces, but these were for our elder brothers and sisters and unmarried aunts who swooned over

Robert Taylor and his sister (we thought then) Elizabeth Taylor. We had a number of tailors in town, but no one went by the name of Robert or Elizabeth, and anyway they did not have long noses or white skin, and all of them rather too short and down-toearth to qualify as stars. The scarcity of movies did not bother us too much. Though we kids loved the movies, we did not miss them as much as the adults did because we had plenty of other things to occupy us with in play. On movie-less nights we could play balatin on the street, hideand-seek in the town plaza, or play cuido and dikdik can (that is, “kick the can,” in English). But the night is nothing, in spite of what Shakespeare said, compared to the garish day; and the games we played at night could not match the excitement, intensity and hilarity of the games we played during the day, and especially if these were played at sea. Muddas is an island surrounded by water much as pan-yam is dough surrounded by oil, though much of this water is salty. The main commercial section of the poblacion was once a beach. On an unusually high tide, the dusty sidewalk would be flooded. The whole back porch of the house where I grew up was on stilts and made of wooden slats so that sometimes the tide rose above the porch a few inches high. It was not an exaggeration then to say to my friends that the members of the family could walk on water without sinking, like some famed Arab religious teachers who were said to have walked on water during their itinerant Islamization of Sulu, believe it or not. The wet market building was also on stilts as were the villages of North Laud and South Laud where the houses were

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connected to one another by a labyrinth of foot bridges, usually of one or two uneven bamboo poles. The sea was the best playground. One of the games my friends and I played was retrieving pebbles. The leader of the group would throw, say, a dozen pebbles into the sea and, when they were mid-way to the bottom, we would jump to the sandy sea bed. Whoever got the lowest number would be punished, and the painful punishment was for his knuckles to be flicked by each member of the group. This game would go on until we grew tired of it, or the most incompetent would have swollen knuckles. No sooner had we stopped with one game than we would play a new one, maybe this time, we would play hide-and-seek. Play hide-and-seek in water, yes, for by mid-morning the jetties would be surrounded by the vintas of the Badjaos, which provided the perfect places for hiding. The rule of the game was that while the “hiders” could dive from one side of the vinta to the other, the “finders” must swim around the length of the vinta. The finder would remain a finder if one of the hiders touched any part of his body before he could call out his name, and the game would begin again. One particular morning, in a reversal of roles, the hiders were hiding and hiding and waiting for the finder to find them, but there was no finder so we thought that maybe he drowned or something. It was almost noon when he showed up, no longer naked or half-naked like most of us, hiding behind the vintas, but already dressed. When we demanded for an explanation, he said his mother had asked him to run an errand and she had forbidden him to go back to the water until after lunch, and he

punctuated his explanation with a question, “Have you all eaten lunch?” Spear-fishing was another exciting activity. With homemade spear-gun and goggles, we would hunt for danggit, kitong and mangilap, a rare and delicious red and silver grouper which lived mostly under the warehouses and jetties of the Chinese merchants. Or for more excitement, we would cross the Muddas channel on a banca and to Siganggang where, if we could not catch fish, we could always come home with a lot of sea urchins whose edible gonads are a poor man’s delicacy. Another exciting, because dangerous, activity was participating in dynamite fishing. We did not actually do the dynamiting ourselves, but some older, experienced fishermen. We would merely wait on the wharf or banca, and watch intensely the whole process of destruction. An explosion was usually preceded by a shudder under our feet, a sudden thud as if a huge stone had dropped on a wooden floor, and a portion of the sea would rise several feet high. All these happened in split seconds. As soon as the dynamite had exploded (underwater, of course, or else we would all be maimed and mangled, if not dead), a school of dead fish would suddenly materialize on the surface of the sea, and we would all dive for them and put them in our banca, giving three fish out of ten to the fishermen. Our sea playground had the shape of a horseshoe. It was shaped that way by a wooden footbridge and about half a dozen jetties, all belonging to Chinese merchants. The open end of the playground led to the channel that divides Muddas from Siganggang. At the other end was the jetty of a wealthy, ancient-looking, but amiable, Chinese

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who had a large family. It was wellknown that he was an inveterate buyer of giant turtles, yet he detested the fishy smell of turtle meat. So why would he buy turtle every month, we asked. Because it was believed that he knew some magic ritual. Every month, during the full moon and two nights after it, he would set a small table on the jetty, which was also the back porch of his large two-story house. On the table were a number of dishes and fruits and a bronze censer with burning incense sticks. He would be praying and offering sacrifices to the sea spirit, which to our young minds took the form of the moon’s reflection on the water right in front of his jetty. On the third night he would set the turtle free, and we imagined it would swim back to the open sea by way of the Muddas channel. For what end was this ritual? Though the merchant, with his long beard, looked like a priest from Shaolin Temple, he was no religious man. The revelation would come in a week’s time when a group of Badjao divers would come to his house to sell their pearls to him. He would sell these to other merchants for a huge profit. And that was how he became wealthy. Right where the sea from the channel entered into our playground stood a growing, yellow coral stone. If a sea spirit guarded our playground, the stone must be his enchanted coral palisade. Or was he merely a minor god of Neptune tasked with guarding one of the outposts of the channel? No matter. He was a feared god. When we swam over this stone, we closed our eyes lest we see something dreadful. And no rowdy fun or boyish pranks were allowed near the stone lest we meet a fate that befell a Badjao who tried to spear a mother catfish living

under the stone. She missed her prey and instead hit the stone with her sangkil, a barbed, single-prong Badjao spear. The coral was chipped. Later that afternoon her relatives came to propitiate the angry god. Around the stone they planted stakes with colored buntings. They claimed the woman died when she got home. A less fatal incident happened to a playmate of my elder brother. He was spear-fishing around the stone. When he surfaced from the water, his face was livid and twisted like he had been slapped by a giant hand. To this day he stutters, and he has not sufficiently explained what happened to him underwater. Yet some said that you could stand on the stone and even fish nearby and nothing would happen to you. Only be sure you did not disturb the god or make him angry. You should know the proper prayer, you should be careful. But we never went near because we did not know the prayer and did not trust ourselves that we could not get careless. So we looked at it from a safe distance, from the roof of the motor launch, always regarding this yellow stone and its mysterious tenant with awe and fear. The rich marine life of this sea playground would be revealed on an unusually low tide, when the water was only a foot high. One could find sea grass and the parasites that lived close to it—a harmless variety of eel. Scattered all over the area was anemones, tough, brownish-black sea cucumber, and agar-agar. The latter was a worthless, cellophane-like bag which we picked up from the sea bed only to throw in jest at our playmates. On such a day my friends and I would skip classes. And never mind the truant officer whose job was to take

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absentee children back to school, because he would have to wet his feet to catch us. As far as we knew, no officer had dared to do this unpleasant task. Anyway, it was a holiday for us, it was kulallit day. We would be beach combing for kulallit, a white, snubnosed shellfish. To gather a basin-full of kulallit, we would have to catch tiny crabs that lived on the stilts of houses. We would break each crab in two and, over a wide area, but always careful not too near the watchful, yellow stone, plant each half on the sea bed with a banana cue stick. We would leave this for an hour or so while we looked for other edible creatures that lived under the stones and at the bottom of the stilts. Almost always we would find baby octopuses and a variety of squids locally called kindat. These and other shellfish would be thrown into the ever-present aluminum basin. From the playground to the next village of Tuhug-tuhug, half a kilometer away, we would be turning and turning every stone along the way. After we had made sure that no stone was literally left unturned, we would go back to the playground. Behold! For every banana cue stick twenty or so shiny white shells had overrun the poor crab. They would fill the basin to the brim. An elder sister or aunt of one of us would volunteer to boil the shellfish. With leftover rice, the shellfish and vinegar-soaked octopuses and kindat would make a filling mid-afternoon snack. But the day was not yet complete. It would still be too early to go out and walk the streets. The truant officer might still be scouring every street corner for us. So we would stay indoors and play cards: lucky nine, black jack, stud poker, sambilan, name it,

my friends already knew it before they could read properly. The stakes would be tansans, jolins, rubber bands, wrappers of Herald and Union cigarettes, and sometimes money. By late afternoon the tide would have risen, and to cap the holiday, we would all go back to the playground and swim and play hide-and-seek, not knowing when to stop playing, until our exasperated mothers would shout out our names, always accompanied by a litany of curses like Saitan bawi or kiawah sin Saitan Manunggol. The physical punishment of being pinched hard on the ears and the inner thigh, as soon as we got home, did not deter us from repeating the rituals of kulallit day. It would be the same thing next time around, next year or next month, whenever the sea god decided to make the tide ebb so low and reveal to us the abundance of his domain. Unwittingly, we were his young votaries, and our mothers were not far from the truth when they applied to us the curses, the epithet “Satanic pigs,” only he was no saitan, but a childhood god. Of the many childhood revels at sea, nothing could match the fun of diving from the roof of a boat. During the summer break when Muddas would be enjoying the balmy weather locally called uttarah, one would find the wharf overrun with brown, naked bodies of boys, ranging from 6 to 17. While the longshoremen were busy loading the cargo of copra, dried fish and other marine products, the boys at play would be climbing up the roof of the boat and use it as their diving board. Once up they dived down, once down they climbed up, causing a lot of mess to the boat and the waiting passengers. The exasperated stewards prevented

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them from using the gangplanks, but the boys would climb to the life boats, using the rope cables, and from there it was an easy climb to the roof of the second deck, or even the pilot’s poop. Diving from the boat was possible only because the wharf was so small that when the boat docked, only half of it, from the bow to the middle hoard, would be connected by a pair of gangplanks to the wharf. Half the length of starboard, down to the stern, would be facing the sea directly, the vacant area to the left of the wharf. This space was where the divers would hit water, allowing the idlers on the nearby jetty to watch the morning exhibition of gymnastic talents. Diving, jack-knifing, somersaulting boys provided a summer spectacle to the idlers and to the halfamused, half-irritated passengers on the boat. The most spectacular diver was the part-time fisherman Bokkoh with his original sea-hawk dive which other boys could only imitate but never surpass. To make his artistic dive he had to do it from the roof of the pilot’s poop, the highest possible place from which to fall down like a sea-hawk attempting to catch a surfacing fish: brown wings spread apart, the legs straight as a spear rod, a Tarzan-like scream, and scarcely a ripple when his hands, like a pair of razors, sliced the water. Aside from Bokkoh the bigger boys did the jack-knife and the somersault. We the smaller kids did the simple dive, arms directly in front in order to protect the head. If we happened to wear the short pants or underwear of an elder brother, there was the likelihood that the pants would surface first before our heads, and the spectators would have a laugh at our

expense. The next time we were on the roof, we would plan our revenge: we would create a big, wide splash on the water, with the malicious intent of soaking the spectators wet, we would do the bomb: jump high, place the arms around the curled-up legs and hit the water with our butts. Towards noon the impatient horns of the boat would warn the would-be passengers to hurry, as well as the tardy, traveling merchants who would still be sipping noodle soup in the chambers of their mistresses. For us, close to thirty of us, it was time to stay put on the roof of the boat, to prepare for one last dive when the boat had departed from the wharf and was somewhere in the middle of the channel. Twenty yards away from the wharf the smallest boys, almost always completely nude and uncircumcised, would start diving. Ten more yards the next group would follow suit. The bigger boys were the last to dive, and often they did when the boat was halfway to the island of Siganggang, to where they would swim and on whose white beach they would spend the rest of the dazzling summer day. Some of us with short pants would be prevented from diving by the bigger, naughtier boys by holding us by the pants. We would panic because the longer we stayed on the boat’s roof the farther was the wharf, and we feared we would not have the strength to swim back. So we would scream and scream, and only when we had sufficiently shed tears, were we released. Close to hundred yards now we would make our dive. It was like falling from the sky. The temporary panic was all forgotten, erased completely in the overwhelming feeling that for a moment one was flying through the air.

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The exhilaration of that final dive was beyond compare. It was a summer day that would be repeated every year until I finished high school. It was a day that seemed to go on forever, but one fine day, like all things rare and beautiful, it had to come to an end. When that day finally came, I was not even aware that my friends and I had been through a glorious summer. It was only many years later, with the onset of manhood and the terrible solitude of exile in the city, hundreds of miles away, that I remembered I had a happy childhood. It was Albert Camus, that Mediterranean poet of the physical, sensual life, who wrote: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” One morning I made my final departure from Muddas. Apart from the dream inspired by the moonlight and the song of Abdul Sayid, four years in a small college in the city had changed my perspective of the island home. And then the strangers from the hinterlands had come down to settle in Muddas, bringing with them their dreadful worship of high-powered guns so that they could perpetuate their equally dreadful culture of vengeance and violence. Then, too, the balcony of the house had been so much reduced: whereas before it had run the length of the façade, it was no longer even large enough for one to sit in on a rocking chair. Though the moon was still as large, as bright, as silvery. By them some friends had died and some dear members of the family. Yes, one cannot go home again, not because the streets have changed or the houses were gutted in a fire, but because the people we used to know and love are no longer where

they used to be when we were children, or behave the way we remembered them like Madame Swann in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Determined to find my own spiritual Muddas, if not another physical one, I boarded one of the boats from whose roof I had made countless dives. I could not restrain myself from watching from the stern the froth of water in the wake. Crystals of bubbles churned up by the boat’s propeller pursued me like a memory—the memory of the molten summer sky, the blue sea, the green shallows and the coral on the sandy bed, of first love and the half-Bengali beauty who had left Muddas for California, of grandmother and her old pots full of silver coins and the appetizing smell of her turmericflavored, yellow rice, the happy faces of my friends, and a thousand other things, even the feared sea god, whose coral mansion had been slowly overtaken by filth and defile. I could not shake off these things from my mind although I was ready to barter them for a newer, better destiny. When I had wakened from my reverie the Muddas mountain was but a distant elevation on the blue plains of the sea. There were no twilight strains of “Harbor Lights” to accompany my departure. Instead, when the boat steered northeast and windward, and it came near the crags of Lugus Island, I heard the seagulls cry their quotidian cry. Henceforth, it was another destiny, a destiny I thought lay beyond the horizon, beyond the sunset, where I could be happy, not knowing in my foolish heart that I had just left a happy childhood and could never, ever be happy again. 

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