“Often, he accompanied the sea gypsies for days and nights at sea. They’d handline for fish, which they’d eat raw. And they’d dive, with him along. He wore a wood-framed mask and a weight belt with five kilos. Each day he remained under longer. ”
By Tim Tomlinson
an apWT publication
His friends had warned him.
—She’s tibo, they said, don’t go there.
—But she was married, he argued. She had children.
—Was married, they said. What does that tell you?
—He said, Isn’t sexuality fluid?
—They said, Is yours?
—He said, So? She’s an activist.
—She’s a gay rights activist.
—She’s an activist, period, he said. An indigenous rights activist.
—And gay.
—She supports gay rights, as do I. Don’t you?
—Support yes, they said, not practice.
—He said, Maybe you should.
They’d met at Warp and Weft: Re-weaving Indigenous Cultures into the Fabric of the Philippines, a conference hosted by his department. She was from the Cordillera. She had Bontoc blood. When she presented, she wore a traditional costume, the skirt ablaze with orange, red, and black stripes. The poetry was fierce, eloquent, blunt. No white colonialist dick will ever get inside this brown pussy, she read, and a tremor shook the room. Out came the hand fans and the androids. Her line became a meme before she reached the second poem, graffiti before the day ended.
She presented barefoot, with anklets. Beautiful. The wide permanent smile, the left incisor missing, the caramel skin. On the final morning, she took a position on the conference hall steps. She wore the tapis skirt and waistband but no top. From wrist to shoulder her arms were patterned in intricate henna the color of her nipples. The sign at her feet read, “Why Do You Stop for These (and not for the children they feed)?” Beneath the text were images of hungry dirty children with outstretched hands. Passersby—students, faculty, conference participants—gathered. Some took photographs, he included. Many took selfies. Throughout, she remained motionless as a statue, with a smile as interior as the Mona Lisa’s. A chorus of groans went up at the arrival of security. One officer draped a rain slicker around her shoulders, another fixed plastic handcuffs to her wrists.
He retrieved her from the campus holding cell.
He had the department car. He was Chair of Indigenous Studies.
By then, she’d missed the flight back to Manila.
“You need to return this,” she told him, flinging the slicker provided by security into the back seat.
—I almost went off the road, he told his friends the next morning at breakfast.
— This is what we’re saying, his colleagues said. She’s trouble. She’ll drive you straight into the ditch.
— She frightens you because she turns you on, he told them.
— She frightens us because she turns you on.
That is what they were saying, he thought, but they’d taken photographs, too.
The following year she applied for a position at the university: a line in Indigenous Studies attracting generous funding from all the guilty sources and many of the ideologically committed foundations. Reading her application, he felt compromised by desire. Its frankness was familiar to him, but he read it with salacious interest. The exploration of gender and ethnic identity, the boundaries of power and sensuality, the separation from her husband, whose traditional Catholicism prevented her exploring more fully her personal inclinations, her tribal heritage. She made offerings to the presences who lived in the trees. She made the sangbo, she beat chickens with sticks and studied their bile on the ground for signs. You appeared in my readings, she confided. Something about a door, or doorway.
—How could that possibly arouse you? his friends asked.
—I don’t ask how, he told them. I ask, what am I going to do about it?
They reminded him about his wife, how happy he’d been with her.
—My wife left me for a Canadian, he said.
—Exactly, they said. You’re vulnerable, and this one’s reeling you in like a fish.
He pursed his lips and rose to his tiptoes. His friends shook their heads.
—She must be ten years younger than you, they said.
—And your wife is what, he said. Twenty?
He explained how important it would be to make this hire. The department needed a shake-up, needed actual indigenous people in order to communicate the university’s serious commitment to the field, and the department’s commitment to tribal representation.
Currently the department skewed toward the Tagalog, which some called the Spanish, even the colonial end of the spectrum. His own background, which included some Spanish blood, supported that perception. His interest in Indigenous Studies sprung from hearing a conference paper about T.S. Eliot’s visit to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where a recreation of an Igorot village served as a living diorama that remained in Eliot’s imagination long enough to make an appearance in “The Waste Land.” How amazing to think that indigenous Filipino culture would inform one of the great masterworks of early 20th century modernism.
At her first faculty meeting, she smoked cigarettes, which was prohibited. The older faculty didn’t care—they had half a mind to join her. It was the younger ones, the ones who believed they had certain rights because certain regulations had been established, developments that they called progress. A compromise was struck—she sat in the rear, near an open window that sucked the aircon-cooled air right out of the room. Male faculty sweat. Female faculty pulled hand fans from their bags. They looked like senoras at a ball.
In the ensuing semesters, they stared as she received plum positions.
They seethed when she gathered funding to travel to one conference after another, some as far away as Denmark and Scotland.
They burned at the publications, especially those in the international journals. How, they wondered, could her work be considered “peer reviewed” if only academics in the US or Canada or Australia read it? How could graphic accounts of lesbian sex qualify as scholarship? How could they lead to promotion and celebrity?
—Don’t you have children? they asked her.
—Sons, she said, two.
—How have they adjusted, they asked, to your move down here?
—She said, They stay with their lola in Bontoc. I try to visit on breaks.
—And your papers, they said, these don’t cause your family shame?
—My papers? she said, laughing. They don’t even read the newspapers.
On their androids they circulated photos of her topless demonstration outside the Student Activity Center.
They wondered how they might goad her into staging another one and get her removed on that basis. The trustees wouldn’t have it. The Church wouldn’t have it. Of course, that would mean forging alliances with ideological enemies.
In her first year, she’d shared an apartment near the campus, but she complained about noise and space. For year two, he found her a house conveniently located on the lot adjacent to his own. Often, he drove her to work. Often, he drove her home. He asked questions, she gave answers. Otherwise only he spoke. She gave the impression of understanding something other than what he’d told her, he couldn’t quite figure out what or how or why, but he liked it. It felt as though he were being known in a way that was truer, deeper, more real than the superficiality of his bonding with colleagues and friends. He often had that feeling around indigenous people. He knew words, he knew sentences and paragraphs, indigenous people vibrated on different frequencies, they understood intuitively, pre-verbally.
—Do you realize how silly you sound, his friends said. How romantic.
—Nothing wrong with a little romance.
—This is more than a little, they said, and it’s entirely wrong. Dangerously wrong.
—You’re saying indigenous people are incapable of pre-verbal insight?
—We’re saying she is incapable.
—Based on what?
—Observation and analysis, they said. And concern for you. You’re exoticizing her, othering her. You’re turning her into something no person is.
—He said, How would you know? Besides visits to the brothel, who was the last indigenous woman you spent more than ten minutes with?
—Speak for yourself, they told him.
—He said, I just did.
As a graduate student, he told her, his research, had included time with many indigenous peoples. The Aeta, the Ifuago, the Sea Gypsies of Tawi-Tawi, from whom he’d learned to free dive to forty meters and to stay underwater on one breath for close to four minutes, while they, of course, went deeper and stayed under longer. His early scholarship questioned the validity of H. Arlo Nimmo’s anthropological field work on the Bajau. It earned attention and acclaim and funding for more and more research. Once, on Samar, he’d hiked for two days through jungle to encampments of the Mamanwa. He slept on a layer of handwoven banig in a one-room bamboo lodge that housed the single men of the village. The gaps between the bamboo permitted a steady breeze. At an evening ceremony he drank something from a gourd, something extracted from a toad.
—Bufo, she said.
—Yes, he said. Bufo.
He remembered drinking the bufo, then convulsing, then dreaming while awake, his eyes bulging, his body racing through indeterminate space. In the dream he encountered a woman. He didn’t share that now he knew who that woman was.
Their lots were separated by a low stone fence. Sometimes she sat on that fence and read. From his living room he could see directly into her kitchen. He kept his blinds down but open. He wondered if she could sense him studying her, longing for her. With his windows up, he could hear her singing, sometimes songs of the cordillera, songs of the resistance, other times American standards by Cole Porter or Irving Berlin. He marveled at her voice, her range of reference, her spirit, how much of it she housed. Her body. He could not discount the body in all this intrigue. Some nights, he crept to the jalousie windows in her dining area. Through their slats, he could see the bathroom. She showered with the door wide open to disperse the steam.
He told his friends about the gecko tattooed just above her vagina.
They hoped that he was joking.
He wished that he were. That tattoo—it would have tormented his sleep, if he could find sleep. All night long he heard the gecko’s call: tu-ko, tu-ko.
When at last they became lovers, sometime during her third semester, he would look down on that tattoo and wonder at the magnitude of his good fortune. What cosmic oversight had granted him access to a woman this exciting, this alive? Long ago he’d abandoned the idea that God was good. Now he was beginning to think God took naps. How else could he be the recipient of this good fortune? Was it because God had awoken?
—She’s using you as a platform, they told him.
—He said, Maybe I’m using her.
—Then why is it you, they said, who looks like the fool?
—What’s wrong with being a fool? he said, Maybe you should try it.
—She’s publishing lesbian pornography, they said. It won’t be long before you’re in it.
—Jealous? he said.
They shook their heads.
—It won’t be long before she leaves you. You won’t be laughing then.
—He said, I’m not laughing now.
He managed to secure funding for them both to travel to Florence for an international conference on diasporic populations. For the sake of appearances they booked separate rooms on the same floor. The first night, she complained of jet lag and went to her room to retire early. In the morning, he knocked before breakfast—no answer.
He went out into the streets, the cobblestoned lanes with the buildings on opposite sidewalks so close to each other he felt that if he held out his arms, he could flatten his palms on the opposing walls. By sense of smell, he found his way to the forna and purchased several pieces of schiacciata. It was early, not many people in the streets. A surprising number of them were Filipino. He overheard Tagalog, Ilocano, and Bisayan. A Tagalog speaker happily directed him to a café. He took his cappuccino and sat on the steps of the basilica in Piazza Santa Croce. How marvelous the pastry, the coffee, the square. In Cebu, public life is greasy and hot, here enchanting.
He tried her room again, still no answer. He inquired after her at reception but he had no Italian. He walked the hill up to the conference alone. He arrived sweaty and shy—he’d become used to her pronounced presence to orchestrate his arrivals and departures and now, left to his own devices, he was a little lost. They had not made love after checking in, and he felt that loss acutely.
Back at the pensione, she’d left a note. She was disappearing. At dinner he heard the whispers. He spent most of the night on a bench in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, smoking cigarettes, listening to a pair of white Americans playing guitar and singing songs, most of which he recognized despite the pair’s unmusicality. The unmusicality made him miss her even more.
Gossip in the hallways woke him late the next morning. He opened his shutters to brilliant sunshine. Past the cap of the Duomo, the hills in hazy distance resembled the north in his country—her country. He showered quickly, ran downstairs, caught a bus to Fiesole. There, he found many Filipinos, instantly friendly, unlike their wary kababayan in Rome, who saw other Filipinos as probable agents of Immigration. Yes, they told him, everyone had seen her. So beautiful, so full of life, how could they miss? She was going north, they told him, she was going south. She was back at the conference, she was catching a train to Prague. Everyone knew, no one knew. She was gone.
Seven years later, she was back at the university with a memoir that had been celebrated in the US press. It was called Indigenous Studies, its cover featured the photograph of her topless protest on the university conference hall steps nearly nine years earlier, the image that had started it all. In the memoir, he was thinly veiled, and his thinly veiled avatar came off as a simp, a chump, a lech. Abusive, dismissive, derisive, homophobic, manipulative, frightened, weak, suspicious, unimaginative. “You’re damaged goods,” she alleged he’d told her. “No man would ever want you, not with your background, your history of perversion.” She reminded him that it was precisely that history that made him her slave. She described in detail his enthrallment with the gecko tattoo, how he’d rest his head on her lower abdomen and attempt to interpret the tattoo’s meanings the way a probinciana studies the entrails of a chicken. He appeared conflicted and unethical. A fool. A buffoon. She dismissed his career-launching critiques of Nimmo as barely-disguised homophobia. She exposed T.S. Eliot, a fascist and anti-Semite, as the source of his interest in indigenous people. He turned her into an object to study. He moved her next door to him to create his own diorama, one where he could exercise Lord Jim colonial fantasies. She accused him of abuse, voyeurism, and perversion. She said he fell for her because of hallucinations he’d had on drugs, and that he fetishized her tribal heredity. Things he’d confided in her about colleagues in the department, she repeated. The assassination was total, or would have been had he not resigned from academia and gone south years earlier.
When he’d given up his search for her across half of Europe, he returned to his university already under a cloud of scandal. The department launched an investigation into possible malfeasance. The mismanagement of his fiduciary duties, it was determined, had left the department bereft of funding for anything but the barest essentials. She, the faculty argued, had run off with the gravy leaving behind only dirty dishes. He had friends. They didn’t defend him, but they spoke on his behalf and he’d been allowed to quit before he was fired. This enabled him to leave with something of a minor package.
Now he lived among the Bajau in Tawi-Tawi, where his expenses were next to nil, and his communication with his past life entirely nil. He hadn’t heard that she’d been welcomed back to his old campus with her partner, a New York City publisher who had two children of her own. He hadn’t heard that she’d been feted by his old department, honored with a degree, enticed to return with housing and an endowed position. He hadn’t heard that she’d appeared on BBC World and ABS-CBN, where she repeated many of the allegations in her book. If he had heard, he might have responded. He might have said, well, what about her? Didn’t she have any say in our affair? Didn’t she express an interest? Didn’t she benefit? And then, once she’d benefited, didn’t she turn around and attack him? Yes, he may have said some things. People say things. She said things, too. Yes, he bent rules to accommodate her, but didn’t she accept those accommodations? Didn’t she, as his colleagues alleged, take the money and run? But he didn’t offer this rebuttal because he didn’t know of the allegations. If he had known, he wouldn’t have been surprised. He understood now, or at least he accepted: he was a doorway.
Often, he accompanied the sea gypsies for days and nights at sea. They’d handline for fish, which they’d eat raw. And they’d dive, with him along. He wore a wood-framed mask and a weight belt with five kilos. Each day he remained under longer. He studied them—the way they descended, hunted, preserved their breath. And he watched fish, whose needs were just as simple. Something to eat and a good place to hide from predators who knew where to find them. Some fish, he learned—wrasse, gobies, clownfish, even moray eels—change sex. Or was it gender? He’d always mixed up the two, but where that mattered, he’d fully left behind.
At sea he slept under the stars, water gently lapping at the bangka. On land he fell asleep to the geckos. Tu-ko, tu-ko, tu-ko.
Tim Tomlinson’s books include Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry), This Is Not Happening to You (short fiction), and The Portable MFA in Creative Writing (as co-author). Recent work appears in About Place Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Litro, and Telephone: A Game of Art Whispered Around the World (Crosstown Press). He’s traveled heavily throughout the Asia-Pacific, and has lived in China, the Philippines, and Thailand. He’s a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and a professor in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies. Visit Tim at timtomlinson.org
The banner picture of the Philippines is by Dane Gayon and downloaded from Unsplash.com