After a few minutes’ resistance and his wife’s gentle persuasion, Señor Fabella decided to give Elias and his mother a trial run. “A month in the plantation,” he said to his wife, in their presence. “These Bagobo natives are the most treacherous tribe of all. Prone to criminal behavior, like the name suggests.”
He would share his real misgivings with his wife later, in the privacy of their room. “For all you know, that Bagobo could’ve actually provoked the shooting,” Señor Fabella said to his astonished wife. “He was a tribal chief, remember. The woman looks all right — she seems meek enough. But the boy!” Señor Fabella shook his head. “That’s Bagobo blood running in his veins right there.”
Yet Señor Fabella enjoyed playing both sides. After all, he’d be proven right either way. “You see?” he’d say. “I knew it wouldn’t work.” Or if it went the opposite way, he could say, “You see? I knew there was something beneath the obvious.”
Isabel decides that there’s still enough light for her to take a walking tour of Intramuros by herself. The guidebook has a foldout map in it which she had studied the night before, after she’d checked in at the Intramuros Hotel. She has highlighted the places she wants to see on the map in orange and green neon. She has also highlighted the numbered items in the legend on the bottom half of the map with the same colors.
Elias used to tease Isabel about her obsessive reliance on maps. “Look, just follow the pathways — they also divide the fields from each other,” he had said impatiently that summer eighteen years ago. Isabel was spending her long break from school on the family plantation, an hour’s drive from Davao City. She had brought the map of their sixty-hectare plantation because she wanted to explore it herself, this time without her father by her side. Now she was turning it around, trying to match Banana Field 27 on the map with the real one.
Her father was grateful that Isabel showed such interest in the plantation; not every daughter did so. But her mother sent Elias after her anyway, just in case she got lost or needed anything, though Elias didn’t tell Isabel this. Instead he ran after her, calling, “Hey, let me come with you.”
“The fields all look the same,” she said, bewildered. “They’re all uniformly square.”
“Yes, they are,” Elias said, “and you don’t need a map to tell you that.”
“But this one,” Isabel waved her hand at the banana trees closest to them, “how come this field doesn’t match the shape of the one on the map? Look.”
“It’s nothing but a piece of paper with a lot of lines.” Elias took the map from Isabel, folded it, and laid the paper in the middle of the footpath, then placed a rock over it. “We’ll pick it up on our way back. C’mon, race you.” With a whoop, he went running toward the hill that marked the edge of the field. Isabel sprinted after him. She couldn’t have understood, because she didn’t know, his exhilaration at being able to run in such wide-open space.
Within a month at the rural plantation, Señora Fabella was chafing to get back to her charity work in Davao City. Elias, too, had passed Señor Fabella’s stipulated trial run. He was packed off to Davao with Isabel and her mother.
It was Sardo, the family driver, who first took to calling Elias “Datu.” He’d say, “Hey, Datu, c’mere and help me wash the cars.”
They’d been doing just that one morning when Sardo asked, “So, what were you in prison for?”
“I wasn’t in prison,” Elias replied. He rubbed a speck of bird dropping off the windshield and stepped back to study his handiwork. Sardo had stopped wiping down his half of the car and stood waiting. Elias realized he might have to do the Fabellas’ whole fleet of cars by himself if he didn’t elaborate. “It was a penal farm. We weren’t behind bars or anything. My father had special privileges. My mother and I were allowed to live there with him, in the family quarters. And each family had a farm lot, so we could grow some cash crops.” He didn’t add that farm lots were for those who were there for the long haul.
“Okay,” said Sardo, hunkering down to start with the tires. “So, what was your father in the penal farm for?”
“He and his people were carrying spears and blowpipes that happened to get in the way of landgrabbers and their private army. And my father was the datu — the chief. What would you call that crime?”
Sardo looked up from his scrubbing. He wasn’t sure if Elias was joking; but then Elias had never struck him as a joker. “Illegal possession of deadly weapons?” he suggested. “Conspiracy to commit murder?” At last all those episodes of Law & Order and its spin-offs were paying dividends.
Elias smiled. “Rebellion. We’re IPs — indigenous people. That’s why we were in the penal farm, not jail.”
“Oh well, that’s all over now. Señor and Señora were talking about you yesterday, in the car. They’re sending you to school, all the way to college. No point letting your brain go to waste washing cars, the señor said.”
“Sure.” Elias wrung water out of his rag. “So that one day he’ll make me the head banana of the Fabella plantation. All this—” he indicated the Village with a sweep of his arm “—was Bagobo land, you know. This was our forest, all the way to the foot of the mountain. And then your masters came and stole it all with a piece of paper.”
Sardo looked around cautiously, although Elias had spoken in a soft, even tone. “That was a long time ago. They were kind enough to take you in. Be grateful for that.”
They didn’t know yet then that in another month Elias would be gone.
It happened on a Saturday. Isabel came home from reading in the park and the servants were chattering excitedly in the kitchen. “What’s going on?” Isabel asked.
“Someone took the money from the secret drawer underneath the altar of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” the housekeeper, who was the mayor-doma, answered. The mayor-doma had discovered the theft, because she was in charge of household expenses. Her voice rose shrilly: “I’ve worked for Señora Fabella longer than any of these other servants, and nothing like this has ever happened before.”
“Don’t worry, manang,” the upstairs cleaning maid said. “We’re all Christians here. Only a pagan would’ve stolen that money right under the eyes of the Lord Jesus.”
The downstairs cleaning maid had the tact to nudge her with an elbow and shake her head in warning. Elias’s mother was cooking lunch at the stove and could hear what they were saying, though they could not see her face.
Isabel left the kitchen to look for her mother. Señora Fabella was sitting on the patio, gazing forlornly at the garden. She told Isabel the rest of the story, the part that the servants didn’t know about. “Your father called Elias into the master bedroom.” When she saw the look on Isabel’s face, Señora Fabella quickly added, “Just to question him about the missing money. But Elias refused to admit to the theft.” She shook her head and passed her hand over her eyes. “One hundred pesos, taken from a sheaf of hundred-peso bills held together by a money-band. Elias — or whoever — didn’t take it all. All Elias had to do was admit to stealing the hundred pesos.”
“But he wouldn’t,” Isabel said.
Señora Fabella gazed at her daughter. “No, he wouldn’t. He just stood there with his jaw clamped shut. Then your father asked me to leave the room, saying it was now a matter between two men. Minutes later, Elias came running out with a bloody cut on his eyebrow.” Señora Fabella sighed. “Now I have to deal with the boy’s mother.” Then she added, “I hate it when your father is always proven right.”