frankie's story-2

It was raining lightly when the Japanese picked up Frankie that Friday afternoon at the Quedancor office in Butuan City. The power window on the passenger side of the red Nissan vanette went down and revealed a man with a scar. He alit, smiled at Frankie, and motioned for him to join them.

A thin man, about 30, sat on the driver’s seat. At the back, the two Japanese that Frankie met days before, stopped talking when they saw him. Right away he noticed that the man in the middle, wearing a lime green shirt, was holding a plastic tube the size of a big Youngstown can, its round tip almost touching the small face of the other man in an orange shirt.

He boarded and sat by the window, beside Green. As the door slid close, he felt a stirring excitement inside him.

***

Frankie hoped that his wife Nening had prepared the room for the Japanese to sleep in as the red vanette sped through the well-lit street of Tago a few minutes past ten o’clock. Earlier that morning, he sent her text messages and she rained him with questions that he promised to answer once home.

Nening and her two sons stood by the door when Frankie got off the car. He introduced her to them and made them feel comfortable.

"Coffee?" she asked. Green and Orange nodded; it was Scarface who said thank you.

As Nening went to the kitchen, Frankie herded his children to their room. Not much later, Green, Orange and Scarface asked to be excused for the trip had worn them out, adding not to mind the driver because he would be sleeping inside the van.

Frankie went out and joined his neighbors over at the corner, passing around a Nescafe glass half-filled with cola and rhum.

It was past midnight when Frankie went home. Though the house was silent, he knew that beyond the wall, the papel de Japon, as he called them, were still awake.

He joined his wife and promptly fell asleep. Hours later, he woke up to empty his bladder. As he passed by the room of the Japanese, he sensed a kind of hush. Why are they still up? he thought as he went back to sleep.

Minutes after four o’clock, he woke up again to use the toilet. The Japanese were still awake, and this time, he could hear them speak in whisper, like early birds careful not to wake the early worms.

What keeps the Japanese awake? What are they doing? These questions made Frankie a bit curious, making him want to go to the far end of the wall where there was a crack that he could peep into.

But Frankie hesitated. What if he got caught? It would be embarrassing, to say the least. He headed for the toilet.

On his way back, he heard their whispers again, and this time, there was an edge of excitement to them. He went to the far end of the wall.

He felt mice playing ik-ikan inside his chest as he pressed his left eye against the crack on the wall. They were sitting on the floor in true Japanese fashion, and from where Frankie stood, Scarface was facing him, blocked partly by Orange; Green had his back against the bed.

From what Frankie could make, they were looking at something spread on the floor. He couldn’t see what it was, at least not in full, because what he could see was only the tip of what looked like a piece of paper. Then suddenly Scarface lifted the paper whose width was such that when he stretched it between his hands, it was like he was crucified.

The mice ran wild as Frakie stared, transfixed: There, in front of him and held by Scarface, was a copy of an old map!

Then Orange, as if to show Green, put his finger at the center of the map and let it stay there for a while before moving slowly to the spot near the top, to the right.

He looked at Green. And together they smiled.

frankie's story-1

Frankie Laurente met the Japanese in Butuan in 2007 when he was still the regional driver of Quedancor. That morning outside their office, he was telling the guard about Tago and Berto Morales, a Tagon-on who got famous after hitting the jackpot when the payloader he was driving as employee of the National Irrigation Administration in the 80s bumped into what was considered the greatest gold cache ever found this side of Asia.

“Excuse me, did you say Tago?”

Frankie stopped in mid-sentence, surprised that the question came from one of the three men retracing their steps toward him. By the way they looked, walked and talked, Frankie surmised they were Japanese.

“Did you say you’re from Tago?” the same old man with a tiny scar just below his right eye asked, this time in Bisaya.

Frankie nodded.

The man looked at his companions who smiled. Then one of them whispered to the man with the scar who, in turn, asked Frankie if they could talk to him for a while.

Frankie hesitated.

Hastily, the man fished a business card from his wallet and handed it to Frankie. “We’re actually from Kajima Construction.”

A huge billboard flashed in Frankie’s mind, one placed near the yet unfinished Butuan bridge that said: “A Project of Kajima Construction.”

Frankie followed them to a snack bar across the street.

“We just need to know a few things about Tago,” the scarred man said even before he could pull a chair. “We’ve been wanting to visit the place. Could you be our guide?”

A beat. Then a shuffling of menu cards.

“When do you want to go to Tago?” Frankie asked.

“Up to you,” the scar twitched along with the eye.

“I won’t be going home until Friday afternoon, after 5:00 PM,” Frankie said. The smell of coffee and pastries that began to engulf the room made his mouth water.

The man with the scar looked at the two men who remained rooted in their seats, silent. Frankie felt feet nudging under the table.

“Friday then," the old man said. "After 5:00 PM.”

Frankie nodded even as he stared beyond the thick and tinted glass, to the guard across the street who stood with his gun glinting in the fierce April sun.


...to be continued....

tago and the yamashita treasure

Tago’s urban legend includes Yamashita burying part of his treasures in selected spots in Tago. And so when a few Japanese recently surveyed Tago like vultures looking for carcasses after a great flood, Tagon-on tongues began wagging again.

The last time the same tongues wagged was in the early 90s when two Japanese firms rose and bade sayonara faster than the owners could say arigato. The firms--- a coconut processing plant in Siti with the Cejocos as partners and a chopstick factory in Gamut with the Pichays as partners---were taken by Tagon-ons as mere fronts to hunt for the Yamashita treasure. “How else could you explain men working at night instead of day behind a tall fence?” they said.

Nobody knows if the Japanese got what they came for. But there’s another urban legend that a Tagon-on businessman and a contractor-politico from Tandag found gold bars separately in each of these areas through pure happenstance.

Frankie Laurente holds the story behind the recent Japanese visit to Tago. And it amazed him that these Japanese knew how Tago was configured long before his parents were even born. But then Frankie thought that it must be the map rolled inside the plastic tube that one Japanese kept close to his body even when asleep as though it was surgically attached to him.

Once, in 2008, Frankie said that he and the Japanese went to our house to look at the area. And it was then that he learned that the lot on which our house now stands was a cemetery.

Suddenly I was thrown back to the 80s when Muslims came to our house to ask my father to allow them to look for antiques in our backyard. With their tester, a thin metal rod so long it extended from Panawsawon to Buruwakwak, they poked the ground and pushed deeper. And when it hit something and clanked, they dug a hole like cats frantic to make a pooh. But the most they got were a blue chip off an old plate, a rusty hasp, and a dented silver bansil attached to a molar.

When I asked my father why Muslims flocked to our house, he said that our lot could be a treasure trove because it was once a cemetery. Seeing I was puzzled, he told me of the ancient practice of burying pieces of clothing and jewelry along with the dead.

It was not until years later, when I was in college, that he finally told me what his father told him before that Yamashita was said to have buried some of his treasures on our lot.


(Next: Frankie’s story)

living the curse

People often ask me why I’ve chosen to stay in Tago. “It’s a small pond for a big fish like you,” they say. “With your looks and your skills, you can make it anywhere.”

When this happens, I don't get flattered or offended. Instead, I’m amused. Really, these people don’t know what they’re missing.

Consistent with its name, Tago is secluded. And the confluence of Tago River in the West and the Pacific Ocean in the East makes this hometown of Eugene Villaluz, Moi Ortiz, Maria Montes, Sunday Salvacion, Zandro Limpot, and Sam Milby a dead end.

Strangers, especially foreigners, like Tago the way it is: clean, well thought-out, tranquil. But Tagon-on balikbayans look at it with sadness and longing. In the past, Tago was the center of education and trade. But now, with all the big establishments owned by Tago’s old rich gone, it is a commercial no-man’s-land. And while the neighboring towns are building new homes and structures, Tago is tearing down some of its own, mostly old ones, thus giving vacationing Tagon-on urbanites a dose of what one writer calls landscape amnesia.

The curse at work? Well, not quite.

Tagon-ons, it seems, don’t realize that more than their park, crabs, and pudding, their hometown’s beauty lies in its unhurried pace. And it is in going placidly amidst financial and technological noise and haste of its neighbors that Tago preserves its old world magic.

Cursed or not, I want no urbanization for Tago. In fact, silly it may sound, I wish I had the power to bring Tago back to the time when Tagon-ons had it easy: rising early in the morning to buy fish strung on a midrib instead of being weighed on a scale; lingering at the market to engage in small talk; buying pan de sal placed inside a paper bag twisted at both ends; buying balikutsa inside a garapon sitting on a window; dropping by a house for a quick chat even when one is in a hurry; getting your share of fish---hilas--- from your neighbor’s catch; asking a pinch of salt from your neighbor when you run out of it; sweeping the leaves into a heap in the morning and making a small fire in the afternoon; joining a procession whose head and tail meet; dropping everything for Angelus; appreciating the moon in full glory; watching a falling star blaze a trail in the sky.

Like strangers, I love Tago the way it is. I like it here where laughs are both cheap and priceless. I like it here where life is easy and slow, where moments linger and not flit away, where I lose all sense of time and enjoy the “nowness” of life.

Ahhhhh my sweet beloved Tago. If I can make it anywhere, why not here?


(photo by dr. ted seclon)