3.. The Black Monkey
Two weeks already she had stayed in the hunt on
the precipice, alone except for the visits of her husband. Carlos came
regularly once a day and stayed three or four hours, but his visits seemed to
her too short and far between. Sometimes, after he had left and she thought she
would be alone again, one or the other of the neighbors came up
unexpectedly, and right away those days became different, or she became
different in a subtle but definite way. For the neighbors caused a disturbed
balance in her which was relieving and necessary. Sometimes it was one of the
women, coming up with some fruits, papayas, perhaps, or wild ink berries, or
guavas. Sometimes the children, to grind her week’s supply of corn meal in the
cubbyhole downstairs. Their chirps and meaningless giggles broke the steady
turn of the stone grinder, scraping to a slow agitation the thoughts that had
settled and almost hardened in the bottom of her mind. She would have liked it
better if these visits were longer, but they could not be; for the folks came
to see her, yet she couldn’t come to them, and she, a sick woman, wasn’t really
with her when they sat there with her. The women were uneasy in the hut and she
could say nothing to the children, and it seemed it was only when the men came
to see her when there was the presence of real people. Real people, and she
real with them.
As
when old Emilio and Sergio left their carabaos standing in the clearing and
crossed the river at low tide to climb solemnly up the path on the precipice,
their faces showing brown and leathery in the filtered sunlight of the forest
as they approached her door. Coming in and sitting on the floor of the
eight-by-ten hut where she lay, looking at her and chewing tobacco, clayey legs
crossed easily, they brought about them the strange electric of living
together, of showing one to another lustily across the clearing, each driving
his beast, of riding the bull cart into the timber to load dead trunks of
firewood, of listening in a screaming silence inside their huts at night to the
sound of real or imagined shots or explosions, and mostly of another kind of
silence, the kid that bogged down between the furrows when the sun was hot and
the soils stony and the breadth for words lay tight and furry upon their
tongues. They were slow of words even when at rest, rousing themselves to talk
numbingly and vaguely after long periods of chewing.
Thinking
to interest her, their talk would be of the women’s doings, soap-making and the
salt project, and who made the most coconut oil that week, whose dog has caught
sucking eggs from whose poultry shed, show many lizards and monkeys they
trapped and killed in the corn fields and yards around the four houses.
Listening to them was hearing a remote story heard once before and strange
enough now to be interesting again. But it was last two weeks locatable in her
body, it was true, but not so much a real pain as a deadness and heaviness
everywhere, at once inside of her as well as outside.
When
the far nasal bellowing of their carabaos came up across the river the men rose
to go, and clumsy with sympathy they stood at the doorstep spiting out many
casual streaks of tobacco and betel as they stretched their leave by the last
remarks. Marina wished for her mind to go on following them
down the cliff to the river across the clearing, to the group of four huts on
the knoll where the smoke spiraled blue glints and grey from charcoal pits, and
the children chased scampering monkeys back into forested slopes only a few
feet away. But when the men turned around the path and disappeared they were
really gone, and she was really alone again.
From
the pallet where she lay a few inches from the door all she could set were the
tops of ipil trees arching over the damp humus soil of the forest, and a very
small section of the path leading from her hut downward along the edge of the
precipice to the river where it was a steep short drop of fifteen or twenty
feet to the water. They used a ladder on the bushy side of the cliff to climb
up and don the path, let down and drawn up again, and no one from the outside
the area could know of the secret hut built so close to the guerilla
headquarters. When the tide was low and then water drained toward the sea, the
river was shallow in some parts and the ladder could be reached by wading on a
pebbly stretched to the base of the cliff. At high tide an outrigger boat had
to be rowed across. They were fortunate to have the hiding place, very useful
to them whenever they had to flee from their hut on the knoll below, every time
a Japanese patrol was reported by the guerillas to be prowling around the hills.
Two
weeks ago, in the night, they had fled up to the forest again, thinking a
patrol had penetrated. Marina remembered how she and Flavia and Flavia’s
daughter had groped their way up to the precipice behind their faster
neighbors, how the whole of that night the three of them had cowered in this
dark hut while all around monkeys gibbered in the leaves, and pieces of voices
from the guerillas on the river pieced into the forest like thin splintered
glass. And all the time the whispered talk of their neighbors crouched in the
crevices of the high rocks above them floated down like echoes of the whispers
in her own mind. Nobody knew the reason for the harm sounded by headquarters
unto the next morning when Carlos and two other guerillas paddled around the
river from camp and had told everyone to come down from their precipice and
return to the huts; it was not enemy troops but the buys chasing after the
Japanese prisoner who had escaped.
Following
the notice of Carlos, old Emilio and others went back to the knoll the day
after the alarm. She had stayed, through two weeks now. Sick and paralyzed on
one side, she had to stay where she was a liability to no one in case of
danger. She had to stay until the Japanese prisoner was caught, and if he had
been able to slip across the channel to Cebu and a Japanese invasion of this guerilla area
was instigated, she would be safe in this hideout.
Listening
closely for several nights, she had learned to distinguish the noises made by
the monkey in the tree nearest her door. She was sure the tree had only one
tenant, a big one, because the sounds it made were unusually heavy and
definite. She would hear a precise rustle, just as if it shifted once in its
sleep and was quiet again, or when the rustling and the grunts were continuous
for a while, she knew it was looking for a better perch and muttering at its
discomfort. Sometimes there were precipitate rubbing sounds and a thud and she
concluded it accidentally slipped and landed on the ground. She always heard it
arrive late at night, long after the forest had settled down. Even now as she
lay quietly, she knew the invisible group of monkeys had begun to come, she
knew from the coughing that started from far up to the slope, sound like wind
on the water, gradually coming downward.
She
must have been asleep about four hours when she awoke uneasily, aware of
movements under the hut. Blackness had pushed into the room, heavily and
moistly, sticky damp around her eyes, under her chin and down the back of her
neck, where it prickled like fine hair creeping on end. Her light had burned
out. Something was fumbling at the door of the compartment below the floor,
where the supply of rice and corn was stored in tall bins. The door was pushed
and rattled cautiously, slow thuds of steps moved around the house. Whatever it
was, it circled the hut once, twice and stop again to jerk at the door.
It
sounded like a monkey, perhaps the monkey in the tree, trying to break in the
door to the corn and rice. It seemed to her it took care not to pass the
stairs, retracing its steps to the side of the hut each time so she could not
see it through her open door. Hearing the sounds and seeing nothing, she could
not see it through her open door. Hearing the sounds and seeing nothing, she
felt it imperative that she should see the intruder. She set her face to the
long slit at the base of the wall and the quick chilly wind came at her like a
whisper suddenly flung into her face. Trees defined her line vision, merged
blots that seemed to possess life and feeling running through them like thin
humming wires. The footsteps had come from the unknown boundary and must have
resolved back into it because she could not hear them anymore. She was deciding
the creature had gone away when she saw a stooping shape creep along the wall
and turn back, slipping by so quickly she could deceive herself into believing
she imagined it. A short, stooping creature, its footsteps heavy and regular
and then unexpectedly running together as if the feet were fired and sore. She
had suspected the monkey but didn’t feel sure, even seeing the quick shaped she
didn’t feel sure, until she heard the heavy steps turn toward the tree. Then
she could distinguish clearly the rubbing sounds as it hitched itself up the
tree.
She
had a great wish to be back below with the others. Now and then the wind blew
momentary gaps through the leaves and she saw fog from the river below, fog
white and stingy, floating over the four huts on the knoll. Along about ten in
the morning the whole area below would be under the direct that of the sun. The
knoll was a sort of islet made by the river bending into the horseshoe shape;
on this formation of the two inner banks they had made their clearing and built
their huts. On one outer bank the guerilla camp hid in thick grove of
madre-de-cacao and undergrowth and on the other outer bank, the other arm of
the horseshoe, abruptly rose the steep precipice where the secret hut stood.
The families asleep on the knoll were themselves isolated, she thought; they
were as on an island cut off by the water and mountain ranges surrounding them;
shut in with it, each one tossing his thought to the others, no one keeping it
privately, no one really taking a deliberate look at it in the secrecy of his
own mind. In the hut by herself it seemed she must play it out, toss it back
and forth.
Threads
of mist tangled under the trees. Light pricked through the suspended raindrops;
the mind carried up the sound of paddling from the river. In a little while him
distinctly. Neena! Neena! Her name thus exploded through the air by his voice
came like a shock after hours of stealthy noises.
He
took the three rungs of the steps in one stride and was beside her on the
floor. Always he came in a flood of size and motions and she couldn’t see all
of him at once. A smell of stale sun and hard walking clung to his clothes and
stung into her; it was the smell of many people and many places and the room
felt even smaller with him in it. In a quick gesture that had become a habit he
touched the back of his hand on her forehead.
“Good,”
he announced, “no fever.”
With
Carlo’s presence, the room bulged with the sense of people and activity,
pointing up with unbearable sharpness her isolation, her fears, her
helplessness.
“I
can’t stay up here,” she told him, not caring anymore whether he despised her
cowardice. “I must go down. There is something here. You don’t know what’s
happening. You don’t know, or you won’t take me stay.”
He
looked at her and then around the room as though her fear squatted there
listening to them.
“It’s
the monkey again.”
“Man
or monkey or devil, I can’t stay up here anymore.”
“Something
must be done,” he said, “this can’t go on.”
“I’ll
go down and be with the others.”
He
raised his head, saying wearily, “I wish that were the best thing, Neena, God
knows I wish it were. But you must go down only when you’re ready. These are
critical days for all of us in this area. If something breaks–the Jap, you
know, think what will happen to you down there, with me at headquarters. You’ve
known of reprisals.”
He
looked at her and his sooty black eyes were like the bottom of a deep drained
well. “I wish I could be here at night. What I’m saying is this: it’s a job you
must do by yourself, since nobody is allowed out of headquarters after dark.
That monkey must be shot or you’re not safe here anymore.”
“You
know I can’t shoot.”
“We
are continuing our lessons. You still remember, don’t you?”
“It
was long ago and it was not really in earnest.”
He
inspected the chambers of the rifle. “You didn’t need it then.”
He
put his life into her hands.
She
lifted it and as its weight yielded coldly to her hands, she said suddenly,
“I’m glad we’re doing this.”
“You
remember how to use the sight?”
“Yes,”
and she could not help smiling a little. “All the o’clock you taught me.”
“Aim
it and shoot.”
She
aimed at a scar on the trunk of the tree near the door, the monkey’s tree. She
pressed on the trigger. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. “It isn’t
loaded.”
“It
is.”
“The
trigger won’t move. Something’s wrong.”
He
took it from her. “It’s locked, you forgot it as usual.” He put it aside.
“Enough now, you’ll do. But you unlock first. Remember, nothing can ever come
out of a locked gun.”
He
left early in the afternoon, about two o’clock.
Just
before the sundown the monkey came. It swung along the trees along the edge of
the precipice, then leaped down on the path and wandered around near the hut.
It must be very, very hungry, or it would not be so bold. It sidled forward all
the time eying her intently, inching toward the grain room below the stairs. As
it suddenly rushed toward her all the anger of the last two years of war seemed
to unite into one necessity and she snatched up the gun, shouting and
screaming, “Get out! Thief! Thief!”
The
monkey wavered. It did not understand the pointed gun she brandished and it
came forward, softly, slowly, its feet hardly making any sound on the ground.
She aimed, and as it slipped past the stairs and was rounding the corner to the
grain room she fired again and once again, straight into its back.
The
loud explosions resounded through the trees. The birds in the forest flew in
confusion and their high excited chatter floated down through the leaves. But
she did not hear them – the only reality was the twisting, grunting shape near
the stairs and after a minute it was quiet.
She
couldn’t help laughing a little, couldn’t help feeling exhilarated. The black
monkey was dead, it was dead, she had killed it. Strangely, too, she was
thinking of the escaped prisoner that she strangely feared him but was curious
about him, and that now she could think of him openly to herself. She could
talk about him now, she thought. Shoe could talk of him to Carlos and to
anybody and not hide the sneaky figure of him with the other black terrors of
her mind.
She realized that she
was still holding the gun. This time, she thought, she had unlocked it. And
with rueful certainty, she knew she could do it again, tonight tomorrow,
whenever it was necessary. The hatter of some monkeys came to her from a far up
in the forest. From that distance, it was vague, a lost sound; hearing it
jarred across her little triumph, and she wished, like someone lamenting a lost
innocence, that she had never seen a gun or fired one.
