This is my auntie, this is my uncle, this lot of land is for my cousin, that lot for my mother, Sheryll was telling me as we walked towards the market on the main street of Abongan, the North National Road passing through the barrio after the mountain pass, at equidistance between Roxas and Taytay, and into the flat rice fields which extend towards El Nido.
Down a dirt path, under corrugated iron roof of the wet market, two women stood each near their stalls chasing flies, one of them dipping the tip of her fingers in a can to sprinkle water on the yellow fin tuna, arranged in a row, big enough to feed an entire family many times, and some other smaller fish on the white tiles of the stall, the daylight slipping on the contour of their slippery shape, their glossy eye looking back at us as we decided which one to take.
On a nearby tray, other fry fish on a jute sack and a mass of translucent minnow netted perhaps just an hour ago, with the pinpoint glint of their dark eyes still quivering, not yet entirely dead.
There were men on the ledge of another empty stall, most probably the husband fishermen of these women, one was sleeping as it was the afternoon siesta time, and the other two saying things in Tagalog that made them all laugh gently, even the two other women in the dimness of the sari-sari store, re-arranging eggplants, water-spinach, calamanci and tiny purple onions in a new pyramidal mound and heap.
Moreno kids looked at me with amazement, I was the curiosity of the barrio, the first white man who lived here they ever saw in flesh. Otherwise, backpackers and tourists never stop, as they transit in mini vans to El Nido, where they go to have fun, seeking nothing else in life.
There was a large chopping board made of a tree trunk, reaching the midriff of the woman chopping the yellow fin tuna with a machete, with deeper scars of blade-cuts on it, where carabao bones were broken with powerful blows of the bolo, as flies hovered over lumps of gory morsels, blood stains and fish scales in a stagnant water of a shallow ditch.
A dog watched absentmindedly the movement of the hand, the head of the fish split open in one deft blow, clipping the dorsal fin in two gentle taps of the machete and instantly flicked them with its tip in the direction of the waiting dog, which it snapped in mid-flight, as it is used to do with flies that disturbs his sleep.
Slices of the tuna meat amassed one by one on the tray of the scale in its red liquid blood, fat of the skin, the marrow of the skull, all to be cooked on charcoal in a "sinigang soupe", with ginger, string beans, black pepper beads and eggplant, for supper tonight.
At first I thought she wanted to impress me, when we reached the curve on the carabao path, walking towards the nipa hut where her family lives, at the juncture of a rice field irrigation canal which retained rain water on higher ground in a mud dam, and where her uncle Rufo brings his carabao to refresh itself.
The vague gesture of her hand encompassed all this, the basin of water hemmed in and corralled within bamboo reeds and water plants and more, further afield the coconut and banana grove, with the nipa huts in the midst and their chicken and ducks and barking dogs, in their bamboo fences limiting the boundary of each, and, on the hilltop, the playground of Elemantary School of Abongan, overlooking the jungle and the wall of its mangium tree-line flickering silver tinsels in the heat of the sunlight, following the contour of the low rice fields where a man in red shorts and hooded face plodded in the soggy mud, along the "kahoon", the knee-high mud lines separating the entire field in small portions, most probably to make irrigation easier. But this is how these parts of the island was owned by her family members, after the land reform of 1963 under the president Macapagal and subsequent government administrations, in 1954, NARRA Republic Act, which was aimed to resettle dissidents and rebel returnees providing home lots and farmlands in Palawan and Mindanow, as her uncle Rufo owned 7 hectares and her mother 4 hectares in the jungle of Tulatulahan where her father panned for gold and found nuggets, which Sheryll remembers seeing, a land which was pawned later against a debt of 150 thousand Piso her father contracted, to start a business that went bankrupt.
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