The Color of My Fears [COMPLETE]

Chapter 6 - The Rite [#21]

I felt unafraid...as the mallet struck the razor blade. I thought of happy things...as the labaha cut the skin. After all I had made a wish with the tinhab. Or so I thought...

My mind drifted. To an age I was smaller...to a time I was 6 or 7 years old...to a place in the hacienda when I barely knew what the hacienda was like. I was amazed at myself, how I was able to remember such things so early in my childhood.

Oblivious to what was in front of me, I saw the old plaza in my mind. The scene was as clear as images on crystal. And my vision was as vivid as if it happened seconds ago.

The old plaza was once located on a piece of land situated on the west side of the highway. It had already been in ruins for a long time by the time I was born. Its days of glory was over. But still I could hear the sound of guitars and drums and violins rising to a beautiful crescendo of music during the nights when the village folks held public dances (bayle). Images of men and women long gone, but I saw their faces smiling and full of life, village folks whose names I could no longer remember were as happy as gentlemen and ladies on the night they stepped on the concrete platform of the old plaza, holding hands to start to dance to the beat of live music played by an orchestra.

I saw a boy playing on that raised square platform of broken concrete, invaded by wild vines and creeping grasses and wild flowers, running in glee, chasing dragonflies and butterflies, running round and round the old plaza now in ruins, running back to the house where I was raised as a baby, our old house, a wooden structure with the nipa roof, standing beside the house of the village blacksmith, Tio Lope, where I used to go visit his shop full of iron instruments and implements: trowels (guna), hoes (sadol), bolos (espading), spades (pala) which he fabricated in his forge for the use of laborers working in the cane fields; the anvil, the iron hammer, and the air blower were my favorite playthings when I did visit Tio Lope's forge, where my friends and I, sometimes collected the scraps of metal lying in the area and then sold our collection to a passing metal buyer (manugsalsalon) for a few pesos which was more than enough for us boys to make us happy for a few days, eating white rabbit candy to our hearts' content.

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