The Disease

A blinding flash of white light tore at the ink-black sky, followed by the deafening pounding of what sounded like gigantic horses' hooves on wooden planks. He turned his back away from the sky, as if it pained his age-old eyes. He shuddered when he heard the roar of the heavens as the light pierced its skin once more. It reminded him of that moment when the albularyo had to pierce the eye of the boil on his right shoulder when he was but 12 years old. It was something like this too—stormy and chaotic as if the cosmos wailed alongside him in gut-wrenching pain.

They said it was the worst storm to hit Manila.

If the rains didn't stop, he would have to deal with the rising floodwater seeping in his apartment again. He hated living in Sampaloc. It was like living in the sewers with nothing but the stench of human excrement and non-biodegradable filth strewn carelessly by man himself.

It was wrong for him to leave his father's hacienda in the province. Leaving the privileged life he had was probably the biggest, foolish mistake he ever made. His grandfather filled him with too much tales of the past that he chased after them in the city where he studied. He fed himself more stories of long ago; it intoxicated him to believe he was meant to tell the narratives himself.  He felt it was a calling that only he can respond to.

What a fool he was.

It was wrong for him to waste his youth and knowledge teaching children who did not share the same passion as he had with the past. No one ever did appreciate history nowadays. How could they do so with all their sophisticated little gadgets and their fascination for all things foreign and synthetic?

It wasn't always like this. When he first started teaching history at the University of Santo Tomas, it was like he had an attentive audience listening to his stories. He recalled the enamored eyes of his students as they latched on to every word he told about engkantos and the diwatas. It was as if it was a million years ago when his young charges badgered him for stories about datus and sultans and their affairs with forbidden love.

Like him and everything else, things grew old in the age of technology. Nobody cared for the world before their world. Nobody believed in the mystics anymore. People did not believe in Bathala anymore.

Old and withered, Professor Bienvenido Suntay looked out his apartment window once more, this time, wishing everything else before him drowned in the murky waters of diseased Manila.