![]() Sacha Calagopi Cielo considered herself a practical woman. Although she believed in magic, the initial moment of meeting someone and intuitively knowing that this person was going to be part of the rest of her life in some form or other, she chose to make the most out of her present situations. She had experienced many moments of magic in the past and she ended up confused, with many tears and arguments with herself in front of her mirror. So on this cloudless night, she entered the gathering of strangers and decided that she was going to play her charming self, maybe flirt a little, and leave the party in peace. The gathering was held in a penthouse of a condominium in Ortigas, one of Manila’s business districts. It was like any other penthouse with a twenty-five meter swimming pool, orchids in adobe pots, a bare function room with a brown carpet, but the people looked different. A mulatto waved at Cielo as the elevator’s doors slid open, an unusual gesture for a Filipino to do to a stranger. What the hell! she thought. They aren’t Filipino. She waved back to him and proceeded to look for the lone friend she knew, who invited her to this party, promising an introduction to a South African who had explored the Arctics. Cristina, where are you? Many eyes of hazel, green, and blue, peered at her as she walked, straight back, around chairs, tables, and the barbeque grill. She sensed that they couldn’t paste her features on a map, for her face, although pretty, wasn’t grazed with the dark Oriental image of women from her city. Her skin was as pale as a European and she remembered playing guessing games with foreigners on a short trip to Jakarta. “Where are you from?” they would ask. “Where do you think I’m from?” she tilted her head and there was a twinkle in her caramel-colored eyes. “Not from here because your English is quite good,” they replied to prevent offense. “Yes, I’m not from here.” She smiled. She didn’t really know where she was from. She had ancestors from Germany, Israel, Spain, the United States, Persia, China, and maybe even Russia, according to a family rumor, but she had lived all her life in the Philippines. Yet, she didn’t think like a typical Filipino, with staunch values of pakikisama and utang na loob, according to the History books she read in university. “Are you searching for someone?” She heard a voice, with a British accent ask, as she was about to climb the short flight of stairs that led to the swimming pool. Cockney, she told herself. Like the singers of the new-wave era she used to listen to when she was in high school. She didn’t look back, for it was uncustomary for her to make conversation with someone she wasn’t properly introduced to. “Excuse me, are you searching for someone?” He repeated. She turned around and saw a boy or man, she wasn’t sure. For his round face lacked the hard edge of the seasoned men she usually went out with. And his hair, with its wispy bangs and blonde-pink streaks reminded her of Peter Pan. But what struck her most were his eyes, for they were slanted, the kind of eyes many of her past lovers bore, as she gazed at them in longing and love on many cloudless nights like this one. “I am looking for Cristina.” She answered, but she knew she was lying, for she was searching for him. Everyone has an opinion on moments of magic. Jung would say that Cielo was searching for her animus, the masculine part of her that she didn’t recognize, but she intuitively knew. A psychic friend, well versed in spiritual reading would say that the soul knew on a first meeting when another soul would teach it lifelong lessons on its short journey in this world, and the soul had more foresight than the conscious mind. But Cielo had no time for soul talk and no thirst for understanding because it caused too much disparity within her and the situations she entered. She didn’t want to think twice and all she desired was peace. James tiptoed, stretched his neck and moved his head from side to side. “Sorry, I don’t think Cristina’s here, yet,” he said in his crisp accent. She looked at him once more and her curiosity, a trait that had gotten her into many unusual adventures in the past, took the lead. “Where are you from?” “I’m from England.” He took her hand and shook it. “James Whitefield.” Lines appeared on her forehead. “But you’re from the Philippines?” His golden brown skin and his lithe physique did not give a hint of any mixed blood, although his accent and manners told her otherwise. He sighed and looked away from her. “No, I’m from London.” Whitefield, she reminded herself. But she persisted. “But your relatives are from here and you went to school there?” He shook his head and the sudden gulp he took from his wine glass told her that she had asked a question that many people asked him, and was now cause for irritation. “They’re from Vietnam.” The wrinkle on her forehead disappeared and she nodded. It was at this point when she wanted to inform him of a job she held in a small magazine that promoted bars, restaurants, and unusual personalities in Manila. She wanted to justify her questions, her prying. “So your family immigrated to England?” He shook his head and stared
into her eyes. His shoulders suddenly drooped and he breathed out
a loud sigh. “No. I was adopted by my British mother.”
“I don’t remember Vietnam,”
he whispered. “And I most certainly don’t remember the village where
I was born. The one that starts with a letter B.”
He clenched his free hand and gazed at his fingers. “I wonder whose hands I have.” He leaned his head on her stomach and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “I know I was born in that village and during the war I lived with my mother and sister in some kind of orphanage. At least that’s what the records say.” She kissed his blonde-pink hair and allowed her cheek to remain on its straight strands. “I know that after the war,” he continued. “We were placed on a boat with a lot of other families and they said my mother and sister died from pneumonia.” She ran the tips of her fingers across his stomach, in the same manner her mother used to do, when she stayed home from school during an asthma attack. “I was fortunate enough to reach England where the immigration officials probably noticed that I could walk a little and talk a little.” He sat up and faced her. “So they entered a birth date for me and filled in a name on the naturalization papers.” She kissed his shoulder and rubbed her cheek on his arm. Many years after, when she looked back at that conversation, she was never sure if she had fallen in love with him or his story but she continued to step on the accelerator of her decrepit Lancer, as she drove him around her city, which she eventually learned to love. She drove him to a restaurant that her magazine had cited because of its view of the bay, where merchant ships were anchored along its shores. They ate large shrimps that sizzled in the fat of crabs and they silently stared at the industrial ships’ smoke stacks and wondered about the goods inside the compartments and their eventual destinations. She bought a Philippine guidebook book written by an American and drove him from church to church, with their gray stones and antique organs and saints, whose names she never memorized. “I’m surrounded by Catholics!” he whined as she parked her car beside a bell tower. She knelt down on the wooden pew’s attachment to make her three wishes, while he strolled around the aisles and stared at wooden faces with blood spilling down their foreheads. “James,” she whispered when she caught up with him by the altar. “Do you believe in God?” He shrugged. “I know that there is a God. But I don’t necessarily think he has anything to do with my life.” They exited the church and entered her car as the church bell rang and she closed her eyes to savor its baritone, while he muttered, “C’mon, let’s go somewhere else.” She called a friend who texted her directions and she drove James to a club in Intramuros where zigzag lights flashed as they danced to an industrial beat intertwined with the sound of whistles and sirens. He stared at the brick walls and arch ceiling. “It looks like a dungeon in here!” James shouted into Cielo’s ear between the bass’s vibration in his chest. “I think it was!” she shouted back as she moved her head from side to side. “For what?” he asked. She shrugged. “I think
for the prisoners of Spaniards and Americans.” She tried to move
her feet to the beat that didn’t seem to have any predictability.
She drove him to karaoke bars she had patronized in the past and he stood on the tattered red carpet to sing her Beetles songs as she gazed into his slanted eyes and golden brown skin, and listened to his high-pitched voice with an accent that dissolved inside a melody. Where is he from? she wondered. And she drove him to penthouse parties where she tried to make conversation with Filipinas who wore tight clothes and too much make-up, and the tall men who huddled together by the bar, peering at her through eyes of hazel, green, and blue, as they discussed names and numbers she couldn’t paste on a map. Eventually Cielo found herself driving to the corners of James’s emotional and mental tortures. During these times, she forced herself to remember the magical boat, he once mentioned, nights alone when she would wait for him in his apartment, silently listening to the beat of his clock. He would stagger into his unit with the scent of cheap lotion rubbed against his skin, from a night of lurking in the dark alleys of P. Burgos, the red light district of Makati, with his expatriate friends, who all left their home countries, many of them abandoning ex-wives and children. James would drop his head on Cielo’s breasts, crying and whispering countless sorries, while she gently rocked him in her arms and planted kisses on his hair. That night she dreamed she was on
a boat, a simple sailboat, like the ones she saw in children’s drawings.
Her arms were wrapped around a man who leaned against a metal post, which
held a white sail, and his warmth that spread through her body felt comfortable
and familiar. She looked up at the man’s face and saw his eyes behind
silver rimmed glasses staring back at her and she realized it was a past
lover who bore a face she had almost forgotten. Her heart beat wildly
inside her chest and she released her arms from the man and ran to the
edge of the boat. “James!” she shouted at the empty sea as she gripped
the wooden edge. “James, where are you?” But the sea remained
quiet and an island with a small cave loomed ahead and her back slid down
the boat’s side and she crouched on the floor, buried her face in her palms
and wept. The man sat in front of her and held her elbows.
“I am sorry,” he whispered. “But it is inevitable.” “But why?”
she sobbed. “I love him. What’s the point of this all?”
He pulled her to her feet. “When you are with him, you are not at home.”
“What do you mean?” she shrieked.
She opened her eyes, sat up, covered herself with a white sheet, and watched James sleep beside her, in a fetal position, his breath reeking of beer, and his eyes half-open, with no irides to show. Where are you from? she asked once again. She slowly walked to the mirror and stared at her naked reflection with its pale skin that she couldn’t paste on a map. She knew she could’ve left James anytime, for she had become editor of the magazine, which now had a nationwide distribution. And she was still attractive, this evidenced by baskets of roses that adorned her desk. But she remembered her swaying arms and hips during dances with many men from her past, and moments when her eyes were bright and she would throw her head back in laughter, just to end the night with the thud of a club door behind her, and the many questions that spiraled in her mind on her stroll back to a car. So what now? Was this all for one wonderful moment? Is this what magic means? Simply treasuring a memory that will be forever etched in my heart? She recalled the tears she had shed as she watched her eyes dull on the mirror attached to her dresser. During those times, she reminded herself of a promise to make the most out of whatever situation came her way. No human being was perfect. Many of us strive for the best of what we can be, but we still fail because we have so much emptiness that we need to fill up. In the end, we hold on to our hopes, but if those hopes don’t manifest themselves, we bow graciously in defeat and acceptance. Sometimes, as she sipped her latte alone in a coffee shop, she happened to observe a couple with a woman sitting on her lover’s lap. The woman would stick a roll of flautas in his mouth, and they would laugh, and giggle, and whisper countless “I love you’s” to each other. Cielo felt a pang in her heart for it knew that her feet had settled on ground she didn’t want to stay in. She risked to lose the experience of real magic because it was too difficult, a star she couldn’t reach, unless she leaped from magic moment to magic moment, as if she were chasing an idea she couldn’t grasp in her palms. She also realized that she had become a typical woman of Manila. Patiently waiting for her man in their abode, because she knew that no matter how many bars he visited, he only had one home, in her arms, sucking the milk out of her breasts. Cielo found her refuge in James.
Sacha is
a preschool teacher and is pursuing her M.A. in Psychology.
Three of her short stories have been published in Philippine Graphic, and
one in the
Many people say that writing is what keeps them sane, but for Sacha it's the other way around. Sometimes she feels like she's actually stuck between the pages of her book, as if the print was written all over her skin.
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