Death day
It is midnight on the day of the dead, and there is a red moon hanging over Sagada.
There are nine of us out on the mountain, sprawled around a bonfire we cannot light on a patio paved with small slabs of cold rock. There are two bottles of gin, a liter of Coke, and no cups to speak of. Adonis, our gaffer who now sports a graying mohawk, cuts out the bottom of a bottle of mineral water. We pass around the makeshift plastic cup half-filled with gin, and chase it down with Coke from the one mug we filched off someone’s hotel room.
The moon still bleeds behind the clouds. My sound engineer says there is a light tower projecting red into the sky. My cinematographer looks up from his handheld computer game, flips his ponytail, and says that the moon is only reflecting the local bonfires. My director puffs on his twentieth-eighth Winston for the day, taps the butts absent-mindedly onto my shoe, and says the red moon is a sign that the aliens are coming in a spaceship to take us all away. He believes it too.
The Sagada we heard of was a place of hippies and hash, but there were more stories—about a mountain that burns on All Souls’ Day, about curses in haunted rooms, about faith and fate and the hand of the gods. And so on Thursday night we negotiated our way up hairpin curves and sudden turns, our driver peering through the windshield at the white fog billowing at the glass. Inside the van, we were suddenly awake, suddenly whispering about white-faced ghosts and falling off cliffs and the possibility of being held up and shot by renegade soldiers on a lonely mountain road. And then there was mad laughter, random jokes about the sexual adventures of dwarves, discussions of the costs of Saturday night hookers in Manila, and the enumeration of various positions not yet illustrated in the Kama Sutra. If you’re one of two girls running with a crew of seven men, you learn to ignore, even appreciate, the various ways by which men deal with fear.
We found George in the burial caves—George, a full-blooded native Igorot farmer who tours the curious around the edges of Sagada’s secrets. We follow him and his bright yellow jacket down stone stairs carved out of the side of the mountain, follow him even as thong slippers and sneakers slide through the slick mud, follow him just outside the looming black mouth of a cave. And here, under the soft blue light of a sun streaming through a canopy of leaves, piles of weathered wood coffins are piled one on top of the other, blank-eyed skulls staring into space. George says the coffins hold the bones of his ancestors. The Igorots believe that the spirits of the dead rise after passing away; they are not buried underground, in the dark, where their spirits are far from the sky. They are left in their rounded wood coffins, closer to their creator.
Someday, says George, this is where he will be laid to rest, his bones in a box over other boxes and other bones, away from the suffocating underground. Igorots do not come to these burial sites; there are no engraved names on the coffins, no plaster angels with clasped hands and faces tipped to the sky, only the anonymous wall of fading wood.
We drive to Demang, not too far away, on a dark field where the wind runs icy fingers down arms, sucks the warmth from lips and licks at cold cheeks, where a fire burns in a circle walled by a stone fence. Here, the tribe’s elders sit, eating with wrinkled oil-slick fingers from plastic bowls of rice, tearing wings and thighs from roasted chicken on wooden platters. Here sit the tribe’s wise men, the men in their eighties in their old cowboy hats, in their bandannas, in their battered jackets, waiting for dawn and the end of Begnas, the ritual of celebration that begins just as the first green sprouts from the purple earth.
The tribe’s chief sits and waits. Esteban talks about ritual, about tradition, about living life the way his grandfather and the grandfather before him lived. Boys in jeans and oversized shirts appear out of the night, some who look as if they have just stepped out of the impromptu basketball courts that pepper Metro Manila cities. They stride into the stone circle. They too are Igorot. When the cicadas begin their singing, the boys pick up their gongs, step out of the circle, and begin to play. At dawn, the men walk, down long narrow paths cutting across rows of corrugated tin homes, dressed in loincloths, gripping spears. They walk, up the mountain, up to a brown lake, up to a tree with a thousand branches and gossamer leaves, where they speak to the gods that need appeasement and thanks.
The men return, and in the cold yellow sunlight of the day of the dead, tiny red flowers bloom along the paths of Demang, just as red blood spurts from the chopped heads of slaughtered pig and dog and chicken. They kill to keep on living.
In cemeteries across the country, wax candles are being lit, rosaries handed out, and prayers spoken to the tune of Magnolia Ice Cream carts. White flowers the texture of tissue are laid over cement and long-brittle bones. My mother calls to ask whether I intend to go with them to the cemetery. In Demang, the offerings are roasted and shared to the hundreds spread out on the grassy lawn. The women begin dancing—arms spread, hips twitching, thumbs raised to point at the great blue bowl of sky. Kick, kick, left, right, the bang of the gong, the smile on many lips. Esteban calls this a dance for joy—to tell the gods that they are glad to be alive. Without ritual, the gods will be angered, and death and sickness will creep into homes.
We were looking for death in Sagada, looked for it in hanging coffins and a foggy road and a tribal chief who believes that to forsake ritual is to forsake life. We didn’t find death, we found life, the rough pulsing of those who tell their stories, who remember so they can believe they will be remembered. Tonight, we drop the cameras and the lights and the piles of cables, buy more gin and Coke and blow what’s left of our budget on plastic cups. I won’t be lighting any candles or offering any flowers. But I’ll celebrate still—by sitting under a red moon on a dark night, listening to the mad laughter of those who live.
