and the evening and the morning were the third day

A slice of life in peaceful, beachful Aninuan: A late-afternoon stroll a couple of kilometres down the road. The first half cement, the remainder rocky dirt. At this point, a boy walks with me just long enough to ask if I am a missionary (why does this keep happening?). A ways further, I stop to search out what was shaking way high in a mango tree, when mangoes started dropping down. Monkeys? No, small children, surprisingly high up. A man standing by and watching with me picked up one of the green missiles and offers it to me. "Very sweet." This surprises me, as I thought the green ones were sour. But it is the most delicious mango I've ever eaten. Indian mangoes, he said they were.

I stroll further, a little nervously past some aggressive-looking horned but tethered goats, their ropes stretching well into the road. A water buffalo is tethered a safe distance away. Finally I am at the next beach down from mine, over some rocky promontories, which is even less populated than Aninuan where I am staying. I have heard about the one restaurant here; it is Italian and supposed to be good. I find it, and also at it the large English family who spent the whole day hogging the best beach chairs back in Aninuan. They appear to have chartered their own outrigger canoe and pilot -- no dirty rocky road for them -- and thankfully are about to leave. Unsurprisingly they had the best table, which I claim victoriously. The spaghetti puttanesca is genuinely Italian, like The Man Of No Words at the restaurant; the service, like the two waitresses, is genuinely Filipino. I practically have to beg to be given a menu, despite that there are only two tables occupied. But I get to sit beachside and watch the twilight turn to night, eating my first non-Filipinized non-Filipino food in weeks, and it is Good.

My company at the restaurant arean intermittently loud Filipino family who mostly keep to themselves, and a table of drunkish, late-middle-aged, haggard-looking mixed bag of European men accompanied by a couple of silent, younger but nonetheless uxorial-looking Filipinas. One man, Sebastian, says nearly nothing but eventually gets up and staggers off in that deliberate, zombie-state way of someone who is not new to heavy drinking. Later, he reappears and sits down at my table; almost immediately his wife (?) locates him and looks into my eyes while apologizing repeatedly with deep and urgent desperation, gradually herding him away to Somewhere Else.

320 pesos later it is 7 pm and dark when I hit the road for the trip home, surrounded by the hushy night sound of crickets and the occasional firefly making its dotted-line way across the tree-canopy black holes in the starry sky. Sometimes a bat puts an end to this dotted line, which makes me melancholy.

Back at Tamaraw (= "water buffalo"), where I am staying, I quickly change into my bathing trunks, wander down the strand as far away from beach lighting as I can get, remove my trunks again and slip into the womb-temperature ocean for a weightless escape under the night sky, which continues to be starry; over all, the sound of slowly crashing waves. Eventually I return, re-clothed, to the little table and chair outside the door to my room, my gaze hovering dreamily just above no point in particular over the night beach, and am soaked with the sense of a day well lived.