Entry #44

I lay there, looking at a crack through my damp burrow, at the hanging fingers of the banyan tree, its branches looping about the heavens like a maze of fantastic bat wings. Soon, I knew, I’d hear the bats, the geckos, and the owls. We used to play in groves like these, out by the creeks of Kawit.

Long ago.

Entomological fulmination in immobile rectitude.

Guess what the tree branches look like, tanga!

The banyan begins not as a tree but a mass of strangleholds, tentacle-roots choking its unsuspecting host, say a fruitwood—langka or guava. The roots start out innocently enough, fine epiphytes of pulp. It’s only later that it turns woody, a semblance of its origins. In a grove of banyans by the bat caves in Cavite that I used to climb, one could hide perfectly still among the branches and listen to the sky.

The best groves are those with the oldest trees, with their gnarled roots upon roots. It was fun to squeeze through its cannibal contortions until you traced the whole of the vanished form into which the banyan tree had become.

The banyan above me, the one that chanted, spoke as if it were the voice of many, perhaps bees or locusts, united in a single drone:

—Because encryption is a way of burying, the banyan said.

I lay in the depths of a phantom shape, against shards of damp wood. It was cramped but cozy, and trapped with me were my proliferating personal effects, now a bit bulky, all of us in a cocoon beyond the battle.

I lay in that gap in the banyan grove, and I heard her steps go by the dark path. It was over. By that time it was over. And as far as I could tell it was stalemate, and the flies and the beetles and soon the rats were perhaps the victors. The fields and streams of Balara were quiet, and even the remnant chickens were asleep, out by the unhusked grains of the Chinese bodega.

She felt me staring at her—Leonor has the intuition of a witch.

I got out with difficulty: the bag hoist on the petate—I mean, of course, the other way around: I swaddled the bag with my unraveling mat.

Without a word, I followed her down the paths of the banyan grove.

It did not surprise me that Leonor would appear at that point near the climax, which is an image in my mind that looks anyhow like a figure hanging perhaps at the edge of a cliff by its fingers, or maybe by a rope, whereas a denouement looks a bit like a flat planggana.

It was Leonor who put it together, in the post-amble of a lover’s walk.

Because nothing exists without an observer. Because the writer died while he was writing. Because encryption is a way of burying.

Still, I said, there was something missing.

Leonor turned to me and nodded.

God, I thought: we really smelled.