BANAAG (Tagalog-English)

Prologue: The Child Who Followed the Fireflies

Barrio Lantayan, Tayabas · 1932

The forest above Lantayan had no name, so the child did not know he was going anywhere at all.

He was three. He was hungry, which that year was nothing special. The whole barrio was hungry in 1932, the way the whole barrio was wet in August. Coconuts had stopped being worth anything. His father had gone to Manila to look for work in the spring and had written twice, and then not at all. His mother sewed for a family in the poblacion by lamplight, piecework, a centavo a hem, until her fingers bled onto the cloth and she had to start the hem over.

On the night of the storm she fell asleep over the needle with the lamp still burning.

The rain stopped a little after midnight. The child woke because the house had gone quiet. The roof had stopped drumming. The banana leaves outside had stopped slapping each other. And at the window, where the capiz shells were missing from the lower panes, there were lights.

Small ones. Green ones. Hundreds of them, blinking slow and soft, like someone breathing on a fire.

He had never seen so many fireflies. Nobody in Lantayan would see that many again for twelve years.

He climbed down from the sleeping mat. He did not wake his mother. He was three, and three-year-olds do not think, I should tell someone. They think, Light. They think, Pretty. They think, I want.

The window was low. The house stood on short stilts, and below the window the ground was soft with rain. He went out the way water goes out of a cracked jar: quietly, all at once.

The fireflies moved ahead of him. Across the wet yard. Past the last banana trees. Down the slope to the creek, which was loud and brown and swollen from the storm, and which had a log across it that had not been there that afternoon.

The fireflies were on the other side.

He crossed on the log. Later, when the old women of the barrio told the story, this was the part that made them cross themselves. A three-year-old does not cross a flooded creek on a wet log in the dark. Something carried him, they said. Something wanted him to come.

On the far side, the air smelled different. Sweeter. Like ripe mango and guava and rice cooking and his mother's hair, all at once. It was coming from the foot of a tree, where something golden lay in the wet leaves, round and glowing faintly, the size of his two fists together.

He was so hungry.

He picked it up. It was warm. He ate it the way small children eat, with both hands, juice running down his wrists.

And the forest noticed him.

* * *

High in the branches above the creek, something enormous had been dozing with a cigar the size of a man's forearm burning slowly between its fingers. It opened one eye.

It looked down at the child sitting in the leaves with gold on his chin.

It sighed, a long gust of smoke that rolled through the canopy like weather, and climbed down. It took a long time. It was very old and very big and it had never been in a hurry about anything in its life.

When it reached the ground, it crouched. Even crouching, it was taller than the house the child had come from.

"Ay," it rumbled. "Huli na."

Too late.

The child looked up at it without fear. Children that young haven't learned which things to be afraid of yet.

The giant reached out one huge finger and touched the child's face. Very gently. Just above the lip, in the small groove every person carries from the womb, the place where the face finished coming together before birth.

Under the giant's finger, the groove smoothed away, the way a thumb smooths wet clay.

That is what the forest does when it keeps you. It erases the mark of the womb. It makes you its own.

The fireflies settled on the child. On his hair, his shoulders, his sticky hands. He sat in the leaves glowing faintly green, like a lamp somebody had forgotten to put out.

The giant looked at him for a long time.

"Banaag," it said finally.

Glimmer. A faint light, just before dawn.

It was the first thing the forest ever gave him. It would not be the last thing the forest took.

* * *

His mother searched for three days.

The whole barrio searched with her. The men walked the near bank of the creek with bolos and lamps. The women prayed in the chapel. On the second day they found one small shirt caught on a root at the water's edge, and the old women stopped praying for him to be found and started praying for something else.

On the third day, they stopped searching.

His mother did not.

On Sunday she cooked rice, the little they had. She put it in a bowl and carried it up the trail to the balete at the bend, where the forest began. The old women had told her that was the door. That if the forest had kept him, that was where you left food for the ones it keeps.

She knelt in the roots. She set the bowl down carefully, the way you set something down for someone who will be hungry. She sang, very quietly, the song she sang him to sleep with every night of his life.

On the other side of the roots, where no one from the barrio could see, a small boy with no groove above his lip sat in the leaves and watched her.

He didn't know who she was. Not anymore. The forest had already started taking that too.

But when she sang, something hurt in his chest, and he didn't know why.

Every Sunday for twenty-one years, she brought the bowl.

Every Sunday for twenty-one years, he watched.

Neither of them ever crossed.