BUTUNG IS LAYP
by tea solon
2024 © tea solon | edited in ArtFilters 2024
Mabolo, Cebu City, Philippines
Chapter 1 – Call for Coconut Water
Even in her third trimester, Balot climbs up the eighty-feet towering coconut tree by the front yard, fully equipped to whack a fruit using her ancestors’ bolo tucked in on her right-side waist held by a manunoba belt that wrapped her pregnant waistline. Her swollen hands carry the smell of freshly crushed garlic as the willful fetus in her tight womb craves fresh coconut water and meat in the middle of her preparing adobo for lunch. Pastilan gyud! she mumbles to herself. What won’t a mother do for her child.
There is not much to this happening for the expectant Balot, who is in her mid-twenties, grew up in the verdant Danao farmlands some two hours ride from the heart of Cebu City where this sole coconut tree, presently heavy with fruits, stood as one of the estate boundary markers of old, about ten steps from the ancestral house of her husband’s dominantly male-populated patriarchal family.
Sporting her black hair in a ponytail exposing the cream color of her porcelain skin, wrapped in a sleeveless shirt and a pair of old volleyball panty shorts, Balot makes each gradual hakhak or notches, those hollow concaves cut into the tree trunk to make a stepway up close to the fruit for no one has ever climbed up on this aged coconut tree ever since, not even the men in her husband’s family. City folks wait for the coconut fruit to drop, they say.
All in a day’s work, Balot, she tells herself.
Nothing is special about this activity—except that the spectacular sight of a pregnant woman— now breezing on her almost 30 feet above ground hakhak, legs hugging the aged tree trunk blew an air of panic to the city dweller relatives on the ground who kept screaming at her to come down.
“Hoist! Come down from the tree, Balot!”
“Hesusmaryosep! Please come down!”
These people are nuts! Why would I come down, she silently protested. I haven’t reached the fruit yet.
“You might fall and get hurt!”
I have been climbing trees since I was three years old. What’s the big deal? And why would I do something that will potentially hurt me and my child? she thought as she kept reaching for the fruit. Her muscle memory in climbing is second nature, distinct and reliable.
“You are so stubborn!”
– – – – –
Please be patient, Balot speaks to the child in her womb. We are almost there.
We will choose the best fruit with the sweetest juice and softest meat, she continues to assure the child. The fetus excitedly moves inside her as a response that makes Balot smile.
Out of the 4.4 billion world population at this time, this particular fetus who kicks and bosses around in the gooey placenta already knows what she wants and has the resourcefulness to get it even while inside Balot’s womb. She has everything she needs: the ableness of her nimble mother, and the dependability of their ancestors’ weapon— the bolo.
Tigbas. That is the name of the sharp, experienced bolo the expecting mother brings. Balot christened it herself when she was thirteen. “I will call you Tigbas,” she declared when she received the ancient weapon from her maternal grandma Ada.
“Balot, you will need this,” her grandma Ada advises. “My grandmother Liba bartered a basket of ripe mango for this bolo with the legendary Manonondang, the grumpy old man who was a renowned blacksmith of the Fifth Mountain.”
“Why did great-great-grandma Liba go through all the hassle to the Fifth Mountain for this?” she asked, stitching her eyebrows in disbelief.
“Because, apo, she wanted only the best weapon for her adventures,” grandma Ada smilingly answered.
The thought of an unnamed heirloom saddened her because an object without a name suggests its irrelevance or unimportance. Tigbas is relevant and important. It is handed down from her forebears and has been used to serve and protect the family for generations. Long before it was named (for the ancestors have not had the foresight of its power), it had drunk blood, culled heads, and chopped off body parts of slain enemies during the war half a century ago. Now, Tigbas— which has had its share of butchering fat pigs during fiestas and slitting feisty chicken for many a birthday hikay— is a fascinating sight to see here in the late ’70s modern city, especially in the hands of a pregnant woman wanting coconut fruit.
– – – – –
“Like a coconut tree heavy with fruit growing out of a coconut tree heavy with fruits,” one of the neighbors, an artist, quietly observed the spectacle.
Holding a coconut fruit in her left hand while the right is striking a blow to crack open the fruit there high up above the tip of the now slightly bent tree, Balot is ready to sip the juice of the coconut fruit. The sight of her stirs an air of panic. Her relatives act aimlessly, as if chased by honeybees.
They are not chased by honeybees, of course, at least not in the city where beehives are rare. There is, however, Balot, the gravid mother, whose cream-colored skin contrasted the darkness of the trunk, drinking coconut water, hanging above them.
An audible news from the Vatican blasted the black and white TV speaker at the ancestral house sala announcing Pope John Paul II as the third pope of the year. The cityfolks panicking found these combined phenomena a rarity too much to handle. Three popes in a year and a full-bellied woman drinking coconut water at the coconut tree top.
City dwellers who love the stunts of Charlie’s Angels are worried about the pregnant woman’s safety, while this young mother is worried about losing her baby if she does not indulge the craving.
I will not lose my child only to comfort your weak hearts, Balot thought to herself.
It is said in the old ways that the fetus tears up and dies inside the womb if the mother cannot satisfy the cravings. Usually, the cravings go from sour mango dipped in hipon to boiled banana slew in ginamus.
Domina, a distant cousin of Balot’s husband, resisted her cravings at eleven in the evening some five years ago. She was six months pregnant with her first child at then and craving fresh takubo mixed in spicy vinegar. Her husband Blado was ready to ride out of the city to the seaside area to check on seashell vendors for takubo, but Domina insisted on not giving in.
Domina passed heavy blood and lost her baby that same night. Though she and Blado still live in the same house and, to everyone’s knowledge, stay in marriage, they never spoke to each other again.
But this particular incident now involves a coconut craving that arrested the family and neighbors in a caveat of hilarious reactions from mild stupor and disorientation to immovability. Some caught by debilitating shock while others hold their breath for too long that later they heave out screams of fear— you can see their pulsating blue-violet veins threatening a burst. To think these people have seen on TV the first man walked on the moon a decade or so, have had their marvels at the first baby born from in vitro fertilization, and have shared sadness about the last produced Volkswagen beetle car, to cite a few, but at the onset of Commodores’ top hit Three Times A Lady on the radio, they are unable to digest the information that a gestating woman can be once, twice, three times a lady.
The commotion on land contrasts the calm and quiet above the coconut tree. Balot is drinking coconut water from the mouth of the fruit now, and what a flowing satisfaction it is to achieve her goal and quench her child’s cravings.
She gently held her belly with her hand and quietly said, You hold on tight, my little one. Mama loves you.
✒️tea solon
September 15, 2022 | Mandaue City
Philippines
Chapter 2 –
BUTUNG IS LAYP | Coconut is Life 