After Eden

RAYMUND FERNANDEZ

She came to me like the concept of God. She was already there came the time for me to wake up to the world, or discover the concept of I. She was already there from as long as I can remember, a majestic creature of village myth, though not always friendly.

She was known to slap people who drew her ire. I do not remember her hitting me.

We were always friendly, keeping a respectful distance between each other when we talked. I was only a little boy. She was already an ageless sea turtle, an inevitable item of our village’s spoken renown.

She might have been my first conception of friend and pet. Brewib, the brown Bisaya dog, came later. I remember coming down from the kitchen of the large ancestral house where I grew up.

Her tub was there, standard bathtub size, and set on the way to the outhouse just so my visits to her came daily.

I remember her concrete tub polished through years of constant friction with the nylon brush they used to clean it with.

It was always clean. It might have been the salt from the brackish water they filled it with, which kept it that way preventing the rampant growth of moss and algae.

The tub was not big. Just big enough for her to turn around when she was smaller. And I should have expected how things would change with the years.

In time, I grew too big to be contained by the dusty old things that contained me. Her time came even sooner. The time came for us to move to the city to be properly educated according to the practice of the time.

We were nine in the family. It was cheaper and easier for us to move there.

Pawikan had grown too big to make a turn in her tub.

She was always facing one way. And though they took it on faith thereabouts that Pawikan were wise enough to cry whenever threatened, it was decided even so she would be slaughtered for meat come the time of the fiesta.

It was not my family’s decision. It was a village decision involving relatives and neighbors.

In the genteel exchange that led to the fateful final day, I learned how she had been caught in the trawler nets years before I was even born. I had an uncle in the fishing business back then. My father was the fishing boat’s main mechanic, though they called him engineer for how good he was with machines.

They would have eaten Pawikan there and then if my mother had not intervened with the proposal to make her grow bigger since she was only so little.

I imagine how pretty she must have been when she was smaller, large black eyes, the hawk bill, skin looking like scales but smooth to the touch like human skin. She might have looked exactly like a baby dinosaur.

And I remember she still looked like a baby when she died. Or when they killed her. I did not see it happen. My mother took me away somewhere. Just so we had between us only a pile of meat to welcome our return. The neighborhood celebrated its fiesta a bit early. What else but a fishing village would know how to cook turtle meat?

I remember my mother looking very sad and tearing up as she cut the meat into cubes.

She might have been contemplating her own life, the incipient tragedy of it or the fact of dusty old containers, tubs and houses.

They, in their time and for as long as we will remember from then on, will always be something like Paradise, Eden; some place always to be aspired for. And we will always ask ourselves, why did we ever leave? It is the fact of containers, tubs and old houses.

They do not last forever. They do not grow with us as would have Pawikan’s own house.

And then, just last week, I went to a small island off the Dumaguete coast to swim among sea turtles in their natural habitat.

It was a family outing. My own children were there. I saw sea turtles feeding off the sea grass.

The littlest one struck me most of all. She swam quite close with what I thought was her mother.

And while I gaped in wonderment at first, I knew immediately how I would have to resolve the sight of it — turtles, free, and in their natural world. I surprised even myself as I felt the wonderment turn into sadness and a deep rage that I did not even know I had.

It will take a while for me to shed and outgrow these feelings as if they were a too-small tub, a dusty old container or an old house.