RAYMUND FERNANDEZ
I can hear it distinctly, to be sure, a soft voice on the edge of the range of hearing.
I know I am hearing it, a faint humming with a soothing rhythmic time, like a nocturne from Chopin. Oh please, you must forgive me for bringing up Chopin here. But who else? This soft singing is with notes so clear I wait for the next ones.
And, of course, it comes inside the narrative logic of a song, a woman’s voice, clearly. And I am alone in the half dark of my late grandfather’s old house sleeping, or trying to.
I am on a bamboo bed.
The bed is in a cavernous sala.
To come to this sala, you climb up through a beautiful balcony with porous callado wood panels.
Two huge rooms lead from the sala.
The sala is well lighted if I turn on the lights at the ceiling.
But the glare makes sleep impossible. And so I turn off these lights.
I allow the lights in the room to waft in. The soft shadows are more comfortable this way.
Even so, sleep does not come quite too easy. The bamboo bed is too hard for me now.
I used to sleep quite well over bamboo. But it has been too long since the last time. I’ve forgotten how. The bamboo presses into my ribs.
I have to move them just so my bones balance themselves more comfortably into the slats.
I have the electric fan in number two. It blows the mosquitoes away.
I hear a stray one near my left ear. By reflex, my left hand waves it away.
I know I am addicted to the sound of the electric fan. It is a distinct sound that lulls me to sleep like the pendulum swing of a cradle, my tonal cradle, or the swinging of a car in motion.
But tonight, I am not driven to sleep quickly.
I am not struggling to sleep. I know it will come. I know my difficulty sleeping stems from a feeling of the strangeness of this place. Only once before in my life did I find myself sleeping here alone.
I was in my late twenties.
Don’t ask me how I ended up homeless for a brief period in my life. The story takes too long in the telling.
For two weeks, I lived here in the ancestral house, alleged by all its neighbors to be haunted by ghosts, many ghosts; but principally, one, Jangkin, who is reputed to be a large shadow.
Jangkin is quite playful at times.
I do not know whether to believe in ghosts or not. But if I do, I find the ghosts who reside here quite benign, even friendly. And If I have ever been afraid of them, it was never for their potential to do harm.
I think the locals have misunderstood these ghosts completely. Which was how I ended up sleeping here alone for two weeks the first time around many years ago. My lone household help, Abdon, slept here only one night.
He abandoned me the next morning without giving me even the small benefit of an explanation. I never saw him again. Or it could be that the locals need a narrative to prevent them from comfortably entering this house without the benefit of company.
Only the insane come here to sleep. That seems a dictum of the local culture. And I had been warned. There was an insane woman who sometimes sleeps in the balcony.
The house’ caretakers suggested to close access to the balcony with a bamboo fence. But it has yet to be made. Indeed, earlier that night, I had smelled something outside in the balcony but whatever it was, it quickly went away.
I checked this by looking into the balcony to see if she was there. She wasn’t.
And so it wasn’t her humming. I could not help thinking it was the house itself singing to me, who was its guest for the night. Do all old houses sing this way?
I would have found this singing scary, or at least annoying.
But it wasn’t. Indeed, the song was so beautiful I found myself trying to remember the tune itself. I hope one day to play this music on my saxophone, though I do not play too well. The song is still with me.
I remember it this way: The house is next to the national highway.
The song begins with the dopler scream of midnight traffic, rubber tires on asphalt, screaming with the exhaust pipes of diesel engines only partially muffled, or motorcycles enjoying their loudness, a shouted conversation segues into silence.
The silence is tenuous, unpredictable, random. And then from the silence, a soft humming emerges, becomes louder, beautiful.
And then out of nowhere a truck from the distance approaching becoming in quick time a metallic scream. In a snap, back to silence. And then, the song begins again.