Читать книгу The Eye Of The Fish - Luis H. Francia - Страница 14

FEET ON FLOOR BOARDS, FEET SHOD, feet attempting to feel earth, its veins of memory. I tap. Haunting mountains that bisect northern Luzon, the Gran Cordilleras are refulgent, regally indifferent, appraising us coolly: passengers in a bus maneuvering the twists and turns of this dusty, pebble-filled road, a sinuous brown finger tracing this range’s elevated contours. Rice terraces, brimming with water, gleam like giant mirrors, Ifugao villages (sometimes perched improbably up there) bathed in the waning light of a western sky that propels us on. In the monsoon season, when the world turns into water, this road will be impassable. The peaks and precipices deceive, make us believe we are moving past them, but it is the road that pulls us, and the trees, crowding the steep mountainsides to get a glimpse of us, lasso these travelers with their fragrance and emerald beauty.

I hope these mountains, scarred in places, would regard me as one who trod lightly, an inconsequential but friendly breeze. Nationality, ethnicity, history hardly mattered to the landscape, yet it had helped shape a culture, the basis of a collective identity, the highlanders’ identity, that had been around for millennia, that had resisted for centuries the assertions of colonizers, reminding me, a lowlander, a coastal dweller and Manileño, of how my own sense of self often lay inert, inarticulate, in danger of being forgotten.