by Rembrandt Ramilo

In the year fifteen twenty one, after three months of circumnavigating and starving sea voyage, the arrival of the great Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan at ‘Homonhon’ shore had been and will always be a momentous event in early Philippine history. Unfortunately, in just a matter of weeks after his coming to shore , a furious encounter against Filipinos occurred that took his life. He will never see Spain again.

Four hundred years later, during World War II, Japan had known of the tough and undaunted resistance the Philippines will engage. Therefore it sent a massive invasion force led by a distinguished general, commander Masaharu Homma. Analysts have said that this has been one of the greatest bloody confrontations in the military annals.

At the heart of the Philippine archipelago seventy two years later, fifty kilometers south of Manila, right now at the foot of a mountain I am in a deep thought.

It’s a sunny morning with a calm southwest wind under the cirrus-clouded sky above. Deep in the woods, surrounded by many huge sunshading star-apple trees, few coconut and papaya trees, scattered wilted leaves on the grassy ground where red ants patrolling speedily in their destinations, I am crowded by the dense evergreen shrubs and herbs.

At the center of this place, a white square epitaph-like tablet with a Japanese inscription in it, is fastened by four big-headed iron screw in four corners.

There is an almost constant loud wissing sound pervading in crescendo, intermittently combined by a distinct cuckoo-cuckoo perhaps from a tree lizard every two or three minutes in between, and sometimes the whispering bird twitters coming from the high tall trees. Maybe I heard two or three times of a hen’s cackle from a distance.

Around this stonework, in front over there, are big palmate-leaved shrubs facing the memorial, then looking right, are big plumagelike leaves almost covered by swarming and twinning vines with small white dainty five-petaled flowers and a foliage, shaped like a silhouette of a goat’s face. To my left, are shrubs like soldiers in rows, with leaves that have yellow-green linear design parallel to the foliage veins. Behind me is a fence of heart shape-leaved shrubs that sometimes I feel they are looking at me.

Silently, I’ve been thinking…
Here in this place, General Masaharu Homma had died.

Editors Note on In a Distant Land Where He Lays:

In a Disant Land Where He Lays is not the first piece by Rembrandt Ramilo published in Eastlit. He has previously been published in Eastlit as follows:

• The Old Lake Port was published in the July 2013 issue of Eastlit.
• Colonial Arch was published in the September 2013 issue of Eastlit.