fiction

The Wing of Madness (i)
by Francisco Arcellana

To Resi who reads

IT IS first a shadow, the very faintest of shadows, you would think, the shadow of nothing at all. Then it is a breath, then a wind, then you see that it is the wind of the wing of madness. Then it is a bird. It is a huge bird with big powerful wings and yellow talons and a redblood beak. It is a bird that is always in your sky.

It is first a shadow, then a breath, then a wind, then a powerful wing, then a bird. Then it is shadow, breath, wind, wing, and bird all at one and the same time. Then it is a wing, then wind, then a breath, then a shadow.

But the moment you see the bird, the moment you see that it is a huge bird with big powerful wings and yellow talons and a redblood beak, you know that the shadow, the breath, the wind, and the wing are parts of the bird and have no reality apart from the bird.

It is a bird then that is always in your sky. You watch it. You follow its circling flight with your eyes. It is a bird that is always in your sky. Sometimes the bird is just a shadow, sometimes just a breath, sometimes just a wind, sometimes just a wing. Half of the time there is more of the bird than the sky and the other half more of the sky than the bird. But since the shadow appeared, it has never been all sky. It has never been all bird either.

But someday you know the sky will fall back and go and it will be all bird and then all wing and then all wind and then all breath and then all shadow and then nothing at all. Someday the bird will swoop down and strike; and shut out all the sky; and it will become a wing; then a wind; then a breath; then a shadow; then nothing at all.

Keep your eye on that bird. Keep your hands and your wrists and your arms and your shoulders free to ward off that bird, to fight it away.

Keep your eye on that bird.

Watch that birdie!

The shadow

OF COURSE I know about Tata Cheng: that he was mad. But there was nothing violent about his madness: he was sweet and he was mild and when he died it was not his madness killed him but his lungs?they failed him. He was the only one and nobody was sure that it was madness.

Tata Cheng was my mother’s youngest brother?and the youngest in their family. I didn’t see him very often, only when the family went home to Vigan in summer during the long vacation?which was not very often, twice in my time, a short first visit and a long second one, the short visit lasting only for about a week and the long visit extending over a month. I remember both visits very well. I remember that during the first I didn’t want to stay: I had left playmates in the city and I wanted to get back to them. But during the second visit which was about a decade later and I was older, older, older than the ten years that had intervened, I wanted to stay, I didn’t want to leave, never again to leave, I didn’t wish to go back to the city. Vigan was quiet, peaceful, soothing, its twilights enchanted me, the church, the empty streets, the old walls, the hill where the town reservoir was and the giant duhat trees grew, the sea. And Tata Cheng was always there, moving stealthily about the house, fussing quietly about the garden, padding silently about the empty streets of Vigan, never still but always silent, always secretly smiling.

The breath

ONCE IT was the fashion to say that one was mad about music. When first I said that I was mad about music I thought that I was being fashionable.

I think now it was music betrayed me, it was music first gave me an intimation of my madness. My father played the violin and the piano, my mother has a true voice, my brothers and sisters play either the violin or the piano.

I remember that I was always singing: I knew all the songs, I knew all the words?even now there is not an old song I hear that I do not know the name of.

One morning, Dorito, who lived across the street from us, confronted me: “What was happening to me last night?”

“What do you mean?what was happening to me last night?”

“What were you wailing about?”

“Wailing? I wasn’t wailing. I was singing.”

“Do you call that singing?” His small bead eyes gleamed in the folds of his dark doughy face. “It sounded more like keening to me.”

And when I discovered whistling, I was whistling when I walked, I whistled to and from school walking when I walked, to and from school in the streetcar when I took the streetcar.

One morning, Armando, who was in my brother’s class, was in the same streetcar with me. I was going home and he was going to town. We were way up front right next to the motorman. Suddenly he leaned over and said “Hey!” right into my face.

My moùed lips collapsed, my throat contracted once or twice, and my Adam’s apple bobbed up and down before I could speak.

“Eh?”

“You were going like a symphony.”

“Eh?”

“You were going even better than a symphony.”

I learned to play the piano. I did not try to learn the violin because of my left-handedness. But the best friends I ever had played the violin?Gamaliel, Nestor. And it was alarming the rate I fell in love with girls who played the piano?Stella, Emma. My father always said there was something different, special about the way I played the piano.

“Something about his touch: he has feeling, great feeling.”

But he never said: “For the man of feeling, the man of great feeling only two ends are possible?madness or suicide.” I wish he had said that too.

I learned the art of listening: the art of listening is really the art of stillness?absolute, perfect.

One morning, I was with Vic at a morning recital. I think it was during the second movement of the Schumann Piano Concerto, you know the one, the only one, you know that incredibly tender movement.

Vic suddenly nudged me and said: “Hey!”

“Eh?”

“Don’t you breathe at all?”

“Eh?”

“You must stop and remember to breathe once in a while. You weren’t breathing any more. I couldn’t hear you breathing any more.”

Prim, a student of physics, once spent one whole morning whistling the principal themes of the Beethoven symphonies to me.

The Wind

MADNESS BEGINS consciously as a loss of control. First to go were my eyes. I do not know when first they pounced on breasts and thighs but since they did they have sought nothing else. My runaway eyes! They were runaway horses and somehow I had let go the reins. They pulled this way and that and I, helpless, followed. Lo, the runaway eyes dragging the runaway I after them! They were always ranging everywhere seeking only breasts and thighs, dark parts and secret places. I lived only in my eyes and only my eyes were alive in me: how I could wrench and twist so that they could feed long and deep on dark parts and secret places, how in my world only breasts and thighs existed.

The wing of madness

THEN MY hands went. My berserk hands! As soon as I knew that my hands were gone, then I knew that I was mad. Never before had I lifted my hands in anger. Never before in my life had I struck a blow?neither in violence nor love. Never before had I used my hands to crush or to caress, to create or to destroy.

Now that they have stirred, when finally they have lifted, they are monsters, how they rage: they have turned against me, they have fallen upon me: they hold me and grip me: they shake me and break me: and there is no stopping their frenzy. Oh, the fury of hands that are denied!

The Bird

FINALLY, THE BODY; and loss of control, partial or total; and a state of anarchy, absolute or relative; madness.

Madness is a huge bird, black ugly, with big powerful wings, yellow talons, a redblood beak. It has an awful stench.

It is a pole on which I am impaled.

It is a knife, the knife of my division.

It is a rack?this derangement.

It is a cross, it is a crucifixion.

Its name is madness. I must recognize it as madness; I must accept it as madness. In that road lies my salvation.

As long as I know that I am mad, then I am safe.

As long as I can keep my eyes on that bird, I can fight it; fight the blows of its wings, the blows of its talons, the blows of its beak.

Parts of a bird

1.

I THINK that madness comes from fear: all kinds of fear. The creep, the craven, the coward becomes mad.

It comes from being divided: feeling one thing and doing another; knowing one thing and doing another; saying one thing and doing another; feeling and knowing and saying one thing and doing another.

It comes from deceit: both kinds?the deception of the self and deceit about the world.

It comes from pride: the pride of the mind, the mind that thinks it knows everything, the mind that thinks it understands everything; pride of the body, the body that thinks it can stand anything; the pride of the soul, the soul that thinks only itself is real, the soul that thinks only itself is true.

2.

Madness is the rule, sanity and exception. Normality is genius. To be normal, to be sane is the most difficult thing in the world to be.

3.

It was not madness that I feared but death. Johnny it is who fears madness. Death he does not fear. He dreams about death. In his dreams Death is a policeman, dying is the serving of a warrant of arrest.

4.

Teresa fears madness too. But to her, madness is not a wing. It is not a bird. It is a shawl, a yellow shawl.

“I can not look,” she says “at a shawl hanging from a clothesline or a shawl hanging from a nail on a wall.”

To Teresa, madness is a yellow shawl.

5.

When first I was confronted by madness, it was like a shadow: I was unmoved.

When second I was confronted by madness, it was like a breath: I was still, I was quiet with love, I hardly felt it.

When third I was confronted by madness, it was like a wind: I had a center but it was not within me, I was warm with love but the wind chilled me.

When fourth I was confronted by madness, it was like a wing: it was a big and powerful wing and it struck me again and again.

This is my fifth confrontation: it is a shadow, and a breath, and a wind, and a wing, and a bird. It is a huge bird, black ugly, hateful. With huge powerful wings, obscene yellow talons, lewd redblood beak, and an awful stench.

6.

It is a bird against the sky. I must keep my eyes on the bird. I must watch that birdie! I must never let the bird out of my sight. I must watch out for those wings, those talons, and that beak.

Those wings: I have known their blows. Those talons?they are sharp. I don’t want that beak feeding on my heart.

7.

It is a bird against the sky. It is a bird, it is a wing, it is a wind, it is a breath, it is a shadow. It is a bird, then a wing, then a wind, then a breath, then a shadow. It is all this all at once. It is a shadow, then a breath, then a wind, then a wing, then a bird.

It is a bird, parts of a bird.

8.

It is the sky too.
The sky is part of the bird too.
The sky is the best part of the bird.
The sky is the best part of any bird.
Watch that birdie! Watch that sky.

1953/1973: Fifteen Stories: Storymasters 5

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