Scarlet dawns as I remember

Flawless iridescent skies on freezing cold days and nights get grayed over and hazed for weeks like now in the constant shift of winter forecast—sometimes mere drizzle or icy rain, flurries or blizzard, or if indicated by a snowflake icon, a feather-quiet snowfall. Not only would the sun be absent, I can also count dawns on my fingers. Like most I’ve woken up to, such would also stun with glorious glare. But filtered through memory, these can’t possibly match what I remember.

Where I grew up in the Ilocos, scarlet shafts would spear the mountain peaks at sunrise. Later tinged blue-gray from mist the forests exhaled, dawn would seem to bruise the mountainsides, and then, fade in pink as if to heal. I would catch that last tint—such tenderness—but always on the rims of sleep.

Yet, once awake, I would trudge through the day, dodging the sun. The light blinded me so I used to slink in the shadows; under trees at high noon, when the crown of an acacia tree from across our balcony covered its root space like a parasol, I’d creep to it and hug the ancient roots, basking in its shadow.

By the stream where my grandmother scoured the soot off the iron rice pot and skillet, I’d haunt the silken strips of shadows under bamboo groves, and waited on the engorged shadow of a kingfisher that never failed to fly by. There under a white sun, I hardly thought of it.

I believed then that I discovered this truth about the sun—its color is red not gold as most perceive it to be, its heart like a man’s, although it flickers, not throbs. It takes on an illusion of absence at its zenith but in living things, it infuses its flare. Consider how, when juiced berries, cherries, grapes (in duhat, more intensely) and pomegranate (the once-only seen granada in my childhood), spurt red.

I had thought growing up that I alone possessed this secret. I sauntered along church walls on my way to school, crushing chipped off terra cotta bricks. By midyear, my slippers would wear a mitt of rust, a tint that looked to me more red than brown. Once using shredded gumamela petals to color my lips and nails, a playmate though, knowing it, too, whispered to me, afraid of winged ears, that poisonous red berries strung into bracelets, avert evil eyes.

When a grand uncle died, I thought my red organdy dress would lift the shroud my family wore; flitting through drawn faces, I was tossed frowns instead. My grand uncle rang the church bells and transcribed Latin prayers. He and the monsignor, I learned from random tales, shared after evening prayers tubs of basi, that brownish-red Iluko wine of fermented sugar cane; the monsignor himself not only officiated but also arranged for the burial.

Up close, the monsignor struck me, as more than a man, and glancing at the red piping of his black cassock, I had thought he could not but be more than a priest. Sensing my surprise, he told me that red, like my dress, is but a color special to him.  He also pointed out we both wore socks that matched the red in our clothes and he even lifted the hem of his cassock for me to look.
That shade of red, scarlet, the color of blood, symbolizes martyrdom, I later learned in religion class at the university.

The Church elevated the symbolism to royalty as in the robes and skullcaps of bishops—a monsignor being a candidate for bishopric. Such princeliness has nothing to do with titles attached to them, though, but how they ought to empty out their own self, akin to dying, our professor explained.

The lesson would unleash counter images of selfishness in me. One such image leaped off my childhood catechism pamphlet—hearts that commit sin from love of self turned black, the color of blood when it has long dried up; another would be the personification of devils in stories about the eternal clash between good and evil—where not darkness but raging fire in red inflamed Satan’s laughter. Both would soon be en-fleshed among people I knew.

The color red then began to dance before me as a two-faced Diablo, an apparition that sneaked in at night—one face masquerading as love, the other as death, which haunted me for years as I got enmeshed and entangled in truths and lies until in an assignment on the islands—which started as bumpy rides often before dawn—I cruised awake through rice fields under threat of dawn.

Soon, scarlet spears rent the mountainsides that torn, revealed bruised backsides. In the moment it took me to blink, it seemed lilac swatches had swirled down as if a violent hand withdrew and with a sleight unfurled pink tulle over the fields. Stunned not at the sight but at the recognition of what I had always thought was a recurring childhood dream, I felt it smother with its most tender tinge, the Diablo slung in my heart.