The Gorilla and some other very strange tales

Introduction by the editor
Karen Berthelsen Cárdenas

May 2023
 

There runs a thread in the tapestry of our family that I am sure many of my cousins will recognize. I would have said the female cousins, until I remember now that some of the boys were even worse scaredy-cats. 

For mom and her siblings, Tandang Sela was a precious institution in their household. Old and retired from her former duties, she spent her days remembering her past, her mind traveling back to her native village, filled with recollections of deceased relatives, woodland nymphs, and other creatures of the forest.

Especially during stormy nights, when they were kept captive indoors, while rain and wind raged outside, Tandang Sela would hold court in her candle-lit room, recounting stories in hushed voices. Huddled together, they shivered with delight as Sela served up a sumptuous feast of frightening tales which she said were all from her own experiences.

She knew them well – the creatures of the night – the tigbalang sitting in the balete tree growing near her parents’ nipa hut, the nuno – little people who lived in earth mounds by the roots of the coconut trees, the aswang hiding in the thick bamboo groves by the river. She called them by their first names, as they did her.

Through her eyes the children pictured them in diaphanous garb, in winged flight, in mischievous leaps – their imaginations stretched beyond reality, and they believed all. 
 

When we, the next generation, were children spending holidays and school vacations in Tiaong, we would always seek out Ka Tomasa, whom we fondly called Ka Tommy, and who was always ready to delight us with stories, our favorite being the one when she was twelve years old and had her first menstrual period. The tigbalang chased her round and round the granary and she called out for her parents who instead sat by the doorway barring her from running out. She would laugh in her hearty cackle and tell us she did marry the tigbalang. We felt shortchanged because we wanted the supernatural kind, not the metaphor. 

But we did get our fill of those too, and we would beg our mothers to let us spend the night in the nipa hut by the river or the granary in the middle of rice fields, listening for the diwata or the duwende, for of course we preferred the more benevolent fairy folks, rather than the evil.

Many decades later, the creatures of those magical nights have not been banished to fantasyland. They remained with Mom, as they remain with me. Sometimes they are the fanciful friendly creatures, but more often they are not.  

Sometimes they come in the guise of humans and haunt the everyday that we do not immediately recognize them. Often times, when it seems that people or life’s vagaries have again shown no reason, we catch that fleeting skirt, that leap, that flight.  

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