A Girl in Dipolog
From “Adventures in a Forgotten Count
ryby Kerima Polotan © 1977
Printed by Focus Philippines Publishing Co. Inc. / UP Press
Published online with permission.

DIPOLOG [last year] was dry and quiet. A town doesn’t come alive for you until there is someone in it you know. I had come in cold from the airport, having missed a relative who promised to be there. The next best thing was to get a room at E------ Hotel, the town’s finest said the driver.

In the last two years, I have done so much traveling that I can always tell when I am shown a room, what kind of plumbing the bathroom will have and what size cockroach will crawl out from the corners later that evening.

I sought out the market, markets having for me that same compulsion that churches do for others. Poking around, I asked about prices, testing my Visayan, and ended up with a bunch of bananas I knew I would leave behind. I have left how many fruits in countless hotel rooms all over the south, but I carried the bananas just the same to E----- Hotel, fleeing a screaming match between women in the poultry section.

The church stood at one end and the wharf at the other, and one could walk from the first to the second in ten minutes down Dipolog’s main street. Hardware and bakery shops proliferated, as though nails and bread spelled the people’s most urgent needs. Was it a “friendly” town? I am done with tagging places, knowing how much violence can lie beneath, but Dipolog looked peaceful enough where I stood in the curb, squinting at the sun counting the number of banks.

Then I bought a toothbrush (another compulsion) and stopped somewhere for coffee. I decided to look for a shoe repair shop. The step-ins that had held up well through Tacloban, Cagayan de Oro, Iligan, and Butuan now needed to be sewn. Probably it was my bad Visayan, but I couldn’t find a repair shop. Three tricycle drivers let me off at three different corners with mumbled assurances that there was such a shop somewhere but I would have to walk a little more.

I SAW FIRST not the girl but a worn-out bench and a rough table on which old shoes and slippers were arranged. No sign anywhere announced this was a repair shop, because it was no shop really, only a portion of the sidewalk, timidly preempted by this girl who couldn’t have been more than ten, the age of a daughter I left back home who would at this hour be seated at her piano.

She wore a leather apron and was twisting what looked like twine into a ball. Beneath her apron, her dress was a size too small, and when she turned around from stepping forward to meet me, I saw the scrawny back and the spindly legs.

“Where is your father?” I asked. The alley behind her led to a home, a dark hole from which the sounds of living drifted. A kettle dropped. Someone was husking the floor. “Your father?”

She didn’t answer me. I shucked the step-in. Very businesslike, she offered me a stool, then spread an old newspaper for my bare feet. She picked up my step-in. “Your father?” I repeated.

For the first time, she spoke. “This is mine,” she said, gesturing to her bench and table. If I had meant to exclaim over her youth, she stopped me by pulling out a box from which she lifted her tools – needle, thread, and hammer.
She bent over her work, lost in it, her dark head nearly touching her knees, her short bob obscuring her face. Expertly, her hands pierced, then threaded; knotted, snipped, and hammered. She handled her tools carefully, as though she had a hard time coming by them. She worked on the slipper with complete concentration, not once lifting her face. She knotted a final stitch, then snipped, and was beginning to return her tools when I said, “Do the other. Please.”

Her solemnity compelled respect, and for twenty minutes I sat there watching the little craftsman. She was ten. A grave girl earning money for food to put in the kettle that someone dropped in the morning – when would the virus of revolution reach her, when would she write graffiti?

Seventy centavos was all she charged me. I wanted to give her a tip but her seriousness left me shy. There was no price for that pride. She emptied a faded purse into her apron and fished out my change; there couldn’t have been more than two pesos on her lap.

She zipped her purse shut, folded the newspaper, and put the stool away. “Are you here every day?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “when school is closed.” Behind her work bench once more, she leaned back, her hands folded, awaiting another stray like me. She had not smiled at all.

Picking up my toothbrush, I said good-bye. The town felt less strange now - it had rubbed against my skin. Dipolog, its houses spread sparsely beneath the sun, the smell of the sea strong in the wind, had begun to take shape for me.