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Back The Human Zoo Save as PDF
Chapters (37)
  1. THE HUMAN ZOO
  2. Also by Sabina Murray
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Part I
  8. I
  9. II
  10. III
  11. IV
  12. V
  13. VI
  14. VII
  15. VIII
  16. IX
  17. X
  18. XI
  19. XII
  20. XIII
  21. XIV
  22. XV
  23. XVI
  24. XVII
  25. XVIII
  26. Part II
  27. I
  28. II
  29. III
  30. IV
  31. V
  32. VI
  33. VII
  34. VIII
  35. IX
  36. Acknowledgments
  37. Back Cover

Suddenly there were two loud bangs. They sounded like bawang firecrackers, but maybe gunshots. The lights were dim inside and the sounds were muted by the air conditioner. Outside a siren went off and then another. Flashing lights danced around the walls of the apartment. There was shouting on the street, but Bibo kept dancing, her palms now flat and open, arms wide to the sky, the gongs answering each other, each ring echoed by a softer response, the cacophony rising in a sharp crescendo of tempo and volume. Inchoy lazily raised his eyes to me and I knew he was wondering, as was I, if someone had just been murdered.

An hour later, when we made our way back down the stairs and into the car that would take us back to Quezon City, the police had already left, and if someone was indeed dead, it was as if they had never lived.

IV

IV

Several days later, I found myself at the library at the University of Santo Tomas. The air-conditioning felt brutal and unnatural and made the sound travel with a crispness that the usual humidity softened. Here, I felt pleasantly ignored. I could have been trawling through the stacks but instead was making use of the internet. Online, there was an account of the Bontoc Igorot written in 1903 by an American, Albert Ernest Jenks. Jenks had lived among the Bontoc for five months, in which time he had developed an admiration for them. He found them an intelligent people, hardworking, and physically attractive. I wondered if Jenks had known Timicheg and decided that they must have crossed paths. Even if it wasn’t written in history, this white man, Jenks, had probably paved the way for the other white man, Schneidewind—less sympathetic to Bontoc well-being, although just as in thrall to their culture—who had been the chief’s undoing.

The Bontoc had lived unaware of Western society until the 1850s, when the Spaniards finally penetrated the mountain provinces. They were taxed heavily by the Spaniards, paying in palay, or unthreshed rice. Despite this subjugation, the Bontoc managed to hold on to their original beliefs, a system of animism in which everything­—­rice, rivers, axes—possessed a spirit. They believed their departed ancestors lived a ghost life in the neighboring mountains, that a supreme Lumawig governed nature and protected crops, that thunder was the result of a bellowing wild boar. The Spaniards did not convert the Bontoc to Catholicism, although a few did take native wives.