The First Kind

I had never before been aware that there were two kinds of cockroaches in Manila.

Both emerge from a room’s blackest corners, or invisible cavities, when at night you’re lying in bed and globules of sweat begin to find form at the back of your neck, or at your back. They come when there is nothing left to sense but darkness and nothing left to feel but the sweltering effects of our city climate and its dust and doggedness and quiet restlessness. When your cheeks don’t feel the air from the night outside, the air that you hope might penetrate your space through the window screen but which doesn’t anyway, not even scantily – well, that’s when the first and second kinds of cockroaches make their appearance.

Proceeding as stealthily as possible, and concealing, as it were, the location of the rotten little hiding place from where they had come out, these creatures are always irritatingly, senselessly wary of being seen by a human eye; senseless, for what else might their agenda be but be seen by a human eye?

Now I don’t know about other countries and cities. But a cockroach in Manila is the only thing that can positively make me reach the higher octave I’ve otherwise never been capable of since undergoing tonsillectomy. (And how do I know I am Filipino? Always I am equipped with Baygon.) They never fail to surprise inasmuch as, say, stepping on a five-letter animal’s excrement is a surprise.

The first kind –the kind I’ve encountered many times at home– will, after its initial display of bravery, be terrorized by the sight of my size-11 Nike Zoom Generations. Soon as I’ve forgotten my having shrieked like a girl, the second war would be waged, and cockroaches of the first kind shall crawl or fly away, retreat, dash almost funnily in a kind of mad panic to the nearest shadow. Damn it if they even find the time to mourn over a freshly squashed cousin whose innards would serve as Exhibit A on the outsoles of my shoes.

My dreadful discovery of the second kind of cockroaches in Manila took place several days ago during my first night at the new apartment, where I had forgotten to initially bring an electric fan. I found that these crawlers were infinitely creepier and –consumed perhaps by deeply familial ties– downright suicidal. They kept coming and coming, in between chapters of Colm Toibin, the first one taking off from the edge of a splintery closet door and fluttering straight to the wild hairs of my left leg. After getting it off with a violent jerk, I began chasing the cockroach, whereupon its short life came to an end with the vicious smack of a Pony sandal. And yet how many of them had followed!

My mass murdering these devil-may-care insects made me unspeakably queasy, not only because of their inherent anatomical ugliness but also because their kind seemed to find gratification –just immense, even obscene gratification– in infuriating a human being and then dying. Theirs is the kamikaze way.

Neither the subsequent pleasant dream about a dancing Beyonce Knowles nor the arrangement of having my own bathroom could excise the horror of that first night. I didn’t even have coffee the following morning; no, no bitter beverages please. It may be the strange case that I’ve begun to sense, vaguely, a kind of nostalgia about the cockroaches from the L-shaped bedroom in which I had lived for the past twenty-two years – those which prowled the dry floorboards my bare feet now miss, especially the spot with permanent specks of dust underneath the Yamaha piano that father had bought more than a decade ago and which the bared parts of my heart and memory just as badly miss. Now –a nocturnal hour wherein a soap opera on cable TV can be heard from the adjacent room, though only distantly, as though it was being played in another world– now I remember that cockroaches of the first kind would disappear whenever someone would knock on the door but no one knocks anymore.