Barrio Stories and Other Tales

Barrio

The Beginning of Daydreams



There is something pleasant in one's returning to childhood's memory, pleasant because the past gets resurrected, things forgotten come back to life.

He remembers the day he walked on the road that led from Concepcion to Santo Domingo - two adjacent barrios in the town Lubao. He was eleven years old. He walked because he had no fare money for the tricycle. He was peddling peanuts.

The road that was dusty and hot a few minutes ago became suddenly solemn and frightening because the sky changed. He remembers that sky - he hasn't seen any other sky like that since - it was gray and low as if it was about to fall on him - no one else was on that road, even the tricycles vanished. He was surrounded by wide rice fields that extended in the horizon until they became one with the gray clouds. Green, silent splendor of a carpet, now more radiant against the clouds.

Lightning slashed the sky and the thunder rolled. At this early age, he already knew lightning could kill. He'd heard many stories about children killed by lightning. He wondered how it felt to be struck by lightning. He heard that especially at night, it could be seen like a big ball rolling towards you. What scared him more was the ground shaking under his feet and the hissing sound that followed every lightning.

Another lightning electrified the sky, it was like a crooked line he drew when he first started writing with a pencil. It took him forever to learn to draw the lines that would eventually be read Arnulfo Sama. Arnulfo Sama, that's his name.

Then...something caught his attention. It was a dragonfly, a big dragonfly. His gaze followed the insect that moved lazily, oblivious to its surroundings. It flapped its silvery wings and stopped now and then at the tips of weeds that lined the road he was walking on. The dragonfly made him think of flying away to a beautiful life somewhere, up in the sky...that was the start of his daydreams.

He followed the dragonfly's direction, carrying his basket full of peanuts, he ran, then he stopped, he walked, then he stopped. The dragonfly took the lightning and thunders away from him. And he dreamt of the day he would return on this road in a car, no more walking, no more being alone. The dragonfly made him imagine himself sitting inside a car which insides he couldn't even picture.

Even today as Arnulfo drives on the road from Concepcion to Santo Domingo, he stops his car now and then, poking his head out of its window, looking for the dragonfly that made his fear disappear when he was a child.

He thinks his life, though difficult, was more beautiful then than today. He is now daydreaming about his life as a child.

Alex Maskara

Barrio Tales