Excitement builds during the week .
As Sunday afternoon grows close, the roosters crowing takes on more urgency. On Sunday afternoons, a stadium in a local neighborhood opens for business and men pay for permits to fight their birds.
The fighting cage in the middle of this stadium looks small from the bleachers and the birds inside it are hard to see.However, you can tell how the match is going by listening to the rise and fall of waves of sound. Sound rumbles at the beginning of the fight as birds are primed and hawkers take bets. It crescendos during the match, if it is a good one. At the end, there is almost a silence as the referee picks up a dead rooster who has lost and presents it to the owner of the winning rooster to take home and put in his cooking pot.
Fighting is both human and animal history.
Martial Arts cage fighting makes the old Friday night television boxing matches look tame. Gladiators in Roman extravaganzas bled in the sand and crowds watched the Emperor’s thumb to see if a man lived or died. David and Goliath was a spectacular Biblical fight.
This early round is over quickly and a new pair of animal contestants and their human trainers enter the ring.
I bet a thousand pesos and lose, but next week will be different.
This event, for me, isn’t entertaining.
Betting on life or death isn’t a wager I like to make, especially when animals are involved.
Each week, rooster fights happen.
Men of all ages bring their favorite fighting roosters to this stadium, pay a fee to enter, put their rooster and their reputation on the line.
These battles are to the death, and, to ensure that, roosters have a finger long barbed metal spike attached to one of their legs just before they are set on the ground in the stadium ring and their owner, and trainer, step back and leave the fight to fate.
This stadium is filled this Sunday afternoon and is a series of intense moments broken by stretches of boredom.
People stand on the seats, move as close to the cage as they can to see better, wave or nod at bet takers who are yelling at them, raising fingers, making eye contact, scratching their right ear. Vendors move through the crowd selling food, snacks, drinks and cigarettes.
I have been told there are a few birds who are favorites but it is really impossible to tell which rooster will be ready to fight when it is time.
The noise in the arena grows deafening as the two roosters start pecking at one another, jumping into the air with outstretched wings,striking out with their talons.
The fights last most of the afternoon and emotions are live wires, as feathers float, in the air, in the cage.
The best statistic to remember is that half of the roosters come out of the war alive.
Today, Gwen wants blue toenails. She is four years old but has a mind of her own, like all of us.
Today, Alma sits on the floor in a doorway and carefully puts a new more beautiful blue on previously red toenails.
Every little girl needs these moments.
Alma knows this better than anyone.
Gwen will remember this, forever.
March is one of the dryer months on Marinduque but, even in March, it rains.
This is a morning rain that lasts an hour, steady. Rain runs off the tin roof and puddles in the yard. After thirty minutes, soil turns to a mud so thick you can’t shake it off your shoes.
We stay indoors and wait.
I listen to the rain make drumbeats on the roof.
Nature makes good music.
The Mogpog market is a place we return each day, more than once,
By lunch most of the fresh products have been sold, fisherman have returned to sleep in their berths after a night on the waters. There are newly slaughtered hogs carried into the market throughout the day, loaded on tables and butchered in public..Flounders look at you with both eyes, flat as pancakes on a diner grill. Chickens, plucked and washed, lie in neat rows, headless. Vegetables look like a Monet painting with their colors bright and bold, splashes from Mother Nature’s paint pot.
Today, we shop for a graduation party and look for a Barbie doll for little girl Gwen.
The market is a kaleidoscope of images, a cacophony of sounds, a security blanket of the familiar.
We find Gwen her Barbie and she carries it home, in the box, happy as a new mom.
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