Enrique Villasis

Sea Krait

Translated from Filipino by Bernard Capinpin

Newly molted, it descended to the waters. In its new life, it established himself in the sea. It left its apprehensions by the shore with its old skin. It had no view in the deep aside from the slumbering darkness: stones and dead coral were skulls of an unfathomable beast which later heaved and yawned as the undertow swept. It hoped that an eel might dart out from the cervices. What else was venom for? Solitude was far more fatal.

All it wanted most was to find companionship. Here was a pile of old skin, a recognizable repugnance. The gash it got by slipping on an old rock didn’t even heal. As before, it started again to believe in uncertainty.

The humid sea was blooming on his skin, here, at the surface of a wide stone, at the mouth of a cave. It chose to stay. Not far off, the sound of the chord and the eastern wind flocking. A hat flapping, there was a chill in the wind when it flew, and among the waves, it will be one with its own reflection. It’s easy to say that each gust was proof to the existence of spite, that there were angels that crossed the mind, picking up unfulfilled wishes, collecting and releasing them as whirlwinds or typhoons. Meanwhile, the sea krait will endure the overgrowth of hisses: a cry like in a duet. Only then could it feel its own breath again.

An old legend: a sage was caged and hung on the oldest mangrove tree from a distant island. His crime was that he taught the old prayers to the parrots. It was there he learned that one could write on a living krait’s skin. Every night after writing, he was afflicted by a fever: a part of his soul was inscribed in the very letters scraped and peeled from the sea snake’s scales, and he would watch it swim farther away. At the center of his eye, the words glistened in the heat and brine. This was the only way he knew how to quench a desire shawled by sorrow. He charted the map underneath his prison, and like a cartographer, he plotted the landmarks according to their own purpose and history, and every so often, he determined it by the movement of his shadow and reflection. So his city below a mirror took no permanent order. In truth, his revulsion erased its origin, loneliness flowed beneath the bones. One time, he jotted down the first unanswered riddle: blind when caught, sees when held. Fate, how simple it’s supposed to be.

After a few months, a reply came, which like him was written on the sea krait’s skin: Like the venom from first discovering fire, I was left unable to breathe. I hate you because I couldn’t speak.

The sage’s townsfolk came back to him. After the storm, the parrots he taught returned, and spoke in the tone of their god, in accursed screeches. Some grew blisters on their index fingers. Some tore open by the frequency of their pitch. There was one who heard nothing in his mind except the repetitive sound of stone splashing on water. In the end, they accepted their mistake. But the sage was not there. Only an abandoned cage reeking of molted hide. It stuck to the air. Who else could they beg for forgiveness? Who could they ask for wisdom?

A time came when two sea kraits were found caught in a fishing net. One entwined in another. On their skins, a message was etched:

You were like a country that had abandoned me—with nothing prepared for me except silence. In my travels, I found myself asking: in the end, which baggage will become part of myself? I’ve discarded everything since, and when I turned around, I found a wandering owl which, like me, kept questioning.

And even with such few words, the second message seemed to hold an answer.

Each one of us carries a burden. Amidst a thousand bubbles, you will find youself: immaculate and bare.