My Monkey Memories

MY EARLIEST childhood memories that had to do with animals were not about dogs or cats or carabaos. Instead, it was about monkeys.

I happened to realize this one Sunday morning not so long ago when I walked along Cutaran Street (the one on the left if you face the Dupax del Sur Municipal Hall) to, among other nostalgic reasons, find out how far the St. Vincent Ferrer Church was to the exact spot in Dupaj where the late Magdalena Pudiquet Castro said she gave birth, around 11PM of August 9, 1951, to her first baby.

The memory of my very first encounter with a monkey came back when I reached the end of the road and caught sight of the lot on the right corner. That was where it occurred.

I don't know whose house occupies that road corner now but when I was in grade school, I recall it used to be that of the Sagario family that owned the dozen or so carabaos that often passed by the road in front of our house in Domang.

Yes, the big Sagario house used to have a monkey on its yard, almost across the road from the solar in the Uruddu part of Dupaj, where I was born and spent much of my toddler days. The monkey was a large one kept as pet with a chain loosely attached to its waist and a horizontal bamboo pole where it walked from one end to the other waiting for food thrown to it.

Because of that monkey, I learned, from the Isinay children feeding it, that the way to call the attention of monkeys is to say “Krrrsss! Krrrsss!" Of course, I was still an Ilokano-speaking kid then, in the care of the Ilokano parents and brothers of my mother. It would be many, many years later that I got to learn that the monkey's name in Isinay is araw, not Krrrsss! Krrrsss!

My second encounter with a monkey was when we moved to I-iyo which was still a tree-rich sitio in the 1950s and only became a barangay and got renamed Palobotan in the 1970s. In front of the house was a kamarin that my grandparents used as shed for newly harvested tobacco. It was on one end of that kamarin that the pet monkey's bamboo pole home and playground was attached but was set low enough so I could feed it with camote, bananas, sugarcane, or peanuts.

Even as the tailed guy was often my only playmate at the time, it made me cry one time because it grabbed my newly bought kallugong (buri hat) and shredded it to pieces. Most likely because it wanted to look for head lice, but I recall I never had another pet monkey after that.

A FAMILY of monkeys used to serve as my entertainment when I was already joining my grandparents to tend their bangkag and their uma (slash-and-burn forest clearing in English, kaingin in Filipino)in Langka, farther upstream of town. The monkeys were a beautiful sight as they perched or walked on charred tree branches and bikal poles. They came out when the sun was already burning hot and my Inang Baket was either preparing utong, rangaw ken uggot ti karabasa, u-ong, and other such vegetables for dinengdeng. Or when nobody was in the uma, they would fall in line while looking for ripe bananas or papayas from the stands that my Apong Lakay grew at the foot of the hill.

Another unique memory was my having festering scabies (gaddil in Ilokano, gate in Isinay) on my calves and knees. No long pants for farm kids then, nor even sandals as protection of our feet from the spiny amaranth (kwantung in Ilokano, suwit in Isinay) when we went chasing fledglings of the bird called bulbul in English (pirruka in Ilokano, pinuu' in Isinay) and the martines (mynah) that both used to abound in the bangkag. And so the scabies were the price I had to pay for incessant playing in the thickets, in the hills, in the farm, in the river – and riding bareback carabaos – while barefoot and in short pants.

You may ask: What in the world did scabies have to do with monkeys?

Well, I heard my doting grandmother tell one of my uncles one day: “Ibirukanyo man toy ubing iti sunggo.” (Kindly find monkey for this kid.) It was probably a tradition or belief handed down to her by elders while growing up in Tagudin, Ilocos Sur, but my grandmother believed that the meat of monkeys was medicine for skin diseases.

Indeed, after being fed with roasted monkey meat, my sores and nasty scabies soon healed!

MANY CHILDREN of Dupax learned about the ways of monkeys through those kept as outdoor pet by neighbors. One such was kept by the Campo brothers Pascual and Otong in our part of Domang. We had fun watching it pick unripe guavas from the tree serving as its one-end-of-the–pole shelter. It would chew off the green peelings of one fruit, spit the bitter bits, then store the cleaned fruit on its mouth, then repeat the same for other fruits. We delighted seeing the bulge on both sides of its mouth created by the peeled guavas it stored.

We children even had games where one would act as monkey while being teased by others with a mimic of the monkey guttural sound “krrrsss” which would soon become “kurus banyas” (an Ilokano phrase that literally means “cross” and “monitor lizard”).

I also have in my memory seeing an Aeta kid holding a pink baby monkey like a doll near Landingan, Nagtipunan, Quirino. This was in January 1990 when I happened to be part of a fact-finding mission on the Ilongot tribe’s reaction to the then still to be constructed Casecnan Dam in Southeastern Nueva Vizcaya. Our group was composed of IP representatives of PAFID, progressive minded guys from UP Diliman and UP Los Baños, staff members of the Office of Northern Cultural Communities in Bambang, and Chip Fay of Amnesty International.

Going back to monkey meat, I don’t recall having feasted on monkey again, while a boy, after that monkey meat as cure for scabies episode. What I do remember was when I was already a forester, I enjoyed monkey adobo as pulutan along with ice-cold beer in Zamboanga City in 1987, courtesy of a fellow forester.