A Tale of the Drowned: The Ghosts We Carry

by Roger B. Rueda

Some stories are like cockroaches—resilient, persistent, and impossible to kill. They burrow into the national psyche, scratching at the walls of memory, refusing to be swept away. Merlie M. Alunan’s A Story for Rainy Nights is not just a ghost story for the gullible or a fireside yarn for the bored. It is a brutal collision of folklore, history, and grief—wrapped in the poetic equivalent of a fist slamming on the table, demanding to be heard. This is not mere entertainment. This is a reckoning.

Alunan’s poem does what every great piece of literature must: it unsettles. It provokes. It forces the reader to confront a tragedy so great that, in true Filipino fashion, we have mythologized it, transforming loss into lore, fact into fable. Why? Because the truth is too painful, too incomprehensible, to be swallowed whole. It must be broken down into digestible fragments—barnacles on a drowned man’s neck, an infant wrapped in kelp, eyes glowing with plankton’s eerie light.

And so the tale mutates, whispered in caldohan corners, carried from one tricycle driver to another, taking on the grotesque dimensions of our own unresolved grief. This is how we make sense of devastation—we dress it up in the supernatural, give it flesh and form so we can wrap our arms around it and call it ours. But beneath the embellishments, the bones of truth remain: 2,000 lives swallowed by the sea, families shattered, a tragedy so massive that even now, decades later, we cannot bear to let it slip into the abyss of forgotten history.

It is not the dead who haunt us, but our own failure to hold anyone accountable. Where were the safety measures? The proper regulations? The lifeboats that could have spared even a fraction of those who perished? No amount of folklore can erase the shameful reality that the M/V Doña Paz tragedy was not just an accident—it was negligence on a catastrophic scale. And yet, where is the justice? Where are the lessons learned? The tragedy itself may have been swallowed by waves, but the repercussions continue to ripple, much like the ghosts Alunan so vividly resurrects.

Rainy nights will always bring stories, and our history—bloody, painful, and unresolved—will always be fertile ground for myth-making. But let us not forget: ghosts do not seek revenge. They seek recognition. They demand remembrance. And, if we are brave enough, they compel us to change.

***

A STORY FOR RAINY NIGHTS
by Merlie M. Alunan
 
On nights when rain pours as if
the very gate of heaven is open,
nothing to stop a shivering earth
from death by drowning,
people in my village tell the story— 
 
An empty house in Delgado Street,
a tricycle stops by the locked gate.
A man alights, his wife cuddling an infant
close to her chest, the boy of five or six
Agripping her skirt with bony fingers.
“Delgado,” says the man, the one word
that brought them to this unlit house
on this lonely street in our village.
Not a sound from them throughout the ride.
Now the man digs into his pockets for fare
and comes up with a few clamshells,
holds out like coins to the driver.
“Wait here,” says the man,“I’ll get the fare,”
and goes into the unlit house, everyone
following him, but the house never lights up
and the man never returns.
Seized by a strange suspicion,
the driver flees, fast as he can, terrified,
pursued by the reek of fish in the wind. 
 
This story goes the rounds of Cardo’s motorshop,
Tentay’s caldohan, or wherever it is that drivers go
to pass the slow time of day, or when rain forces them
to seek shelter—the story growing with every telling: 
 
barnacles on the man’s neck, his hands, his ears
the woman’s hair stringy like seaweeds
the infant in her arms swaddled in kelp
—and did he have fishtail instead of feet—
the boy’s flourescent stare, as though
each eyes were wells of plankton—
was that a starfish dangling from his neck
seasnakes wriggling in and out of his pockets 
 
The house in Delgado waits empty and dark
as on the day, ten, eleven years ago
when the M/V Dona Paz with 2000 humans
on its decks, became grub for the sea.
Of that time, the old women in my village
remember coffins on the dockside,
stench in the air, in almost every street, a wake,
funerals winding daily down the streets. 
 
No driver in our village has made a claim
to a role in the telling of this tale, yet the story
moves like a feckless wind blowing
breath to breath, growing hair,
hand, fist, feet with every telling, and claws
to grip us cold. We cower in the dark,
grateful of the dry bed, the earth under us,
the body we hold against the tyranny of rain
pelting our fragile shelter—a mere habit
of those who breathe air and walk on land,
you might say, but still, always, the sea
grumbling grumbling grumbling sleeplessly— 
 
somedaywecome
somedaywecome
somedaysomedaysomeday....