By the time Mateo Álvarez reached Davao, he had already learned the rhythm of Mindanao: mornings that smelled of diesel and salt, afternoons heavy with rain, evenings stitched together by karaoke and the low thrum of generators. He was a Spanish university student on a gap year, officially studying postcolonial linguistics, unofficially chasing the ghosts of empire. He kept a notebook of place names—Zamboanga, Isabela, Basilan—circling the syllables that still sounded like home.
He stayed at a private lodging run by Mr. Lin, a Chinese resident whose real business lived between shipping manifests and looms. Lin exported traditional Mindanao textiles—inabal from the Visayas traded inland, pis syabit from the Tausug—into niche markets on the mainland, where heritage fashion had become a quiet countercurrent to mass production. He talked about supply chains the way others talked about weather: container backlogs easing after the pandemic years, insurance premiums spiking whenever the Celebes Sea made headlines, customs codes shifting as Beijing and Manila tried to keep trade insulated from their maritime quarrels.
The invitation came casually. The owner of the lodging mentioned Sulu, not as a warning but as a rumor. Lin’s eyes lit up. Mateo noticed the way Spanish vowels still clung to the map there, stubborn as coral. A month in Mindanao had already rearranged his sense of distance; Sulu felt close.
When Lin confided his plan to the middle-aged Filipino man who delivered meals—Jun, from Zamboanga City—the refusal was immediate. Jun had grown up with the advisories. Sulu sat red on embassy maps, a place where kidnappings had once paid like a pension and where the remnants of old groups still moved between islands faster than policy could. Even after the creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region and the demobilization programs that followed, some waters remained gray.
Lin tried reason. Daylight. No landfall. Just looking. He added money, a lump sum that acknowledged risk without naming it. Jun hesitated, the way a man does when he knows exactly what he is agreeing to. What Lin didn’t know—what Mateo only sensed later—was that Jun brokered illegal shipping on the side: rice one week, cigarettes the next, sometimes people. He knew which flags to fly.
They left late, the engine tuned low. The Celebes Sea did its usual work, mixing jurisdictions into a moving puzzle. When a patrol silhouette loomed, Jun ran up one flag; when another appeared, he swapped it for a neighbor’s. Maritime domain awareness, Mateo had read, depended on radar and AIS transponders. Out here it also depended on cloth.
At dawn the Sulu Archipelago rose like a thought you try not to finish. An ordinary island, green and quiet. Then a rowboat cut toward them. Four people aboard. The leader was a young woman with a cloth wrapped around her head; behind her, a man cradled an automatic rifle with the casual intimacy of habit.
“Are you here to deliver a package?” she asked.
“We’re sightseeing,” Jun shouted back. “We leave before sunset.”
Laughter carried over water. “Get on,” one of the men said, tapping the gun.
Jun leaned close. “If you get on that boat,” he whispered, “you might not come back.”
And then, improbably, Jun began to sing.
Mateo recognized the moment before the words. Music here was infrastructure—more reliable than cell service. The rowboat’s crew joined in, voices finding each other the way currents do. When the song ended, smiles replaced calculations. They waved. The rowboat turned away.
On the ride back, the sea gentled. Lin exhaled a plan he had already revised: business in Sulu would take time—trust first, logistics later, maybe cooperative weaving centers tied to post-conflict livelihood programs that donors liked to fund. He asked Jun what song it was.
“I don’t know what it means,” Jun said. “My grandfather sang it.”
Mateo flipped through his notebook. “Parts of it were Spanish,” he said, surprised by the steadiness of his voice. “I remember the line: El amigo de nuestro amigo es nuestro amigo. El amigo de nuestro enemigo es nuestro enemigo.”
It wasn’t a proverb you’d find in textbooks. It was older than borders and newer than treaties, a rule that survived because it traveled well.
Back in Davao, Mateo extended his stay to three months. There was more to map than names. There were currents—of language, of trade, of fear easing into caution. In Mindanao, he realized, history didn’t end. It learned to sing.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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