Humanities 311

Philippine literature in American Period

Philippine literature in English has its roots in the efforts of the United States, then
engaged in a war with Filipino nationalist forces at the end of the 19th century. By 1901, public
education was institutionalized in the Philippines, with English serving as the medium of
instruction. That year, around 600 educators in the S.S. Thomas (the "Thomasites") were tasked
to replace the soldiers who had been serving as the first teachers. Outside the academe, the
wide availability of reading materials, such as books and newspapers in English, helped Filipinos
assimilate the language quickly. Today, 78.53% of the population can understand or speak
English (see List of countries by English-speaking population).

It was during the early American period that seditious plays, using the form of the zarsuwela,
were mounted. Zarsuwelistas Juan Abad, Aurelio Tolentino, Juan Matapang Cruz. Juan
Crisostomo Sotto mounted the classics like Tanikalang Ginto, Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas and
Hindi Ako Patay, all directed against the American imperialists. Patricio Marianos Anak ng Dagat
and Severino Reyess Walang Sugat are equally remarkable zarsuwelas staged during the
period.
On the eve of World War II, Wilfredo Maria Guerrero would gain dominance in theatre
through his one-act plays which he toured through his mobile theatre. Thus, Wanted a
Chaperone and The Forsaken House became very popular in campuses throughout the
archipelago.
The novel in Tagalog, Iloko, Hiligaynon and Sugbuanon also developed during the period
aided largely by the steady publication of weekly magazines like the Liwayway, Bannawag and
Bisaya which serialized the novels.
Among the early Tagalog novelists of the 20th century were Ishmael Amado, Valeriano
Hernandez Pea, Faustino Aguilar, Lope K. Santos and Lazaro Francisco.
Ishmael Amados Bulalakaw ng Pag-asa published in 1909 was one of the earliest novels
that dealt with the theme of American imperialism in the Philippines. The novel, however, was
not released from the printing press until 1916, at which time, the author, by his own admission
and after having been sent as a pensionado to the U.S., had other ideas apart from those he
wrote in the novel.
Valeriano Hernandez Peas Nena at Neneng narrates the story of two women who
happened to be best of friends as they cope with their relationships with the men in their lives.
Nena succeeds in her married life while Neneng suffers from a stormy marriage because of her
jealous husband.
Faustino Aguilar published Pinaglahuan, a love triangle set in the early years of the century
when the workers movement was being formed. The novels hero, Luis Gatbuhay, is a worker
in a printery who isimprisoned for a false accusation and loses his love, Danding, to his rival
Rojalde, son of a wealthy capitalist. Lope K. Santos, Banaag at Sikat has almost the same theme
and motif as the hero of the novel, Delfin, also falls in love with a rich woman, daughter of a
wealthy landlord. The love story of course is set also within the background of development of
the workers trade union movement and throughout the novel, Santos engages the readers in
lengthy treatises and discourses on socialism and capitalism. Many other Tagalog novelists
wrote on variations of the same theme, i.e., the interplay of fate, love and social justice. Among
these writers are Inigo Ed Regalado, Roman Reyes, Fausto J. Galauran, Susana de Guzman,
Rosario de Guzman-Lingat, Lazaro Francisco, Hilaria Labog, Rosalia Aguinaldo, Amado V.
Hernandez. Many of these writers were able to produce three or more novels as Soledad Reyes
would bear out in her book which is the result of her dissertation, Ang Nobelang Tagalog (1979).
 Among the Iloko writers, noted novelists were Leon Pichay, who was also the regions poet
laureate then, Hermogenes Belen, and Mena Pecson Crisologo whose Mining wenno Ayat ti
Kararwa is considered to be the Iloko version of a Noli me Tangere.
In the Visayas, Magdalena Jalandoni and Ramon Muzones would lead most writers in
writing the novels that dwelt on the themes of love, courtship, life in the farmlands, and other
social upheavals of the period. Marcel Navarra wrote stories and novels in Sugbuhanon.
Poetry in all languages continued to flourish in all regions of the country during the American
period. The Tagalogs, hailing Francisco F. Balagtas as the nations foremost poet invented the
balagtasan in his honor. The balagtasan is a debate in verse, a poetical joust done almost
spontaneously between protagonists who debate over the pros and cons of an issue.
The first balagtasan was held in March 1924 at the Instituto de Mujeres, with Jose Corazon
de Jesus and Florentino Collantes as rivals, bubuyog (bee) and paru-paro (butterfly) aiming for
the love of kampupot (jasmine). It was during this balagtasan that Jose Corazon de Jesus, known
as Huseng Batute, emerged triumphant to become the first king of the Balagtasan. Jose Corazon
de Jesus was the finest master of the genre. He was later followed by balagtasistas, Emilio Mar
Antonio and Crescenciano Marquez, who also became King of the Balagtasan in their own time.
As Huseng Batute, de Jesus also produced the finest poems and lyrics during the period.
His debates with Amado V. Hernandez on the political issue of independence from America and
nationhood were mostly done in verse and are testament to the vitality of Tagalog poetry during
the era. Lope K. Santos, epic poem, Ang Panggingera is also proof of how poets of the period
have come to master the language to be able to translate it into effective poetry.
The balagtasan would be echoed as a poetical fiesta and would be duplicated in the Ilocos
as thebukanegan, in honor of Pedro Bukaneg, the supposed transcriber of the epic, Biag ni Lam-
ang; and theCrissottan, in Pampanga, in honor of the esteemed poet of the Pampango, Juan
Crisostomo Sotto.
In 1932, Alejandro G. Abadilla , armed with new criticism and an orientation on modernist
poetry would taunt traditional Tagalog poetics with the publication of his poem, Ako ang
Daigdig. Abadillas poetry began the era of modernism in Tagalog poetry, a departure from the
traditional rhymed, measured and orally recited poems. Modernist poetry which utilized free or
blank verses was intended more for silent reading than oral delivery.
Noted poets in Tagalog during the American period were Julian Cruz Balmaceda, Florentino
Collantes, Pedro Gatmaitan, Jose Corazon de Jesus, Benigno Ramos, Inigo Ed. Regalado,
Ildefonso Santos, Lope K. Santos, Aniceto Silvestre, Emilio Mar. Antonio , Alejandro Abadilla
and Teodoro Agoncillo.
Like the writers in English who formed themselves into organizations, Tagalog writers also
formed the Ilaw at Panitik, and held discussions and workshops on the value of literature in
society. Benigno Ramos, was one of the most politicized poets of the period as he aligned
himself with the peasants of the Sakdal Movement.
Fiction in Tagalog as well as in the other languages of the regions developed alongside the
novel. Most fictionists are also novelists. Brigido Batungbakal, Macario Pineda and other writers
chose to dwell on the vicissitudes of life in a changing rural landscape. Deogracias Del Rosario
on the other hand, chose the city and the emerging social elite as subjects of his stories. He is
considered the father of the modern short story in Tagalog
Among the more popular fictionists who emerged during the period are two women writers,
Liwayway Arceo and Genoveva Edroza Matute, considered forerunners in the use of light
fiction, a kind of story telling that uses language through poignant rendition. Genoveva Edroza
Matutes Akoy Isang Tinig and Liwayway Arceos Uhaw ang Tigang na Lupa have been used
as models of fine writing in Filipino by teachers of composition throughout the school system.
Teodoro Agoncillos anthology 25 Pinakamahusay na Maiikling Kuwento (1945) included
the foremost writers of fiction in the pre-war era.
The separate, yet parallel developments of Philippine literature in English and those in
Tagalog and other languages of the archipelago during the American period only prove that
literature and writing in whatever language and in whatever climate are able to survive mainly
through the active imagination of writers. Apparently, what was lacking during the period was for
the writers in the various languages to come together, share experiences and come to a
conclusion on the elements that constitute good writing in the Philippines.

The Commonwealth Period

The founding of Silliman University by Presbyterian missionaries and the Philippine

Normal School (PNS) in 1901 and the University of the Philippines (U.P.) in 1908, as well as of
English newspapers like the Daily Bulletin 1900, The Cablenews 1902, and the Philippines Free
Press 1905, helped boost English usage. The first ten years of the century witnessed the first
verse and prose efforts of Filipinos in student publications such as The Filipino Students
Magazine first issue, 1905, a short-lived quarterly published in Berkeley, California, by Filipino
pensionados (or government scholars); the U.P. College Folio (first issue, 1910); The Coconut
of the Manila High School (first issue, 1912); and The Torch of the PNS (first issue, 1913).

However, the beginnings of anything resembling a professional market for writing in

English would not be realized until the 1920s with the founding of other newspapers and
magazines like the Philippines Herald in 1920, the Philippine Education Magazine in 1924
(renamed Philippine Magazine in 1928), and later the Manila Tribune, the Graphic, Woman's
Outlook, and Woman's Home Journal. The publications helped introduce the reading public to
the works of Paz Marquez Benitez, Jose Garcia Villa, Loreto Paras, and Casiano Calalang,
among others. Cash incentives were given to writers in 1921 when the Free Press started to pay
for published contributions and awarded P1,000 for the best stories. The organization in 1925 of
the Philippine Writers Association and in 1927 of the University of the Philippines National
Writers Workshop, which put out the Literary Apprentice, also helped encourage literary
production. In 1939, the Philippine Writers League was put up by politically conscious writers,
intensifying their debate with those in the "art for art's sake" school of Villa.

Among the significant publications of this fertile period were:

Filipino Poetry (1924) by Rodolfo Dato;

English-German Anthology of Filipino Poets (1934) by Pablo Laslo;
Jose Garcia Villa's Many Voices (1939) and Poems of Doveglion (1941);
Poems (1940) by Angela Manalang-Gloria;
Chorus for America: Six Philippine Poets (1942) by Carlos Bulosan;
Zoilo Galang's A Child of Sorrow (1921), the first Filipino novel in English, and Box of
Ashes and Other Stories (1925), the first collection of stories in book form;
Villas Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (1933);
"The Wound and the Scar" (1937) by Arturo Rotor, a collection of stories;
"Winds of April" (1940) by N. V. M. Gonzalez;
"His Native Soil" (1941) by Juan C. Laya;
Manuel Arguilla's "How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Stories" (1941);
Galang's "Life and Success" (1921), the first volume of essays in English; and
the influential "Literature and Society" (1940) by Salvador P. Lpez.

Dramatic writing took a backseat due to the popularity of Filipino vaudeville (bodabil) and
Tagalog movies, although it was kept alive by the playwright Wilfredo Ma. Guerrero.

The post-war period

 During the Japanese occupation, when Tagalog was favored by the Japanese military
authority, writing in English was consigned to limbo, since most of the English writers were forced
to write in Tagalog or joined in the underground and wrote English stories based on the battles
to serve as propaganda pieces in boosting the morale of the guerrillas. It picked up after the war,
however, with a fervor and drive for excellence that continue to this day. Stevan Javellana's
"Without Seeing the Dawn" (1947), the first postwar novel in English, was published in the United
States. In 1946, the Barangay Writers Project was founded to help publish books in English..

Against a background marked by political unrest and government battles with Hukbalahap
guerrillas, writers in English in the postwar period honed their sense of craft and techniques.
Among the writers who came into their own during this time were, among many others:

Carlos Bulosan Virginia Moreno

Linda Ty Casper Peter Solis Nery
Gilda Cordero-Fernando Vicente Rivera Jr.
Amador Daguio Alejandro R. Roces
Ricaredo Serrano Bienvenido Santos
N. V. M. Gonzalez Abelardo and Tarrosa Subido
Sinai C. Hamada Edilberto K. Tiempo
Alejandrino Hufana Kerima Polotan Tuvera
Dominador Ilio Manuel A. Viray
Nick Joaquin Raul Rafael R. Ingles
F. Sionil Jos Oscar de Zuiga

Fresh from studies in American universities, usually as Fulbright or Rockefeller scholars, a

number of these writers introduced New Criticism to the country and applied its tenets in
literature classes and writing workshops. In this way were born the Silliman National Writers
Workshop.

Literary awards and competitions

In 1940, the first Commonwealth Literary Awards were given by President Manuel L.
Quezon to Salvador P. Lopez for "Literature and Society" (essay), Manuel Arguilla for "How My
Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Stories" (short story), R. Zulueta da Costa for
"Like the Molave" (poetry), and Juan C. Laya for "His Native Soil" (novel).

Government recognition of literary merit came in the form of the Republic Cultural
Heritage Awards (1960), the Pro Patria Awards for Literature (1961), and the National Artist
Awards (1973). Only the last of these three awards survives today. Writers in English who have
received the National Artist award include: Jose Garcia Villa (1973), Nick Joaquin (1976), Carlos
P. Romulo (1982), Francisco Arcellana (1990), N. V. M. Gonzalez, Rolando Tinio (1997), Edith
L. Tiempo, (2000), F. Sionil Jos (2003), and Bienvenido Lumbera (2006).

A select group of local writers have also received the international Magsaysay Award,
namely, F. Sionil Jos, Nick Joaquin and Bienvenido Lumbera
 The Bread of Salt

By NVM Gonzalez (1958)

Usually I was in bed by ten and up by five and thus was ready for one more day of my fourteenth year.
Unless Grandmother had forgotten, the fifteen centavos for the baker down Progreso Street - and how I enjoyed
jingling those coins in my pocket!- would be in the empty fruit jar in the cupboard. I would remember then that
rolls were what Grandmother wanted because recently she had lost three molars. For young people like my
cousins and myself, she had always said that the kind called pan de sal ought to be quite all right.

The bread of salt! How did it get that name? From where did its flavor come through what secret action
of flour and yeast? At the risk of being jostled from the counter by early buyers, I would push my way into the
shop so that I might watch the men who, stripped to the waist, worked their long flat wooden spades in and out
of the glowing maw of the oven. Why did the bread come nut-brown and the size of my little fist? And why did it
have a pair of lips convulsed into a painful frown? In the half light of the street, and hurrying, the paper bag
pressed to my chest, I felt my curiosity a little gratified by the oven-fresh warmth of the bread I was proudly
bringing home for breakfast.

Well I knew how Grandmother would not mind if I nibbled away at one piece; perhaps, I might even eat
two, to be charged later against my share at the table. But that would be betraying a trust; and so, indeed, I kept
my purchase intact. To guard it from harm, I watched my steps and avoided the dark street corners.

For my reward, I had only to look in the direction of the sea wall and the fifty yards or so of riverbed
beyond it, where an old Spaniard's house stood. At low tide, when the bed was dry and the rocks glinted with
broken bottles, the stone fence of the Spaniard's compound set off the house as if it were a castle. Sunrise
brought a wash of silver upon the roofs of the laundry and garden sheds which had been built low and close to
the fence. On dull mornings the light dripped from the bamboo screen which covered the veranda and hung
some four or five yards from the ground. Unless it was August, when the damp, northeast monsoon had to be
kept away from the rooms, three servants raised the screen promptly at six-thirty until it was completely hidden
under the veranda eaves. From the sound of the pulleys, I knew it was time to set out for school.

It was in his service, as a coconut plantation overseer, that Grandfather had spent the last thirty years
of his life. Grandmother had been widowed three years now. I often wondered whether I was being depended
upon to spend the years ahead in the service of this great house. One day I learned that Aida, a classmate in
high school, was the old Spaniard's niece. All my doubts disappeared. It was as if, before his death, Grandfather
had spoken to me about her, concealing the seriousness of the matter by putting it over as a joke. If now I kept
true to the virtues, she would step out of her bedroom ostensibly to say Good Morning to her uncle. Her real
purpose, I knew, was to reveal thus her assent to my desire.

On quiet mornings I imagined the patter of her shoes upon the wooden veranda floor as a further sign,
and I would hurry off to school, taking the route she had fixed for me past the post office, the town plaza and the
church, the health center east of the plaza, and at last the school grounds. I asked myself whether I would try to
walk with her and decided it would be the height of rudeness. Enough that in her blue skirt and white middy she
would be half a block ahead and, from that distance, perhaps throw a glance in my direction, to bestow upon
my heart a deserved and abundant blessing. I believed it was but right that, in some such way as this, her
mission in my life was disguised.

Her name, I was to learn many years later, was a convenient mnemonic for the qualities to which
argument might aspire. But in those days it was a living voice. "Oh that you might be worthy of uttering me," it
said. And how I endeavored to build my body so that I might live long to honor her. With every victory at single
sat the handball court the game was then the craze at school -- I could feel my body glow in the sun as though
it had instantly been cast in bronze. I guarded my mind and did not let my wits go astray. In class I would not
allow a lesson to pass unmastered. Our English teacher could put no question before us that did not have a
ready answer in my head. One day he read Robert Louis Stevenson's The Sire de Maletroit's Door , and
we were so enthralled that our breath strembled. I knew then that somewhere, sometime in the not too
improbable future, a benign old man with a lantern in his hand would also detain me in a secret room, and there
daybreak would find me thrilled by the sudden certainty that I had won Aida's hand.

It was perhaps on my violin that her name wrought such a tender spell. Maestro Antonino remarked
the dexterity of my stubby fingers. Quickly I raced through Alard-until I had all but committed two
thirds of the book to memory. My short, brown arm learned at last to draw the bow with grace. Sometimes,
when practising my scales in the early evening, I wondered if the sea wind carrying the straggling notes across
the pebbled river did not transform them into Schubert's Serenade."

At last Mr. Custodio, who was in charge of our school orchestra, became aware of my
progress. He moved me from second to first violin. During the Thanksgiving Day program he bade me render
a number, complete with pizzicati and harmonics.

"Another Vallejo! Our own Albert Spalding!" I heard from the front row.

Aida, I thought, would be in the audience. I looked around quickly but could not see her.
As I retired to my place in the orchestra I heard Pete Saez, the trombone player, call my name.

"You must join my band," he said. "Look, we'll have many engagements soon. It'llbe vacation time.

"Pete pressed my arm. He had for some time now been asking me to join the Minviluz Orchestra, his
private band. All I had been able to tell him was that I had my schoolwork to mind. He was twenty-two. I was
perhaps too young to be going around with him. He earned his school fees and supported his mother hiring out
his band at least three or four times a month. He now said:

"Tomorrow we play at the funeral of a Chinese-four to six in the afternoon; in the evening, judge Roldan's
silver wedding anniversary; Sunday, the municipal dance.

My head began to whirl. On the stage, in front of us, the principal had begun a speech about America.
Nothing he could say about the Pilgrim Fathers and the American custom of feasting on turkey seemed
interesting. I thought of the money I would earn. For several days now I had but one wish, to buy a box
of linen stationery. At night when the house was quiet I would fill the sheets with words that would tell Aida how
much I adored her. One of these mornings, perhaps before school closed for the holidays, I would borrow her
algebra book and there, upon a good pageful of equations, there I would slip my message, tenderly pressing
the leaves of the book. She would perhaps never write back. Neither by post nor by hand would a reply reach
me. But no matter; it would be a silence full of voices.

That night I dreamed I had returned from a tour of the world's music centers; the newspapers of Manila
had been generous with praise. I saw my picture on the cover of a magazine. A writer had described how, many
years ago, I used to trudge the streets of Buenavista with my violin in a battered black cardboard case. In New
York, he reported, a millionaire had offered me a Stradivarius violin, with a card that bore the inscription: "In
admiration of a genius your own people must surely be proud of." I dreamed I spent a weekend at the
millionaire's country house by the Hudson. A young girl in a blue skirt and white middy clapped her lily-white
hands and, her voice trembling, cried "Bravo!"

What people now observed at home was the diligence with which I attended to my violin lessons. My
aunt, who had come from the farm to join her children for the holidays, brought with her a maidservant, and to
the poor girl was given of taking the money to the baker's for rolls and pan de sal. I realized at once that it would
be no longer becoming on my part to make these morning trips to the baker's. I could not thank my aunt enough.
 I began to chafe on being given other errands. Suspecting my violin to be the excuse, my aunt remarked:
"What do you want to be a musician for? At parties, musicians always eat last.

"Perhaps, I said to myself, she was thinking of a pack of dogs scrambling for scraps tossed over the
fence by some careless kitchen maid. She was the sort you could depend on to say such vulgar things. For that
reason, I thought, she ought not to be taken seriously at all.

But the remark hurt me. Although Grandmother had counseled me kindly to mind my work at school, I
went again and again to Pete Saez's house for rehearsals.

She had demanded that I deposit with her my earnings; I had felt too weak to refuse. Secretly, I counted
the money and decided not to ask for it until I had enough with which to buy a brooch. Why this time I wanted to
give Aida a brooch, I didn't know. But I had set my heart on it. I searched the downtown shops. The Chinese
clerks, seeing me so young, were annoyed when I inquired about prices.

At last the Christmas season began. I had not counted on Aida's leaving home, and
remembering that her parents lived in Badajoz, my torment was almost unbearable. Not once had I tried to tell
her of my love. My letters had remained unwritten, and the algebra book unborrowed. There was still the brooch
to find, but I could not decide on the sort of brooch I really wanted. And the money, in any case, was in
Grandmother's purse, which smelled of "Tiger Balm." I grew somewhat feverish as our class Christmas program
drew near. Finally it came; it was a warm December afternoon. I decided to leave the room when our English
teacher announced that members of the class might exchange gifts. I felt fortunate; Pete was at the door,
beckoning to me. We walked out to the porch where, Pete said, he would tell me a secret.

It was about an asalto the next Sunday which the Buenavista Women's Club wished to give Don
Esteban's daughters, Josefina and Alicia, who were arriving on the morning steamer from Manila. The spinsters
were much loved by the ladies. Years ago, when they were younger, these ladies studied solfeggio with Josefina
and the piano and harp with Alicia. As Pete told me all this, his lips ash-gray from practising all morning on his
trombone, I saw in my mind the sisters in their silk dresses, shuffling off to church for the evening benediction.
They were very devout, and the Buenavista ladies admired that. I had almost forgotten that they were twins and,
despite their age, often dressed alike. In low-bosomed voile bodices and white summer hats, I remembered,
the pair had attended Grandfather's funeral, at old Don Esteban's behest. I wondered how successful they had
been in Manila during the past three years in the matter of finding suitable husbands.

"This party will be a complete surprise," Pete said, looking around the porch as if to swear me to secrecy.
"They've hired our band."
I rejoined my classmates in the room, greeting everyone with a Merry Christmas jollier than that of
the others. When I saw Aida in one corner unwrapping something two girls had given her, I found the
boldness to greet her also.

"Merry Christmas," I said in English, as a hairbrush and a powder case emerged from the fancy
wrapping. It seemed to me rather apt that such gifts went to her. Already several girls were gathered
around Aida. Their eyes glowed with envy, it seemed to me, for those fair cheeks and the bobbed dark-
brown hair which lineage had denied them.

I was too dumbstruck by my own meanness to hear exactly what Aida said in answer to my greeting.
But I recovered shortly and asked:
"Will you be away during the vacation?"
"No, I'll be staying here," she said. When she added that her cousins were arriving and that a big party
in their honor was being planned, I remarked:
"So you know all about it?" I felt I had to explain that the party was meant to be a surprise, an asalto.
 And now it would be nothing of the kind, really. The women's club matrons would hustle
about, disguising their scurrying around for cakes and candies as for some baptismal party or other. In the end,
the Rivas sisters would outdo them. Boxes of meringues, bonbons, ladyfingers, and cinnamon buns that only
the Swiss bakers in Manila could make were perhaps coming on the boat with them. I imagined a table
glimmering with long-stemmed punch glasses; enthroned in that array would be a huge brick-red bowl of
gleaming china with golden flowers around the brim. The local matrons, however hard they tried, however
sincere their efforts, were bound to fail in their aspiration to rise to the level of Don Esteban's daughters. Perhaps,
I thought, Aida knew all this. And that I should share in a foreknowledge of the matrons' hopes was a matter
beyond love. Aida and I could laugh together with the gods.

At seven, on the appointed evening, our small band gathered quietly at the gate of Don
Esteban's house, and when the ladies arrived in their heavy shawls and trim panuelo, twittering with excitement,
we were commanded to play the Poet and Peasant overture. As Pete directed the band, his eyes glowed with
pride for his having been part of the big event. The multicolored lights that the old Spaniard's gardeners had
strung along the vine-covered fence were switched on, and the women remarked that Don Esteban's daughters
might have made some preparations after all. Pete hid his face from the glare. If the women felt let down, they
did not show it.

The overture shuffled along to its climax while five men in white shirts bore huge boxes of goods into the
house. I recognized one of the bakers in spite of the uniform. A chorus of confused greetings, and the women
trooped into the house; and before we had settled in the sala to play "A Basket of Roses," the heavy damask
curtains at the far end of the room were drawn and a long table richly spread was revealed under the
chandeliers. I remembered that, in our haste to be on hand for the asalto, Pete and I had discouraged the
members of the band from taking their suppers.

"You've done us a great honor!" Josefina, the more buxom of the twins, greeted the ladies.
"Oh, but you have not allowed us to take you by surprise!" the ladies demurred in a chorus.
There were sighs and further protestations amid a rustle of skirts and the glitter of earrings. I saw Aida in
a long, flowing white gown and wearing an arch of sampaguita flowers on her hair. At her command, two
servants brought out a gleaming harp from the music room. Only the slightest scraping could be heard because
the servants were barefoot. As Aida directed them to place the instrument near the seats we occupied, my heart
leaped to my throat. Soon she was lost among the guests, and we played "The Dance of the Glowworms." I
kept my eyes closed and held for as long as I could her radiant figure before me.

Alicia played on the harp and then, in answer to the deafening applause, she offered an
encore. Josefina sang afterward. Her voice, though a little husky, fetched enormous sighs. For her encore, she
gave "The Last Rose of Summer"; and the song brought back snatches of the years gone by. Memories of
solfeggio lessons eddied about us, as if there were rustling leaves scattered all over the hall. Don Esteban
appeared. Earlier, he had greeted the crowd handsomely, twisting his mustache to hide a natural shyness
before talkative women. He stayed long enough to listen to the harp again, whispering in his rapture: "Heavenly.
Heavenly . . ."

By midnight, the merrymaking lagged. We played while the party gathered around the great table at the
end of the sala. My mind traveled across the seas to the distant cities I had dreamed about. The sisters sailed
among the ladies like two great white liners amid a fleet of tugboats in a bay. Someone had thoughtfully
remembered-and at last Pete Saez signaled to us to put our instruments away. We walked in single file across
the hall, led by one of the barefoot servants

.Behind us a couple of hoarse sopranos sang "La Paloma" to the accompaniment of the harp, but I did
not care to find out who they were. The sight of so much silver and china confused me. There was more food
before us than I had ever imagined. I searched in my mind for the names of the dishes; but my ignorance
appalled me. I wondered what had happened to the boxes of food that the Buenavista ladies had sent up earlier.
In a silver bowl was something, I discovered, that appeared like whole egg yolks that had been dipped in honey
and peppermint. The seven of us in the orchestra were all of one mind about the feast; and so, confident that I
was with friends, I allowed my covetousness to have its sway and not only stuffed my mouth with this and that
confection but also wrapped up a quantity of those egg-yolk things in several sheets of napkin paper. None of
my companions had thought of doing the same, and it was with some pride that I slipped the packet under my
shirt. There, I knew, it would not bulge.

"Have you eaten?"

I turned around. It was Aida. My bow tie seemed to tighten around my collar. I mumbled something, I
did not know what.
"If you wait a little while till they've gone, I'll wrap up a big package for you," she added.

I brought a handkerchief to my mouth. I might have honored her solicitude adequately and even relieved
myself of any embarrassment; I could not quite believe that she had seen me, and yet I was sure that she knew
what I had done, and I felt all ardor for her gone from me entirely.

I walked away to the nearest door, praying that the damask curtains might hide me in my shame. The
door gave on to the veranda, where once my love had trod on sunbeams. Outside it was dark, and a faint wind
was singing in the harbor.

With the napkin balled up in my hand, I flung out my arm to scatter the egg-yolk things in the dark. I
waited for the soft sound of their fall on the garden-shed roof. Instead, I heard a spatter in the rising night-tide
beyond the stone fence. Farther away glimmered the light from Grandmother's window, calling me home.
But the party broke up at one or thereabouts. We walked away with our instruments after the matrons
were done with their interminable good-byes. Then, to the tune of "Joy to the World," we pulled the Progreso
Street shop keepers out of their beds. The Chinese merchants were especially generous. When Pete divided
our collection under a street lamp, there was already a little glow of daybreak.

He walked with me part of the way home. We stopped at the baker's when I told him that I wanted to
buy with my own money some bread to eat on the way to Grandmother's house at the edge of the sea wall. He
laughed, thinking it strange that I should be hungry. We found ourselves alone at the counter; and we watched
the bakery assistants at work until our bodies grew warm from the oven across the door. It was not quite five,
and the bread was not yet ready.

Scent of Apples
By Bienvenido N. Santos

When I arrived in Kalamazoo it was October and the war was still on. Gold and silver
stars hung on pennants above silent windows of white and brick-red cottages. In a backyard an
old man burned leaves and twigs while a gray-haired woman sat on the porch, her red hands
quiet on her lap, watching the smoke rising above the elms, both of them thinking the same
thought perhaps, about a tall, grinning boy with his blue eyes and flying hair, who went out to
war: where could he be now this month when leaves were turning into gold and the fragrance of
gathered apples was in the wind? It was a cold night when I left my room at the hotel for a usual
speaking engagement. I walked but a little way. A heavy wind coming up from Lake Michigan
was icy on the face. If felt like winter straying early in the northern woodlands. Under the
lampposts the leaves shone like bronze. And they rolled on the pavements like the ghost feet of
a thousand autumns long dead, long before the boys left for faraway lands without great icy
winds and promise of winter early in the air, lands without apple trees, the singing and the gold!
It was the same night I met Celestino Fabia, "just a Filipino farmer" as he called himself, who
had a farm about thirty miles east of Kalamazoo.

"You came all that way on a night like this just to hear me talk?" "I've seen no Filipino for so
many years now," he answered quickly.

"So when I saw your name in the papers where it says you come from the Islands and that
you're going to talk, I come right away.

Earlier that night I had addressed a college crowd, mostly women. It appeared they
wanted me to talk about my country, they wanted me to tell them things about it because my
country had become a lost country. Everywhere in the land the enemy stalked. Over it a great
silence hung, and their boys were there, unheard from, or they were on their way to some little
known island on the Pacific, young boys all, hardly men, thinking of harvest moons and the smell
of forest fire. It was not hard talking about our own people. I knew them well andI loved them.
And they seemed so far away during those terrible years that I must have spoken of them with
a little fervor, a little nostalgia. In the open forum that followed, the audience wanted to know
whether there was much difference between our women and the American women. I tried to
answer the question as best I could, saying, among other things, that I did not know that much
about American women, except that they looked friendly, but differences or similarities in inner
qualities such as naturally belonged to the heart or to the mind, I could only speak about with
vagueness.

While I was trying to explain away the fact that it was not easy to make comparisons,
a man rose from the rear of the hall, wanting to say something. In the distance, he looked slight
and old and very brown. Even before he spoke, I knew that he was, like me, a Filipino.

"I'm a Filipino," he began, loud and clear, in a voice that seemed used to wide open spaces,
"I'm just a Filipino farmer out in the country."

He waved his hand toward the door.

"I left the Philippines more than twenty years ago and have never been back. Never will perhaps.
I want to find out, sir, are our Filipino women the same like they were twenty years ago?"

As he sat down, the hall filled with voices, hushed and intrigued. I weighed my answer
carefully. I did not want to tell a lie yet I did not want to say anything that would seem
platitudinous, insincere. But more important than these considerations, it seemed to me that
moment as I looked towards my countryman, I must give him an answer that would not make
him so unhappy. Surely, all these years, he must have held on to certain ideals, certain beliefs,
even illusions peculiar to the exile.

"First," I said as the voices gradually died down and every eye seemed upon me, "First,
tell me what our women were like twenty years ago."

The man stood to answer. "Yes," he said, "you're too young . . . Twenty years ago our
women were nice, they were modest, they wore their hair long, they dressed proper and went
for no monkey business. They were natural, they went to church regular, and they were faithful."
He had spoken slowly, and now in what seemed like an afterthought, added,

"It's the men who ain't." Now I knew what I was going to say.
 "Well," I began, "it will interest you to know that our women have changed--but definitely!
The change, however, has been on the outside only. Inside, here," pointing to the heart,

"they are the same as they were twenty years ago. God-fearing, faithful, modest, and
nice."

The man was visibly moved. "I'm very happy, sir," he said, in the manner of one who,
having stakes on the land, had found no cause to regret one's sentimental investment.

After this, everything that was said and done in that hall that night seemed like an anti-
climax, and later, as we walked outside, he gave me his name and told me of his farm thirty
miles east of the city. We had stopped at the main entrance to the hotel lobby. We had not talked
very much on the way. As a matter of fact, we were never alone. Kindly American friends talked
to us, asked us questions, said goodnight. So now I asked him whether he cared to step into the
lobby with me and talk.

"No, thank you," he said, "you are tired. And I don't want to stay out too late." "Yes, you
live very far." "I got a car," he said, "besides . . . "

Now he smiled, he truly smiled. All night I had been watching his face and I wondered
when he was going to smile. "Will you do me a favor, please," he continued smiling almost
sweetly.

"I want you to have dinner with my family out in the country. I'd call for you tomorrow
afternoon, then drive you back. Will that be alright?"

"Of course," I said. "I'd love to meet your family." I was leaving Kalamazoo for Muncie,
Indiana, in two days.

There was plenty of time.

"You will make my wife very happy," he said.

"You flatter me."

"Honest. She'll be very happy. Ruth is a country girl and hasn't met many Filipinos. I
mean Filipinos younger than I, cleaner looking. We're just poor farmer folk, you know, and we
don't get to town very often. Roger, that's my boy, he goes to school in town. A bus takes him
early in the morning and he's back in the afternoon. He's nice boy."

"I bet he is," I agreed.

"I've seen the children of some of the boys by their American wives and the boys are
tall, taller than their father, and very good looking."

"Roger, he'd be tall. You'll like him."

Then he said goodbye and I waved to him as he disappeared in the darkness. The next
day he came, at about three in the afternoon. There was a mild, ineffectual sun shining, and it
was not too cold. He was wearing an old brown tweed jacket and worsted trousers to match. His
shoes were polished, and although the green of his tie seemed faded, a colored shirt hardly
accentuated it. He looked younger than he appeared the night before now that he was clean
shaven and seemed ready to go to a party. He was grinning as we met.

"Oh, Ruth can't believe it," he kept repeating as he led me to his car--a nondescript
thing in faded black that had known better days and many hands.

"I says to her, I'm bringing you a first class Filipino, and she says, aw, go away, quit
kidding, there's no such thing as first class Filipino.

But Roger, that's my boy, he believed me immediately. What's he like, daddy, he asks.
Oh, you will see, I says, he's first class. Like you daddy? No, no, I laugh at him, your daddy ain't
first class. Aw, but you are, daddy, he says. So you can see what a nice boy he is, so innocent.
Then Ruth starts griping about the house, but the house is a mess, she says. True it's a mess,
it's always a mess, but you don't mind, do you? We're poor folks, you know. The trip seemed
interminable. We passed through narrow lanes and disappeared into thickets, and came out on
barren land overgrown with weeds in places. All around were dead leaves and dry earth. In the
distance were apple trees.

"Aren't those apple trees?" I asked wanting to be sure.

"Yes, those are apple trees," he replied.

"Do you like apples? I got lots of 'em. I got an apple orchard, I'll show you."

All the beauty of the afternoon seemed in the distance, on the hills, in the dull soft sky.
"Those trees are beautiful on the hills," I said.

"Autumn's a lovely season. The trees are getting ready to die, and they show their
colors, proud-like."

"No such thing in our own country," I said.

That remark seemed unkind, I realized later. It touched him off on a long deserted
tangent, but ever there perhaps. How many times did lonely mind take unpleasant detours away
from the familiar winding lanes towards home for fear of this, the remembered hurt, the long lost
youth, the grim shadows of the years; how many times indeed, only the exile knows. It was a
rugged road we were traveling and the car made so much noise that I could not hear everything
he said, but I understood him.

He was telling his story for the first time in many years. He was remembering his own
youth. He was thinking of home. In these odd moments there seemed no cause for fear no cause
at all, no pain. That would come later. In the night perhaps. Or lonely on the farm under the apple
trees. In this old Visayan town, the streets are narrow and dirty and strewn with coral shells. You
have been there? You could not have missed our house, it was the biggest in town, one of the
oldest, ours was a big family. The house stood right on the edge of the street. A door opened
heavily and you enter a dark hall leading to the stairs. There is the smell of chickens roosting on
the low-topped walls, there is the familiar sound they make and you grope your way up a massive
staircase, the bannisters smooth upon the trembling hand.

Such nights, they are no better than the days, windows are closed against the sun;
they close heavily. Mother sits in her corner looking very white and sick. This was her world, her
domain. In all these years, I cannot remember the sound of her voice. Father was different. He
moved about. He shouted. He ranted. He lived in the past and talked of honor as though it were
the only thing. I was born in that house. I grew up there into a pampered brat. I was mean. One
day I broke their hearts. I saw mother cry wordlessly as father heaped his curses upon me and
drove me out of the house, the gate closing heavily after me. And my brothers and sisters took
up my father's hate for me and multiplied it numberless times in their own broken hearts. I was
no good. But sometimes, you know, I miss that house, the roosting chickens on the low-topped
walls. I miss my brothers and sisters, Mother sitting in her chair, looking like a pale ghost in a
corner of the room. I would remember the great live posts, massive tree trunks from the forests.
Leafy plants grew on the sides, buds pointing downwards, wilted and died before they could
become flowers. As they fell on the floor, father bent to pick them and throw them out into the
coral streets.

His hands were strong. I have kissed these hands . . . many times, many times. Finally
we rounded a deep curve and suddenly came upon a shanty, all but ready to crumble in a heap
on the ground, its plastered walls were rotting away, the floor was hardly a foot from the ground.
I thought of the cottages of the poor colored folk in the south, the hovels of the poor everywhere
in the land. This one stood all by itself as though by common consent all the folk that used to
live here had decided to say away, despising it, ashamed of it. Even the lovely season could not
color it with beauty.

A dog barked loudly as we approached. A fat blonde woman stood at the door with a
little boy by her side. Roger seemed newly scrubbed. He hardly took his eyes off me. Ruth had
a clean apron around her shapeless waist. Now as she shook my hands in sincere delight I
noticed shamefacedly (that I should notice) how rough her hands were, how coarse and red with
labor, how ugly! She was no longer young and her smile was pathetic. As we stepped inside and
the door closed behind us, immediately I was aware of the familiar scent of apples. The room
was bare except for a few ancient pieces of second-hand furniture. In the middle of the room
stood a stove to keep the family warm in winter. The walls were bare. Over the dining table hung
a lamp yet unlighted. Ruth got busy with the drinks. She kept coming in and out of a rear room
that must have been the kitchen and soon the table was heavy with food, fried chicken legs and
rice, and green peas and corn on the ear. Even as we ate, Ruth kept standing, and going to the
kitchen for more food. Roger ate like a little gentleman.

"Isn't he nice looking?" his father asked.

"You are a handsome boy, Roger," I said.

The boy smiled at me. You look like Daddy," he said.

Afterwards I noticed an old picture leaning on the top of a dresser and stood to pick it
up. It was yellow and soiled with many fingerings. The faded figure of a woman in Philippine
dress could yet be distinguished although the face had become a blur.

"Your . . . " I began. "I don't know who she is," Fabia hastened to say.

"I picked that picture many years ago in a room on La Salle street in Chicago. I have
often wondered who she is."

"The face wasn't a blur in the beginning?"

"Oh, no. It was a young face and good."

 Ruth came with a plate full of apples. "Ah," I cried, picking out a ripe one.

"I've been thinking where all the scent of apples came from.

The room is full of it." "I'll show you," said Fabia.

He showed me a backroom, not very big. It was half-full of apples. "Every day," he
explained,

"I take some of them to town to sell to the groceries. Prices have been low. I've been
losing on the trips."

"These apples will spoil," I said.

"We'll feed them to the pigs."

Then he showed me around the farm. It was twilight now and the apple trees stood bare
against a glowing western sky. In apple blossom time it must be lovely here. But what about
wintertime? One day, according to Fabia, a few years ago, before Roger was born, he had an
attack of acute appendicitis. It was deep winter. The snow lay heavy everywhere. Ruth was
pregnant and none too well herself. At first she did not know what to do. She bundled him in
warm clothing and put him on a cot near the stove. She shoveled the snow from their front door
and practically carried the suffering man on her shoulders, dragging him through the newly made
path towards the road where they waited for the U.S. Mail car to pass.

Meanwhile snowflakes poured all over them and she kept rubbing the man's arms and
legs as she herself nearly froze to death.

"Go back to the house, Ruth!" her husband cried, "you'll freeze to death."

But she clung to him wordlessly. Even as she massaged his arms and legs, her tears
rolled down her cheeks.

"I won't leave you," she repeated. Finally the U.S. Mail car arrived.

The mailman, who knew them well, helped them board the car, and, without stopping
on his usual route, took the sick man and his wife direct to the nearest hospital. Ruth stayed in
the hospital with Fabia. She slept in a corridor outside the patients' ward and in the day time
helped in scrubbing the floor and washing the dishes and cleaning the men's things. They didn't
have enough money and Ruth was willing to work like a slave.

"Ruth's a nice girl," said Fabia, "like our own Filipino women.

Before nightfall, he took me back to the hotel. Ruth and Roger stood at the door holding
hands and smiling at me. From inside the room of the shanty, a low light flickered. I had a last
glimpse of the apple trees in the orchard under the darkened sky as Fabia backed up the car.
And soon we were on our way back to town. The dog had started barking. We could hear it for
some time, until finally, we could not hear it anymore, and all was darkness around us, except
where the headlamps revealed a stretch of road leading somewhere. Fabia did not talk this time.
I didn't seem to have anything to say myself. But when finally we came to the hotel and I got
down, Fabia said,
 "Well, I guess I won't be seeing you again."

It was dimly lighted in front of the hotel and I could hardly see Fabia's face. Without
getting off the car, he moved to where I had sat, and I saw him extend his hand. I gripped it.

"Tell Ruth and Roger," I said, "I love them."

He dropped my hand quickly. "They'll be waiting for me now," he said.

"Look," I said, not knowing why I said it, "one of these days, very soon, I hope, I'll be
going home. I could go to your town."

"No," he said softly, sounding very much defeated but brave, "Thanks a lot. But, you
see, nobody would remember me now."

Then he started the car, and as it moved away, he waved his hand.

"Goodbye," I said, waving back into the darkness.

And suddenly the night was cold like winter straying early in these northern woodlands.
I hurried inside. There was a train the next morning that left for Muncie, Indiana, at a quarter
after eight.

-----oo0o0oo----

Realism in Scent of Apples serves as the tool of the author to depict the lives of Filipinos
in abroad. In this short story there are series of themes that are presented either in an implicit or
explicit way that brings the reader to read on.
In one of the character who captured my undivided attention is in the sense that the character
put a trademark in himself just a Filipino farmer which is a common trait of a Filipino who sees
himself as a Filipino only. This is an often response of Filipino wherever and whenever is asking
him/her about such. . We tend to be ashamed and make it inferior, racial discrimination per se;
however there is also a lot of prejudice that has absolutely no ties with race that the character in
the story portrays. This is what the author implies in his first part of the story.
The story focuses on the real score of Filipinos who cannot come back to the Philippines due to
poverty. It mirrors the immigrant-character longing to come back to his own land. And when he
sees a fellow Filipino he was very delighted to introduce him to his family living in a small house
having an apple orchard. It is meant to show that not all Filipinos are lucky to go abroad and it
is indeed possible the lives of Filipinos to be miserable and suffer from poverty even in abroad.
Santos shows that even we are in a foreign land we still carry the manners that we Filipinos
have, his character shows how hospitable Filipinos are. If were going to take a look at the
settings of the story particularly the scenario of the narrator were he is with his fellow Filipino
going to his familys place, the author described the place as the beauty of the afternoon
seemed in the distance, on the hills, in a dull soft sky. When they got into the house of Fabia,
his description of the house was repulsive so as his impression for his wife, mean words per se.
But when twilight came and Fabia took him outside he was amused of the view.

--------oOo------
 MADONNA
Genoveva Edroza Matute

Characters:
Osang the first one to judge Madonna until she realizes everything.
Madonna a matron who attending dance lessons in Bliss Club.
Sonny the dance instructor in the Bliss Club.
Bella the one occupying room C.
Ada the one occupying room D.
Rita Rosales Osangs friend
Dading housemaid of Madonna
Mary Jane the one who gives information about the matron and the Bliss Club.

In Santa Salome Street Quezon City, there was an apartment with 6 rooms on it, from A
to F. The room C was occupied by Bella; room D by Ada; room E by Osang (the one narrating
the story) and room F (the last room of the apartment) occupied by Madonna (it was just a name
being tagged on her by her roommates) together with her housemaid Dading. Room A and B
are occupied by the person who doesnt really care about their surroundings.

Out of nowhere, Ada, Osang and Bella are having a conversation about Madonna.
Madonna is a typical woman aging 50 above with a bushy yellowish hair, shaved eyebrows, full
of make-up and lipstick which seems like shes on her teenage years.
Since Madonna is a new transferee from that apartment, she is always the topic of the girls there.

The following days, a tall and gorgeous man that seems like a 25 year old due to his body
built who is always visiting Madonna catches the attention of the three of us. The man sometimes
took a long time inside the room F and sometimes he is there in a short while.
Whenever Madonna is leaving the apartment, her housemaid Dading is the only one left and for
her not to be bored, she is just wasting her time talking to their neighbours.

Dading was once asked by Ada, Who is that gorgeous man that is always visiting
Madonna? Is he the boyfriend of your boss?

I dont know she answered.

Come to think of it, you are the one who is always with her, and yet you are going to tell
me you dont know? said Bella. But Dading still insisted that she really dont know anything.

What does your boss call him? asked Bella. Sani replied Dading. Ah, Sonny? then
Bella laughed. Sonny Boy? Osang added that makes them burst out laughter.

Many stories spread out about the relationship between Sonny and Madonna even if they
are not yet sure. One day, Madonna forgot to bring her make-up kit so she called Dading to bring
it to her in Bliss Club at Pasay City. Bliss Club is a dancing school for matron. Before going
home, Dading watched the matrons and so as her boss dancing that was being instructed by
Sonny.

Madonna is a sugar mommy! Sonny is a DI or in other terms, Dance Instructor and

nothing else but... as I stated.

Nothing else but... said Ada

 Thats it! Bella continued.

We got some further information from Mary Jane, a new transferee in Santa Salome that
according to her, she came from different apartments from Pasay, Malate and Ermita.

Before, she is also a housemaid of different matrons. Thats why she knew that Bliss club
is a legal club that has permission from the higher sectors of the government. Dance Instructors
like Sonny are legal as well but then again...

There are private activities that a matron and a D.I. are doing like . . . Sexual Intercourse.
Bliss Club is a diverse group of matrons. They all have prosperous lives. Some of them are
widow, mistresses; others are those whose husbands are impotent already those who are out
of the country

Even if I am like this, I can never take it to see those women who are just taking good
care of such D.I. while their husbands are almost dying from other countries just to assure they
will earn money for their living Mary Jane added.

Bella asked Mary Jane if she knew about Madonna, but she only answered that she was
just a new boarder from that apartment. Bella told Mary Jane that Madonna is a 50 year old
woman who is trying to be like a teenager. She is also a dancer in Bliss Club and has its own
handsome and gorgeous D.I.

Some of them are just entertaining themselves Mary Jane explained. Where does she
come from? Mary Jane aadded. In Bicol! You know much about them, right? Osang initiated
as she fight for what she think Madonna is, since she was the first one to judge Madonnas
personality. I am always criticizing Madonna. But I always do come to the point of what my friend
named Rita Rosales told me, That we are inclined to criticize others because we do want also
to do those things that we criticized upon It is just that we do not have time or either we are
not that strong enough to do it. Every night, I was wondering why Room F is closed that seems
nobody is at home. I knew that Dading was taking her leave and Madonna was the only one left
in Room F.As Id go to my bed, theres this feeling that triggers me to take a look at room F. I
was shock when I saw the D.I. asking for help. He was carrying the unconscious Madonna. I
immediately ran to help the D.I. open the door to bring Madonna inside the room. As we enter
the room, The D.I. carefully laid Madonna in the sofa.

Mommy! Mommy! as the D.I. troubled in the said situation. In a short while, Madonna
gradually open her eyes uttering a statement that says, Thank you my child. . . Thank you
Osang,

I waited the sunrise before I go home. I must surely must say that I am out of nowhere
because I came to a realization for what Madonnas D.I. confessed to me. All they have is just a
very deep motherly relationship. Madonnas D.I. added that he was once a thief who is trying to
steal valuable things from the matron but the moment she met Madonna, everything changes.
Madonna accepted him for who he are without thinking of his past personality and treat him as
his real son. He was able to find a mother figure in Madonnas personality since he grew up in
an orphanage. At the same time, Madonna found him the love that was being denied by a father
which she never traditionally known; a husband that never offers her the true meaning of love;
and a child that never in her life, she was able to share laughter and sadness with. For once in
her life, she thirsts for love. Sonny added that a man have different ways at discover the truths
in life on how to become a real man having works or jobs, ambition and race in life but a woman
will only become real one if she was love and be loved" As Sonny took care of Madonna for the
past few days, Madonna died already from a heart attack. I was smote for what my friend Rita
told me. That I was the one to judge a woman who never once became a real woman.

-------oo00oo------

The Hand of the Enemy won the 1961 Stonehill Award for Filipino Novel in English. In this
novel, Kerima Polotan probes into the sensibility of the middle-class, and the intellectual elite.
With her technical competence and fluent writing, Polotan follows her heroine as she agonizes
through her marriage, the unfaithfulness of her husband, and the sense that life has defeated
her. These personal concerns are linked to the climate of social and political corruption
particularly in the city due to society's failure to read the lessons of history. Yet Polotan, although
she shows her character to be a victim (not so much of society circumstances as of her own
failure of will and her rather romantic perceptions and confused set of priorities), recognizes in
her life and career that it is essential for a woman to survive and for a woman writer to be able
to write and continue writing.

The Hand of The Enemy

By Kerima Polotan Tuvera

All throughout college, her ailling father had written her harsh unforgiving letters, speaking
with the eloquence that the only the dying can have, demanding that she return home. But she
had held out, even when the old man cut her allowance. She had pawned her jewelry, and when
that had dwindled, then she got a job. Running occasionally into old friends, she would clamp
her tongue down on the cruel message that she ached to send home. It would not help she
knew. The Perezes and the Villanons and the Abads would soon enough hasten to Luna to
speak the shocked tones of Capitan Paulinos daughter, working! Like someone poorly born.
The balding cashier whose pudgy fingers pushed her pay across the counter to her every two
weeks for twop years at Bells Embroidery House did not know that Emma pleased, she could
pay for his life, and ten others like him.

Emmas father owned eight hundred hectares of the best rice land in Luna, but he had
married again. Tere was all Emmas tragedy. The man who had wept because Emmas mother
could give him only Emma now appeared to discover new strength in his limds. In ten years, the
piano teacher-his second wife-gave birth ten times and Emma Mercene found herself with ten
half-brother and sisters.

I disown you, her father wrote in his last letter. One week later, he died in his sleep.

Emma Mercene arrived in Luna in time to see him being pushed into the family
mausoleum. As soon as she had turned away from the sight of the hole being shut with cement
and stone and marble slab, her fathers second wife, her thin, parchment-like skin stretched tight
across her high cheek-bones, pulled a large envelop and dropped this in Emmas hand. She
babbled hysterically of mortgages and foreclosures. Emma Mercenne, unable to feel grief at her
fathers death, now felt sorry for the woman who had estranged him from her.

There was nothing more-nothing more was to be had. Emma, going through the
documents, knew that the old Mercene wealth was gone.
 The piano teacher and her dead fathers offrings stood by to see Emma off on the night
train at the same day. Bereaved, bankrupt, Emmas stepmother now fount time to hold her tightly
and whisper brokenly her regret for the past years.

One week after the graduation, Emma Mercene was sailing for the South, to flash out a
marriage-shy fiance who had disappeared mysteriously that March. She found him in Ipil,
tending a store, his lawyers diploma tucked on the wall above a row of candy jars. Antonio
Fuentes jiggled a fat baby on his knee. He swayed like a drunken fool, pointing to the boy and
saying, My son. Emma could not find the strength to break the bottles or upbraid him, for what
indeed had he done? I never proffered marriage, he said, filling the small boys mouth with soft
candy while Emma stood beneath the nipa leaves of the frail lean-to. She watched a swarm of
flies alight on the strain of dried fish. Never, never, Antonio Fuentes repeated. Never marriage,
Emma.

Thats right, she said. When he stood up to swat the flies, she noticed that he wore a
pair of pajama trousers. Oh, put on your pants, Tony, she said and left.

It was a week before Emma realized that she had been jilted. By then she was back in
the city and summer had begun in the earnest. The humid mornings, the merciless noons, the
damp evenings, these left the skin dry, the body tired. At seven in the morning, a cup of coffee
and a piece of bread sloshing around her stomach, she jostled her way through the Quiapo
crowd, trying to arrange her face in soft, evocative lines. She did not wish tro look like the rest
of the anxious, worried people who pushed her space in jeepney or on side walk.

With April, a lethargy upon the streets. People moved more heavily, as if burdened by a
common frustration. In the office where now she worked, proofreading ads for the bi-monthly
Teachers Journal, the days were a vacuum. Occasionally, the phone rang but it was always for
someone else-for Salud or Rita, their lunches-cold rice, fried fish-and eat quickly. It was an
unpleasant chore to be done with. Then Emma would walk to the cooler to wash the taste of
food from her mouth.

The main protagonist in the novel is Emma Gorrez, nea Emma Mercene, and it is from
her point of view that much of the action is seen. She also has grown up as an unwanted chid,
though in a different way from Norma Rividad: Norma grew up in poverty; Emma was reared on
an 800-hectare farm. But after her mother's death and her father's remarriage, she had left home
to work in Manila. Jilted by a former suitor, disinherited in her father's lifetime and penniless after
his death, Emma tries first one job, then another, keeping her integrity amid morally squalid
surroundings in the city which disgust her. An sdvertisement in the papers catches her eye, and
she goes--in answer to the advertisement -to Tayug to become a teacher in Mr. Rividad's high
school.

Among her duties is that of adviser to two student organizations: the History Club and the
School Newspaper. The History Club becomes the occasion for her researches into the
"colorum" uprising of Tayug in which so many people had been killed. The school paper, on the
other hand, brings her on one occasion to Dagupan to see the printers. There, at the printing
press, she meets Domingo Gorrez whom she eventually marries. Domingo Gorrez is also a
native of Tayug, the surviving son of a once powerful politician who at one time was governor of
the province. Having inherited the house in Tayug and a small farm in the country and little eke,
Domingo seeks his fortune, first in Manila (where he fails) and later in Pangasinan as editor of a
local newspaper (where he again fails), He eventually finds uncongenial employment in a local
construction company. But it is while Domingo Gorrez is still the idealistic but jipecunious editor
of the Pangasinan Clarion that he marries Emma Mercene.
 He has failed in Manila and so has she: but they start life with youthful optimism, and for
a few years they and their two children live quietly in frugal comfort in the secure surroundings
of Tayug. But this peace is shattered by the advent of Nora Cosio. She is the wife of an army
major, and both she and her husband have hitched their wagon to the rising star of a Big Man
who gets elected President in the national elections of 1953. During the electoral campaign Nora
Cosio is an indefatigable worker, and she arrives in Tayug with a truckload of shirts and rice for
distribution among the populace.

She invites herself to the Gorrez house, uses it as her base of operations, and with her
charm she wins the support of Domingo Gorrez who himself bezome an effective campaigner
among his tenant. But Nora Cosio's charm appears synthetic to Emma Gorrez, to whom the
mode of campaigning-the kissing of babies, the giving away of gifts, the promise of & better
world-seems somehow dishonest. With intuitive instinct Emma recognizes Nora Cosio as a
menace to her home and her family. Nora Cosio is a menace not in the usual and predictable
way of the "love triangle", but in a wholly unexpected manner: by enslaving the Gorrezes and
casting them off when their usefulness is over. Nora Cosio's candidate becomes President. Her
husband, the ex-army major, becomes a powerful member of the Cabinet. Living as they do in
ever increasing affluence in Manila, the Cosios think of repaying the Gorrezes' hospitality by
suggesting that they abandon their shabby obscurity in Tayug and move into the city where they
could enter into a business partnership. Domingo Gorrez accepts, over the protests of his wife
Emma who has misgivings about the Cosios. Emma is content to spend the rest of her life in the
modest but stable security of Tayug. But not her husband. He has failed once in the city: he
would make another try.

They move to Manila, into the shabby discomfort of Sampaloc. They are patronized by
the Cosio. A printing press is established: financed by the Cosio, operated by the Gorrezes-but
operated at great personal sacrifice; for Nor? Cosio, enthusiastic at first, soon loses interest. The
money is no longer forthcoming. The price of paper goes up. The Gorrezes have to borrow
money to meet the weekly payroll. The workers, poorly paid, do shabby work. The customers
complain. The Gorrez children are underfed. Doming Gorrez, plodding the streets in search of
more customers, becomes sickly. Emma Gorrez tries desperately to make ends meet, but she
finally comes to the end of her rope. Treated as a menial by Nora Cosio, Emma demands a
confrontation. In a violent quarrel, Nora calls Emma a thief. Emma knocks Nora down, rips open
her dress, seizes her hand and pins it under the electric cutter as the blade descends.

Opens on a quiet note, with Emma Gorrez back in Tayug. But she is alone with the
children. Her husband is not with her. Gradually, the reader finds out what has happened: Nora
Cosio's hand had not been amputater: after all; one of the employees had kicked the electric
plug off the socket and had pushed the women away from the descending blade. The business
partnership was of worse broken up, and the Cosios could have sued the Gorrezes for assault:
but since both sides wanted to avoid a public scandal, nothing further was done in the matter.
But Domingo Gorrez, thus left without a job, lands a more promising one in the public relations
department of a firm called Qualitv Products. Tired of his farmer failures, he decides this time to
play the game well. He earns one promotion after another until he becomes a trusted subordinate
with a large monthly salary. "Playing the game" involves other things besides the routine work
of the office. He is expected, for instance, to cover up for the top executive's amorous activities.
Gorrez's office is used as a "resting place" for the office girls in whom the boss is interested.
("Pimping", his wife Emma calls it.) has to buy off an old man whose granddaughter has been
violated by the company's vice president.
 It is Gorrez's action in a crucial moment that prevents the workers' union from obtaining
their just demands for better wages and better working terms. To Emma, her husband's activities
seem both dishonest and destructive. He has become a destroyer of men's lives. What does a
man live for? she asks. Isn't it enough to have a roof and a moment to be comfortable in? Unable
to stand this new corruption, Emma leaves her husband and brings her two children back to
Tayug to resume her job as a teacher in Mr. Rividad's high school. And there--a lonely woman
she falls in love with Mr. Rividad, himself a lonely man. But the affair has an unexpected
denouement, which must be read to be appreciated.

An example of this last-mentioned point is the passage in which Emma Mercene learns
from her landlady about Norma Rividad's wayward ways. "What made a man bear it?' cried Mrs.
Pintoy, shelling beans, while Emma washed her hair at the sink. The shelling of the beans and
the washing of the hair at the sink are irrelevant to the story that Mrs. Pintoy is telling, namely,
Norma Rividad's unfaithfulness to her husband. But these details serve to anchor the incident to
time and place: we know where they are-in the kitchen; and we know what they are doing as
they talk-the one shelling beans, the other washing her hair at the sink. Sometimes the casual
introduction of a vivid detail not ordinaly objectifies the incident but serves to define the emotional
atmosphere. For instance, in the same passage, Mrs. Pintoy wonders how Mr. Rividad must feel
about his wife's infidelity: It wasn't merely the humiliation of having it known abroad that one's
wife prowled the streets like an alley cat, but the waiting up for her to come back from other
men's arms, what did a man think of then? Murder or suicideMrs. Pintoy crushed the beans
fiercely in her fingers. The crushing of the beans in her fingers indicates Mrs. Pintoy's indignation.
Emma on the other hand reacts differently. Emma put her head beneath the faucet and watched
the grime flow away--sometimes, a man thought of penance. Emma knows what Mrs. Pintoy
does not: Mr. Rividad is trying to atone for what his parents-the leaders of the "colorum" rebellion-
had done to Tayug. Emma's reaction therefore has a symbolic touch. The washing of the hair
and the flowing away of the dirt leaves the hair clean: symbolic of the purification effected by
penance. Sometimes a casual detail brought in to objectify a scene, serves also to render ironic
judgment on it. For instance, a bitter quarrel takes place between Domingo Gorrez and his wife
Emma. They are in their bedroom overlooking a quiet street and an estero in Manila. They had
had a wearying fight and he cut short their argument with one vicious blow of his fist against the
bedroom wall. Emma went to the window, pushed the curtain aside and looked out upon a scene
of peace: the pavements empty; the stores across the street boarded up; the moon shattering in
a million pieces on the canal waters that were clear for once. Outside, peace; inside, hatred and
bitterness. The juxtaposition heightens the contrast.

The "colorum"revolt which is repeatedly mentioned in the novel was an actual historical
event which took place in 1931, but Ms. Tuvera has altered the details (as a novelist is entitled
to do) to suit her narrative. The term "Colorum" originates from the liturgy: many of the prayers
end with the phrase in suecrola saeculorum (forever and ever). In the mumbo jumbo of
superstition, the term saeculorum became truncated. The rebels who practiced the superstition
became knom as "colorurn"-a term which has come to mean anything unlicensed or extralegal.
Historically, the "colorurn" revolt was an uprising of disgruntled peasants directed against the
government and the landlords. It started on a Saturday night. The peasants burned down the
houses of two policemen in the town of San Nicolas. Pangasinan. While the houses were ablaze,
the peasants some in commandeered buses, others on horseback, others m foot-converged
upon the town of Tayug, ten kilometers distant. There were some seventy of them, of whom
fourteen were women, Arriving in Tayug an hour after midnight and armed mostly with bolos,
they attacked the Constabulary Camp, killing some of the wildiers and seizing their guns. They
then set fire to the town hall, looted the houses and set them also on fire. By this time it was
sunrise of Sunday, and with amazing (and amusing) inconsistency the rebels trooped into the
church, awakened the priest, and demanded Mass and breakfast. (Whatever they were rebelling
against, it wa; apparently not against God or the Church.) Mass was offered and breakfast
served. The rebels were still in the church or in the adjoining rectory when Constabulary
reenforcements arrived, first from Dagupan, and later from Manila. Protected by the massive
walls of the church or the ample embrasures of the conuento, the rebels put up a stiff resistance
for ten hours, until the soldiers, greatly reenforcing, stormed the buildings and captured the
rebels. The casualties were not many. Some died, others escaped, most were cap tured. They
stood trial but were mildly treated.

The women were all discharged "for lack of evidence"; the men were given short prison
terms, except the leader-Pedro Calosa-who was sentenced to life imprisonment but paroled after
eight years." Such was the historical event. In the novel the details are altered: All the peasant
rebels are killed. The leader of the revolt (Pedro Calosa in real life) is called Amang in the novel.
He has his head blown off. And he is later revealed to have been Rae Rividad's father. One
weird incident in the revolt appears also in the novel, but slightly altered. Historically, during a
lull in the fighting on Sunday afternoon, while the rebels were holding out in the convento, the
doors suddenly opened and a woman appeared, carrying a Philippine flag. With martial step she
walked out into the plaza towards the Rizal monument. In a stupid moment the Constabulary
fired on her and she fell at the foot of the monument. In the novel, she is represented as climbing
to the top of the monument waving her flag; she topples to the ground when she is shot. The
woman-in the novel-is Rene Rividad's mother. In the novel, all this is revealed only gradually to
Emma (and the reader). When the colorum revolt is first mentioned there is no indication that it
has any connection with any of the characters of the story. It is a past event whose only relevance
appears to be the fact that it happened in the very town where Emma proposes to teach. The
speaker is the school principal, and he speaks of the episode in disinvolved terms: Nineteen
years ago, a group of men and women captured Tayug. They were aggrieved tenants.

They burned the municipio and ran up a crazy flag in the town square. Perhaps it was
true they were fighting for more land. Perhaps again they were fighting because Christmas was
over, the cockpits were closed, and they had nothing else to do. But they were fighting. They did
it with bobs and rifles that they had seen for the first time in their lives only that morning. But it
was a furious, bloody fight they were trying to get something deep and fundamental out of their
systems. They died in the church patio, crouching behind the low walls. They jumped up to shoot
and - 4 An interesting interview with Pedro Calosa held in Pangasinan in 1966 (one year before
his death) has been reported by David R. Sturtevant, "Epilog for an Old Colorum", dropped,
hugging the ground.

One man's head was blown off and his left eye flew and was plastered against the wall.
They buried him without his head, while his eye stared back at those who would scrape it off the
wall. For a long time, it stayed there, until the sun shrivelled it and the rain washed it away. But
people say, if you stand before that particuIar spot and Iook, you might see it yet. It's something
we don't show to strangers. Precisely. It is something to be ashamed of. A skeleton in the closet.
But dead, like any skeleton. But this assumption is contradicted by the next person who mentions
the episode to Emma, namely, the town judge. He happens to meet her on the corridor of the
school building as she comes out from a session with her History Club. He suggests that the
History Club might do well to study the "colorurn" revolt. "But why that?" asks Emma.
"And why not?'his voice rose. "The town has not been the same since the insurrection. .
. " So the "colorum" insurrection does not belong simply to the past. It has a present relevance:
the town has not been the same since. The judge explains: prior to the uprising, Tayug was a
carefree town, interested in fiestas and beauty contats and the like. Then the peasant uprising
occurred. "When it was over, many things were gone. Not just relatives dead and houses burned
and important papers missing from the municipio, but something else again: a certain innocence,
a graciousness, gone from the town." Presumably like the "graciousness" of the American South
which after the Civil War was "gone with the wind". Having promised the judge to set her History
CIub interested in the colorum revolt, Emma dutifully digs up the details of the uprising. She
makes two trips by bus to the Dagupan public library, looks up old newspapers, writes to the
historical section of the Army. From these researches, Emma begins to see that the colorum
revolt was not merely an abstract historical event. It was a human event, involving flesh and
blood. Those who fought and those who died were men and women.

An item had read: An official said, "We were caught by surprise. There had been no
signs." No signs? Harvests delayed, because men had met in bamboo groves. Bolos
unsheathed, planted in the ground. Incantations murmured, and then husbands returned home
to suppers they would not eat and wives to whom they said nothing. Signs? For weeks in the
barrios there had been a feverish search for a white horse, a steed fit for Amang to ride Amang,
God's only begotten son, who would lead them out of the darkness into light; -Amang, who
gathered charcoal when there was nothing to plant, suddenly touched by the Holy Ghost,
donning white shirt, white pants, and a little piece of red cloth pinned. carefully over the heart,
clutching bolo in hand and raising it to the skies and proclaiming wildly, Let me free you, children,
God ordains! And the children: simplehearted men and women, losing their gentle sweet ways
overnight, turned into savages. Some rode on horses to Tavug. - - others mandered a Pantran,
sent the frightened conductor scurrying away, forced the driver to take them to town.

And in town? First the barracks, surprising the guards at the gate. Then the armory. Then
the sleeping quarters-leaving a trail of blood and guts and wounds wider and deeper than the
mouths of men. The woman who had herself polished the steps of her home before bidding the
alcalde up her humble abode herself picked up a rifle and aimed it at His Honor and pulled the
trigger and laughed at the noisy way His Honor died; and screaming, picked up a red' flag, and
ran across the plaza, clambering up Rizal's statue, and waved and waved and waved the flag,
while the hero in concrete looked away, carrying his eternal books, untouched by her fury, until
a bullet from the young lieutenant, roused from sleep beside his wife in Dagupan, felled the flag
and the woman who waved it. And she plummeted earthward where she lay clawing at the grass
It is a vividly human event as Emma sees it, but she still does not see any particular connection
with the present. But, while telling the story to the students, mentioning all the gory details and
finding the students bored, Emma suddenly realizes that the peasant uprising is after all not
merely a thing of the past: it has a definite and an urgent relevance to their lives. Emma Mercene
told the story slowly, anxious because the students seemed bored.

It suddenly mattered that they should know the story. There was something to be learned
from the revolt. But the students don't see what there is to learn.

"Why ma'am?' they ask. "Why should we. ma'am?' someone asked.
She looked at the questioning face, unrelenting in its youth and its insolence, its ignorance
and good looks

"Someday," Emma raid, "another may come along, offering to free you. If you know this
story, you may remember to ask him how he will do it. If he say it is, and fire, and the entrails of
men, what should you do? You might ask him what's the other side of the bargain For drawing
blood, for eating fire, for spilling your intestines, what do you get? You must ask questions. It is
the only way to keep from dying for foolish things." Emma has become a cynic, and her cynical
comments have been overheard by two people. The judge overhears it and applauds. The
principal overhears it and approaches Emma with blazing eyes. He orders Emma to dismiss the
students and then orders her to follow him. She follows him half running to the church patio
where he points to a spot on the wall. She can only see stone and lichen and moss: but it was
the spot where Amang's eye had been splashed when his head had been blown off.
 "Amang was my father," says the principal. The revelation is melodramatic, but the
melodrama has some justification. The revolt that had appeared at first as a purely historical
incident has turned out to be not only relevant but deeply personal.

The abortive rebellion in Tayug has captured the imagination of other novelists besides
Mrs. Tuvera. The event forms part of the historical background of Sionil Jose's The Pretenders,
published in 1962 and reprinted in 1966. In this latter novel, however, the "colorum" uprising
serves a somewhat different purpose. It is portrayed as part (or as an illustration) of the Ilocano
experience. Driven from their homeland in the Ilocos by want or by oppression or by the desire
to better their fortunes, the Ilocano peasantry migrated elsewhere. In Pangasinan they cleared
the forests and cultivated the land, establishing new communities-only to have their lands taken
away from them by the moneyed and educated elite: the "ilustrados".

In such a situation, an explosion like that of the "colorums" is almost inevitable: it is the
natural-if misguided--result of social injustice.

In Mrs. Tuvera's novel the Tayug revolt is used differently. She is not interested in its
causes (which are hardly mentioned) nor precisely in its effects (though these are adverted to).
Mrs. Tuvera is rather interested in its mythic significance.

The Tayug revolt is an allegory---or (if the term is preferred) a symbol---of something that
occurs quite commonly in human life. The peasants, with their pitiful weapons and their pathetic
belief in a non-existent invincibility, were trying to fight a battle which they not possibly win; but
they were fighting for a cause which was in itself presumably just. In their fanaticism by fighting
their crusade, they did more harm than good. Hence Emma's cynicism against "dying for foolish
things".

This raises certain interesting questions with regard to the novel's intent. On one level,
there is a perceptible parallel between the peasant lender Amang, a self-proclaimed Messiah,
and the presidential candidate portrayed by Nora Cosio and her fellow-campaigners as the
savior of the country. The peasants, by entrusting their lives to Amang, met only death. The
country, by entrusting its fate to a political "savior", is bound to be disillusioned. The parallel is
perceptible. But the novel seems to probe into the question at a deeper level of analogy. Is it
really possible or desirable (the nove! seems to say) to fight a crusade at all? Can a person ever
win such a crusade? And if a person can not win, is it worth fighting?

What should Rene Rividad have done in the face of his wife's habitual infidelity? Or what
should Emla Gorrez have done in the face of Nora Cosio's tyranny or her own husband's
surrender to the ways of the business world? Was there anything she could do? Despite her
cynicism, was not Emma herself, in a manner, "dying for foolish things"?

To put it in other terms, is not Emma in her constant seeking for honesty and integrity,
betrayed into a position where she herself finally gives up her own integrity? Who is the betrayer
in this case? The novel is entitled The Hand of the Enemy. Who is the Enemy?>

In some cases, of course, the "enemy" is external and perceptible. In the case of Emma
Gorrez, the enemy is Nora Cosio. In the case of Dorningo Gorrez, the enemy is partly the corrupt
world outside and partly Dorningo Gorrez himself. In the case of the Rividads, the enemy is
Norma Rividad and her uncontrolled deeires. Those are the visible-or at least identifiable-
enemies, as identifiable as the country's enemy during the Japanese invasion of 1941: "He wore
funny looking shoes, with the big toe away from the rest of his feet, and a cloth-hat with flags,
and hc was a Jap." But there are also invisible enemies, hardly identifiable. Mr. Rividad, married
to an unfaithful woman but in love with another whom he can not marry, is made to say:

"Life is the enemy. A man has wounds it can not heal, a woman has wants it can not
give, and everyone burns with a fatal fever."

That seems to echo an observation made by Emma herself: "It seemed to her as if she
had to break her heart first before life allowed her a grace or two." Are these merely passing
observations of Rene Rividad and Emma Gorrez, and applicable only to their own cases? Or do
they state a principle of wider-even universal - application? Is Life the "Enemy" to which the
novel's title refers? This question can not be answered satisfactorily merely from the data given
in the novel, for there are aspects of life which are not fully treated. The theological dimension
of life is hinted at but not explored. But the fact that such questions as these can be raised is an
indication of the novel's seriousnes. This is not a mere tale. It is a work of creative art that raises
serious questions and invites serious thought.

Footnote to Youth
By Jose Garcia Villa

The sun was salmon and hazy in the west. Dodong thought to himself he would tell his
father about Teang when he got home, after he had unhitched the carabao from the plow, and
let it to its shed and fed it. He was hesitant about saying it, but he wanted his father to know.
What he had to say was of serious import as it would mark a climacteric in his life. Dodong finally
decided to tell it, at a thought came to him his father might refuse to consider it. His father was
silent hard-working farmer who chewed areca nut, which he had learned to do from his mother,
Dodongs grandmother.

I will tell it to him. I will tell it to him.

The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish earthy
smell. Many slender soft worms emerged from the furrows and then burrowed again deeper into
the soil. A short colorless worm marched blindly to Dodongs foot and crawled calmly over it.
Dodong go tickled and jerked his foot, flinging the worm into the air. Dodong did not bother to
look where it fell, but thought of his age, seventeen, and he said to himself he was not young
any more.

Dodong unhitched the carabao leisurely and gave it a healthy tap on the hip. The beast
turned its head to look at him with dumb faithful eyes. Dodong gave it a slight push and the
animal walked alongside him to its shed. He placed bundles of grass before it land the carabao
began to eat. Dodong looked at it without interests.

Dodong started homeward, thinking how he would break his news to his father. He wanted
to marry, Dodong did. He was seventeen, he had pimples on his face, the down on his upper lip
already was darkthese meant he was no longer a boy. He was growing into a manhe was a
man. Dodong felt insolent and big at the thought of it although he was by nature low in statue.
Thinking himself a man grown, Dodong felt he could do anything.

He walked faster, prodded by the thought of his virility. A small angled stone bled his foot,
but he dismissed it cursorily. He lifted his leg and looked at the hurt toe and then went on walking.
In the cool sundown he thought wild you dreams of himself and Teang. Teang, his girl. She had
a small brown face and small black eyes and straight glossy hair. How desirable she was to him.
She made him dream even during the day.

Dodong tensed with desire and looked at the muscles of his arms. Dirty. This field
work was healthy, invigorating but it begrimed you, smudged you terribly. He turned back the
way he had come, then he marched obliquely to a creek.

Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts,
on the grass. The he went into the water, wet his body over, and rubbed at it vigorously. He was
not long in bathing, then he marched homeward again. The bath made him feel cool.

It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already was
lighted and the low unvarnished square table was set for supper. His parents and he sat down
on the floor around the table to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish, rice, bananas, and caked
sugar.

Dodong ate fish and rice, but did not partake of the fruit. The bananas were overripe and
when one held them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong broke off a piece of the cakes sugar,
dipped it in his glass of water and ate it. He got another piece and wanted some more, but he
thought of leaving the remainder for his parents.

Dodongs mother removed the dishes when they were through and went out to the batalan
to wash them. She walked with slow careful steps and Dodong wanted to help her carry the
dishes out, but he was tired and now felt lazy. He wished as he looked at her that he had a sister
who could help his mother in the housework. He pitied her, doing all the housework alone.

His father remained in the room, sucking a diseased tooth. It was paining him again,
Dodong knew. Dodong had told him often and again to let the town dentist pull it out, but he was
afraid, his father was. He did not tell that to Dodong, but Dodong guessed it. Afterward Dodong
himself thought that if he had a decayed tooth he would be afraid to go to the dentist; he would
not be any bolder than his father.

Dodong said while his mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There it was
out, what he had to say, and over which he had done so much thinking. He had said it without
any effort at all and without self-consciousness. Dodong felt relieved and looked at his father
expectantly. A decrescent moon outside shed its feeble light into the window, graying the still
black temples of his father. His father looked old now.

I am going to marry Teang, Dodong said.

His father looked at him silently and stopped sucking the broken tooth. The silence
became intense and cruel, and Dodong wished his father would suck that troublous tooth again.
Dodong was uncomfortable and then became angry because his father kept looking at him
without uttering anything.

I will marry Teang, Dodong repeated. I will marry Teang.

His father kept gazing at him in inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his seat.

I asked her last night to marry me and she saidyes. I want your permission. I want
it. There was impatient clamor in his voice, an exacting protest at this coldness, this
indifference. Dodong looked at his father sourly. He cracked his knuckles one by one, and the
little sounds it made broke dully the night stillness.

Must you marry, Dodong?

Dodong resented his fathers questions; his father himself had married. Dodong made a
quick impassioned easy in his mind about selfishness, but later he got confused.

You are very young, Dodong.

Im seventeen.

Thats very young to get married at.

I I want to marryTeangs a good girl.

Tell your mother, his father said.

You tell her, tatay.

Dodong, you tell your inay.

You tell her.

All right, Dodong.

You will let me marry Teang?

Son, if that is your wish of course There was a strange helpless light in his fathers
eyes. Dodong did not read it, so absorbed was he in himself.

Dodong was immensely glad he had asserted himself. He lost his resentment for his
father. For a while he even felt sorry for him about the diseased tooth. Then he confined his mind
to dreaming of Teang and himself. Sweet young dream.

Dodong stood in the sweltering noon heat, sweating profusely, so that his camiseta was
damp. He was still as a tree and his thoughts were confused. His mother had told him not to
leave the house, but he had left. He had wanted to get out of it without clear reason at all. He
was afraid, he felt. Afraid of the house. It had seemed to cage him, to compares his thoughts
with severe tyranny. Afraid also of Teang. Teang was giving birth in the house; she gave screams
that chilled his blood. He did not want her to scream like that, he seemed to be rebuking him. He
began to wonder madly if the process of childbirth was really painful. Some women, when they
gave birth, did not cry.

In a few moments he would be a father. Father, father, he whispered the word with awe,
with strangeness. He was young, he realized now, contradicting himself of nine months
comfortable Your son, people would soon be telling him. Your son, Dodong.

Dodong felt tired standing. He sat down on a saw-horse with his feet close together. He
looked at his callused toes. Suppose he had ten children What made him think that? What
was the matter with him? God!
 He heard his mothers voice from the house:

Come up, Dodong. It is over.

Suddenly he felt terribly embarrassed as he looked at her. Somehow he was ashamed to

his mother of his youthful paternity. It made him feel guilty, as if he had taken something no
properly his. He dropped his eyes and pretended to dust dirt off his kundiman shorts.

Dodong, his mother called again. Dodong.

He turned to look again and this time saw his father beside his mother.

It is a boy, his father said. He beckoned Dodong to come up.

Dodong felt more embarrassed and did not move. What a moment for him. His parents
eyes seemed to pierce him through and he felt limp.

He wanted to hide from them, to run away.

Dodong, you come up. You come up, he mother said.

Dodong did not want to come up and stayed in the sun.

Dodong. Dodong.

Ill come up.

Dodong traced tremulous steps on the dry parched yard. He ascended the bamboo steps
slowly. His heart pounded mercilessly in him. Within, he avoided his parents eyes. He walked
ahead of them so that they should not see his face. He felt guilty and untrue. He felt like crying.
His eyes smarted and his chest wanted to burst. He wanted to turn back, to go back to the yard.
He wanted somebody to punish him.

His father thrust his hand in his and gripped it gently.

Son, his father said.

And his mother: Dodong

How kind were their voices. They flowed into him, making him strong.

Teang? Dodong said.

Shes sleeping. But you go on

His father led him into the small sawali room. Dodong saw Teang, his girl-wife, asleep on
the papag with her black hair soft around her face. He did not want her to look that pale.

Dodong wanted to touch her, to push away that stray wisp of hair that touched her lips,
but again that feeling of embarrassment came over him and before his parents he did not want
to be demonstrative.
 The hilot was wrapping the child, Dodong heard it cry. The thin voice pierced him queerly.
He could not control the swelling of happiness in him.

You give him to me. You give him to me, Dodong said.

Blas was not Dodongs only child. Many more children came. For six successive years a
new child came along. Dodong did not want any more children, but they came. It seemed the
coming of children could not be helped. Dodong got angry with himself sometimes.

Teang did not complain, but the bearing of children told on her. She was shapeless and
thin now, even if she was young. There was interminable work to be done. Cooking. Laundering.
The house. The children. She cried sometimes, wishing she had not married. She did not tell
Dodong this, not wishing him to dislike her. Yet she wished she had not married. Not even
Dodong, whom she loved. There has been another suitor, Lucio, older than Dodong by nine
years, and that was why she had chosen Dodong. Young Dodong. Seventeen. Lucio had
married another after her marriage to Dodong, but he was childless until now. She wondered if
she had married Lucio, would she have borne him children. Maybe not, either. That was a better
lot. But she loved Dodong

Dodong whom life had made ugly.

One night, as he lay beside his wife, he rose and went out of the house. He stood in the
moonlight, tired and querulous. He wanted to ask questions and somebody to answer him. He
w anted to be wise about many things.

One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youths dreams. Why it must be so. Why one
was forsaken after Love.

Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question was not to be answered. It must
be so to make youth Youth. Youth must be dreamfully sweet. Dreamfully sweet. Dodong returned
to the house humiliated by himself. He had wanted to know a little wisdom but was denied it.

When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered and happy. It was late
at night and Teang and the other children were asleep. Dodong heard Blass steps, for he could
not sleep well of nights. He watched Blas undress in the dark and lie down softly. Blas was
restless on his mat and could not sleep. Dodong called him name and asked why he did not
sleep. Blas said he could not sleep.

You better go to sleep. It is late, Dodong said.

Blas raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice.

Dodong did not answer and tried to sleep.

Itay , Blas called softly.

Dodong stirred and asked him what it was.

I am going to marry Tona. She accepted me tonight.

Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving.

 Itay, you think it over.

Dodong lay silent.

I love Tona and I want her.

Dodong rose from his mat and told Blas to follow him. They descended to the yard, where
everything was still and quiet. The moonlight was cold and white.

You want to marry Tona, Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas was very
young. The life that would follow marriage would be hard

Yes.

Must you marry?

Blass voice stilled with resentment. I will marry Tona.

Dodong kept silent, hurt.

You have objections, Itay? Blas asked acridly.

Son n-none (But truly, God, I dont want Blas to marry yet not yet. I dont want
Blas to marry yet.)

But he was helpless. He could not do anything. Youth must triumph now. Love must
triumph now. Afterwards it will be life.

As long ago Youth and Love did triumph for Dodong and then Life.

Dodong looked wistfully at his young son in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad and sorry
for him.

-----oo00oo------

Marra PL. Lanot writes poetry and essays in Filipino, English and Spanish. She also
writes for newspapers, magazines and television, and has attended as invited delegate to
various international literary/poetry festivals, the most recent ones of which are in Colombia
(2013) and in India (2014).
 The Boy Who Never Learned

by Susan Refalda- Mercaida

The Boy Who Never Learned was written by Susan Refalda- Mercaida. This is an
example of a short story which is a prose type of literature. It is a brief artistic form of prose fiction
which focuses on a single main incident that involves one or more characters and is intended to
produce a single dominant impression. The short story, The Boy Who Never Learned is about
the friendship between Danny Dimatuto, a boy that was mocked by other people because of his
poor intellect and Ben, a boy who stood above the rest and got along with Danny well. In
analyzing fictions such as short stories, important things should be considered.
First are the four main elements that are interrelated in making a unified story: plot, characters,
setting and theme. Also, the point of view and style of the author:

I. Plot.
It is the framework of fiction that consists of causally related sequence of events which through
a conflict of opposing forces lead to a crisis or climax, the turning point of the story. This climax,
then proceed to a resolution, the part where the complication is solved and ends or concludes
happily or tragically. In The Boy Who Never Learned, these basic parts can be identified. First
is the exposition. It is the part in the story where Danny was introduced through describing his
physical appearance, his thoughts and the origin of his sobriquet. Also, this is where Ben and
other characters are presented directly or indirectly in the story. Next is the complication. This is
the portion in the story where Danny went to Mang Doro to buy some monay and Ben looked for
him which then led to the climax. A.Climax The climax took place when Ben confronted and got
angry to Danny for what Mang Doro had done and his response to it. And finally, the resolution
happened when Ben confessed that he will go to Manila to study and Danny bid goodbye to him.
In addition to the elements, there is also a conflict in the story B. ConflictsThe conflicts in the
story are combinations of both external and internal conflict. However, Danny basically
experienced social conflict in the form of the mockery of Mang Doro and the people of Banahaw
because of his mental incapacity, but as what was mentioned earlier, he also faced psychological
conflict(internal conflict) in the form of his fearfulness in being alone and intellectual inability.

II.Characters
The second element of a fiction is the characters. They are the persons about whom the story
is told which influence the events and vice versa. The characters in the story are Danny
Dimatuto, Ben, Aling Carmen, Mang Carding, Mang Doro, Bens mother and the people of
Banahaw that mocked Danny. In relation to the conflict, the characters may be classified into
two: protagonist and antagonist. In the story, Danny is the protagonist while Mang Doro and the
people that mocked Ben are the antagonists. In direct presentation, the author explicitly narrated
what the characters are like. This is illustrated in the following excerpt:

"Among the street urchins, Danny Dimatutos name evoked an image of a queer hydrocephalus,
a peculiarly robust boy whose shoulders sagged as if from and invisible burden.

His face was especially amusing with his thick under lip that held the mouth perpetually agape
so that flies were said to have travelled in and out of it in sheer delight and freedom. On the
other hand, in indirect presentation, the author implicitly described the characters by showing
the characters in action such as in the excerpt, But he shortchanged you. Nanay gave you one
peso for fetching us water. Mang Doro should have given you four buns for your one peso...
Bens point was etched with gathering fury. But he cheated you, dont you realize? Ben was
beside himself. He was almost crying"

III.Setting
Third element is the setting. It refers to the time, place, and general environment in which a piece
of fiction took place. First, the time of the short story, The Boy Who Never Learned, are different
for every event such as a Saturday afternoon when Danny and Ben talked about their dreams
and one morning when Danny tried to feed his dying pet, Broas. However, in general, the time
of the short story is when Danny was at his last year in high school and before he left for Manila
to further study. Then, the short story occurred at Banahaw. Interestingly, in the story, the setting
not only produced a background or physical context for the action, but it also revealed the
characters, shaped events and created atmosphere from which the story evolved. For example,
the railroad track and Dannys thoughts about a departing train enhanced the personality of
Danny as being fearful to be alone while Banahaw, the place itself, added a sense of Bens
progress in studying further from a province to Manila.IV. Theme Last among the elements is the
theme. The theme is the underlying idea or a truth the author wants to convey. Interestingly, the
story conveys a vast number of messages. One is to have an understanding heart as Danny.
This means that the way we treat other people is more important than any educational
attainment. Another message that was expressed is about friendship. The story communicates
that true friendship looks beyond on any impediments of a person, despite Dannys condition,
Ben became friends with him. Also, a true friend has a deep concern for his friend, Ben wanted
to inculcate in Dannys mind the idea of shame and self-respect as aprerequisite for respect from
others. So, on my opinion, the theme can be interpereted and expressed in two ways:
The way we treat other people is more important than our intellect and Genuine friendship can
surpass any boundaries.

V.Point of view
In addition to the elements of the plot, the point of view of the author must also be identified in
evaluating a fiction. The point of view refers to the angle of vision from where the story is told.
Of the four different points of view, the omniscient point of view was evident in the story. This is
because the author narrates the story using the third person pronoun, and he knows everything
including the feelings and thoughts of the character. An excerpt that proves this is as follows, ''
Ben liked the place where Danny Dimatuto lived. It was only some distance from the newly paved
road... How he loved the gentle sway, the soft pillow that smelled fragrantly of starch the silent
flicker of the gas-fed lamp... Danny felt lonely even with this boy who is the son of his mothers
friend. Did the people he knew get afraid, too? But they seemed so brave, so unafraid of
everything. He wished he were like the rest, like Ben. ''

VI. Irony
In addition, the writer used irony specifically dramatic irony in that Danny Dimatuto spoke highly
of Mang Doro, saying hes a good man, but the reader exactly knows the opposite. Then, the
author also utilized symbolism such that Ben signifies a true and honest friend. Finally, the writer
utilized suspense in that if Ben would give up his friendship because of Dannys dumbness after
a quarrel between them.