Short Stories
SCENT OF APPLES or similarities in inner qualities such as naturally belonged to the heart or to the
by Bienvenido Santos
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 and I 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
Philippine Literature in English
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.
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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 disappearedin 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 worstedtrousers 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,
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
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 he is 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,
2

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
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
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
3

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.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
"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.
__________________________________________________
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,
Dodong’s 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
Dodong’s 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 dark–these meant he was no longer a boy.
He was growing into a man–he 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.
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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.
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.”

Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman His father kept gazing at him in inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his
shorts, on the grass. The he went into the water, wet his body over, and rubbed at seat.
it vigorously. He was not long in bathing, then he marched homeward again. The “I asked her last night to marry me and she said…yes. I want your permission. I…
bath made him feel cool. want… it….” There was impatient clamor in his voice, an exacting protest at this
It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already coldness, this indifference. Dodong looked at his father sourly. He cracked his
was lighted and the low unvarnished square table was set for supper. His parents knuckles one by one, and the little sounds it made broke dully the night stillness.
and he sat down on the floor around the table to eat. They had fried fresh-water “Must you marry, Dodong?”
fish, rice, bananas, and caked sugar.
Dodong resented his father’s questions; his father himself had married. Dodong
Dodong ate fish and rice, but did not partake of the fruit. The bananas were made a quick impassioned easy in his mind about selfishness, but later he got
overripe and when one held them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong broke confused.
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 “You are very young, Dodong.”
his parents.
“I’m… seventeen.”
Dodong’s mother removed the dishes when they were through and went out to the
“That’s very young to get married at.”
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 “I… I want to marry…Teang’s a good girl.”
looked at her that he had a sister who could help his mother in the housework. He
pitied her, doing all the housework alone. “Tell your mother,” his father said.

His father remained in the room, sucking a diseased tooth. It was paining him “You tell her, tatay.”
again, Dodong knew. Dodong had told him often and again to let the town dentist
“Dodong, you tell your inay.”
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 “You tell her.”
tooth he would be afraid to go to the dentist; he would not be any bolder than his
father. “All right, Dodong.”

Dodong said while his mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There “You will let me marry Teang?”
it was out, what he had to say, and over which he had done so much thinking. He
“Son, if that is your wish… of course…” There was a strange helpless light in his
had said it without any effort at all and without self-consciousness. Dodong felt
father’s eyes. Dodong did not read it, so absorbed was he in himself.
relieved and looked at his father expectantly. A decrescent moon outside shed its

5
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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 mother’s 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.”
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
“I’ll… 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.
“She’s 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 Dodong’s 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…
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Dodong whom life had made ugly. Blas’s voice stilled with resentment. “I will marry Tona.”

One night, as he lay beside his wife, he rose and went out of the house. He stood Dodong kept silent, hurt.
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. “You have objections, Itay?” Blas asked acridly.

One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youth’s dreams. Why it must be so. “Son… n-none…” (But truly, God, I don’t want Blas to marry yet… not yet. I
Why one was forsaken… after Love. don’t want Blas to marry yet….)

Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question was not to be answered. But he was helpless. He could not do anything. Youth must triumph… now. Love
It must be so to make youth Youth. Youth must be dreamfully sweet. Dreamfully must triumph… now. Afterwards… it will be life.
sweet. Dodong returned to the house humiliated by himself. He had wanted to As long ago Youth and Love did triumph for Dodong… and then Life.
know a little wisdom but was denied it.
Dodong looked wistfully at his young son in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad
When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered and happy. It was and sorry for him.
late at night and Teang and the other children were asleep. Dodong heard Blas’s
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.
THE SUMMER SOLSTICE
“You better go to sleep. It is late,” Dodong said.
by Nick Joaquin
Blas raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice.

Dodong did not answer and tried to sleep.

THE MORETAS were spending St. John’s Day with the children’s grandfather,
“Itay …,” Blas called softly.
whose feast day it was. Doña Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound
Dodong stirred and asked him what it was. of screaming in her ears. In the dining room the three boys already attired in their
holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her, talking all at once.
“I am going to marry Tona. She accepted me tonight.”
“How long you have slept, Mama!”
Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving.
“We thought you were never getting up!”
“Itay, you think it over.”
“Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?”
Dodong lay silent.
“Hush, hush I implore you! Now look: your father has a headache, and so have I.
“I love Tona and… I want her.” So be quiet this instant—or no one goes to Grandfather.”
Dodong rose from his mat and told Blas to follow him. They descended to the Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnace, the
yard, where everything was still and quiet. The moonlight was cold and white. windows dilating with the harsh light and the air already burning with the
“You want to marry Tona,” Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas immense, intense fever of noon.
was very young. The life that would follow marriage would be hard… She found the children’s nurse working in the kitchen. “And why is it you who
“Yes.” are preparing breakfast? Where is Amada?” But without waiting for an answer
she went to the backdoor and opened it, and the screaming in her ears became
“Must you marry?”

7
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wild screaming in the stables across the yard. “Oh my God!” she groaned and,
grasping her skirts, hurried across the yard.
In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams, was hitching the
pair of piebald ponies to the coach.
“Not the closed coach, Entoy! The open carriage!” shouted Doña Lupeng as she
came up.
“But the dust, señora—“
“I know, but better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your wife,
eh? Have you been beating her again?”
“Oh no, señora: I have not touched her.”
“Then why is she screaming? Is she ill?”
“I do not think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, señora.
She is up there.”
When Doña Lupeng entered the room, the big half-naked woman sprawled across
the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Doña Lupeng was shocked.
“What is this Amada? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in such a posture!
Come, get up at once. You should be ashamed!”
But the woman on the bed merely stared. Her sweat-beaded brows contracted, as
if in an effort to understand. Then her face relax her mouth sagged open
humorously and, rolling over on her back and spreading out her big soft arms and
legs, she began noiselessly quaking with laughter—the mute mirth jerking in her
throat; the moist pile of her flesh quivering like brown jelly. Saliva dribbled from
the corners of her mouth.
Doña Lupeng blushed, looking around helplessly, and seeing that Entoy had
followed and was leaning in the doorway, watching stolidly, she blushed again.
The room reeked hotly of intimate odors. She averted her eyes from the laughing
woman on the bed, in whose nakedness she seemed so to participate that she was
ashamed to look directly at the man in the doorway.
“Tell me, Entoy: has she had been to the Tadtarin?”
“Yes, señora. Last night.”
“But I forbade her to go! And I forbade you to let her go!”
“I could do nothing.”
“Why, you beat her at the least pretext!”
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“But now I dare not touch her.”
“Oh, and why not?”
“It is the day of St. John: the spirit is in her.”
“But, man—“
“It is true, señora. The spirit is in her. She is the Tadtarin. She must do as she
pleases. Otherwise, the grain would not grow, the trees would bear no fruit, the
rivers would give no fish, and the animals would die.”
“Naku, I did not know your wife was so powerful, Entoy.”
“At such times she is not my wife: she is the wife of the river, she is the wife of
the crocodile, she is the wife of the moon.”
“BUT HOW CAN they still believe such things?” demanded Doña Lupeng of her
husband as they drove in the open carriage through the pastoral countryside that
was the arrabal of Paco in the 1850’s.
Don Paeng darted a sidelong glance at his wife, by which he intimated that the
subject was not a proper one for the children, who were sitting opposite, facing
their parents.
Don Paeng, drowsily stroking his moustaches, his eyes closed against the hot
light, merely shrugged.
“And you should have seen that Entoy,” continued his wife. “You know how the
brute treats her: she cannot say a word but he thrashes her. But this morning he
stood as meek as a lamb while she screamed and screamed. He seemed actually
in awe of her, do you know—actually afraid of her!”
“Oh, look, boys—here comes the St. John!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she sprang
up in the swaying carriage, propping one hand on her husband’s shoulder while
the other she held up her silk parasol.
And “Here come the men with their St. John!” cried voices up and down the
countryside. People in wet clothes dripping with well-water, ditch-water and
river-water came running across the hot woods and fields and meadows,
brandishing cans of water, wetting each other uproariously, and shouting San
Juan! San Juan! as they ran to meet the procession.
Up the road, stirring a cloud of dust, and gaily bedrenched by the crowds gathered
along the wayside, a concourse of young men clad only in soggy trousers were
carrying aloft an image of the Precursor. Their teeth flashed white in their
laughing faces and their hot bodies glowed crimson as they pranced past, shrouded
in fiery dust, singing and shouting and waving their arms: the St. John riding
8

swiftly above the sea of dark heads and glittering in the noon sun—a fine, blonde,
heroic St. John: very male, very arrogant: the Lord of Summer indeed; the Lord
of Light and Heat—erect and godly virile above the prone and female earth—
while the worshippers danced and the dust thickened and the animals reared and
roared and the merciless fires came raining down form the skies—the relentlessly
upon field and river and town and winding road, and upon the joyous throng of
young men against whose uproar a couple of seminarians in muddy cassocks
vainly intoned the hymn of the noon god:
That we, thy servants, in chorus
May praise thee, our tongues restore us…
But Doña Lupeng, standing in the stopped carriage, looking very young and
elegant in her white frock, under the twirling parasol, stared down on the passing
male horde with increasing annoyance. The insolent man-smell of their bodies
rose all about her—wave upon wave of it—enveloping her, assaulting her senses,
till she felt faint with it and pressed a handkerchief to her nose. And as she glanced
at her husband and saw with what a smug smile he was watching the revelers, her
annoyance deepened. When he bade her sit down because all eyes were turned on
her, she pretended not to hear; stood up even straighter, as if to defy those rude
creatures flaunting their manhood in the sun.
And she wondered peevishly what the braggarts were being so cocky about? For
this arrogance, this pride, this bluff male health of theirs was (she told herself)
founded on the impregnable virtue of generations of good women. The boobies
were so sure of themselves because they had always been sure of their wives. “All
the sisters being virtuous, all the brothers are brave,” thought Doña Lupeng, with
a bitterness that rather surprised her. Women had built it up: this poise of the male.
Ah, and women could destroy it, too! She recalled, vindictively, this morning’s
scene at the stables: Amada naked and screaming in bed while from the doorway
her lord and master looked on in meek silence. And was it not the mystery of a
woman in her flowers that had restored the tongue of that old Hebrew prophet?
“Look, Lupeng, they have all passed now,” Don Paeng was saying, “Do you mean
to stand all the way?”
She looked around in surprise and hastily sat down. The children tittered, and the
carriage started.
“Has the heat gone to your head, woman?” asked Don Paeng, smiling. The
children burst frankly into laughter.
Their mother colored and hung her head. She was beginning to feel ashamed of
the thoughts that had filled her mind. They seemed improper—almost obscene—
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and the discovery of such depths of wickedness in herself appalled her. She moved
closer to her husband to share the parasol with him.
“And did you see our young cousin Guido?” he asked.
“Oh, was he in that crowd?”
“A European education does not seem to have spoiled his taste for country
pleasures.”
“I did not see him.”
“He waved and waved.”
“The poor boy. He will feel hurt. But truly, Paeng. I did not see him.”
“Well, that is always a woman’s privilege.”
BUT WHEN THAT afternoon, at the grandfather’s, the young Guido presented
himself, properly attired and brushed and scented, Doña Lupeng was so charming
and gracious with him that he was enchanted and gazed after her all afternoon
with enamored eyes.
This was the time when our young men were all going to Europe and bringing
back with them, not the Age of Victoria, but the Age of Byron. The young Guido
knew nothing of Darwin and evolution; he knew everything about Napoleon and
the Revolution. When Doña Lupeng expressed surprise at his presence that
morning in the St. John’s crowd, he laughed in her face.
“But I adore these old fiestas of ours! They are so romantic! Last night, do you
know, we walked all the way through the woods, I and some boys, to see the
procession of the Tadtarin.”
“And was that romantic too?” asked Doña Lupeng.
“It was weird. It made my flesh crawl. All those women in such a mystic frenzy!
And she who was the Tadtarin last night—she was a figure right out of a
flamenco!”
“I fear to disenchant you, Guido—but that woman happens to be our cook.”
“She is beautiful.”
“Our Amada beautiful? But she is old and fat!”
“She is beautiful—as that old tree you are leaning on is beautiful,” calmly insisted
the young man, mocking her with his eyes.
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They were out in the buzzing orchard, among the ripe mangoes; Doña Lupeng
seated on the grass, her legs tucked beneath her, and the young man sprawled flat
on his belly, gazing up at her, his face moist with sweat. The children were chasing
dragonflies. The sun stood still in the west. The long day refused to end. From the
house came the sudden roaring laughter of the men playing cards.
“Beautiful! Romantic! Adorable! Are those the only words you learned in
Europe?” cried Doña Lupeng, feeling very annoyed with this young man whose
eyes adored her one moment and mocked her the next.
“Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over there—to see the holiness and the
mystery of what is vulgar.”
“And what is so holy and mysterious about—about the Tadtarin, for instance?”
“I do not know. I can only feel it. And it frightens me. Those rituals come to us
from the earliest dawn of the world. And the dominant figure is not the male but
the female.”
“But they are in honor of St. John.”
“What has your St. John to do with them? Those women worship a more ancient
lord. Why, do you know that no man may join those rites unless he first puts on
some article of women’s apparel and—“
“And what did you put on, Guido?”
“How sharp you are! Oh, I made such love to a toothless old hag there that she
pulled off her stocking for me. And I pulled it on, over my arm, like a glove. How
your husband would have despised me!”
“But what on earth does it mean?”
“I think it is to remind us men that once upon a time you women were supreme
and we men were the slaves.”
“But surely there have always been kings?”
“Oh, no. The queen came before the king, and the priestess before the priest, and
the moon before the sun.”
“The moon?”
“—who is the Lord of the women.”
“Why?”
“Because the tides of women, like the tides of the sea, are tides of the moon.
Because the first blood -But what is the matter, Lupe? Oh, have I offended you?”
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“Is this how they talk to decent women in Europe?”
“They do not talk to women, they pray to them—as men did in the dawn of the
world.”
“Oh, you are mad! mad!”
“Why are you so afraid, Lupe?”
“I afraid? And of whom? My dear boy, you still have your mother’s milk in your
mouth. I only wish you to remember that I am a married woman.”
“I remember that you are a woman, yes. A beautiful woman. And why not? Did
you turn into some dreadful monster when you married? Did you stop being a
woman? Did you stop being beautiful? Then why should my eyes not tell you
what you are—just because you are married?”
“Ah, this is too much now!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she rose to her feet.
“Do not go, I implore you! Have pity on me!”
“No more of your comedy, Guido! And besides—where have those children gone
to! I must go after them.”
As she lifted her skirts to walk away, the young man, propping up his elbows,
dragged himself forward on the ground and solemnly kissed the tips of her shoes.
She stared down in sudden horror, transfixed—and he felt her violent shudder.
She backed away slowly, still staring; then turned and fled toward the house.
ON THE WAY home that evening Don Paeng noticed that his wife was in a mood.
They were alone in the carriage: the children were staying overnight at their
grandfather’s. The heat had not subsided. It was heat without gradations: that
knew no twilights and no dawns; that was still there, after the sun had set; that
would be there already, before the sun had risen.
“Has young Guido been annoying you?” asked Don Paeng.
“Yes! All afternoon.”
“These young men today—what a disgrace they are! I felt embarrassed as a man
to see him following you about with those eyes of a whipped dog.”
She glanced at him coldly. “And was that all you felt, Paeng? Embarrassed — as
a man?”
“A good husband has constant confidence in the good sense of his wife,” he
pronounced grandly, and smiled at her.
10

But she drew away; huddled herself in the other corner. “He kissed my feet,” she
told him disdainfully, her eyes on his face.
He frowned and made a gesture of distaste. “Do you see? They have the instincts,
the style of the canalla! To kiss a woman’s feet, to follow her like a dog, to adore
her like a slave –”
“Is it so shameful for a man to adore women?”
“A gentleman loves and respects Woman. The cads and lunatics—they ‘adore’
the women.”
“But maybe we do not want to be loved and respected—but to be adored.”
But when they reached home she did not lie down but wandered listlessly through
the empty house. When Don Paeng, having bathed and changed, came down from
the bedroom, he found her in the dark parlour seated at the harp and plucking out
a tune, still in her white frock and shoes.
“How can you bear those hot clothes, Lupeng? And why the darkness? Order
someone to bring light in here.”
“There is no one, they have all gone to see the Tadtarin.”
“A pack of loafers we are feeding!”
She had risen and gone to the window. He approached and stood behind her,
grasped her elbows and, stooping, kissed the nape of her neck. But she stood still,
not responding, and he released her sulkily. She turned around to face him.
“Listen, Paeng. I want to see it, too. The Tadtarin, I mean. I have not seen it since
I was a little girl. And tonight is the last night.”
“You must be crazy! Only low people go there. And I thought you had a
headache?” He was still sulking.
“But I want to go! My head aches worse in the house. For a favor, Paeng.”
“I told you: No! go and take those clothes off. But, woman, whatever has got into
you!” he strode off to the table, opened the box of cigars, took one, banged the lid
shut, bit off an end of the cigar, and glared about for a light.
She was still standing by the window and her chin was up.
“Very well, if you do want to come, do not come—but I am going.”
“I warn you, Lupe; do not provoke me!”
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“I will go with Amada. Entoy can take us. You cannot forbid me, Paeng. There is
nothing wrong with it. I am not a child.”
But standing very straight in her white frock, her eyes shining in the dark and her
chin thrust up, she looked so young, so fragile, that his heart was touched. He
sighed, smiled ruefully, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Yes, the heat ahs touched you in the head, Lupeng. And since you are so set on
it—very well, let us go. Come, have the coach ordered!”
THE CULT OF the Tadtarin is celebrated on three days: the feast of St. John and
the two preceding days. On the first night, a young girl heads the procession; on
the second, a mature woman; and on the third, a very old woman who dies and
comes to life again. In these processions, as in those of Pakil and Obando,
everyone dances.
Around the tiny plaza in front of the barrio chapel, quite a stream of carriages was
flowing leisurely. The Moretas were constantly being hailed from the other
vehicles. The plaza itself and the sidewalks were filled with chattering, strolling,
profusely sweating people. More people were crowded on the balconies and
windows of the houses. The moon had not yet risen; the black night smoldered;
in the windless sky the lightning’s abruptly branching fire seemed the nerves of
the tortured air made visible.
“Here they come now!” cried the people on the balconies.
And “Here come the women with their St. John!” cried the people on the
sidewalks, surging forth on the street. The carriages halted and their occupants
descended. The plaza rang with the shouts of people and the neighing of horses—
and with another keener sound: a sound as of sea-waves steadily rolling nearer.
The crowd parted, and up the street came the prancing, screaming, writhing
women, their eyes wild, black shawls flying around their shoulders, and their long
hair streaming and covered with leaves and flowers. But the Tadtarin, a small old
woman with white hair, walked with calm dignity in the midst of the female
tumult, a wand in one hand, a bunch of seedling in the other. Behind her, a group
of girls bore aloft a little black image of the Baptist—a crude, primitive, grotesque
image, its big-eyed head too big for its puny naked torso, bobbing and swaying
above the hysterical female horde and looking at once so comical and so pathetic
that Don Paeng, watching with his wife on the sidewalk, was outraged. The image
seemed to be crying for help, to be struggling to escape—a St. John indeed in the
hands of the Herodias; a doomed captive these witches were subjecting first to
their derision; a gross and brutal caricature of his sex.
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Don Paeng flushed hotly: he felt that all those women had personally insulted him. “Hoy you are crushing my feet!”
He turned to his wife, to take her away—but she was watching greedily, taut and
breathless, her head thrust forward and her eyes bulging, the teeth bared in the “And let go of my shawl, my shawl!”
slack mouth, and the sweat gleaning on her face. Don Paeng was horrified. He “Stop pushing, shameless one, or I kick you!”
grasped her arm—but just then a flash of lightning blazed and the screaming
women fell silent: the Tadtarin was about to die. “Let me pass, let me pass, you harlots!” cried Don Paeng.

The old woman closed her eyes and bowed her head and sank slowly to her knees. “Abah, it is a man!”
A pallet was brought and set on the ground and she was laid in it and her face
“How dare he come in here?”
covered with a shroud. Her hands still clutched the wand and the seedlings. The
women drew away, leaving her in a cleared space. They covered their heads with “Break his head!”
their black shawls and began wailing softly, unhumanly—a hushed, animal
keening. “Throw the animal out!”

Overhead the sky was brightening, silver light defined the rooftops. When the ”Throw him out! Throw him out!” shrieked the voices, and Don Paeng found
moon rose and flooded with hot brilliance the moveless crowded square, the himself surrounded by a swarm of gleaming eyes.
black-shawled women stopped wailing and a girl approached and unshrouded the
Terror possessed him and he struck out savagely with both fists, with all his
Tadtarin, who opened her eyes and sat up, her face lifted to the moonlight. She
strength—but they closed in as savagely: solid walls of flesh that crushed upon
rose to her feet and extended the wand and the seedlings and the women joined in
him and pinned his arms helpless, while unseen hands struck and struck his face,
a mighty shout. They pulled off and waved their shawls and whirled and began
and ravaged his hair and clothes, and clawed at his flesh, as—kicked and buffeted,
dancing again—laughing and dancing with such joyous exciting abandon that the
his eyes blind and his torn mouth salty with blood—he was pushed down, down
people in the square and on the sidewalk, and even those on the balconies, were
to his knees, and half-shoved, half-dragged to the doorway and rolled out to the
soon laughing and dancing, too. Girls broke away from their parents and wives
street. He picked himself up at once and walked away with a dignity that forbade
from their husbands to join in the orgy.
the crowd gathered outside to laugh or to pity. Entoy came running to meet him.
“Come, let us go now,” said Don Paeng to his wife. She was shaking with
“But what has happened to you, Don Paeng?”
fascination; tears trembled on her lashes; but she nodded meekly and allowed
herself to be led away. But suddenly she pulled free from his grasp, darted off, “Nothing. Where is the coach?”
and ran into the crowd of dancing women.
“Just over there, sir. But you are wounded in the face!”
She flung her hands to her hair and whirled and her hair came undone. Then,
planting her arms akimbo, she began to trip a nimble measure, an indistinctive “No, these are only scratches. Go and get the señora. We are going home.”
folk-movement. She tossed her head back and her arched throat bloomed whitely.
When she entered the coach and saw his bruised face and torn clothing, she smiled
Her eyes brimmed with moonlight, and her mouth with laughter.
coolly.
Don Paeng ran after her, shouting her name, but she laughed and shook her head
“What a sight you are, man! What have you done with yourself?”
and darted deeper into the dense maze of procession, which was moving again,
towards the chapel. He followed her, shouting; she eluded him, laughing—and And when he did not answer: “Why, have they pulled out his tongue too?” she
through the thick of the female horde they lost and found and lost each other wondered aloud.
again—she, dancing and he pursuing—till, carried along by the tide, they were
both swallowed up into the hot, packed, turbulent darkness of the chapel. Inside
poured the entire procession, and Don Paeng, finding himself trapped tight among AND WHEN THEY are home and stood facing each other in the bedroom, she
milling female bodies, struggled with sudden panic to fight his way out. Angry was still as light-hearted.
voices rose all about him in the stifling darkness.
“What are you going to do, Rafael?”
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“I am going to give you a whipping.”
“But why?”
“Because you have behaved tonight like a lewd woman.”
“How I behaved tonight is what I am. If you call that lewd, then I was always a
lewd woman and a whipping will not change me—though you whipped me till I
died.”
“I want this madness to die in you.”
“No, you want me to pay for your bruises.”
He flushed darkly. “How can you say that, Lupe?”
“Because it is true. You have been whipped by the women and now you think to
avenge yourself by whipping me.”
His shoulders sagged and his face dulled. “If you can think that of me –”
“You could think me a lewd woman!”
“Oh, how do I know what to think of you? I was sure I knew you as I knew myself.
But now you are as distant and strange to me as a female Turk in Africa.”
“Yet you would dare whip me –”
“Because I love you, because I respect you.”
“And because if you ceased to respect me you would cease to respect yourself?”
“Ah, I did not say that!”
“Then why not say it? It is true. And you want to say it, you want to say it!”
But he struggled against her power. “Why should I want to?” he demanded
peevishly.
“Because, either you must say it—or you must whip me,” she taunted.
Her eyes were upon him and the shameful fear that had unmanned him in the dark
chapel possessed him again. His legs had turned to water; it was a monstrous
agony to remain standing.
But she was waiting for him to speak, forcing him to speak.
“No, I cannot whip you!” he confessed miserably.
“Then say it! Say it!” she cried, pounding her clenched fists together. “Why suffer
and suffer? And in the end you would only submit.”
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But he still struggled stubbornly. “Is it not enough that you have me helpless? Is
it not enough that I feel what you want me feel?”
But she shook her head furiously. “Until you have said to me, there can be no
peace between us.”
He was exhausted at last; he sank heavily to his knees, breathing hard and
streaming with sweat, his fine body curiously diminished now in its ravaged
apparel.
“I adore you, Lupe,” he said tonelessly.
She strained forward avidly, “What? What did you say?” she screamed.
And he, in his dead voice: “That I adore you. That I adore you. That I worship
you. That the air you breathe and the ground you tread is so holy to me. That I am
your dog, your slave...”
But it was still not enough. Her fists were still clenched, and she cried: “Then
come, crawl on the floor, and kiss my feet!”
Without moment’s hesitation, he sprawled down flat and, working his arms and
legs, gaspingly clawed his way across the floor, like a great agonized lizard, the
woman steadily backing away as he approached, her eyes watching him avidly,
her nostrils dilating, till behind her loomed the open window, the huge glittering
moon, the rapid flashes of lightning. she stopped, panting, and leaned against the
sill. He lay exhausted at her feet, his face flat on the floor.
She raised her skirts and contemptuously thrust out a naked foot. He lifted his
dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted his hands and grasped
the white foot and kiss it savagely - kissed the step, the sole, the frail ankle - while
she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the whole windowsill her body and her
loose hair streaming out the window - streaming fluid and black in the white night
where the huge moon glowed like a sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and
the pure heat burned with the immense intense fever of noon.
__________________________________________________
MY FATHER GOES TO COURT
by Carlos Bulosan
When I was four, I lived with my mother and brothers and sisters in a small town
on the island of Luzon. Father’s farm had been destroyed in 1918 by one of our
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sudden Philippine floods, so for several years afterward we all lived in the town,
though he preffered living in the country. We had a next-door neighbor, a very
rich man, whose sons and daughters seldom came out of the house. While we boys
and girls played and sand in the sun, his children stayed inside and kept the
windows closed. His house was so tall that his children could look in the windows
of our house and watch us as we played, or slept, or ate, when there was any food
in the house to eat.
Now, this rich man’s servants were always frying and cooking something good,
and the aroma of the food was wafted down to us from the windows of the big
house. We hung about and took all the wonderful smell of the food into our beings.
Sometimes, in the morning, our whole family stood outside the windows of the
rich man’s house and listened to the musical sizzling of thick strips of bacon or
ham. I can remember one afternoon when our neighbor’s servants roasted three
chickens. The chickens were young and tender and the fat that dripped into the
burning coals gave off an enchanting odor. We watched the servants turn the
beautiful birds and inhaled the heavenly spirit that drifted out to us.
Some days the rich man appeared at a window and glowered down at us. He
looked at us one by one, as though he were condemning us. We were all healthy
because we went out in the sun every day and bathed in the cool water of the river
that flowed from the mountains into the sea. Sometimes we wrestled with one
another in the house before we went out to play.
We were always in the best of spirits and our laughter was contagious. Other
neighbors who passed by our house often stopped in our yard and joined us in our
laughter.
Laughter was our only wealth. Father was a laughing man. He would go in to the
living room and stand in front of the tall mirror, stretching his mouth into
grotesque shapes with his fingers and making faces at himself, and then he would
rush into the kitchen, roaring with laughter.
There was plenty to make us laugh. There was, for instance, the day one of my
brothers came home and brought a small bundle under his arm, pretending that he
brought something to eat, maybe a leg of lamb or something as extravagant as that
to make our mouths water. He rushed to mother and through the bundle into her
lap. We all stood around, watching mother undo the complicated strings. Suddenly
a black cat leaped out of the bundle and ran wildly around the house. Mother
chased my brother and beat him with her little fists, while the rest of us bent
double, choking with laughter.
Another time one of my sisters suddenly started screaming in the middle of the
night. Mother reached her first and tried to calm her. My sister criedand groaned.
When father lifted the lamp, my sister stared at us with shame in her eyes.
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“What is it?” <other asked.
“I’m pregnant!” she cried.
“Don’t be a fool!” Father shouted.
“You’re only a child,” Mother said.
“I’m pregnant, I tell you!” she cried.
Father knelt by my sister. He put his hand on her belly and rubbed it gently. “How
do you know you are pregnant?” he asked.
“Feel it!” she cried.
We put our hands on her belly. There was something moving inside. Father was
frightened. Mother was shocked. “Who’s the man?” she asked.
“There’s no man,” my sister said.
‘What is it then?” Father asked.
Suddenly my sister opened her blouse and a bullfrog jumped out. Mother fainted,
father dropped the lamp, the oil spilled on the floor, and my sister’s blanket caught
fire. One of my brothers laughed so hard he rolled on the floor.
When the fire was extinguished and Mother was revived, we turned to bed and
tried to sleep, but Father kept on laughing so loud we could not sleep any more.
Mother got up again and lighted the oil lamp; we rolled up the mats on the floor
and began dancing about and laughing with all our might. We made so much noise
that all our neighbors except the rich family came into the yard and joined us in
loud, genuine laughter.
It was like that for years.
As time went on, the rich man’s children became thin and anemic, while we grew
even more robust and full of fire. Our faces were bright and rosy, but theirs were
pale and sad. The rich man started to cough at night; then he coughed day and
night. His wife began coughing too. Then the children started to cough one after
the other. At night their coughing sounded like barking of a herd of seals. We
hung outside their windows and listened to them. We wondered what had
happened to them. We knew that they were not sick from lack of nourishing food
because they were still always frying something delicious to eat.
One day the rich man appeared at a window and stood there a long time. He looked
at my sisters, who had grown fat with laughing, then at my brothers, whose arms
and legs were like the molave, which is the sturdiest tree in the Philippines. He
banged down the window and ran through the house, shutting all the windows.
14

From that day on, the windows of our neighbor’s house were closed. The children
did not come outdoors anymore. We could still hear the servants cooking in the
kitchen, and no matter how tight the windows were shut, the aroma of the food
came to us in the wind and drifted gratuitously into our house.
One morning a policeman from the presidencia came to our house with a sealed
paper. The rich man had filled a complaint against us. Father took me with him
when he went to the town clerk and asked him what it was all about. He told Father
the man claimed that for years we had been stealing the spirit of his wealth and
food.
When the day came for us to appear in court, Father brushed his old army uniform
and borrowed a pair of shoes from one of my brothers. We were the first to arrive.
Father sat on a chair in the center of the courtroom. Mother occupied a chair by
the door. We children sat on a long bench by the wall. Father kept jumping up his
chair and stabbing the air with his arms, as though he were defending himself
before an imaginary jury.
The rich man arrived. He had grown old and feeble; his face was scarred with
deep lines. With him was his young lawyer. Spectators came in and almost filled
the chairs. The judge entered the room and sat on a high chair. We stood up in a
hurry and sat down again.
After the courtroom preliminaries, the judge took at father. “Do you have a
lawyer?” he asked.
“I don’t need a lawyer judge.” He said.
“Proceed,” said the judge.
The rich man’s lawyer jumped and pointed his finger at Father, “Do you or do
you not agree that you have been stealing the spirit of the complainant’s wealth
and food?”
“I do not!” Father said.
“Do you or do you not agree that while the complainant’s servants cooked and
fried fat legs of lambs and young chicken breasts, you and your family hung
outside your windows and inhaled the heavenly spirit of the food?”
“I agree,” Father said.
“How do you account for that?”
Father got up and paced around, scratching his head thoughtfully. Then he said,
“I would like to see the children of the complainant, Judge.”
“Bring the children of the complainant.”
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
They came shyly. The spectators covered their mouths with their hands. They
were so amazed to see the children so thin and pale. The children walked silently
to a bench and sat down without looking up. They stared at the floor and moved
their hands uneasily.
Father could not say anything at first. He just stood by his chair and looked at
them. Finally he said, “I should like to cross-examine the complainant.”
“Proceed.”
“Do you claim that we stole the spirit of your wealth and became a laughing family
while yours became morose and sad?” Father asked.
“Yes.”
“Then we are going to pay you right now,” Father said. He walked over to where
we children were sitting on the bench and took my straw hat off my lap and began
filling it up with centavo pieces that he took out his pockets. He went to Mother,
who added a fistful of silver coins. My brothers threw in their small change.
“May I walk to the room across the hall and stay there for a minutes, Judge?”
Father asked.
“As you wish.”
“Thank you,” Father said. He strode into the other room with the hat in his hands.
It was almost full of coins. The doors of both rooms were wide open.
“Are you ready?” Father called.
“Proceed.” The judge said.
The sweet tinkle of coins carried beautifully into the room. The spectators turned
their faces toward the sound with wonder. Father came back and stood before the
complainant.
“Did you hear it?” he asked.
“Hear what?” the man asked.
“The spirit of the money when I shook this hat?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you are paid.” Father said.
The rich man opened his mouth to speak and fell to the floor without a sound. The
lawyer rushed to his aid. The judge pounded his gravel.
15

“Case dismissed,” he said.
Father strutted around the courtroom. The judge even came down to his high chair
to shake hands with him. “By the way,” he whispered, “I had an uncle who died
laughing.”
“You like to hear my family laugh, judge?” Father asked.
“Why not?”
Did you hear that children?” Father said.
My sister started it. The rest of us followed them and soon the spectators were
laughing with us, holding their bellies and bending over the chairs. And the
laughter of the judge was the loudest of all.
__________________________________________________
THE WEDDING DANCE
By Amador Daguio
Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the
headhigh threshold. Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound that
carried him across to the narrow door. He slid back the cover, stepped inside, then
pushed the cover back in place. After some moments during which he seemed to
wait, he talked to the listening darkness.
"I'm sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it."
The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house like muffled
roars of falling waters. The woman who had moved with a start when the sliding
door opened had been hearing the gangsas for she did not know how long. There
was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave no sign that she heard Awiyao, but
continued to sit unmoving in the darkness.
But Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on all
fours to the middle of the room; he knew exactly where the stove was. With bare
fingers he stirred the covered smoldering embers, and blew into the stove. When
the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of pine on them, then full round logs
as his arms. The room brightened.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
"Why don't you go out," he said, "and join the dancing women?" He felt a pang
inside him, because what he said was really not the right thing to say and because
the woman did not stir. "You should join the dancers," he said, "as if--as if nothing
had happened." He looked at the woman huddled in a corner of the room, leaning
against the wall. The stove fire played with strange moving shadows and lights
upon her face. She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger
or hate.
"Go out--go out and dance. If you really don't hate me for this separation, go out
and dance. One of the men will see you dance well; he will like your dancing, he
will marry you. Who knows but that, with him, you will be luckier than you were
with me."
"I don't want any man," she said sharply. "I don't want any other man."
He felt relieved that at least she talked: "You know very well that I won't want
any other woman either. You know that, don't you? Lumnay, you know it, don't
you?"
She did not answer him.
"You know it Lumnay, don't you?" he repeated.
"Yes, I know," she said weakly.
"It is not my fault," he said, feeling relieved. "You cannot blame me; I have been
a good husband to you."
"Neither can you blame me," she said. She seemed about to cry.
"No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have nothing
to say against you." He set some of the burning wood in place. "It's only that a
man must have a child. Seven harvests is just too long to wait. Yes, we have waited
too long. We should have another chance before it is too late for both of us."
This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in.
She wound the blanket more snugly around herself.
"You know that I have done my best," she said. "I have prayed to Kabunyan much.
I have sacrificed many chickens in my prayers."
"Yes, I know."
"You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work
in the terrace because I butchered one of our pigs without your permission? I did
it to appease Kabunyan, because, like you, I wanted to have a child. But what
could I do?"
16

"Kabunyan does not see fit for us to have a child," he said. He stirred the fire. The
spark rose through the crackles of the flames. The smoke and soot went up the
ceiling.
Lumnay looked down and unconsciously started to pull at the rattan that kept the
split bamboo flooring in place. She tugged at the rattan flooring. Each time she
did this the split bamboo went up and came down with a slight rattle. The gong of
the dancers clamorously called in her care through the walls.
Awiyao went to the corner where Lumnay sat, paused before her, looked at her
bronzed and sturdy face, then turned to where the jars of water stood piled one
over the other. Awiyao took a coconut cup and dipped it in the top jar and drank.
Lumnay had filled the jars from the mountain creek early that evening.
"I came home," he said. "Because I did not find you among the dancers. Of course,
I am not forcing you to come, if you don't want to join my wedding ceremony. I
came to tell you that Madulimay, although I am marrying her, can never become
as good as you are. She is not as strong in planting beans, not as fast in cleaning
water jars, not as good keeping a house clean. You are one of the best wives in
the whole village."
"That has not done me any good, has it?" She said. She looked at him lovingly.
She almost seemed to smile.
He put the coconut cup aside on the floor and came closer to her. He held her face
between his hands and looked longingly at her beauty. But her eyes looked away.
Never again would he hold her face. The next day she would not be his anymore.
She would go back to her parents. He let go of her face, and she bent to the floor
again and looked at her fingers as they tugged softly at the split bamboo floor.
"This house is yours," he said. "I built it for you. Make it your own, live in it as
long as you wish. I will build another house for Madulimay."
"I have no need for a house," she said slowly. "I'll go to my own house. My parents
are old. They will need help in the planting of the beans, in the pounding of the
rice."
"I will give you the field that I dug out of the mountains during the first year of
our marriage," he said. "You know I did it for you. You helped me to make it for
the two of us."
"I have no use for any field," she said.
He looked at her, then turned away, and became silent. They were silent for a
time.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
"Go back to the dance," she said finally. "It is not right for you to be here. They
will wonder where you are, and Madulimay will not feel good. Go back to the
dance."
"I would feel better if you could come, and dance---for the last time. The gangsas
are playing."
"You know that I cannot."
"Lumnay," he said tenderly. "Lumnay, if I did this it is because of my need for a
child. You know that life is not worth living without a child. The man have
mocked me behind my back. You know that."
"I know it," he said. "I will pray that Kabunyan will bless you and Madulimay."
She bit her lips now, then shook her head wildly, and sobbed.
She thought of the seven harvests that had passed, the high hopes they had in the
beginning of their new life, the day he took her away from her parents across the
roaring river, on the other side of the mountain, the trip up the trail which they
had to climb, the steep canyon which they had to cross. The waters boiled in her
mind in forms of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters tolled and growled,
resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the stiff cliffs; they were far
away now from somewhere on the tops of the other ranges, and they had looked
carefully at the buttresses of rocks they had to step on---a slip would have meant
death.
They both drank of the water then rested on the other bank before they made the
final climb to the other side of the mountain.
She looked at his face with the fire playing upon his features---hard and strong,
and kind. He had a sense of lightness in his way of saying things which often made
her and the village people laugh. How proud she had been of his humor. The
muscles where taut and firm, bronze and compact in their hold upon his skull---
how frank his bright eyes were. She looked at his body the carved out of the
mountains five fields for her; his wide and supple torso heaved as if a slab of
shining lumber were heaving; his arms and legs flowed down in fluent muscles--
he was strong and for that she had lost him.
She flung herself upon his knees and clung to them. "Awiyao, Awiyao, my
husband," she cried. "I did everything to have a child," she said passionately in a
hoarse whisper. "Look at me," she cried. "Look at my body. Then it was full of
promise. It could dance; it could work fast in the fields; it could climb the
mountains fast. Even now it is firm, full. But, Awiyao, I am useless. I must die."
"It will not be right to die," he said, gathering her in his arms. Her whole warm
naked naked breast quivered against his own; she clung now to his neck, and her
17

hand lay upon his right shoulder; her hair flowed down in cascades of gleaming
darkness.
"I don't care about the fields," she said. "I don't care about the house. I don't care
for anything but you. I'll have no other man."
"Then you'll always be fruitless."
"I'll go back to my father, I'll die."
"Then you hate me," he said. "If you die it means you hate me. You do not want
me to have a child. You do not want my name to live on in our tribe."
She was silent.
"If I do not try a second time," he explained, "it means I'll die. Nobody will get
the fields I have carved out of the mountains; nobody will come after me."
"If you fail--if you fail this second time--" she said thoughtfully. The voice was a
shudder. "No--no, I don't want you to fail."
"If I fail," he said, "I'll come back to you. Then both of us will die together. Both
of us will vanish from the life of our tribe."
The gongs thundered through the walls of their house, sonorous and faraway.
"I'll keep my beads," she said. "Awiyao, let me keep my beads," she half-
whispered.
"You will keep the beads. They come from far-off times. My grandmother said
they come from up North, from the slant-eyed people across the sea. You keep
them, Lumnay. They are worth twenty fields."
"I'll keep them because they stand for the love you have for me," she said. "I love
you. I love you and have nothing to give."
She took herself away from him, for a voice was calling out to him from outside.
"Awiyao! Awiyao! O Awiyao! They are looking for you at the dance!"
"I am not in hurry."
"The elders will scold you. You had better go."
"Not until you tell me that it is all right with you."
"It is all right with me."
He clasped her hands. "I do this for the sake of the tribe," he said.
"I know," she said.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
He went to the door.
"Awiyao!"
He stopped as if suddenly hit by a spear. In pain he turned to her. Her face was in
agony. It pained him to leave. She had been wonderful to him. What was it that
made a man wish for a child? What was it in life, in the work in the field, in the
planting and harvest, in the silence of the night, in the communing with husband
and wife, in the whole life of the tribe itself that made man wish for the laughter
and speech of a child? Suppose he changed his mind? Why did the unwritten law
demand, anyway, that a man, to be a man, must have a child to come after him?
And if he was fruitless--but he loved Lumnay. It was like taking away of his life
to leave her like this.
"Awiyao," she said, and her eyes seemed to smile in the light. "The beads!" He
turned back and walked to the farthest corner of their room, to the trunk where
they kept their worldly possession---his battle-ax and his spear points, her betel
nut box and her beads. He dug out from the darkness the beads which had been
given to him by his grandmother to give to Lumnay on the beads on, and tied them
in place. The white and jade and deep orange obsidians shone in the firelight. She
suddenly clung to him, clung to his neck as if she would never let him go.
"Awiyao! Awiyao, it is hard!" She gasped, and she closed her eyes and huried her
face in his neck.
The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened, and he buried out
into the night.
Lumnay sat for some time in the darkness. Then she went to the door and opened
it. The moonlight struck her face; the moonlight spilled itself on the whole village.
She could hear the throbbing of the gangsas coming to her through the caverns of
the other houses. She knew that all the houses were empty that the whole tribe
was at the dance. Only she was absent. And yet was she not the best dancer of the
village? Did she not have the most lightness and grace? Could she not, alone
among all women, dance like a bird tripping for grains on the ground, beautifully
timed to the beat of the gangsas? Did not the men praise her supple body, and the
women envy the way she stretched her hands like the wings of the mountain eagle
now and then as she danced? How long ago did she dance at her own wedding?
Tonight, all the women who counted, who once danced in her honor, were dancing
now in honor of another whose only claim was that perhaps she could give her
husband a child.
"It is not right. It is not right!" she cried. "How does she know? How can anybody
know? It is not right," she said.
18

Suddenly she found courage. She would go to the dance. She would go to the chief
of the village, to the elders, to tell them it was not right. Awiyao was hers; nobody
could take him away from her. Let her be the first woman to complain, to
denounce the unwritten rule that a man may take another woman. She would tell
Awiyao to come back to her. He surely would relent. Was not their love as strong
as the river?
She made for the other side of the village where the dancing was. There was a
flaming glow over the whole place; a great bonfire was burning. The gangsas
clamored more loudly now, and it seemed they were calling to her. She was near
at last. She could see the dancers clearly now. The man leaped lightly with their
gangsas as they circled the dancing women decked in feast garments and beads,
tripping on the ground like graceful birds, following their men. Her heart warmed
to the flaming call of the dance; strange heat in her blood welled up, and she
started to run. But the gleaming brightness of the bonfire commanded her to stop.
Did anybody see her approach?
She stopped. What if somebody had seen her coming? The flames of the bonfire
leaped in countless sparks which spread and rose like yellow points and died out
in the night. The blaze reached out to her like a spreading radiance. She did not
have the courage to break into the wedding feast.
Lumnay walked away from the dancing ground, away from the village. She
thought of the new clearing of beans which Awiyao and she had started to make
only four moons before. She followed the trail above the village.
When she came to the mountain stream she crossed it carefully. Nobody held her
hand, and the stream water was very cold. The trail went up again, and she was in
the moonlight shadows among the trees and shrubs. Slowly she climbed the
mountain.
When Lumnay reached the clearing, she could see from where she stood the
blazing bonfire at the edge of the village, where the wedding was. She could hear
the far-off clamor of the gongs, still rich in their sonorousness, echoing from
mountain to mountain. The sound did not mock her; they seemed to call far to her,
to speak to her in the language of unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their
gratitude for her sacrifice. Her heartbeat began to sound to her like many gangsas.
Lumnay thought of Awiyao as the Awiyao she had known long ago-- a strong,
muscular boy carrying his heavy loads of fuel logs down the mountains to his
home. She had met him one day as she was on her way to fill her clay jars with
water. He had stopped at the spring to drink and rest; and she had made him drink
the cool mountain water from her coconut shell. After that it did not take him long
to decide to throw his spear on the stairs of her father's house in token on his desire
to marry her.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
The mountain clearing was cold in the freezing moonlight. The wind began to stir
the leaves of the bean plants. Lumnay looked for a big rock on which to sit down.
The bean plants now surrounded her, and she was lost among them.
A few more weeks, a few more months, a few more harvests---what did it matter?
She would be holding the bean flowers, soft in the texture, silken almost, but moist
where the dew got into them, silver to look at, silver on the light blue, blooming
whiteness, when the morning comes. The stretching of the bean pods full length
from the hearts of the wilting petals would go on.
Lumnay's fingers moved a long, long time among the growing bean pods.
__________________________________________________
MAY DAY EVE
by Nick Joaquin
The old people had ordered that the dancing should stop at ten o’clock but it was
almost midnight before the carriages came filing up the departing guests, while
the girls who were staying were promptly herded upstairs to the bedrooms, the
young men gathering around to wish them a good night and lamenting their ascent
with mock signs and moaning, proclaiming themselves disconsolate but
straightway going off to finish the punch and the brandy though they were quite
drunk already and simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment, arrogance and
audacity, for they were young bucks newly arrived from Europe; the ball had been
in their honor; and they had waltzed and polka-ed and bragged and swaggered and
flirted all night and where in no mood to sleep yet--no, caramba, not on this moist
tropic eve! Not on this mystic May eve! – with the night still young and so
seductive that it was madness not to go out, not to go forth---and serenade the
neighbors! Cried one; and swim in the Pasid! Cried another; and gather fireflies!
cried a third—whereupon there arose a great clamor for coats and capes, for hats
and canes, and they were a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last carriage
rattled away upon the cobbles while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush,
their tile roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wile sky murky with
clouds, save where an evil young moon prowled about in a corner or where a
murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now
of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable childhood fragrances or ripe
guavas to the young men trooping so uproariously down the street that the girls
who were desiring upstairs in the bedrooms catered screaming to the windows,
crowded giggling at the windows, but were soon sighing amorously over those
young men bawling below; over those wicked young men and their handsome
19

apparel, their proud flashing eyes, and their elegant moustaches so black and vivid
in the moonlight that the girls were quite ravished with love, and began crying to
one another how carefree were men but how awful to be a girl and what a horrid,
horrid world it was, till old Anastasia plucked them off by the ear or the pigtail
and chases them off to bed---while from up the street came the clackety-clack of
the watchman’s boots on the cobble and the clang-clang of his lantern against his
knee, and the mighty roll of his great voice booming through the night, "Guardia
serno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o.
And it was May again, said the old Anastasia. It was the first day of May and
witches were abroad in the night, she said--for it was a night of divination, and
night of lovers, and those who cared might peer into a mirror and would there
behold the face of whoever it was they were fated to marry, said the old Anastasia
as she hobble about picking up the piled crinolines and folding up shawls and
raking slippers in corner while the girls climbing into four great poster-beds that
overwhelmed the room began shrieking with terror, scrambling over each other
and imploring the old woman not to frighten them.
"Enough, enough, Anastasia! We want to sleep!"
"Go scare the boys instead, you old witch!"
"She is not a witch, she is a maga. She is a maga. She was born of Christmas Eve!"
"St. Anastasia, virgin and martyr."
"Huh? Impossible! She has conquered seven husbands! Are you a virgin,
Anastasia?"
"No, but I am seven times a martyr because of you girls!"
"Let her prophesy, let her prophesy! Whom will I marry, old gypsy? Come, tell
me."
"You may learn in a mirror if you are not afraid."
"I am not afraid, I will go," cried the young cousin Agueda, jumping up in bed.
"Girls, girls---we are making too much noise! My mother will hear and will come
and pinch us all. Agueda, lie down! And you Anastasia, I command you to shut
your mouth and go away!""Your mother told me to stay here all night, my grand
lady!"
"And I will not lie down!" cried the rebellious Agueda, leaping to the floor. "Stay,
old woman. Tell me what I have to do."
"Tell her! Tell her!" chimed the other girls.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
The old woman dropped the clothes she had gathered and approached and fixed
her eyes on the girl. "You must take a candle," she instructed, "and go into a room
that is dark and that has a mirror in it and you must be alone in the room. Go up
to the mirror and close your eyes and shy:
Mirror, mirror, show to me him whose woman I will be. If all goes right, just
above your left shoulder will appear the face of the man you will marry." A
silence. Then: "And that if all does not go right?" asked Agueda. "Ah, then the
Lord have mercy on you!" "Why." "Because you may see--the Devil!"
The girls screamed and clutched one another, shivering. "But what nonsense!"
cried Agueda. "This is the year 1847. There are no devil anymore!" Nevertheless
she had turned pale. "But where could I go, hugh? Yes, I know! Down to the sala.
It has that big mirror and no one is there now." "No, Agueda, no! It is a mortal
sin! You will see the devil!" "I do not care! I am not afraid! I will go!" "Oh, you
wicked girl! Oh, you mad girl!" "If you do not come to bed, Agueda, I will call
my mother." "And if you do I will tell her who came to visit you at the convent
last March. Come, old woman---give me that candle. I go." "Oh girls---give me
that candle, I go."
But Agueda had already slipped outside; was already tiptoeing across the hall; her
feet bare and her dark hair falling down her shoulders and streaming in the wind
as she fled down the stairs, the lighted candle sputtering in one hand while with
the other she pulled up her white gown from her ankles. She paused breathless in
the doorway to the sala and her heart failed her. She tried to imagine the room
filled again with lights, laughter, whirling couples, and the jolly jerky music of
the fiddlers. But, oh, it was a dark den, a weird cavern for the windows had been
closed and the furniture stacked up against the walls. She crossed herself and
stepped inside.
The mirror hung on the wall before her; a big antique mirror with a gold frame
carved into leaves and flowers and mysterious curlicues. She saw herself
approaching fearfully in it: a small while ghost that the darkness bodied forth---
but not willingly, not completely, for her eyes and hair were so dark that the face
approaching in the mirror seemed only a mask that floated forward; a bright mask
with two holes gaping in it, blown forward by the white cloud of her gown. But
when she stood before the mirror she lifted the candle level with her chin and the
dead mask bloomed into her living face.
She closed her eyes and whispered the incantation. When she had finished such a
terror took hold of her that she felt unable to move, unable to open her eyes and
thought she would stand there forever, enchanted. But she heard a step behind her,
and a smothered giggle, and instantly opened her eyes.
20

"And what did you see, Mama? Oh, what was it?" But Dona Agueda had forgotten
the little girl on her lap: she was staring pass the curly head nestling at her breast
and seeing herself in the big mirror hanging in the room. It was the same room
and the same mirror out the face she now saw in it was an old face---a hard, bitter,
vengeful face, framed in graying hair, and so sadly altered, so sadly different from
that other face like a white mask, that fresh young face like a pure mask than she
had brought before this mirror one wild May Day midnight years and years ago....
"But what was it Mama? Oh please go on! What did you see?" Dona Agueda
looked down at her daughter but her face did not soften though her eyes filled with
tears. "I saw the devil." she said bitterly. The child blanched. "The devil, Mama?
Oh... Oh..." "Yes, my love. I opened my eyes and there in the mirror, smiling at
me over my left shoulder, was the face of the devil." "Oh, my poor little Mama!
And were you very frightened?" "You can imagine. And that is why good little
girls do not look into mirrors except when their mothers tell them. You must stop
this naughty habit, darling, of admiring yourself in every mirror you pass- or you
may see something frightful some day." "But the devil, Mama---what did he look
like?" "Well, let me see... he has curly hair and a scar on his cheek---" "Like the
scar of Papa?" "Well, yes. But this of the devil was a scar of sin, while that of your
Papa is a scar of honor. Or so he says." "Go on about the devil." "Well, he had
mustaches." "Like those of Papa?" "Oh, no. Those of your Papa are dirty and
graying and smell horribly of tobacco, while these of the devil were very black
and elegant--oh, how elegant!" "And did he speak to you, Mama?" "Yes… Yes,
he spoke to me," said Dona Agueda. And bowing her graying head; she wept.
"Charms like yours have no need for a candle, fair one," he had said, smiling at
her in the mirror and stepping back to give her a low mocking bow. She had
whirled around and glared at him and he had burst into laughter. "But I remember
you!" he cried. "You are Agueda, whom I left a mere infant and came home to
find a tremendous beauty, and I danced a waltz with you but you would not give
me the polka." "Let me pass," she muttered fiercely, for he was barring the way.
"But I want to dance the polka with you, fair one," he said. So they stood before
the mirror; their panting breath the only sound in the dark room; the candle shining
between them and flinging their shadows to the wall. And young Badoy Montiya
(who had crept home very drunk to pass out quietly in bed) suddenly found
himself cold sober and very much awake and ready for anything. His eyes
sparkled and the scar on his face gleamed scarlet. "Let me pass!" she cried again,
in a voice of fury, but he grasped her by the wrist. "No," he smiled. "Not until we
have danced." "Go to the devil!" "What a temper has my serrana!" "I am not your
serrana!" "Whose, then? Someone I know? Someone I have offended grievously?
Because you treat me, you treat all my friends like your mortal enemies." "And
why not?" she demanded, jerking her wrist away and flashing her teeth in his face.
"Oh, how I detest you, you pompous young men! You go to Europe and you come
back elegant lords and we poor girls are too tame to please you. We have no grace
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like the Parisiennes, we have no fire like the Sevillians, and we have no salt, no
salt, no salt! Aie, how you weary me, how you bore me, you fastidious men!"
"Come, come---how do you know about us?"
"I was not admiring myself, sir!" "You were admiring the moon perhaps?" "Oh!"
she gasped, and burst into tears. The candle dropped from her hand and she
covered her face and sobbed piteously. The candle had gone out and they stood in
darkness, and young Badoy was conscience-stricken. "Oh, do not cry, little one!"
Oh, please forgive me! Please do not cry! But what a brute I am! I was drunk,
little one, I was drunk and knew not what I said." He groped and found her hand
and touched it to his lips. She shuddered in her white gown. "Let me go," she
moaned, and tugged feebly. "No. Say you forgive me first. Say you forgive me,
Agueda." But instead she pulled his hand to her mouth and bit it - bit so sharply
in the knuckles that he cried with pain and lashed cut with his other hand--lashed
out and hit the air, for she was gone, she had fled, and he heard the rustling of her
skirts up the stairs as he furiously sucked his bleeding fingers. Cruel thoughts
raced through his head: he would go and tell his mother and make her turn the
savage girl out of the house--or he would go himself to the girl’s room and drag
her out of bed and slap, slap, slap her silly face! But at the same time he was
thinking that they were all going to Antipolo in the morning and was already
planning how he would maneuver himself into the same boat with her. Oh, he
would have his revenge, he would make her pay, that little harlot! She should
suffer for this, he thought greedily, licking his bleeding knuckles. But---Judas! He
remembered her bare shoulders: gold in her candlelight and delicately furred. He
saw the mobile insolence of her neck, and her taut breasts steady in the fluid gown.
Son of a Turk, but she was quite enchanting! How could she think she had no fire
or grace? And no salt? An arroba she had of it!
"... No lack of salt in the chrism at the moment of thy baptism!" He sang aloud in
the dark room and suddenly realized that he had fallen madly in love with her. He
ached intensely to see her again---at once! ---to touch her hands and her hair; to
hear her harsh voice. He ran to the window and flung open the casements and the
beauty of the night struck him back like a blow. It was May, it was summer, and
he was young---young! ---and deliriously in love. Such a happiness welled up
within him that the tears spurted from his eyes. But he did not forgive her--no! He
would still make her pay, he would still have his revenge, he thought viciously,
and kissed his wounded fingers. But what a night it had been! "I will never forget
this night! He thought aloud in an awed voice, standing by the window in the dark
room, the tears in his eyes and the wind in his hair and his bleeding knuckles
pressed to his mouth.
But, alas, the heart forgets; the heart is distracted; and May time passes; summer
lends; the storms break over the rot-tipe orchards and the heart grows old; while
the hours, the days, the months, and the years pile up and pile up, till the mind
21

becomes too crowded, too confused: dust gathers in it; cobwebs multiply; the
walls darken and fall into ruin and decay; the memory perished...and there came
a time when Don Badoy Montiya walked home through a May Day midnight
without remembering, without even caring to remember; being merely concerned
in feeling his way across the street with his cane; his eyes having grown quite dim
and his legs uncertain--for he was old; he was over sixty; he was a very stopped
and shivered old man with white hair and mustaches coming home from a secret
meeting of conspirators; his mind still resounding with the speeches and his patriot
heart still exultant as he picked his way up the steps to the front door and inside
into the slumbering darkness of the house; wholly unconscious of the May night,
till on his way down the hall, chancing to glance into the sala, he shuddered, he
stopped, his blood ran cold-- for he had seen a face in the mirror there---a ghostly
candlelight face with the eyes closed and the lips moving, a face that he suddenly
felt he had been there before though it was a full minutes before the lost memory
came flowing, came tiding back, so overflooding the actual moment and so swiftly
washing away the piled hours and days and months and years that he was left
suddenly young again; he was a gay young buck again, lately came from Europe;
he had been dancing all night; he was very drunk; he s stepped in the doorway; he
saw a face in the dark; he called out...and the lad standing before the mirror (for
it was a lad in a night go jumped with fright and almost dropped his candle, but
looking around and seeing the old man, laughed out with relief and came running.
"Oh Grandpa, how you frightened me. Don Badoy had turned very pale. "So it
was you, you young bandit! And what is all this, hey? What are you doing down
here at this hour?" "Nothing, Grandpa. I was only... I am only ..." "Yes, you are
the great Señor only and how delighted I am to make your acquaintance, Señor
only! But if I break this cane on your head you might wish you were someone
else, Sir!" "It was just foolishness, Grandpa. They told me I would see my wife."
"Wife? What wife?" "Mine. The boys at school said I would see her if I looked in
a mirror tonight and said: Mirror, mirror show to me her whose lover I will be.
Don Badoy cackled ruefully. He took the boy by the hair, pulled him along into
the room, sat down on a chair, and drew the boy between his knees. "Now, put
your cane down the floor, son, and let us talk this over. So you want your wife
already, hey? You want to see her in advance, hey? But so you know that these
are wicked games and that wicked boys who play them are in danger of seeing
horrors?"
"Well, the boys did warn me I might see a witch instead."
"Exactly! A witch so horrible you may die of fright. And she will be witch you,
she will torture you, she will eat your heart and drink your blood!"
"Oh, come now Grandpa. This is 1890. There are no witches anymore."
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"Oh-ho, my young Voltaire! And what if I tell you that I myself have seen a witch.
"You? Where?
"Right in this room land right in that mirror," said the old man, and his playful
voice had turned savage.
"When, Grandpa?"
"Not so long ago. When I was a bit older than you. Oh, I was a vain fellow and
though I was feeling very sick that night and merely wanted to lie down
somewhere and die I could not pass that doorway of course without stopping to
see in the mirror what I looked like when dying. But when I poked my head in
what should I see in the mirror but...but..."
"The witch?"
"Exactly!"
"And then she bewitch you, Grandpa!"
"She bewitched me and she tortured me. She ate my heart and drank my blood."
said the old man bitterly.
"Oh, my poor little Grandpa! Why have you never told me! And she very horrible?
"Horrible? God, no--- she was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen! Her
eyes were somewhat like yours but her hair was like black waters and her golden
shoulders were bare. My God, she was enchanting! But I should have known---I
should have known even then---the dark and fatal creature she was!"
A silence. Then: "What a horrid mirror this is, Grandpa," whispered the boy.
"What makes you slay that, hey?"
"Well, you saw this witch in it. And Mama once told me that Grandma once told
her that Grandma once saw the devil in this mirror. Was it of the scare that
Grandma died?"
Don Badoy started. For a moment he had forgotten that she was dead, that she had
perished---the poor Agueda; that they were at peace at last, the two of them, her
tired body at rest; her broken body set free at last from the brutal pranks of the
earth---from the trap of a May night; from the snare of summer; from the terrible
silver nets of the moon. She had been a mere heap of white hair and bones in the
end: a whimpering withered consumptive, lashing out with her cruel tongue; her
eye like live coals; her face like ashes... Now, nothing--- nothing save a name on
a stone; save a stone in a graveyard---nothing! Was left of the young girl who had
flamed so vividly in a mirror one wild May Day midnight, long, long ago.
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And remembering how she had sobbed so piteously; remembering how she had
bitten his hand and fled and how he had sung aloud in the dark room and surprised
his heart in the instant of falling in love: such a grief tore up his throat and eyes
that he felt ashamed before the boy; pushed the boy away; stood up and looked
out----looked out upon the medieval shadows of the foul street where a couple of
street-lamps flickered and a last carriage was rattling away upon the cobbles,
while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tiled roofs looming like
sinister chessboards against a wild sky murky with clouds, save where an evil old
moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling
and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and
wafting unbearable the window; the bowed old man sobbing so bitterly at the
window; the tears streaming down his cheeks and the wind in his hair and one
hand pressed to his mouth---while from up the street came the clackety-clack of
the watchman’s boots on the cobbles, and the clang-clang of his lantern against
his knee, and the mighty roll of his voice booming through the night:
"Guardia sereno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o!"
__________________________________________________
DEAD STARS
by Paz Marquez Benitez
THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room,
quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry
mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down,
to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil
murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and
Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.
"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"
"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants
it to be next month."
Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is
over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."
"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally
commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.
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"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen
returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you
remember how much in love he was?"
"In love? With whom?"
"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of,"
she said with good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he
was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--"
Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That
was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a great
hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on
him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of
the trees in the plaza, did man woo maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he
seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication
of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of
insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of
circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him,
still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined
it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those
days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood
when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there
in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed to urge in
his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for
a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he
became very much engaged to Esperanza.
Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined
so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold,
to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves
when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to
the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the
hand of Time, or of Fate.
"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.
"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think
they are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been
allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of
affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He
was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice
toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural
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enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with
escaping youth--"
Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--
almost indolence--disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative
language.
"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.
Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had
amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence.
Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under
straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow,
dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's
appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward
humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.
He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone
steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little
tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on
the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy
lavender bloom.
The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide,
open porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the
Martinez yard.
Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez
house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia
Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now--
One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough
occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with
the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be
persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man
had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is
worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and
a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.
A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of
the Judge's children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the
characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge
limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that
Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.
Philippine Literature in English
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He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed
her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he
had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very
dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have
corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should
explain.
To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, each time I was about to correct you,
but I remembered a similar experience I had once before."
"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.
"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so,
the young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is
Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"
He laughed with her.
"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is
to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without
help."
"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"
"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."
Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game
of chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory
conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered
porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and banged away
as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas
could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.
He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably
a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doña Adela was of a different type
altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined
eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the complexion of a
baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty.
She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich
brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she
gave of abounding vitality.
On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel
road to the house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which
Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard
would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to
chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm,
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quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that
she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so
undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to
ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts
of the girl next door.
Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo
suddenly realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza
to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go
"neighboring."
He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually
untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."
She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked
jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their
power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of
course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another
woman.
That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was
giving Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet
something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.
It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy
and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the
shadows around, enfolding.
"Up here I find--something--"
He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted
intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"
"No; youth--its spirit--"
"Are you so old?"
"And heart's desire."
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too
broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery."
"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In
the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from
somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.
Philippine Literature in English
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"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"
"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."
"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
"I could study you all my life and still not find it."
"So long?"
"I should like to."
Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been
so deep in the living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because
neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present,
day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded
him in his calmer moments.
Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend
Sunday afternoon at Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the
beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She and Doña Adela
spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and
discussing the likeable absurdities of their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was
so absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her
on this visit to her father; how Doña Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded
of men, sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.
After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a
thriving young coconut looked like--"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"--
while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the
rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of
the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving beach.
Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were
her footsteps, narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear
which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.
When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.
"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.
"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely
beach."
There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and
whipped the tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was
something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace,
distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all
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the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. "Nothing? There is you."
The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a
thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm. "Oh, me? But I am here."

"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last "I will not go, of course, until you are there."
time--we can visit." "Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"
"The last? Why?" "Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."
"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps." She laughed.
He noted an evasive quality in the answer. "We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."
"Do I seem especially industrious to you?" "Could I find that?"
"If you are, you never look it." "If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.
"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be." "I'll inquire about--"
"But--" "What?"
"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself. "The house of the prettiest girl in the town."
"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause. "There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is
She waited. not quite sincere."

"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid." "It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.

"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely "I thought you, at least, would not say such things."

"Who? I?" "Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean
that quite--"
"Oh, no!"
"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"
"You said I am calm and placid."
"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more
"That is what I think." than that when--"

"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves." "If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.

It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert "Exactly."
phrase.
"It must be ugly."
"I should like to see your home town."
"Always?"
"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on
them, and sometimes squashes." Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting
streamer of crimsoned gold.
That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet
withal more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him. "No, of course you are right."

26
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"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.
"I am going home."
The end of an impossible dream!
"When?" after a long silence.
"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me
to spend Holy Week at home."
She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last
time."
"Can't I come to say good-bye?"
"Oh, you don't need to!"
"No, but I want to."
"There is no time."
The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a
pool far away at the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the
senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of
tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret.
She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.
"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."
"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old
things."
"Old things?"
"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly,
unwilling to mar the hour. He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for
one whirling second.
Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.
Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her
face away, but he heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye."
II
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and
entered the heart of the town--heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung
roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing
establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a consumptive bent
over a magnifying lens; heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-
ball knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of
ancient church and convento, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth
and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of
the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came
the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this
was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black
skirts. Came to the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay
tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on
display while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes,
heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief
lighting device.
Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the
length of the street like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where
the saints' platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices
of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.
The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of
Sorrows suddenly destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of
light into component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to
look unaware, and could not.
The line moved on.
Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was
coming down the line--a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that
could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed
ordering of his life.
Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.
The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and
then back again, where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.
At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the
choir, whose voices now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close
of the procession.
A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky,
whitening the iron roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still
27

densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males loitered
and, maybe, took the longest way home.
Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The
crowd had dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived
farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little
while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening" and fell into
step with the girl.
"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was
both excited and troubled.
"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."
"Oh, is the Judge going?"
"Yes."
The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned
elsewhere. As lawyer--and as lover--Alfredo had found that out long before.
"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you."
Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.
"For what?"
"For your approaching wedding."
Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not
offend?
"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors
are slow about getting the news," she continued.
He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard
nothing to enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early
acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice--cool, almost detached
from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.
"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly
"When they are of friends, yes."
"Would you come if I asked you?"
"When is it going to be?"
"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.
Philippine Literature in English
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"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a
shade of irony.
"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"
"Why not?"
"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"
"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.
"Then I ask you."
"Then I will be there."
The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the
house on the hill. There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen
that it was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the
present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife,
returning with him to the peace of home.
"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose
between something you wanted to do and something you had to do?"
"No!"
"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man
who was in such a situation."
"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.
"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"
"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us
and rushes downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to
ask whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him."
"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his
problem after all."
"Doesn't it--interest you?"
"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."
Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.
Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope
trembled in his mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement,
a very near wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own
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conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer
young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.
He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a
kind of aversion which he tried to control.
She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable
appearance. She never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with
startling reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the street, she was always
herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms
and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-
conscious care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.
She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about
Calixta, their note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened,
understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well,
what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.
"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched
voice. "Besides, she should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up.
We never thought she would turn out bad."
What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?
"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was
always positive.
"But do you approve?"
"Of what?"
"What she did."
"No," indifferently.
"Well?"
He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her
mind. "All I say is that it is not necessarily wicked."
"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your
ideas were like that."
"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only
test I wish to apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No?
Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she
is not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not."
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.
"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the
passion in his voice.
"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you
have been indifferent to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what
perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The blood surged into his very eyes
and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?
"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me
and of what people will say." Her voice trembled.
Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before.
What people will say--what will they not say? What don't they say when long
engagements are broken almost on the eve of the wedding?
"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to
be fair--according to his lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's
self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare--"
"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my
shortcomings, and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of
my way, of my place, to find a man."
Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was
that a covert attack on Julia Salas?
"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--"
Yet how could a mere man word such a plea?
"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you
tell me you are tired of me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him
completely shamed and unnerved.
The last word had been said.
III
AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over
the lake, he wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of
his. He was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the
Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if
Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to find that
elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town
29

which was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly yet he was disturbed
to a degree utterly out of proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner
tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used to such
occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia Salas. Still,
he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of
mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds
a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes
from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not heed
the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.
He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of
capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of
character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring
up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment
he derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being
in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When
claims encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the
inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as
remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza
feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away,
beyond her reach.
Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted
town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood
beside the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red
through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple
shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as
the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.
The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples
on the dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd
assembled to meet the boat--slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna
lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had
no way of knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then
a voice shouted.
"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"
"What abogado?" someone irately asked.
That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.
It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with
Brigida Samuy--Tandang "Binday"--that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar's
second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet
the abogado and invite him to our house."
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board
since the boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had
received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent
an answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write because we heard
that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her."
San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do
something for him. It was not every day that one met with such willingness to
help.
Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into
a somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too
bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk around
the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made
fast to sundry piles driven into the water.
How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim
light issuing forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An
occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelas making scraping sounds.
From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--
tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet
place filled him with a pitying sadness.
How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything
to her? That unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with
a sense of incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married-
-why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory.
It was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability.
Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a
dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an
insistent, unfinished prayer.
A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young
moon wove indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree
threw its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly
midnight the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.
Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would
surely be sitting at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night?
The house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into
unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.
"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.
"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"
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"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.
"Won't you come up?"
He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the
window, calling to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came
downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last--he was shaking her
hand.
She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet
something had gone. He missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into
her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a
sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with
a growing wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from
her face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity
creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a
blush.
Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt
undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly
interested him.
The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a
star-studded sky.
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long
extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some
immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and
where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.
__________________________________________________
FAITH, LOVE, TIME AND DR. LAZARO
by Gregorio Brillantes
From the upstairs veranda, Dr. Lazaro had a view of stars, the country darkness,
the lights on the distant highway at the edge of town. The phonograph in the sala
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
played Chopin – like a vast sorrow controlled, made familiar, he had wont to think.
But as he sat there, his lean frame in the habitual slack repose took after supper,
and stared at the plains of night that had evoked gentle images and even a kind of
peace (in the end, sweet and invincible oblivion), Dr. Lazaro remembered nothing,
his mind lay untouched by any conscious thought, he was scarcely aware of the
April heat; the pattern of music fell around him and dissolved swiftly,
uncomprehended. It was as though indifference were an infection that had entered
his blood it was everywhere in his body. In the scattered light from the sala his
angular face had a dusty, wasted quality, only his eyes contained life. He could
have remained there all evening, unmoving, and buried, it is where, in a strange
half-sleep, had his wife not come to tell him he was wanted on the phone.
Gradually his mind stirred, focused; as he rose from the chair he recognized the
somber passage in the sonata that, curiosly, made him think of ancient
monuments, faded stone walls, a greyness. The brain filed away an image; and
arrangement of sounds released it… He switched off the phonograph, suppressed
and impatient quiver in his throat as he reached for the phone: everyone had a
claim on his time. He thought: Why not the younger ones for a change? He had
spent a long day at the provincial hospital.
The man was calling from a service station outside the town – the station after the
agricultural high school, and before the San Miguel bridge, the man added rather
needlessly, in a voice that was frantic yet oddly subdued and courteous. Dr. Lazaro
thad heard it countless times, in the corridors of the hospitals, in waiting rooms:
the perpetual awkward misery. He was Pedro Esteban, the brother of the doctor’s
tenant in Nambalan, said the voice, trying to make itself less sudden remote.
But the connection was faulty, there was a humming in the wires, as though
darkness had added to the distance between the house in the town and the gas
station beyond the summer fields. Dr. Lazaro could barely catch the severed
phrases. The man’s week-old child had a high fever, a bluish skin; its mouth would
not open to suckle. They could not take the baby to the poblacion, they would not
dare move it; its body turned rigid at the slightest touch. If the doctor would
consent to come at so late an hour, Esteban would wait for him at the station. If
the doctor would be so kind…
Tetanus of the newborn: that was elementary, and most likely it was so hopeless,
a waste of time. Dr. Lazaro said yes, he would be there; he had committed himself
to that answer, long ago; duty had taken the place of an exhausted compassion.
The carelessness of the poor, the infected blankets, the toxin moving toward the
heart: they were casual scribbled items in a clinical report. But outside the grilled
windows, the night suddenly seemed alive and waiting. He had no choice left now
but action: it was the only certitude – he sometimes reminded himself – even if it
would prove futile, before, the descent into nothingness.
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His wife looked up from her needles and twine, under the shaded lamp of the
bedroom; she had finished the pullover for the grandchild in Bagiuo and had
begun work, he noted, on another of those altar vestments for the parish church.
Religion and her grandchild certainly kept her busy … She looked at him, into so
much to inquire as to be spoken to: a large and placid woman.
“Shouldn’t have let the drive go home so early,” Dr. Lazaro said. “They had to
wait till now to call … Child’s probably dead…”
“Ben can drive for you.”
“I hardly see that boy around the house. He seems to be on vacation both from
home and in school.”
“He’s downstairs,” his wife said.
Dr. Lazaro put on fresh shirt, buttoned it with tense, abrupt motions, “I thought
he’d gone out again… Who’s that girl he’s been seeing?...It’s not just warm, it’s
hot. You should’ve stayed on in Baguio… There’s disease, suffering, death,
because Adam ate the apple. They must have an answer to everything… “He
paused at the door, as though for the echo of his words.
Mrs. Lazaro had resumed the knitting; in the circle of yellow light, her head
bowed, she seemed absorbed in some contemplative prayer. But her silences had
ceased t disturb him, like the plaster saints she kept in the room, in their cases of
glass, or that air she wore of conspiracy, when she left with Ben for Mass in the
mornings. Dr. Lazaro would ramble about miracle drugs, politics, music, the
common sense of his unbelief; unrelated things strung together in a monologue;
he posed questions, supplied with his own answers; and she would merely nod,
with an occasional “Yes?” and “Is that so?” and something like a shadow of
anxiety in her gaze.
He hurried down the curving stairs, under the votive lamps of the Sacred Heart.
Ben lay sprawled on the sofa, in the front parlor; engrossed in a book, one leg
propped against the back cushions. “Come along, we’re going somewhere,” Dr.
Lazaro said, and went into the clinic for his medical bag. He added a vial of
penstrep, an ampule of caffeine to the satchel’s content’s; rechecked the bag
before closing it; the cutgut would last just one more patient. One can only cure,
and know nothing beyond one’s work… There had been the man, today, in the
hospital: the cancer pain no longer helped by the doses of morphine; the patients’s
eyes flickering their despair in the eroded face. Dr. Lazaro brushed aside the stray
vision as he strode out of the whitewashed room; he was back in his element,
among syringes, steel instruments, quick decisions made without emotion, and it
gave him a kind of blunt energy.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
I’ll drive, Pa?” Ben followed him through the kitchen, where the maids were
ironing the week’s wash, gossiping, and out to the yard shrouded in the dimness
of the single bulb under the eaves. The boy push back the folding doors of the
garage and slid behind the wheel.
“Somebody’s waiting at the gas station near San Miguel. You know the place?”
“Sure,” Ben said.
The engine sputtered briefly and stopped. “Battery’s weak,” Dr. Lazaro said. “Try
it without the lights,” and smelled the gasoline overflow as the old Pontiac finally
lurched around the house and through the trellised gate, its front sweeping over
the dry dusty street.
But he’s all right, Dr. Lazaro thought as they swung smoothly into the main
avenue of the town, past the church and the plaza, the kiosko bare for once in a
season of fiestas, the lam-posts shining on the quiet square. They did not speak;
he could sense his son’s concentration on the road, and he noted, with a tentative
amusement, the intense way the boy sat behind the wheel, his eagerness to be of
help. They passed the drab frame houses behind the marketplace, and the capitol
building on its landscaped hill, the gears shifting easily as they went over the
railroad tracks that crossed the asphalted street.
Then the road was pebbled and uneven, the car bucking slightly; and they were
speeding between open fields, a succession of narrow wooden bridges breaking
the crunching drive of the wheels. Dr. Lazaro gazed at the wide darkness around
them, the shapes of trees and bushes hurling toward them and sliding away and
he saw the stars, hard glinting points of light yards, black space, infinite distances;
in the unmeasured universe, man’s life flared briefly and was gone, traceless in
the void. He turned away from the emptiness. He said: “You seem to have had a
lot of practice, Ben.”
“A lot of what, Pa?”
“The ways you drive. Very professional.”
In the glow of the dashboard lights, the boy’s face relaxed, smiled. “Tio Cesar let
me use his car, in Manila. On special occasions.”
“No reckless driving now,” Dr. Lazaro said. “Some fellows think it’s smart. Gives
them a thrill. Don’t be like that.”
“No, I won’t, Pa. I just like to drive and – and go place, that’s all.”
Dr. Lazaro watched the young face intent on the road, a cowlick over the forehead,
the mall curve of the nose, his own face before he left to study in another country,
a young student of full illusions, a lifetime ago; long before the loss of faith, God
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turning abstract, unknowable, and everywhere, it seemed to him, those senseless
accidents of pain. He felt a need to define unspoken things, to come closer
somehow to the last of his sons; one of these days, before the boy’s vacation was
over, they might to on a picnic together, a trip to the farm; a special day for the
two of them – father and son, as well as friends. In the two years Ben had been
away in college, they had written a few brief, almost formal letters to each other:
your money is on the way, these are the best years, make the most of them…
Time was moving toward them, was swirling around and rushing away and it
seemed Dr. Lazaro could almost hear it’s hallow receding roar; and discovering
his son’s profile against the flowing darkness, he had a thirst to speak. He could
not find what it was he had meant to say.
The agricultural school buildings came up in the headlights and glided back into
blurred shapes behind a fence.
“What was that book you were reading, Ben?”
“A biography,” the boy said.
“Statesman? Scientist maybe?”
It’s about a guy who became a monk.”
“That’s your summer reading?” Dr. Lazaro asked with a small laugh, half
mockery, half affection. “You’re getting to be a regular saint, like your mother.”
“It’s an interesting book,” Ben said.
“I can imagine…” He dropped the bantering tone. “I suppose you’ll go on to
medicine after your AB?”
“I don’t know yet, Pa.”
Tiny moth like blown bits of paper flew toward the windshield and funneled away
above them. “You don’t have to be a country doctor like me, Ben. You could build
up a good practice in the city. Specialized in cancer, maybe or neuro-surgery, and
join a good hospital.” It was like trying to recall some rare happiness, in the car,
in the shifting darkness.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Ben said. It’s a vocation, a great one. Being able to
really help people, I mean.”
“You’ve done well in math, haven’t you?”
“Well enough, I guess,” Ben said.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
Engineering is a fine course too, “ Dr. Lazaro said. “There’ll be lots of room for
engineers. Planners and builders, they are what this country needs. Far too many
lawyers and salesmen these days. Now if your brother –“ He closed his eyes,
erasing the slashed wrists, part of the future dead in a boarding-house room, the
landlady whimpering, “He was such a nice boy, doctor, your son…” Sorrow lay
in ambush among the years.
“I have all summer to think about, “ Ben said.
“There’s no hurry,” Dr. Lazaro said. What was it he had wanted to say? Something
about knowing each other, about sharing; no, it was not that at all…
The stations appeared as they coasted down the incline of a low hill, its fluorescent
lights the only brightness on the plain before them, on the road that led farther into
deeper darkness. A freight truck was taking on a load of gasoline as they drove up
the concrete apron and came to a stop beside the station shed.
A short barefoot man in a patchwork shirt shuffled forward to meet them.
I am Esteban, doctor,” the man said, his voice faint and hoarse, almost inaudible,
and he bowed slightly with a careful politeness. He stood blinking, looking up at
the doctor, who had taken his bag and flashlight form the car.
In the windless space, Dr. Lazaro could hear Esteban’s labored breathing, the
clank of the metal nozzle as the attendant replaced it in the pump. The men in the
truck stared at them curiously.
Esteban said, pointing at the darkness beyond the road: “We will have to go
through those fields, doctor, then cross the river,” The apology for yet one more
imposition was a wounded look in his eyes. He added, in his subdued voice: “It’s
not very far…” Ben had spoken to the attendants and was locking the car.
The truck rumbled and moved ponderously onto the road, its throb strong and then
fading in the warm night stillness.
“Lead the way, “ Dr. Lazaro said, handing Esteban the flashlight.
They crossed the road, to a cleft in the embankment that bordered the fields, Dr.
Lazaro was sweating now in the dry heat; following the swinging ball of the
flashlight beam, sorrow wounded by the stifling night, he felt he was being
dragged, helplessly, toward some huge and complicated error, a meaningless
ceremony. Somewhere to his left rose a flapping of wings, a bird cried among
unseen leaves: they walked swiftly, and there was only the sound of the silence,
the constant whirl of crickets and the whisper of their feet on the path between the
stubble fields.
33

With the boy close behind him, Dr. Lazaro followed Esteban down a clay slope
to the slope and ripple of water in the darkness. The flashlight showed a banca
drawn up at the river’s edge. Esteban wade waist-deep into the water, holding the
boat steady as Dr. Lazaro and Ben stepped on the board. In the darkness, with the
opposite bank like the far rise of an island, Dr. Lazaro had a moment’s tremor of
fear as the boar slide out over the black water; below prowled the deadly currents;
to drown her in the dephts of the night… But it took only a minute to cross the
river. “We’re here doctor,” Esteban said, and they padded p a stretch of sand to a
clump of trees; a dog started to bark, the shadows of a kerosene lamp wavered at
a window.
Unsteady on a steep ladder, Dr. Lazaro entered the cave of Esteban’s hut. The
single room contained the odors he often encountered but had remained alien to,
stirring an impersonal disgust: the sourish decay, the smells of the unaired sick.
An old man greeted him, lisping incoherently; a woman, the grandmother, sat
crouched in a corner, beneath a famed print of the Mother of Perpetual Help; a
boy, about ten, slept on, sprawled on a mat. Esteban’s wife, pale and thin, lay on
the floor with the sick child beside her.
Motionless, its tiny blue-tinged face drawn way from its chest in a fixed wrinkled
grimace, the infant seemed to be straining to express some terrible ancient
wisdom.
Dr. Lazaro made a cursory check – skin dry, turning cold; breathing shallow;
heartbeat fast and irregular. And I that moment, only the child existed before him;
only the child and his own mind probing now like a hard gleaming instrument.
How strange that it should still live, his mind said as it considered the spark that
persisted within the rigid and tortured body. He was alone with the child, his
whole being focused on it, in those intense minutes shaped into a habit now by so
many similar instances: his physician’s knowledge trying to keep the heart
beating, to revive an ebbing life and somehow make it rise again.
Dr. Lazaro removed the blankets that bundled the child and injected a whole
ampule to check the tonic spasms, the needle piercing neatly into the sparse flesh;
he broke another ampule, with deft precise movements, and emptied the syringe,
while the infant lay stiff as wood beneath his hands. He wiped off the sweat
running into his eyes, then holding the rigid body with one hand, he tried to draw
air into the faltering lungs, pressing and releasing the chest; but even as he worked
to rescue the child, the bluish color of its face began to turn gray.
Dr. Lazaro rose from his crouch on the floor, a cramped ache in his shoulders, his
mouth dry. The lamplight glistened on his pale hollow face as he confronted the
room again, the stale heat, the poverty. Esteban met his gaze; all their eyes were
upon him, Ben at the door, the old man, the woman in the corner, and Esteban’s
wife, in the trembling shadows.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
Esteban said: “Doctor..”
He shook his head, and replaced the syringe case in his bag, slowly and
deliberately, and fastened the clasp. T Here was murmuring him, a rustle across
the bamboo floor, and when he turned, Ben was kneeling beside the child. And he
watched, with a tired detached surprise, as the boy poured water from a coconut
shell on the infant’s brow. He caught the words half-whispered in the quietness:
“.. in the name of the Father.. the Son… the Holy Ghost…”
The shadows flapped on the walls, the heart of the lamp quivering before it settled
into a slender flame. By the river dogs were barking. Dr. Lazaro glanced at his
watch; it was close to midnight. Ben stood over the child, the coconut shell in his
hands, as though wandering what next to do with it, until he saw his father nod
for them to go.
Doctor, tell us – “Esteban took a step forward.
“I did everything: Dr. Lazaro said. “It’s too late –“
He gestured vaguely, with a dull resentment; by some implicit relationship, he
was also responsible, for the misery in the room, the hopelessness. “There’s
nothing more I can do, Esteban, “ he said. He thought with a flick of anger: Soon
the child will be out of it, you ought to be grateful. Esteban’s wife began to cry, a
weak smothered gasping, and the old woman was comforting her, it is the will of
God, my daughter…”
In the yard, Esteban pressed carefully folded bills into the doctor’s hand; the limp,
tattered feel of the money was sort of the futile journey, “I know this is not enough,
doctor,” Esteban said. “as you can see we are very poor… I shall bring you fruit,
chickens, someday…”
A late moon had risen, edging over the tops of the trees, and in the faint wash of
its light, Esteban guided them back to the boat. A glimmering rippled on the
surface of the water as they paddled across,; the white moonlight spread in the
sky, and a sudden wind sprang rain-like and was lost in the tress massed on the
riverbank.
“I cannot thank you enough, doctor,” Esteban said. “You have been very kind to
come this far, at this hour.” He trail is just over there, isn’t it?” He wanted to be
rid of the man, to be away from the shy humble voice, the prolonged
wretchedness.
I shall be grateful always, doctor,” Esteban said. “And to you son, too. God go
with you.” He was a faceless voice withdrawing in the shadows, a cipher in the
shabby crowds that came to town on market days.
“Let’s go, Ben” Dr. Lazaro said.
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They took the path across the field; around them the moonlight had transformed
the landscape, revealing a gentle, more familiar dimension, a luminous haze upon
the trees stirring with a growing wind; and the heat of the night had passed, a
coolness was falling from the deep sky. Unhurried, his pace no more than a casual
stroll, Dr. Lazaro felt the oppression of the night begin to life from him, an
emotionless calm returned to his mind. The sparrow does not fall without the
Father’s leave he mused at the sky, but it falls just the same. But to what end are
the sufferings of a child? The crickets chirped peacefully in the moon-pale
darkness beneath the trees.
“You baptized the child, didn’t you, Ben?”
“Yes, Pa.” The boy kept in the step beside him.
He used to believe in it, too. The power of the Holy Spirit washing away original
sin, the purified soul made heir of heaven. He could still remember fragments of
his boy hood faith, as one might remember an improbable and long-discarded
dream.
“Lay baptism, isn’t that the name for it?”
“Yes,” Ben said. I asked the father. The baby hadn’t been baptized.” He added as
they came to the embankment that separated the field from the road: “They were
waiting for it to get well.”
The station had closed, with only the canopy light and the blobed neon sign left
burning. A steady wind was blowing now across the field, the moonlit plains.
He saw Ben stifle a yawn. I’ll drive,” Dr. Lazaro said.
His eyes were not what they used to be, and he drove leaning forward, his hands
tight on the wheel. He began to sweat again, and the empty road and the lateness
and the memory of Esteban and of the child dying before morning in the
impoverished, lamplit room fused into tired melancholy. He started to think of his
other son, one he had lost.
He said, seeking conversation, if other people carried on like you, Ben, the priests
would be run out of business.”
The boy sat beside him, his face averted, not answering.
“Now, you’ll have an angel praying for you in heaven,” Dr. Lazaro said, teasing,
trying to create an easy mood between them. “What if you hadn’t baptized the
baby and it died? What would happen to it then?”
It won’t see God,” Ben said.
“But isn’t that unfair?” It was like riddle, trivial, but diverting. “Just because..”
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
“Maybe God has another remedy,” Ben said. “I don’t know. But the church says.”
He could sense the boy groping for the tremendous answers. “The Church teaches,
the church says…. “ God: Christ: the communications of saints: Dr. Lazaro found
himself wondering about the world of novenas and candles, where bread and wine
became the flesh and blood of the Lord, and a woman bathed in light appeared
before children, and mortal men spoke of eternal life; the visions of God, the
body’s resurrection at the end of time. It was a country from which he was barred;
no matter – the customs, the geography didn’t appeal to him. But in the care
suddenly, driving through the night, he was aware of an obscure disappointment,
a subtle pressure around his heart, as though he had been deprived of a certain
joy…
A bus roared around a hill toward, its lights blinding him, and he pulled to the side
of the road, braking involuntarily as a billow of dust swept over the car. He had
not closed the window on his side, and the flung dust poured in, the thick brittle
powder almost choking him, making him cough, his eyes smarting, before he
could shield his face with his hands. In the headlights, the dust sifted down and
when the air was clear again, Dr. Lazaro, swallowing a taste of earth, of darkness,
maneuvered the car back onto the road, his arms exhausted and numb. He drove
the last half-mile to town in silence, his mind registering nothing but the frit of
dust in his mouth and the empty road unwinding swiftly before him.
They reached the sleeping town, the desolate streets, the plaza empty in the
moonlight, and the huddled shapes of houses, the old houses that Dr. Lazaro had
always know. How many nights had he driven home like this through the quiet
town, with a man’s life ended behind him, or a child crying newly risen from the
womb; and a sense of constant motions, of change, of the days moving swiftly
toward and immense revelation touched him once more, briefly, and still he could
not find the words.. He turned the last corner, then steered the car down the
gravelled driveway to the garage, while Ben closed the gate. Dr. Lazaro sat there
a moment, in the stillness, resting his eyes, conscious of the measured beating of
his heart, and breathing a scent of dust that lingered on his clothes, his skin. Slowly
he emerged from the car, locking it, and went around the tower of the water-tank
to the front yard where Ben Stood waiting.
With unaccustomed tenderness he placed a hand on Ben’s shoulder was they
turned toward the ement –walled house. They had gone on a trip; they had come
home safely together. He felt closer to the boy than he had ever been in years.
“Sorry for ekeeping you up this late,” Dr. Lazaro said.
“It’s all right, Pa.”
Some night, huh, Ben? What you did back in that barrio” – there was just the
slightest patronage in this one – “ your mother will love to hear about it.”
35

He shook the boy beside him gently. “Reverend Father Ben Lazaro.”
The impulse of certain humor – it was part of the comradeship. He chuckled
drowsily: father Lazaro, what must I do to gain eternal life?”
As he slid the door open on the vault of darkness, the familiar depth of the house,
it came to Dr. Lazaro faintly in the late night that for certain things, like love there
was only so much time. But the glimmer was lost instantly, buried in the mist of
indifference and sleep rising now in his brain.
__________________________________________________
WHY WOMEN WASH THE DISHES
by Filomena N. Colendrino
In the town of Santa Rosa there once lived a couple named Hugo and Imelda.
Every mealtime they quarreled over the chore of washing the dishes. Imelda
would scold Hugo if he refused to wash the dishes. Sometimes she would become
angry and call him names, and if he talked back she would get coconut midrib
broom and chase him with it. He would run to the house of his compadre and hide
there till his wife’s anger had passed.
The neighbors familiarly called Imelda, Ka Maldang and Hugo, Ka Ugong.
One day just as they were finishin their lunch, Ka Ugong announced: “I’m not
going to wash the dishes any more.” He threw out his chest and lifted his chin.
“Who says so?” asked Ka Maldang, holding up her chin, highert than his.
“I say so; I worked so hard in the field this morning. I’m not going to wash any
dish.”
Ka Maldang stood up and with her arms akimbo, she glared down at Ka Ugong
across the table. She was at Ka Ugong across the table. She was a Big woman.
Her arms were stourt. Her voice was also big. “Ad who, Mister Hugo, is going to
wash these dishes?” she asked.
Ka Ugong’s chest sank again. His chin salso went down. He held on the edge of
the table nervously.
“You!” he said in a much lower tone. “You are the woman. You should do all the
housework.”
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
“And what do you do?” asked Ka Maldang. “You tie the carabao to the reeds in
the field and then you lie down on the grass to watch it graze. You call that hard
work? I cook, clean the house, wash your clothes, I scrub the floor, I do all the
work that only slaves should do. And yet, you even refuse to help me wash the
plate which you have eaten!” Ka Maldang’s voice was now raised to a high pitch
and her tears posed on her eyelids at Ka Ugong and at her broom. She grabbed the
broom. She raised the broom to strike him, crying, “You, you, you lazy man!”
Ka Ugong ducked under the table, “Don’t” he cried. “Don’t strike me!”
“Come out from under the table, you coward.” ordered Ka Maldang.
“Lay down your broom,” said Ka Ugong.
“All right, all right. Come out.” Ka Maldang put her broom behind the door.
Ka Ugong returned to his seat opposite her at the table.
“What have you to say?” asked Ka Maldang, wipingher eyes.
“Let’s stop quarreling over the plates. Let’s have a wager. The first one of us who
will speak after I’d said ‘Begin’ will wash the dishes. Always”
“Only that?” said Ka Maldang. “The first one who talks will always wash the
plates, and bowls, and pots and pans. Always.”
“Right.” said Ka Ugong. “If you ever say just one word to me or to anybody, or
to anything after I had said ‘Begin’, you will always wash the dishes.”
“That’s easy. I can keep my mouth shut even for a week. You can’t. You even
talk to your carabao.”
“All right, are you ready?” asked Ka Ugong.
Ka Maldang sat upright in front of him across the table. She nodded her head,
compressed her lips, and Ka Ugong said “Begin.”
They both fell silent. They sat at the table looking at each other across the
unwashed plates and bowls and spoons. They did not like to leave each other for
fear that one would talk to him self without the other’s hearing. They sat there just
staring.
Soon the cat began to mew for its food. Neither Ka Maldang nor Ka Ugong paid
attention to its mewing. The cat jumped upon the drying dishes to lick the
leftovers. Ka Maldang did not drive the cat away. Neither did Ka Ugong. The cat
licked the pot and pan on it, overturned a kettle, spilled its contents, then went to
lie down under the table. Ka Ugong pretended that nothing had happened. He
continue to sit still, and so did Ka Maldang.
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Soon, it was getting late in the afternoon but they went on sitting mutely at the
lunch table. Their eyes were tired from staring hard at each other. Tears began to
roll down their cheeks. Ka Ugong’s shirt became damp with his sweat. Ka
Maldang’s sweat gathered on her fore heat, and trickle down to the sides of her
face, and fell drop by drop to her breast.
A neighbor called, “Compadre Ugong! Oh! Compadre!”
Ka Ugong did not answer.
The neighbor called again, “Comadre Maldang! Yoo-hoo Comadre Maldang.
Yoo-hoo, Compadre Ugong, may I borrow your ax?”
Ka Maldang did not answer. Ka Ugong looked at her silently.
“Perhaps nobody is at home,” they heard the neighbor say to himself. “But why
did they leave their ladder at the door? They usually remove the ladder when they
go away. Well, I’ll just go up get the ax and return it later.” The neighbor went
up.
When the neighbor went u the bamboo ladder he was surprised to see Ka Maldang
and Ka Ugong sitting silently at the table where the plates had dried up with the
leftovers. He hurried toward them.
Ka Ugong nether moved nor talked. The neighbor repeated his question. He shook
Ka Ugong;s shoulder. Ka Ugong let him shake him, closing his lips tighter.
The neighbor turned to Ka Maldang. “Speak, Comadre! What happened?” He
shook her shoulders, too.
She pushed him roughly aside but did not speak.
“Did you eat something poisonous? Some food that has made you dumb?” He
shook each one alternately. But still neither stood up nor talked.
The neighbor was alarmed. He did not get the ax but ran out to the rest of the
neighbors, He told them that something terrible had happened to to his Compadre
Ugong and Compadre Maldang. The neighbors gathered at Ka Maldang’s dining
room. They took turns trying to make them speak. But the two continued to sit
staring at each other in silence. Ka Maldang looked at her husband threateningly
for a moment then closed her eyes. Ka Ugong knew that she did so to avoid
looking at the neighbors, He also closed his eyesand ignored everyone who had
come up to his house. Ka Maldang was very angry with her Compadre’s
interference but she dared not to speak her mind, she pretended to be asleep.
The compadre was very much worried. He ran to the village herb man. The herb
man came and when he saw the motionless, silent husband and wife sitting at the
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
table, he declared that they were bewitched. He spread a woven bud mat in the
center of the sala and asked the “bewitched” couple to lie down. Ka Ugong
obediently lay down and closed his eyes. He curled up and went to sleep. But Ka
Maldang refused to get up from where she sat at the dining table
The herb man said “Ah, the spirit that has taken possession of her is very stubborn.
I must break its spell.”
He turned, then produced from a small bag which he always carried nine pieces
of betel leaf, a piece of areca nut, and a little lime from a tiny bottle. He examined
the leaves closely to choose those which had veins running in identical
arrangements on each side of the midrib. He cut the nut into nine pieces. He spread
a little lime on each betel leaf, rolled them and wrapped them around each piece
of areca nut. He now had nine rings of the leaves.
“This represents the lost spirit of the couple,” he said.
He chewed the leaf and nut. When he had chewed it he spat it on his palm, dipped
a forefinger of the other hand into the nut colored saliva and marked with it a cross
on the foreheads of Ka Ugong and Ka Maldang. Ka Ugong did not seem to feel
the old man’s finger on his forehead. Ka Maldang caught the man’s forefinger and
twisted it. The old herb doctor cried “aray” and pulled back his hand. He moved
toward Ka Ugong who was lying down. Calling his name softly and slowly several
times. “Come, Ugong, Come back, Ugong!” Ka Ugong did not move nor speak.
“Come Maldang…come home to your body now…come. Maldang…!” chanted
the old man. Ka Maldang did not answer.
Evening fell on the frightened village, frightened because the herb doctor said that
the spell might be cast on some other villagers besides Ka Ugong and Ka Maldang.
He called to the bewitched couple softly at first, and then louder, but became tired
so she reclined against the bamboo wall.
The old her man said, “This is the first witchery of its kind that I have met here.
By their silence I believe that they are dead. Their spirits, driven away by the
witch, have left their bodies. The only thing to do in order to keep their souls in
peace and to prevent this witchery craft from spreading among us is to bury them.”
The herb man ordered some of the men to look for boards and make two coffins
immediately before the malady would go to them. In no time, the two coffins,
made of rough planks, hurriedly nailed together, were finished.
The women began to weep for Ka Maldang. She had leaned rigidly against the
back of her chair, closed her eyes, and shut her lips tight. The herb man asked the
men gathered around to lift the couple into the coffins.
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“We shall bury them at sunrise. Some of us have to stay to keep the wake for the
dead,” he said.
The man easily lifted Ka Ugong and places him inside his coffin. Surely, he
thought to himself, he would win the wager. He would not be afraid of being
buried. Why, he would just get cut of the grave when the neighbors were gone.
He thought everything going on was great fun and he was enjoying himself. How
he would frighten them all when he returned from his grave!
The herb man approached Ka Maldang. Although her eyes were closed, she had
been listening to his directions. She was afraid that he would surely force her into
the coffin if she did not tell him to go away. But she did not want to talk. She
hoped her husband would object to the men’s lifting her into the coffin.
“Surely, Hugo will not let me be buried tomorrow. Uh, I’m afraid to sleep in that
coffin tonight. No, I’ll not let them lift me into it,” she thought to herself.
But she did not hear Ka Ugong speak. She opened her eyes just as the herb man,
aided by two other men, put his arms around her to lift up from her chair.
Ka Maldang pushed the men, got up to her feet, and shouted, “Don’t touch us!
Get out! Get out of my house. Shame on you for coming here, meddling with our
lives!”
Ka Ugong leaped to his feet. He also shouted, “You talked first!”
He jumped about clapping his hands and saying to the astonished neighbors, “She
talked first. We had a wager. Now she will always wash the dishes!’
Ka Maldang lifted up the lid of Ka Ugong’s coffin to strike his head with it but he
ran out with his neighbors, still shouting happily and saying “I won, I knew I
would win! Now I’ll never wash dishes.”
__________________________________________________
MAGNIFICENCE
by Estrella Alfon
There was nothing to fear, for the man was always so gentle, so kind. At night
when the little girl and her brother were bathed in the light of the big shaded bulb
that hung over the big study table in the downstairs hall, the man would knock
gently on the door, and come in. he would stand for a while just beyond the pool
of light, his feet in the circle of illumination, the rest of him in shadow. The little
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
girl and her brother would look up at him where they sat at the big table, their eyes
bright in the bright light, and watch him come fully into the light, but his voice
soft, his manner slow. He would smell very faintly of sweat and pomade, but the
children didn’t mind although they did notice, for they waited for him every
evening as they sat at their lessons like this. He’d throw his visored cap on the
table, and it would fall down with a soft plop, then he’d nod his head to say one
was right, or shake it to say one was wrong.
It was not always that he came. They could remember perhaps two weeks when
he remarked to their mother that he had never seen two children looking so smart.
The praise had made their mother look over them as they stood around listening
to the goings-on at the meeting of the neighborhood association, of which their
mother was president. Two children, one a girl of seven, and a boy of eight. They
were both very tall for their age, and their legs were the long gangly legs of fine
spirited colts. Their mother saw them with eyes that held pride, and then to partly
gloss over the maternal gloating she exhibited, she said to the man, in answer to
his praise, But their homework. They’re so lazy with them. And the man said, I
have nothing to do in the evenings, let me help them. Mother nodded her head and
said, if you want to bother yourself. And the thing rested there, and the man came
in the evenings therefore, and he helped solve fractions for the boy, and write
correct phrases in language for the little girl.
In those days, the rage was for pencils. School children always have rages going
at one time or another. Sometimes for paper butterflies that are held on sticks, and
whirr in the wind. The Japanese bazaars promoted a rage for those. Sometimes it
is for little lead toys found in the folded waffles that Japanese confection-makers
had such light hands with. At this particular time, it was for pencils. Pencils big
but light in circumference not smaller than a man’s thumb. They were unwieldy
in a child’s hands, but in all schools then, where Japanese bazaars clustered there
were all colors of these pencils selling for very low, but unattainable to a child
budgeted at a baon of a centavo a day. They were all of five centavos each, and
one pencil was not at all what one had ambitions for. In rages, one kept a
collection. Four or five pencils, of different colors, to tie with strings near the
eraser end, to dangle from one’s book-basket, to arouse the envy of the other
children who probably possessed less.
Add to the man’s gentleness and his kindness in knowing a child’s desires, his
promise that he would give each of them not one pencil but two. And for the little
girl who he said was very bright and deserved more, who would get the biggest
pencil he could find.
One evening he did bring them. The evenings of waiting had made them look
forward to this final giving, and when they got the pencils they whooped with joy.
The little boy had two pencils, one green, and one blue. And the little girl had
three pencils, two of the same circumference as the little boy’s but colored red and
38

yellow. And the third pencil, a jumbo size pencil really, was white, and had been
sharpened, and the little girl jumped up and down, and shouted with glee. Until
their mother called from down the stairs. What are you shouting about? And they
told her, shouting gladly, Vicente, for that was his name. Vicente had brought the
pencils he had promised them.
Thank him, their mother called. The little boy smiled and said, Thank you. And
the little girl smiled, and said, Thank you, too. But the man said, are you not going
to kiss me for those pencils? They both came forward, the little girl and the little
boy, and they both made to kiss him but Vicente slapped the boy smartly on his
lean hips, and said, Boys do not kiss boys. And the little boy laughed and
scampered away, and then ran back and kissed him anyway.
The little girl went up to the man shyly, put her arms about his neck as he crouched
to receive her embrace, and kissed him on the cheeks.
The man’s arms tightened suddenly about the little girl until the little girl squirmed
out of his arms, and laughed a little breathlessly, disturbed but innocent, looking
at the man with a smiling little question of puzzlement.
The next evening, he came around again. All through that day, they had been very
proud in school showing off their brand new pencils. All the little girls and boys
had been envying them. And their mother had finally to tell them to stop talking
about the pencils, pencils, for now that they had, the boy two, and the girl three,
they were asking their mother to buy more, so they could each have five, and three
at least in the jumbo size that the little girl’s third pencil was. Their mother said,
Oh stop it, what will you do with so many pencils, you can only write with one at
a time.
And the little girl muttered under her breath, I’ll ask Vicente for some more.
Their mother replied, He’s only a bus conductor, don’t ask him for too many
things. It’s a pity. And this observation their mother said to their father, who was
eating his evening meal between paragraphs of the book on masonry rites that he
was reading. It is a pity, said their mother, People like those, they make friends
with people like us, and they feel it is nice to give us gifts, or the children toys and
things. You’d think they wouldn’t be able to afford it.
The father grunted, and said, the man probably needed a new job, and was
softening his way through to him by going at the children like that. And the mother
said, No, I don’t think so, he’s a rather queer young man, and I think he doesn’t
have many friends, but I have watched him with the children, and he seems to
dote on them.
The father grunted again, and did not pay any further attention.
Philippine Literature in English
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Vicente was earlier than usual that evening. The children immediately put their
lessons down, telling him of the envy of their schoolmates, and would he buy them
more please?
Vicente said to the little boy, Go and ask if you can let me have a glass of water.
And the little boy ran away to comply, saying behind him, But buy us some more
pencils, huh, buy us more pencils, and then went up to stairs to their mother.
Vicente held the little girl by the arm, and said gently, Of course I will buy you
more pencils, as many as you want
And the little girl giggled and said, Oh, then I will tell my friends, and they will
envy me, for they don’t have as many or as pretty.
Vicente took the girl up lightly in his arms, holding her under the armpits, and
held her to sit down on his lap and he said, still gently, what are your lessons for
tomorrow? And the little girl turned to the paper on the table where she had been
writing with the jumbo pencil, and she told him that that was her lesson but it was
easy.
Then go ahead and write, and I will watch you.
Don’t hold me on your lap, said the little girl, I am very heavy, you will get very
tired.
The man shook his head, and said nothing, but held her on his lap just the same.
The little girl kept squirming, for somehow she felt uncomfortable to be held thus,
her mother and father always treated her like a big girl, she was always told never
to act like a baby. She looked around at Vicente, interrupting her careful writing
to twist around.
His face was all in sweat, and his eyes looked very strange, and he indicated to
her that she must turn around, attend to the homework she was writing.
But the little girl felt very queer, she didn’t know why, all of a sudden she was
immensely frightened, and she jumped up away from Vicente’s lap.
She stood looking at him, feeling that queer frightened feeling, not knowing what
to do. By and by, in a very short while her mother came down the stairs, holding
in her hand a glass of sarsaparilla, Vicente.
But Vicente had jumped up too soon as the little girl had jumped from his lap. He
snatched at the papers that lay on the table and held them to his stomach, turning
away from the mother’s coming.
The mother looked at him, stopped in her tracks, and advanced into the light. She
had been in the shadow. Her voice had been like a bell of safety to the little girl.
39

But now she advanced into glare of the light that held like a tableau the figures of
Vicente holding the little girl’s papers to him, and the little girl looking up at him
frightened, in her eyes dark pools of wonder and fear and question.
The little girl looked at her mother, and saw the beloved face transfigured by some
sort of glow. The mother kept coming into the light, and when Vicente made as if
to move away into the shadow, she said, very low, but very heavily, do not move.
She put the glass of soft drink down on the table, where in the light one could
watch the little bubbles go up and down in the dark liquid. The mother said to the
boy, Oscar, finish your lessons. And turning to the little girl, she said, come here.
The little girl went to her, and the mother knelt down, for she was a tall woman
and she said, turn around. Obediently the little girl turned around, and her mother
passed her hands over the little girl’s back.
Go upstairs, she said.
The mother’s voice was of such a heavy quality and of such awful timbre that the
girl could only nod her head, and without looking at Vicente again, she raced up
the stairs. The mother went to the cowering man, and marched him with a glance
out of the circle of light that held the little boy. Once in the shadow, she extended
her hand, and without any opposition took away the papers that Vicente was
holding to himself. She stood there saying nothing as the man fumbled with his
hands and with his fingers, and she waited until he had finished. She was going to
open her mouth but she glanced at the boy and closed it, and with a look and an
inclination of the head, she bade Vicente go up the stairs.
The man said nothing, for she said nothing either. Up the stairs went the man, and
the mother followed behind. When they had reached the upper landing, the woman
called down to her son, Son, come up and go to your room.
The little boy did as he was told, asking no questions, for indeed he was feeling
sleepy already.
As soon as the boy was gone, the mother turned on Vicente. There was a pause.
Finally, the woman raised her hand and slapped him full hard in the face. Her
retreated down one tread of the stairs with the force of the blow, but the mother
followed him. With her other hand she slapped him on the other side of the face
again. And so down the stairs they went, the man backwards, his face continually
open to the force of the woman’s slapping. Alternately she lifted her right hand
and made him retreat before her until they reached the bottom landing.
He made no resistance, offered no defense. Before the silence and the grimness of
her attack he cowered, retreating, until out of his mouth issued something like a
whimper.
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The mother thus shut his mouth, and with those hard forceful slaps she escorted
him right to the other door. As soon as the cool air of the free night touched him,
he recovered enough to turn away and run, into the shadows that ate him up. The
woman looked after him, and closed the door. She turned off the blazing light over
the study table, and went slowly up the stairs and out into the dark night.
When her mother reached her, the woman, held her hand out to the child. Always
also, with the terrible indelibility that one associated with terror, the girl was to
remember the touch of that hand on her shoulder, heavy, kneading at her flesh,
the woman herself stricken almost dumb, but her eyes eloquent with that angered
fire. She knelt, she felt the little girl’s dress and took it off with haste that was
almost frantic, tearing at the buttons and imparting a terror to the little girl that
almost made her sob. Hush, the mother said. Take a bath quickly.
Her mother presided over the bath the little girl took, scrubbed her, and soaped
her, and then wiped her gently all over and changed her into new clothes that smelt
of the clean fresh smell of clothes that had hung in the light of the sun. The clothes
that she had taken off the little girl, she bundled into a tight wrenched bunch,
which she threw into the kitchen range.
Take also the pencils, said the mother to the watching newly bathed, newly
changed child. Take them and throw them into the fire. But when the girl turned
to comply, the mother said, No, tomorrow will do. And taking the little girl by the
hand, she led her to her little girl’s bed, made her lie down and tucked the covers
gently about her as the girl dropped off into quick slumber.
__________________________________________________
IN THE GARDEN
by Jose Dalisay
The children were in the schoolhouse garden, pressing squash seeds into mounds
they had shaped the day before, when the soldiers came. The tomatoes would have
been ripe for picking in a few days; they had watered these, and Rosita, being big-
boned and the eldest at fourteen, was drawing more water from the pump near the
mango tree. The pump was old and creaky; it was as old as the schoolhouse, and
older than the tree. Rosita pushed the iron lever down with all her weight, and the
pump spat water out into her pail in uneven bursts. The pail was nearly full when
Rosita saw the soldiers coming up the path.
Mr. Pareja was inside the one-room schoolhouse at that moment, preparing
questions for a social studies quiz he planned to give the following morning. On
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the table, in front of him, was a tin box that had once held biscuits. The crayons
he had brought back with him from his last trip to the capital now lay at the bottom
of the box, most of them stripped of their paper coverings. The box sat on top of
a folded map, and the map was reinforced with tape at the folds. Earlier that day
Mr. Pareja had made the children copy, with their pencils and the crayons, the
map of the country—all its major islands and important cities. He had watched
over their shoulders as the children labored with the unfamiliar names and shapes
and shaded the islands—lightly, because the crayons were few and had to be
shared.
Bienvenido, the brightest boy, had asked him where Kangmating was on the big
map. It was nowhere to be found, much to the children’s anxiety, so Mr. Pareja
had had to mark its approximate location with his pen. In doing so his eyes had
strayed upwards, across straits and seas, to another town with its name printed in
the smallest and faintest type, and he felt a fleeting clutch in the chest, and saw in
his mind the outlines of a church and belfry and the fall of delicate white lace.
“Here,” he had said softly, “Kangmating is here. This map was made by very old
people. They forgot to put us in it.” The children had laughed, and he had laughed
with them. Then he had gone to the part of the wall where the children had pasted
cut-out pictures of Mayon Volcano, Pagsanjan Falls and the Banaue Rice
Terraces, and he had pointed out their locations on the map. Bienvenido had
remarked that they all seemed to be very far away from Kangmating, and Mr.
Pareja, wiping his glasses on the hem of his shirt, had tried to explain that away
by saying that Kangmating was a beautiful place in its own right—there were wild
orchids and blue-feathered birds to be found in the outlying forests—but no one
had smiled.
Now it was past four in the afternoon and the midday heat had dissipated. Mr.
Pareja had removed his shoes, as it was his habit to do, and had forgotten to put
them back on. His socks were the same ones he had worn the day before, but they
were soft and comfortable on his feet, which he perched on top of his shoes. The
shoes themselves—brown suede with black rubber soles—had long lost their
color and had taken on the dull grey of the earthen floor; one of the laces had
frayed so badly that he had had to knot it whole again. Nevertheless they were the
only shoes in the building, and he had resolved to wear them every school day for
the past two years, failing only once when a scorpion had stung him in the ankle,
causing it to swell.
Mr. Pareja looked out the window and saw two children arguing over the distance
to leave between the seeds. He thought of stepping out and resolving the issue for
them, but he changed his mind just as quickly; they would know, in a few weeks,
who was right. It was more likely that they already knew, being farmers’ children,
and that one was simply being stubborn. It did not matter; they would learn. The
bushes of white rosal caught his eye, and gladdened him; he had planted these
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himself at the beginning of his tenure, and now the garden had yielded both
vegetables for the children and himself to study and to eat, and flowers for the
plaster Virgin they had set up in a corner of the schoolroom. The garden was neat
and well-tended; a sea of weeds and deep-rooted shrubbery stood on the other side
of the fence, and beyond were the foothills and the forests, watered on their own
by rivers and cloudbursts; where the children went home among the coconut and
bamboo groves, the same vegetables and flowers grew in abandon. But Mr. Pareja
had insisted on the garden; the children had giggled the first time that the man had
taken them out to scratch plots in the hard earth, but soon everyone went about
his business severely, and their first harvest of eggplants—small and pudgy as
they were—was roasted and feasted on by all.
At the instant that the soldiers came into view, Mr. Pareja was divided between
forming a question about famous landmarks in the distant north and savoring the
memory of how sweet and crunchy the biscuits in the box had been.
Then Rosita screamed, and Mr. Pareja ran out to the garden in his socks.
There were six of them, led by a sergeant. The sergeant was a large man in his
forties, and when he moved he forced the air about him into corners; his name was
Baclagon. The other men on the detail were younger and leaner of build; they
wore soggy but new camouflage uniforms and held their rifles close to their
bodies; they would look at Baclagon, then sweep the perimeter, then look at the
sergeant again. He would tell them where to go and what to do, and they would
follow. Now the soldiers were picking the garden clean of its vegetables, green
tomatoes and all, as Mr. Pareja and the children watched in silence. Baclagon
stood before them and spoke kindly to Rosita.
“It was nothing, it was only a tweak.”
Rosita took a step backward, murmuring something, not knowing that she had
begun to hold on to Mr. Pareja’s shirt. Mr. Pareja was looking at the garden; one
of the soldiers had found it easier to uproot the plants than to pick the vegetables
off them one by one. Slowly he removed his glasses and stared at his feet.
Baclagon stared along with him and laughed.
“Sir, did you forget your shoes at home, sir?”
Mr. Pareja shook his head. He felt a tug at his shirt and then he found his voice.
“How long will you stay?”
“Tonight. Tomorrow morning, maybe. It’s a routine job, that’s all. There are
rebels all around these days, terrorists. I’m sure you know.”
“We’re peaceful people here. We hide nothing.”
41

Baclagon rubbed his chest and squinted at Bienvenido. “The other day, a soldier
was killed, here in Kangmating. Do you have a cigarette?”
“No. I don’t smoke.”
“You want to live longer, sir?” The sergeant chuckled. “Did you hear about our
soldier?”
“Yes.” The children had told him about it. The man had been drinking a gallon of
tuba, and had started firing his rifle into trees and houses. That evening he had
been found along the road, his guts bubbling out of a huge gash in his belly. It had
shocked Mr. Pareja—the soldier’s actions and his fate—but there was nothing, he
thought, to be done about it, and he made a point later in the day to make no further
mention of the incident.
“There is food in the mountains,” Mr. Pareja said. “You cannot possibly uproot
everything.”
“It was very unfortunate,” Baclagon said. “His killers have not been caught. Now,
we have to do this.” The vegetable patch was a shambles. Bienvenido, who had
planted most of the okra, was staring at the soldier whose task it was to destroy
those plants. His fingers curled around the ball of mud he had been holding when
the soldiers came, and soon Bienvenido, now eleven but fatherless at eight, was
crying. The soldier looked back at him, and then away; he could not have been
older than seventeen himself; he, too, looked like a farmer’s son, a boy from the
north as soldiers usually were. The soldier put his rifle down on the ground to free
both hands for his work, but the sergeant quickly strode over to him and struck
him hard on the shoulder. “Never drop your weapon unless I say so, estupido!
Very soon you’ll have a rebel on your back, with a grin on his face and a knife in
your neck!” The soldier scrambled for his rifle, scattering okra. His companions
snickered; Baclagon glared at them as well, and they fell quiet. The sergeant
returned to Mr. Pareja. “We have to take everything. We have orders, you
understand? These rebels, they come and go. But they need food, too, like you
have here. But surely this is nothing to you, no? It’s just a—what—a decoration.
But to some people, it is everything. So we take everything—with your
permission, sir. Ah, everything but the flowers. We are not sissies, you see.” That
drew a laugh from the men.
“There is food in the mountains,” Mr. Pareja said. “You cannot possibly uproot
everything.”
“Good, then let them stay and feast there, in the mountains. Here, unless fools
support them, they starve.” He stepped closer and softened his voice. “You, sir,
you seem to be a wise and honest man. Surely you were not born here?”
“No,” Mr. Pareja said. “I come from the north.”
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“That’s what I thought!” Baclagon said, slapping his thigh. “What do you know,
I’m a northerner myself! Boys, the maestro is one of us!” The sergeant roared with
laughter and shook Mr. Pareja roughly. Rosita staggered backward. “Now,”
Baclagon said grandly, “we feel less shy to avail ourselves of your hospitality,
shouldn’t we, manong, if I may call you that? And we, needless to say, are at your
service.”
Mr. Pareja cleared his throat and put his glasses back on. “I’d like to send the
children home now. It’s past the hour.”
“Yes, of course!”
Mr. Pareja looked at the children and said “Go.” Uro, a boy of ten, came up to ask
if a quiz was going to be given the next day, but Bienvenido tugged him away
before Mr. Pareja could answer. “Go,” the teacher said again, and the children
turned to go.
“The girl stays,” Baclagon said, “the big one.”
Rosita froze in her step and stared in terror at the sergeant, then at Mr. Pareja. The
sergeant’s face was stern and impassive; the teacher’s reflected his pupil’s
astonishment.
“She’s just a child,” Mr. Pareja said, “she can do nothing.”
“Our things need washing. If she can draw water she can wash for us. It’s the least
she can do to help her people.” The sergeant sniffed his armpit and snorted.
Mr. Pareja’s throat felt scorched as he heard himself saying, “Let me do it. I can
do your washing. Please.”
“You’ll do no such thing. What an insult! Did you hear that, boys? A man of
learning and position, begging to do our laundry. It’s unthinkable. We refuse your
offer, for the sake of your pride!” The laughter again. “Go!” Baclagon growled at
the other children, who promptly scurried off into the woods. Bienvenido’s ball
fell and crumbled by the wayside.
“It’s all right, sir,” Rosita said. “I know how to wash clothes, I’ve done it before.”
“Your parents—”
“Bienvenido will tell them.”
The sergeant clapped his hands together. “Good. You, manong, you can go. We
will sleep in your schoolhouse, but I assure you, we will leave your precious things
alone.”
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“No, I am sorry, but I must stay. It is my responsibility.” His socks again. “You
will have to drag me out of here.”
Baclagon considered a sharp retort to that, but he looked at Rosita and said,
smiling, “Oh, all right, if you must. You can watch us sleep. Perhaps you can even
tell me in the morning if I fart in my sleep, as the rumors say. You’ll stay awake,
won’t you?” The teacher did not answer. “Girl, clean some of those eggplants and
broil us a supper. You can do the washing afterwards. Tumaneng, go with her to
the pump, and light her a fire. Don’t forget, always keep your weapon at the
ready!” The soldiers hooted at the innuendoes. “Tumaneng, I’ll shoot you if
anything happens to my eggplants!”
A cool wind blew across the clearing and brought the fragrance of rosal to Mr.
Pareja’s nose. The petals seemed tinted by the afternoon sun; their delicateness
made him ache. He watched Rosita walk to the iron pump, followed by the soldier.
The other conscripts had paused in their work and were looking at the pair, their
brows sweaty and their hands caked with earth. Baclagon gazed at the rapidly
setting sun. Mr. Pareja turned, dragged his socks across the garden, sat at his desk,
and prayed desperately to the plaster Virgin for the gift of wakefulness.
__________________________________________________
PORTENTS
by Jessica Zafra
Positive, she said cheerily, as if I shouldn’t go out and hang myself this instant. I
held on to the phone for a long time; I was sure that if I let go I would fall down.
The coffee turned to mud in my mouth—I ran to the sink and heaved.
Congratulations, it’s a fetus. You frigging idiot.
Afterwards I sat at the kitchen table and tried to make sense of the stuff swirling
around in my head. Visions of blood and umbilical cords and feeding bottles
whirled before my eyes like malevolent frisbees. The newspaper was lying next
to the platter of toast; I read the headline about two hundred times. “May use
poison gas, Iraq warns.” Next to it a picture of a dead Kurdish woman clutching
the body of her dead child. Mother. Child. I felt like throwing up all over again. I
imagined a creature ripping out of my stomach in a gory mess, like the monster in
Alien.
There was a Post-it note on the mirror: “Lunch with Lawrence, 12:30,” Lawrence
being a fifty-fifty candidate for the father. I painted a face on and stared at the
mirror. I saw my belly swelling up, my clothes rising like a circus tent, and all I
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could think about was the ten pounds I’d just lost, and the new dress I bought to
mark the occasion. Finally I got my new dress out of the closet and put it on while
it still fit.
In the elevator my next-door neighbor smiled and said Good morning. She had
this sort of knowing smile, and I found myself wondering if she knew about me.
I wasn’t just being paranoid; this is Manila, the neighbors know everything. They
are extremely sympathetic, and if you let them they will take over your life. It
turned out she was just trying to sell me a watch. Her husband had managed to get
out of Kuwait by driving across the desert, and when he got home the banks
refused to change his Kuwaiti dinars. That’s why she was selling his watches. I
felt kind of sorry for Mrs. Santos, setting out with her imitation Gucci handbag
and several dozen gold bracelets to sell her husband’s watches. Or was it Mrs. San
Juan, I can never remember.
A nervous breakdown would’ve been in order, or a fit of tears and keening, the
kind that comes with a runny nose and smeared mascara. But I’ve never been one
for hysterics. Thanks to my parents, by the time I was eight, the sight of a chair
being hurled across the room was no longer cause for alarm. Maybe there is
something to be said for a lousy home life. Ramon says my emotional range is
limited to rage, guilt, and occasional hilarity. He neglected to mention
blanknesss—there are times when I just don’t feel anything.
Ramon also claims he can read my thoughts by looking at me—he says I’m
transparent. I hope so; it’s embarrassing to tell somebody there’s a fifty per cent
chance that he may be a father in several months.
By the time it occurred to me to catch a ride I was halfway to my office and
decided to walk the rest of the way. I was swallowed up by the crowd of people
hurrying to work; rising above the din of traffic, their footfalls sounded like the
marching of a distant army.
In front of the church where rosaries and good-luck charms were sold under the
baleful stare of the Archangel Michael’s statue, a strange figure appeared on my
right; a filthy man with long, matted hair. A tattered bag was slung across his bare
chest, upon which his ribs protruded like spikes. A thick layer of soot covered his
emaciated body—he looked like a walking pile of ashes. He started speaking to
me in urgent tones, as if he were revealing important secrets, and there was a crazy
glint in his eyes. I understood nothing. He was speaking either in dialect of in
gibberish, I couldn’t tell, I looked on stupidly. People stared, expecting perhaps
that he would produce a cleaver and hack me to death. The man went on with his
weird recitation; why he chose me I had no idea, maybe he could see past the
designer clothes into my dark and grimy soul. After a while he frowned like a
teacher who had just given up on a particularly moronic student. Then he wheeled
43

and dashed into the church, stopping a moment to rub with his filthy hand the
scowling face of the Archangel Michael.
Through the glass I could see the cashier, Wilma, on the telephone, spewing vile
words like poisoned toads into the receiver. She was screaming at some poor
bastard who owed her money. Across from me, Pocholo, in his pink shirt and red
paisley necktie, sat flipping through the morning papers.
“It’s exactly as Nostradamus said,” Pocholo said. “He predicted earthquakes
signaling the end of the world, and we had that big one last month. Then he said
a leader from the Middle East would launch a world war. I thought it would be
Khadaffi but no, it’s Saddam Hussein.
“Sure,” I said. I watched Wilma slam the phone so hard it fell to the floor. Cursing
mightily, she stopped to pick it up. On this particular day she was clad in polyester
cloth abloom with pink and purple flowers, which made her look like a demented
sofa.
“Anyway,” Pocholo continued, “my aunts say they saw this vision in Taal.” His
voice dropped to a whisper. “They saw a horseman in the sky.”
“A what?”
“A man on a horse. Riding across the sky. A hundred schoolchildren saw it.
According to my aunt it looked like the statue of St. Martin that stands in their
church.”
“St. Martin on a horse?” I said. “Maybe it was St. George or Joan of Arc. I don’t
think St. Martin rode a horse.”
“No, stupid,” he said. “You’re thinking of St. Martin de Porres. We’re elating
about St. Martin of Tours. And you know what? My aunt says they saw the same
vision just before World War II. Then the Japanese arrived.” He ran his fingers
through his artfully moussed and tousled hair. “Oh my God, what if it’s really the
end. I mean, I don’t even have a kid yet.”
I looked away so he wouldn’t see me grimace, and was just in time to see Wilma
spitting into her wastebasket.
All morning I wondered whether I should ask Wilma for her abortionist’s address.
She would give the address, I knew, even accompany me to the place. Probably
some decrepit wooden house in the fetid alleys of Tondo, where the gangs hunted
each other down with homemade revolvers. Wilma hid nothing, she wore her
brazen honesty like a soiled and rusty halo. She had had four abortions, she told
me casually while I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom; the washerwoman
down her street performed the operation, she owed Wilma money. I imagine
Wilma’s insides, as torn and bloody as a battlefield. She said she’d regretted her
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last abortion: it was a girl, she’s always wanted a baby girl. She put the fetus in a
jar of formalin and kept it in the drawer where her wedding dress, which had
outlasted her marriage, lay yellowing among mothballs and dead flowers.
The others she’d flushed down the toilet.
Lawrence ate his lunch the way he lived his life: very carefully, as if he would
choke on it. Everything about him was resoundingly correct, from his hair to his
Italian shoes, from the schools he’d attended to the fashionable gym where he
wrestled with machines three times a week. I knew that as he read the menu he
was figuring out how much cholesterol, how much sodium and fat were in the
entrees.
“It’s going to be bad,” he was saying. “By next year the official exchange rate
could be 28 pesos to the dollar. That’s a conservative projection. We haven’t
considered oil prices and the damage from the earthquake.” Daintily, he chewed
on his vegetable. “Inflation will go through the roof,” he added, almost with relish.
While he delivered his analysis of the economy, I twirled the noodles around my
fork but I hardly ate anything. No appetite. Idly, I wondered if Lawrence was
sleeping with someone else. One of the girls from his office, someone tall and
svelte who worked in PR, shopped in Hong Kong, and wore linen suits with tiny
skirts. I concluded that he wasn’t—I had no illusions about his undying love and
fidelity, but I trusted his fear of AIDS.
“Am I boring you?” he said at last. Mr. Sensitive. He put his hand on my knee—
maybe he expected me to salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know we haven’t seen each other much lately, but it’s been hell at the office.”
Without missing a beat he slid his hand up my skirt. Boy, he was smooth, no one
would’ve suspected that the earnest-looking young man in the pinstripe shirt could
be doing something as ignoble as giving a girl a feel in a restaurant. “That guy
from the head office is a major asshole. Goes around trying to catch people
loafing. The office feels like a...”
Abruptly he withdrew his hand and stood up. A large, red-nosed white man in an
ill-fitting brown suit was approaching our table.
“Mr. Fowler,” said Lawrence.
“Alvarado,” said the man, shaking the hand Lawrence extended.
“How was the beach?” Lawrence said. I had to restrain myself from calling the
waiter and asking for a receptacle I could puke into.
“Fine,” said Fowler, “Well. Enjoy your meal.”
“Is that the asshole from the main office?” I said.
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“Sssh,” Lawrence hissed. “He might hear you.”
“Let him.” I reached over with my fork and speared food off his plate. He hated it
whenever I did that. Lawrence had a very definite concept of “mine.” For instance,
all his books were stamped “Private Library of Lawrence R. Alvarado.” The
strange thing was, he didn’t even read his books. They were lined up according to
height on his antique bookshelf, neatly covered in plastic. One time I took a book
out of the shelf, and it had been there unopened for so long the pages stuck
together.
“Anyway,” Lawrence said, “where were we?”
“You mean until your sahib came along?”
“What’s the matter with you?” he said. Funny he should use the exact same words
he said coming up to me at Diday’s birthday party while I stood in a corner holding
my breath to get rid of my hiccups. He said he was Lawrence and I should breathe
into a paper bag, so we went into the kitchen and rummaged in the closets. There
weren’t any paper bags, and when he found a plastic shopping bag I didn’t need
anymore, my hiccups were gone. He got my name and my telephone number, it
was as easy as that.
“Miggy,” he said. Miggy, for Chrissakes. I knew Lawrence wasn’t going to follow
me, he hated scenes—and I walked out of the restaurant, it was as easy as that.
I wandered around the mall for a while. I went into stores and looked at things.
There was this outfit that looked like our uniform at the Academy of Our Lady’s
Seven Sorrows—white blouse, blue necktie, and a navy-blue skirt—only the skirt
was too short. At Seven Sorrows, skirts had to cover the entire knee area. If your
knees were exposed the nuns would give you a lecture on modesty. There was no
spanking—the nuns were an enlightened bunch—but after fifteen minutes of
having guilt laid thickly on you, you’d wish they’d give you ten lashes instead and
get it over with.
Corporal punishment would simplify everything. For sleeping with a guy you
weren’t married to, you’d get, say, five hundred lashes. For sleeping with two
guys, neither of whom you were married to, one thousand lashes. For even
thinking about abortion, ten thousand lashes. And I’d been such a good girl too,
until recently, anyway, so I’d probably get five hundred extra lashes for being
such a disappointment.
I made a mental list of the reasons for and against having this baby. Pro: This child
would be mine, really truly mine, which couldn’t be said of a lot of things. Pro:
Maybe I’ll turn out to be a genius who will invent something beneficial to
mankind, like a device that would cause world leaders to self-destruct if they got
the urge to wage war.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
Anti: I’m not sure I’d be such a hot parent. I have serious deficiencies in the
responsibility department, as the credit card people will attest. Anti: The lack of a
husband, the resulting social stigma, and if not that, my own paranoia. I would
drive myself crazy wondering if someone was going to cast stones at me. Anti:
my mother would freak. She’s in California, running a Filipino restaurant, and
she’s always going on about the decline of traditional Filipino values. I don’t think
she would appreciate having me prove her theories. I can just see her talking to
my father, blaming him for dying young and leaving her to raise his daughter to
adulthood (I was always “his daughter” everytime I screwed up).
When I got back to the office people were scurrying about like newly-beheaded
chickens.
“What’s going on?” I asked Pocholo. He was alternately squirting his asthma
medication into his mouth with an inhaler and stuffing folders into his briefcase.
“There’s going to be a big earthquake at 2:30,” he said, only there were no pauses
between his words.
“Says who?” I demanded.
“It was on the radio,” he said. He snapped his briefcase shut. People were running
into elevators. Wilma let loose a steady stream of obscenities while she stuffed
into shopping bags the fake Benetton shirts she sold on installment.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “You can’t predict exactly when an earthquake will
happen.”
"It was on the radio,” Pocholo repeated, as if media coverage were an infallible
confirmation of truth. “2:30. Powerful earthquake, intensity nine.”
“Well, I’m not leaving,” I declared. “I’m not going to fall for an idiotic prank.”
“This building could collapse!” he screeched. “Like the Hyatt Terraces!”
“You can’t predict an earthquake exactly.”
“What if there is one? Be reasonable!”
Reasonable! I nearly laughed at that. Pocholo gave up, gathered his briefcase and
inhaler, and ran to the elevator.
“Come on,” said Wilma, “It’s almost time.”
“It’s a prank,” I said. “I’m not leaving.”
“They’re closing the building,” she said. “Everyone’s getting out. Do you want to
get locked in?”
45

She had a point. I got my bag—I could use the afternoon off, anyway.
I figured I’d go home and get some sleep; maybe when I woke up this whole thing
would turn out to be a bad dream like the one that killed my Uncle Danding. One
night he ate too much rice and stewed pork, then went to bed and started screaming
horribly in his sleep. They slapped him, poured cold water on him, pounded and
bit him, but he never woke up. He died uttering strange garbled noises. The official
cause of death was cardiac arrest, but everyone said it was bangungot, the sleeping
sickness.
It did seem like a dream, the crowd of people gathered at the parking lot and
looking at the building, waiting for the swaying to start. Idiots, I muttered, as I
flagged down a taxi.
“Where to?” the driver snarled.
“Salcedo,” I said.
“Too near,” he snapped, zooming off before I could get in the cab. Taxi drivers!
This was not a great moment for humanity: everyone was being an idiot or an
asshole.
All the taxis were taken, and the buses were so full people were sprouting out the
windows. I could see the passengers crammed together like fillings in an
enormous sandwich, bumping and rubbing against each other with every lurch of
the bus. Maybe if something asks who my kid’s father is, I could say I took a
really crowded bus and got knocked up.
By the time I got back to my apartment my feet were throbbing. A menu from a
pizza parlor that delivered had been shoved under my door; reading it I had a
sudden wild craving for anchovy pizza. Pregnant women are supposed to have
these wild cravings, but I was slightly worried. I’ve heard old people say that what
you crave during pregnancy determines how your child will turn out. For instance,
if you crave guavas, your child will be stubborn. My friend claims her clumsiness
was caused by her mother’s fondness for noodles. And singkamas is supposed to
produce fair-complexioned children, no matter how dark their parents are. I
thought, if I ate a lot of anchovies, would my child have scaly skin, or look like a
fish?
I phoned the pizza place anyway, and when I put the phone down it rang. “Hi,”
said Ramon.
“How did you know I was home?” I said.
“You’re always home on Sunday.”
“It’s Monday.”
Philippine Literature in English
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“Oh. Are you going out tonight?” he said. “Can I come over?”
“Okay.”
When I hung up I noticed how quiet the building was. No radios blaring, no TV,
no brats squalling down the hall. For a second I wondered if there really was an
earthquake. The last time, when the tremors started there was a stunned silence.
The phones stopped ringing, the printers stopped whirring, conversations paused
in mid-sentence; everyone sat gripping their desks, their eyes wide open and their
mouths shaped into O’s. Then people dove under tables and Wilma was saying
“OhGodOhGodOhGod” and there was a loud wailing in the air. When the tremors
stopped I heard Pocholo’s radio, and the B-52s were singing, “Cosmic! Cosmic!”
I switched the TV on. There was this soap opera about a little girl whom everyone
maltreated. The actress was played by a little girl was so good at being a martyr,
it was as if she had a sign on her forehead that said, “Kick me.” The soap was
interrupted by a news broadcast: 262 more Filipinos had fled Kuwait. A middle-
aged woman told a reporter she had been raped by Iraqi soldiers. Why should I be
ashamed, she said, I didn’t want it to happen. It was amazing how casual she was.
How could she be so cool? War could break out any second, and that madman
could use chemical weapons. I thought of worldwide recession, rioting for food,
and pictures I had seen of Hiroshima after that blast.
Maybe Pocholo and his aunt were right, the world was coming to an end. What a
lousy time it was to be born, with madmen waiting to gas you or blow you away,
and the earth opening up to swallow you. On the other hand, with everything going
against you, you didn’t need your own mother plotting to get rid of you.
Ramon came in at six. His hair looked like he’d cut it himself, which he often did.
He brought a take-out box of friend noodles and a videotape of Road Runner
cartoons. I heated the pizza leftovers and he ate them on the card table on the
terrace.
He looked exhausted. “I stayed up late filling out the forms for my grant,” he
explained, rubbing his eyes.
“I had a weird day,” I said. I told him about the street crazy in front of the church,
and his strange message.
He rubbed a spot of sauce off my chin with his thumb. “Maybe it was an obscene
proposal. Or maybe he was speaking Aramaic. Repent or else.”
“My officemate says the world is ending,” I said.
He ate the last crumb of pizza. “Maybe.”
“Doesn’t it worry you?”
46

“It’s not like I can do anything about it. If it’s true. What’s scary is being the last
person on earth,” Ramon said.
"Everyone else is dead, and you wander around the rubble and slowly realize
you’re alone.”
“God,” I said. “What would you do?”
“Keep looking for another survivor. Try to go crazy,” he reached over and picked
a noodle from my plate. “We’re being morbid tonight.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “All this talk about war.”
It started to rain, so we got up and went inside. As I closed the door to the terrace
I thought I saw something in the sky—a man on a black horse, riding through the
rain.
“You want some coffee?” Ramon called from the kitchen.
“Yes, please,” I said. My knees were wobbly, I had to sit down. You’re seeing
things, I told myself. Pregnant women do it all the time, it’s hormones or
something.
“What’s wrong?” said Ramon.
“Nothing,” I said, and in the pit of my stomach I felt a little kick.
__________________________________________________
LOVE IN THE CORNHUSKS
by Aida L. Rivera
Tinang stopped before the Señora’s gate and adjusted the baby’s cap. The dogs
that came to bark at the gate were strange dogs, big-mouthed animals with a sense
of superiority. They stuck their heads through the hogfence, lolling their tongues
and straining. Suddenly, from the gumamela row, a little black mongrel emerged
and slithered through the fence with ease. It came to her, head down and body
quivering.
“Bantay. Ay, Bantay!” she exclaimed as the little dog laid its paws upon her shirt
to sniff the baby on her arm. The baby was afraid and cried. The big animals
barked with displeasure.
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
Tito, the young master, had seen her and was calling to his mother. “Ma, it’s
Tinang. Ma, Ma, it’s Tinang.” He came running down to open the gate.
“Aba, you are so tall now, Tito.”
He smiled his girl’s smile as he stood by, warding the dogs off. Tinang passed
quickly up the veranda stairs lined with ferns and many-colored bougainville. On
landing, she paused to wipe her shoes carefully. About her, the Señora’s white
and lavender butterfly orchids fluttered delicately in the sunshine. She noticed
though that the purple waling-waling that had once been her task to shade from
the hot sun with banana leaves and to water with mixture of charcoal and eggs and
water was not in bloom.
“Is no one covering the waling-waling now?” Tinang asked. “It will die.”
“Oh, the maid will come to cover the orchids later.”
The Señora called from inside. “Tinang, let me see your baby. Is it a boy?”
“Yes, Ma,” Tito shouted from downstairs. “And the ears are huge!”
“What do you expect,” replied his mother; “the father is a Bagobo. Even Tinang
looks like a Bagobo now.”
Tinang laughed and felt warmness for her former mistress and the boy Tito. She
sat self-consciously on the black narra sofa, for the first time a visitor. Her eyes
clouded. The sight of the Señora’s flaccidly plump figure, swathed in a loose
waist-less housedress that came down to her ankles, and the faint scent of agua de
colonia blended with kitchen spice, seemed to her the essence of the comfortable
world, and she sighed thinking of the long walk home through the mud, the baby’s
legs straddled to her waist, and Inggo, her husband, waiting for her, his body
stinking of tuba and sweat, squatting on the floor, clad only in his foul
undergarments.
“Ano, Tinang, is it not a good thing to be married?” the Señora asked, pitying
Tinang because her dress gave way at the placket and pressed at her swollen
breasts. It was, as a matter of fact, a dress she had given Tinang a long time ago.
“It is hard, Señora, very hard. Better that I were working here again.”
“There!” the Señora said. “Didn’t I tell you what it would be like, huh? . . . that
you would be a slave to your husband and that you would work a baby eternally
strapped to you. Are you not pregnant again?”
Tinang squirmed at the Señora’s directness but admitted she was.
“Hala! You will have a dozen before long.” The Señora got up. “Come, I will give
you some dresses and an old blanket that you can cut into things for the baby.”
47

They went into a cluttered room which looked like a huge closet and as the Señora
sorted out some clothes, Tinang asked, “How is Señor?”
“Ay, he is always losing his temper over the tractor drivers. It is not the way it
was when Amado was here. You remember what a good driver he was. The
tractors were always kept in working condition. But now . . . I wonder why he left
all of a sudden. He said he would be gone for only two days . . . .”
“I don’t know,” Tinang said. The baby began to cry. Tinang shushed him with
irritation.
“Oy, Tinang, come to the kitchen; your Bagobito is hungry.”
For the next hour, Tinang sat in the kitchen with an odd feeling; she watched the
girl who was now in possession of the kitchen work around with a handkerchief
clutched I one hand. She had lipstick on too, Tinang noted. the girl looked at her
briefly but did not smile. She set down a can of evaporated milk for the baby and
served her coffee and cake. The Señora drank coffee with her and lectured about
keeping the baby’s stomach bound and training it to stay by itself so she could
work. Finally, Tinang brought up, haltingly, with phrases like “if it will not offend
you” and “if you are not too busy” the purpose of her visit–which was to ask
Señora to be a madrina in baptism. The Señora readily assented and said she would
provide the baptismal clothes and the fee for the priest. It was time to go.
“When are you coming again, Tinang?” the Señore asked as Tinang got the baby
ready. “Don’t forget the bundle of clothes and . . . oh, Tinang, you better stop by
the drugstore. They asked me once whether you were still with us. You have a
letter there and I was going to open it to see if there was bad news but I thought
you would be coming.”
A letter! Tinang’s heart beat violently. Somebody is dead; I know somebody is
dead, she thought. She crossed herself and after thanking the Señora profusely,
she hurried down. The dogs came forward and Tito had to restrain them. “Bring
me some young corn next time, Tinang,” he called after her.
Tinang waited a while at the drugstore which was also the post office of the barrio.
Finally, the man turned to her: “Mrs., do you want medicine for your baby or for
yourself?”
“No, I came for my letter. I was told I have a letter.”
“And what is your name, Mrs.?” He drawled.
“Constantina Tirol.”
The man pulled a box and slowly went through the pile of envelopes most of
which were scribbled in pencil, “Tirol, Tirol, Tirol. . . .” He finally pulled out a
Philippine Literature in English
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letter and handed it to her. She stared at the unfamiliar scrawl. It was not from her
sister and she could think of no one else who could write to her.
Santa Maria, she thought; maybe something has happened to my sister.
“Do you want me to read it for you?”
“No, no.” She hurried from the drugstore, crushed that he should think her
illiterate. With the baby on one arm and the bundle of clothes on the other and the
letter clutched in her hand she found herself walking toward home.
The rains had made a deep slough of the clay road and Tinang followed the prints
left by the men and the carabaos that had gone before her to keep from sinking
mud up to her knees. She was deep in the road before she became conscious of
her shoes. In horror, she saw that they were coated with thick, black clay.
Gingerly, she pulled off one shoe after the other with the hand still clutching to
the letter. When she had tied the shoes together with the laces and had slung them
on an arm, the baby, the bundle, and the letter were all smeared with mud.
There must be a place to put the baby down, she thought, desperate now about the
letter. She walked on until she spotted a corner of a field where cornhusks were
scattered under a kamansi tree. She shoved together a pile of husks with her foot
and laid the baby down upon it. With a sigh, she drew the letter from the envelope.
She stared at the letter which was written in English.
My dearest Tinay,
Hello, how is life getting along? Are you still in good condition?
As for myself, the same as usual. But you’re far from my side. It
is not easy to be far from our lover.
Tinay, do you still love me? I hope your kind and generous heart
will never fade. Someday or somehow I’ll be there again to
fulfill our promise.
Many weeks and months have elapsed. Still I remember our
bygone days. Especially when I was suffering with the heat of
the tractor under the heat of the sun. I was always in despair
until I imagine your personal appearance coming forward
bearing the sweetest smile that enabled me to view the distant
horizon.
48

Tinay, I could not return because I found that my mother was
very ill. That is why I was not able to take you as a partner of
life. Please respond to my missive at once so that I know
whether you still love me or not. I hope you did not love anybody
except myself.
I think I am going beyond the limit of your leisure hours, so I
close with best wishes to you, my friends Gonding, Sefarin,
Bondio, etc.
Yours forever,
Amado
P.S. My mother died last month.
Address your letter:
Mr. Amado Galauran
Binalunan, Cotabato
It was Tinang’s first love letter. A flush spread over her face and crept into her
body. She read the letter again. “It is not easy to be far from our lover. . . . I
imagine your personal appearance coming forward. . . . Someday, somehow I’ll
be there to fulfill our promise. . . .” Tinang was intoxicated. She pressed herself
against the kamansi tree.
My lover is true to me. He never meant to desert me. Amado, she thought. Amado.
And she cried, remembering the young girl she was less than two years ago when
she would take food to Señor in the field and the laborers would eye her furtively.
She thought herself above them for she was always neat and clean in her
hometown, before she went away to work, she had gone to school and had reached
sixth grade. Her skin, too, was not as dark as those of the girls who worked in the
fields weeding around the clumps of abaca. Her lower lip jutted out disdainfully
when the farm hands spoke to her with many flattering words. She laughed when
a Bagobo with two hectares of land asked her to marry him. It was only Amado,
the tractor driver, who could look at her and make her lower her eyes. He was
very dark and wore filthy and torn clothes on the farm but on Saturdays when he
came up to the house for his week’s salary, his hair was slicked down and he
would be dressed as well as Mr. Jacinto, the schoolteacher. Once he told her he
Philippine Literature in English
Short Stories
would study in the city night-schools and take up mechanical engineering
someday. He had not said much more to her but one afternoon when she was
bidden to take some bolts and tools to him in the field, a great excitement came
over her. The shadows moved fitfully in the bamboo groves she passed and the
cool November air edged into her nostrils sharply. He stood unmoving beside the
tractor with tools and parts scattered on the ground around him. His eyes were a
black glow as he watched her draw near. When she held out the bolts, he seized
her wrist and said: “Come,” pulling her to the screen of trees beyond. She resisted
but his arms were strong. He embraced her roughly and awkwardly, and she
trembled and gasped and clung to him. . . .
A little green snake slithered languidly into the tall grass a few yards from the
kamansi tree. Tinang started violently and remembered her child. It lay motionless
on the mat of husk. With a shriek she grabbed it wildly and hugged it close. The
baby awoke from its sleep and cries lustily. Ave Maria Santisima. Do not punish
me, she prayed, searching the baby’s skin for marks. Among the cornhusks, the
letter fell unnoticed.
__________________________________________________
SINIGANG
by Marby Villaceran
“SO, what happened?”
She had finally decided to ask the question. I had been wondering how long my
Tita Loleng could contain her curiosity.
I continued to pick out tomatoes for the sinigang we were to have for dinner. I
wasn’t usually the one who assisted my aunt with the cooking. She preferred my
younger sister, Meg, for I knew far less in this area—not having the aptitude, or
the interest, I guess—for remembering recipes. That didn’t matter today, though.
This time, Tita Loleng wanted more than just an extra pair of hands in the kitchen.
“Nothing much,” I answered offhandedly. “We did what people usually do during
funerals.” I reminded myself to tread carefully with her. Though I did not really
feel like talking, I could not tell her off for she took offense rather easily.
I put the tomatoes in the small palanggana, careful not to bruise their delicate
skin, and carried them to the sink.
“Did you meet…her?” Tita Loleng asked.
49

There came to me a memory of sitting in one of the smaller narra sofas in the
living room in Bulacan. I faced a smooth white coffin whose corners bore gold-
plated figures of cherubs framed by elaborate swirls resembling thick, curling
vines. Two golden candelabras, each supporting three rows of high-wattage
electric candles, flanked the coffin and seared the white kalachuchi in the funeral
wreaths, causing the flowers to release more of their heady scent before they
wilted prematurely. Through an open doorway, I could see into the next room
where a few unfamiliar faces held murmured conversations above their coffee
cups.
“Are you Liza?” A woman beside me suddenly asked.
I was surprised, for I had not heard anyone approaching. Most of the mourners
preferred to stay out on the veranda for fear that the heat from the lights might
also cause them to wither.
I looked up slowly: long, slim feet with mauve-painted toenails that peeked
through the opening of a pair of scruffy-looking slippers; smooth legs unmarred
by swollen veins or scars—so unlike the spider-veined legs of my mom—encased
in a black, pencil-cut skirt; a white blouse with its sleeves too long for the wearer,
causing the extra fabric to bunch around the cuffs; a slim neck whose skin sagged
just a little bit; and a pale face that seemed like it had not experienced sleep in
days. The woman looked to me like she was in her forties—the same age as my
mother.
“Yes,” I had answered that woman—the same answer I now gave to Tita Loleng.
I gently spilled out all the tomatoes into the sink and turned on the tap. The water,
like agua bendita, cleansed each tomato of the grime from its origins.
“What did she tell you?” Tita Loleng asked.
“Nothing much. She told me who she was.”
“What did she look like?”
“She’s pretty, I guess.”
She was. She looked like she had Indian blood with her sharp nose and deep-set
eyes thickly bordered by long lashes. Just like Mom, she still maintained a slim
figure though she already had children. The woman, upon seeing my curious stare,
had explained, “I am Sylvia.”
All my muscles tensed upon hearing her name. It took all my self-control to
outwardly remain calm and simply raise an eyebrow.
Philippine Literature in English
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My reaction caused a range of emotion to cross the woman’s face before it finally
crumbled and gave way to tears. Suddenly, she grabbed my hand from where it
had been resting on the arm of the sofa. Her own hands were damp and sticky with
sweat. She knelt in front of me—a sinner confessing before a priest so he could
wash away the dirt from her past.
But I was not a priest. I looked down at her and my face remained impassive.
When her weeping had subsided, she raised her head and looked at me. “Everyone
makes mistakes, Liza.” Her eyes begged for understanding.
It was a line straight out of a Filipino soap opera. I had a feeling that the whole
situation was a scene from a very bad melodrama I was watching. I looked around
to see if anyone had witnessed the spectacle unfolding in this living room, but it
was as if an invisible director had banned all but the actors from the set. Except
for us, not a soul could be seen.
I wanted Sylvia to free my hand so I nodded and pretended to understand.
Apparently convinced, she let go and, to my shock, suddenly hugged me tight.
My nose wrinkled as the pungent mix of heavy perfume and sweat assailed me. I
wanted to scream at her to let go but I did not move away.
“Hmm, I think they’re washed enough na.” Tita Loleng said.
Turning off the tap, I placed the tomatoes inside the basin once more. Then, as an
afterthought, I told my Tita, “I don’t think she is as pretty as Mom, though.”
Tita Loleng nodded understandingly. She gestured for me to place the basin on
the table where she already had the knives and chopping board ready.
“Where was your Dad when she was talking to you?”
“Oh, he was sleeping in one of the bedrooms. Mom did not want to wake him up
because they told her he had not slept for two nights straight.”
Tita Loleng snorted. “Haay, your mother talaga,” she said, shaking her head.
I had to smile at that before continuing. “When he saw me, Sylvia had already
been called away to entertain some of the visitors.”
“Was he surprised to see you?” Tita knew that I had not wanted to go to the
funeral. Actually, she was one of the few people who respected, and understood,
my decision.
“No.” I sliced each of the tomatoes in quarters. The blade of the knife clacked
fiercely against the hard wood of the chopping board. “He requested Mom to make
me go there.” We both knew that I could never have refused my mother once she
insisted that I attend. I had even gone out and gotten drunk with some friends the
50

night before we were to leave just so I could have an excuse not to go, but my
mom was inflexible. She had ordered my two sisters to wake me up.
Tita Loleng gave me a sympathetic look. “No choice then, huh?” She was forever
baffled at the way my mother could be such a martyr when it came to my father
and such a tyrant to her children.
Clack! Clack! The knife hacked violently against the board.
“Nope.”
When my Dad had come out of the room, I remembered sensing it immediately—
the same way an animal instinctively perceives when it is in danger. I had been
looking at the face of my dead half-brother, searching for any resemblance
between us. Chemotherapy had sunk his cheeks and had made his hair fall out,
but even in this condition, I could see how handsome he must have been before
his treatment. His framed photograph atop the glass covering of the coffin
confirmed this. Lem took after my father so much that Dad could never even hope
to deny that he was his son. I, on the other hand, had taken after my mother.
I knew my father was staring at me but I refused look at him. He approached and
stood next to me. I remained silent.
“I am glad you came,” he said.
I gave him a non-committal nod, not even glancing his way.
Tita Loleng interrupted my thoughts with another one of her questions. “Did you
cry?”
I shook my head vehemently as I answered, “No.”
I took the sliced tomatoes, surprised to find not even a splinter of wood with them,
as well as the onions Tita Loleng had chopped and put them in a pot. “What next?”
I asked her.
“The salt.” Then she went and added a heaping tablespoonful of salt to the pot.
“Is that all?”
“Uh-huh. Your Mom and I prefer it a bit saltier, but your Dad likes it this way.”
Then she gestured towards the pot, closing and opening her fist like a baby flexing
its fingers.
I started crushing the onions, tomatoes, and salt together with my hand.
“He was an acolyte in church,” my father had said then, finally splintering the
silence I had adamantly maintained. “Father Mario said that we shouldn’t feel sad
Philippine Literature in English
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because Lem is assured of going to a better place because he was such a good
child.” Good, I thought, unlike me whom he always called “Sinverguenza”, the
shameless daughter.
I finally turned to him. There was only one question I needed to ask. “Why?”
He met my gaze. I waited but he would not—could not— answer me. He looked
away.
My mask of indifference slipped. It felt like a giant hand was rubbing salt into me,
squeezing and mashing, unsatisfied until all of me had been crushed.
“Stop it na, Liza!” Tita Loleng exclaimed. “Any more of that mashing and you
will be putting bits of your own flesh and bone in there,” my aunt warned. She
went to the refrigerator and took out plastic bags containing vegetables. She
placed them in the sink. “All of these will be needed for the sinigang,” she said.
“Prepare them while you’re softening the meat.” Then she took off her apron,
“You go and finish off here. I will just go to my room and stretch my back out a
bit.” With a tender pat on my head, she walked out of the kitchen.
I breathed a sigh of relief. The questions had stopped, for now.
I poured the hugas bigas into the mass of crushed onions and tomatoes and added
the chunks of beef into the concoction before covering the pot and placing it on
the stove. I turned on the flame. The sinigang needed to simmer for close to an
hour to tenderize the meat.
In the meantime, I started preparing all the other ingredients that will be added to
the pot later on. Taking all the plastic bags, I unloaded their contents into the sink
then washed and drained each vegetable thoroughly before putting them beside
my chopping board.
I reached for the bunch of kangkong and began breaking off choice sections to be
included in the stew. When I was a child, before Tita Loleng had chosen to stay
with us, my mom used to do the cooking and she would have Meg and I sit beside
her while she readied the meals. I remembered that whenever it came to any dish
involving kangkong, I would always insist on preparing it because I loved the
crisp popping sound the vegetable made whenever I broke off a stem. It was on
one such occasion, I was in second year high school by then but still insistent on
kangkong preparation, when Mom had divulged the truth about the boy who kept
calling Dad on the phone every day at home. Meg had also been there, breaking
off string beans into two-inch sections. Neither of us had reacted much then, but
between us, I knew I was more affected by what Mom had said because right until
then, I had always been Daddy’s girl.
51
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When the kangkong was done, I threw away the tough, unwanted parts and
reached for the labanos. I used a peeler to strip away the skin—revealing the
white, slightly grainy flesh—and then sliced each root diagonally. Next came
the sigarilyas, and finally, the string beans. Once, I asked Tita Loleng how she
knew what type of vegetable to put into sinigang and she said, “Well, one never
really knows which will taste good until one has tried it. I mean, some people cook
sinigang with guavas, some with kamias. It is a dish whose recipe would depend
mostly on the taste of those who will do the eating.”

I got a fork and went to the stove where the meat was simmering. I prodded the
chunks to test whether they were tender enough—and they were. After pouring in
some more of the rice washing, I cleared the table and waited for the stew to boil.
A few minutes later, the sound of rapidly popping bubbles declared that it was
now time to add the powdered tamarind mix. I poured in the whole packet and
stirred. Then I took the vegetables and added them, a fistful at a time, to the pot.
As I did so, I remembered the flower petals each of my two sisters and I had
thrown, fistful by fistful, into the freshly dug grave as Lem’s casket was being
lowered into it. My dad was crying beside me and I recalled thinking, would he
be the same if I was the one who had died? I glanced up at him and was surprised
to find that he was looking at me. His hand, heavy with sadness, fell on my
shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he had told me.

I let the stew boil for a few more minutes before turning off the fire.

The sinigang would be served later during dinner. I pictured myself seated in my
usual place beside my father who is at the head of the table. He would tell Mom
about his day and then he would ask each of us about our own. I would answer,
not in the animated way I would have done when I was still young and his pet, but
politely and without any rancor.

Then, he would complement me on the way I had cooked his favorite dish and I
would give him a smile that would never quite show, not even in my eyes.

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Philippine Literature in English