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ASOCENA

By Antonio Enriquez

Like most of the boys in Labuan, a coastal barrio in Zamboanga, Chu had a farm dog. He called him
Leal, which in the Chabacano dialect means loyal. It was always fun to watch Leal chase the big
monkeys in the cornfield, for as the dog passed under the low branches of the trees on the slope of a
small hill above the kaingin, the monkeys hanging by their tails from the low branches would reach
out and pull Leal’s tail. This always enraged the dog and he would bark at the foot of the hill until
the monkeys, bored, left for higher branches. Chu could not think of anything funnier happening to
a farm dog.

Early one morning Leal is missing, and Chu goes up to the kaingin to look for him. “Have you
seen Leal, Pa?”

“No,” said his father. “I thought he was with you when I left the house.”

“I hope nothing has happened to him,” the boy said.

The father noted real worry in his son’s voice. His boy was taking it badly. He was too young to
worry like this. He said, “Maybe he’s in the house.”

“Don’t worry, Chu,” said the father. “He is just around somewhere.”

“Do you think, Pa,” Chu said, “that anything has happened to him?”

There was that worry in his voice again, the father noticed. Chu looked bad trying to hide his
worry, not knowing how to handle it. “You are a big worrier,” he said. “Why don’t you look for him
at the river? He loves to flush those wild palomas, pigeons, along the river bank.”

The sun was still very young in the morning. Chu walked barefoot along the footpath, coming
down the slope of the hill through the meadow in front of the house. The path was smooth and the
dew was cool under his bare feet. He passed the house and went around the back and on to the long
bank of the river, his feet wet in the mud clay, and then went up the river to a clearing below the
woods where the wild pigeons comes down every morning. But the palomas were quietly feeding in
the black sand, pecking at the small pebbles, lumping low and short-legged on the river bed. If Leal
were here, he would come between them and the clearing, and once they flushed they would come
whirring at him, some rising steep, others skimming by his head, before they angleds back down
into the brush. And so Chu went on around the clearing, taking the longer route back to the house.

At lunch Chu would not eat anything. He sat at the table staring at the food on his plate. He had
that worried look again, the same one as at the kaingin, staring at his food without touching it.

His father said, “Don’t you want to eat?”

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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“I’m not hungry.”

“The tapa is wonderful.” The father picked up Chu’s plate, put a piece of fried sun-dry venison
on it, and, setting the plate down in front of the boy, he said, “You try it, hijo.”

Chu’s mother reached for a knife on the table and cut the venison into slices. Then she set the
knife down beside the meat. She said, “Try a tiny piece, Chu.”

“I don’t want to eat anything,” said the boy.

“Chu,” said his father, “that’s not the way to talk to your mama.”

“It’s alright, Ingo,” the woman says. “He did not mean it. Did you, hijo?”

“No,” says Chu, without looking up from his plate.

“What is really the matter, Chu?” the father asked.

“Nada, Pa,” he said. “Nothing.”

“Go on, tell me,” says the father. “You can always tell your papa.”

Chu kept gazing at the food on his plate. He was trying hard not to cry, his face strained and
looking sadder every minute. “They killed Leal, Pa.”

“Who killed your dog?”

“Tomas and his friends,” Chu answered.

“No!” said his mother. “How could anyone be so beastly?”

“They are beasts!” said the boy.

“Are you sure of this?” said the father. He had not gone with the boy to search for his dog earlier
that morning. He had thought nothing of it then. Anyway, the plowing of his kaingin had to be done
first, for he had seen signs in the sky that told him the rainy season was coming earlier this year.

“Tomas always bragged they’d kill my dog for asocena,” says Chu.

“Oh, no!” Chu’s mother cried, imagining that maybe now the dog was already on someone’s
plate as asocena.

Chu sprang up from the table, tilting over his chair, and ran out of the house. The farmer stood
up, and his wife said to him, “Don’t do anything rash, Ingo.”

“I’ll just see if Chu is alright.”

His wife said, “Remember, Ingo, that you won’t gain anything quarreling with that sort of man.”

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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Ingo walked out of the dining room, through the sala, and down the steps. He found his son
under the camias tree wiping his tears on his soiled shoulder sleeves. Poor Chu, he thought. He did
look a bit like a boy of nine with that sad look on his face. Poor Chu. He had been waiting to cry
since early this morning. Pobrecito Chu.

“Stop crying, hijo.”

The boy said, “I want to go with you.”

“What——” said Ingo. Then he said, “Go with me? You mean that … “

“Si, Papa.”

Ingo was quiet for a while. He could not look at his son. “We will see Tomas later,” he said. But
the boy started to cry again, and that same sad look came over his face and the small shoulders rose
and shook. So he said, “Bueno. But you must stop crying.”

The boy said, “I’ve stopped crying already, Pa.”

The two of them went around the house and across a stream below the shed, where the river
narrowed before it widened again and emptied into an inlet near the sea. Then they climbed over a
fence, their feet wet and muddy, and through the coconut lot, coming out suddenly onto the long
shoreline of the beach. It was a little after midday and the sun was high in the sky. Already there
were men drinking as the boy and his father passed the tuba-an stores along the beach. The two
o’clock autobus was parked in front of the tuba-an. The driver was waiting for the fishermen to
come in with their catch, so he could take it to the city market.

Tomas Dayrit and some other men were drinking at a table by the window, with squat glasses
of tuba in front of them. They have been drinking since early that morning, the half-empty plates of
caldereta beside them. There are some fish buyers standing outside the tuba store, or sitting inside
at the tables as they waited for the fishermen to bring in their night’s catch from the small islands of
Balug-Balug and Sangbay.

Ingo went into the store while the boy stood outside with the fish buyers by a window. When
Chu saw the asocena on a table, his stomach turned but he bravely stood there by the window and
waited for his father.

Tomas Dayrit said, “Do you wish an invitation yet?”

“No,” said Ingo. “I don’t eat dog meat.”

“This is not dog meat,” says Dayrit. “It’s goat meat.”

“You cannot fool me,” said Ingo, going over to the table. “No matter how you cooked it, I can see
it is dog meat.”

Dayrit says, “Are you calling me a liar, Ingo?”

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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He was a huge man, dark and nearly bald, with broad shoulders, and his idea of fun was to get
into a fight. He was an Ilocano, one of the few who has come south to this small coastal barrio in
Zamboanga.

The other men at the table had stopped drinking. They were watching Chu’s father.

“I am not calling you a liar, Tomas,” said Ingo.

“Wow, wow, wow!” said one of the men who sat by the big man, imitating a dog’s bark.

“Then eat it,” said Dayrit.

“You’re not going to make me eat my own son’s dog.”

“What?” Dayrit exclaimed. “What? What?”

The big man stood up from the table and, laughing quietly inside, his eyes became red coals in
their sockets. He got his glass of tuba, his hand going all the way around. He had big hands. And
fighting, to him, was like a hot cup of black coffee steaming in the half-light of dawn.

The other men, sitting there at the table, watched Ingo like jackals.

“Alright,” says Ingo, “it’s goat meat.”

“Wow, wow, wow!” said the men at the table.

Ingo turned away and walked quickly out of the store. He was very mad and went out through
the door without looking back. Dayrit sat back on his chair and his laughter rolled out from deep in
his chest. The men at the table watched Ingo as he walked off down the long shoreline toward the
inlet. They saw that he was very mad. They saw it in the way he walked, his heavy steps making
imprints on the sand. In the meantime the boy who had followed the quarrel with his eyes went
down toward the autobus. He did not follow his father to their house.

At home Ingo climbed the stairs, his feet heavy on the wooden steps. He walked into the sala
and hooked his buri hat on a deer’s horn hanging on the wall by the window.

His wife was crocheting a doily in the sala. She was very fond of crocheting. “What’s wrong,
Ingo?”

“I had a quarrel with Tomas,” he said. “The liar!”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” his wife said, looking up from her work. The sunlight came
through the half-drawn curtains of the window and slanted on the floor scrubbed clean with water
and rag. She put her open hands in her lap, saying, “Ingo, you must not lie to me. Tell me, were you
responsible for this quarrel you had with Tomas?”

“No,” he said. “He just wouldn’t admit that he had killed Chu’s dog for asocena. Anyone could tell
he was lying.”

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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“What did Tomas say?” his wife asked.

“He did not say anything,” said Ingo. “He was only looking for an excuse to quarrel.”

“You know, Ingo, I really don’t see how anyone can eat dog meat,” she said. “It’s detestable!”

“Ilocanos don’t think so,” says Ingo. “They’ll eat anything.”

“Ingo!” shrieked his wife. “Ingo, please don’t say that of people. Not even of Tomas and his
gang.”

“No?” said Ingo, recalling suddenly and very clearly how it had really been.

His wife replied, “No, it isn’t good to talk that way.”

Ingo turned away from the window and took his buri hat off the hook. He tramped across the
length of the sala, putting his hat on as he passed through the door.

His wife picked up her crochet again. Her eyes flitted for a moment toward the door and then
returned to her work. Without looking up, she said, “Are you going out again?”

“I’m going over to see `Ñor Pedro,” said her husband. “He promised me a puppy.” He walked to
the porch and put a hand on the wooden railing of the stairs. He did not look back, but he ceased
walking and seemed about to return.

His wife said, loud, fast, “You taking Chu along with you?”

“Si,” said Ingo doing down the stairs, the worn-out steps smooth under his feet, and on to the
sandy ground. He found the boy alone under the house. He said, “Don’t you want to come along with
me?”

“I’ll stay here,” said Chu. He shuffled his feet on the sandy ground; as the dust lifted up around
his shanks, it settled on his perspiring legs. It made smudges of dark dirt on his brown limbs, like
maps drawn recklessly in the dust with a finger or a stick. “Oh, Pa. Papa, Papa.”

I wish his legs would stop sweating, his father thought. But I could not stop that just as I could
not bring back his dog for him. “What?” said Ingo. “What’s it, hijo?”

But Chu was quiet for a while, the beads of sweat running onto his feet. Then he said, “Never
mind, Pa.”

“Is it about your dog, hah?”

“Yes, Pa.”

“I’m sorry about it. Truly I am, hijo,” the father said. I wished he hadn’t been there, he thought. I
wished to God he hadn’t come along to see it.

Now Chu said, “Couldn’t you have done something for him?”

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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“No,” his father said. “It was too late. No one could have done anything for your dog.”

Ingo could not look at his son as he spoke. He was watching the boy’s feet, bare, wet, and baked
with dust from the sand under the house. He noted that his son’s toenails are long and dirty.

“I have a surprise for you, Chu,” he said. “Do you wish to see it?”

“What is it, Pa?”

“Just come along, hijo,” he said.

The two of them went down the walk and through the bamboo gate. The boy stopped and
closed the gate behind him. Coming down the dirt road, the father and the boy turned on to a
footpath that cut through the lawa-an woods. The path was full of pies de gallo grass, and on either
side the thickets and the forest floor were covered with dry leaves. Walking along the soft and
spongy path they climbed up a bluff, the small woody forest now behind them, and then came
around the slope until they saw the squat nipa house on top of the bald hill.

“How are you, Ingo?” said Ñor Pedro.

With the nipa house behind him, Ñor Pedro stood before a wooden, rope-twining contraption. It
had a crude wheel to twirl soft rattan strands into persoga, a kind of heavy rope for trussing up
carabaos and cows.

“It’s well with me,” said Ingo. “And with you?”

“Igualmente,” the other said.

Ingo sat down on a boulder beside the house, his muscles twitchy with the climbing. The boy
went on around the house to the orchard behind. Ñor Pedro fixeds the wheel with a bar, came
around the wooden contraption, and squatted beside the farmer.

“I was to bring my crops down this morning,” said Ñor Pedro, “but it became a little dark over
the mountains. I was afraid it would rain.”

Ingo said, “It would be difficult to go up and down the hill when it rains.”

“O-o,” said Ñor Pedro. “You have to wait for a week until the way becomes dry.”

Chu’s father looked past Ñor Pedro and beyond the now-idle, rope-twining machine toward the
orchard. He saw his son walking under the papaya and banana trees and down to the point of the
granite ledge. The newly cut banana branches hanged like stumps, and their latex was still half-
fresh around the ends. Below the ledge he knew was a deep ravine, and during rain the river bed
would roar with water from the mountains.

With his neck stretched, its thick veins swollen like roots, Ingo shouted to his son, “Don’t go out
too far on the ledge, Chu.”

“You’re lucky to have such a buen hijo,” says Ñor Pedro. “A good son.”

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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“Indeed, I’m lucky.”

“I envy you very much, Ingo.”

Ñor Pedro has no son of his own, a rare thing, for the people of the barrios were usually blessed
with eight or ten children. Somewhere in the squat nipa house is his barren wife.

Chu’s father said then, “That’s why I came here.”

“What is it?” Ñor Pedro asked.

Ingo told him, speaking slowly, although the veins in his neck swelled as though he was
shouting again to his son. “I’m quite worried about him. Really, I am.”

“Es nada,” said Ñor Pedro. “He’s just a boy.”

“He must have been terribly hurt,” said Ingo, “when he saw his own father being bullied in front
of Tomas and his barcada.”

The other farmer, squatting on his wiry legs, said, “Maybe it wasn’t as bad as you see it now,
Ingo.”

But Ingo shook his head, then jerked it suddenly toward the farmer, and says, “Tell me frankly,
Ñor Pedro. Does my son think I’m maybe a coward? I mean, because I didn’t stand up to Tomas.”

“No, I don’t think so, Ingo,” said Ñor Pedro. He paused for a moment, shifted his weight to one
leg, and his sinewy muscles rippled up his limbs. “But what can I do to help the boy?” He did not
want anything to hurt the boy. He knew that if he had a son he would not want him hurt.

“Could I now get the puppy you promised me?”

The two of them rose and walked around the house. Underneath, in a dust hole, the little
puppies lay with their paws pressed against the bitch’s swollen paps. Once in a while, their small,
fluff-covered heads jerked back as they made suckling sounds with their tongues. Now the two
farmers bent down under the low bamboo floor of the house. Ñor Pedro said, “The puppies are too
young to wean yet.”

“It’s important that I have the puppy now,” saidIngo. “You understand, of course.”

“Si,” said Ñor Pedro. “Maybe it’ll help the boy to forget, hah?”

“He’s a very sensitive boy, Ñor Pedro.”

Then the father looking toward the orchard called, “Oh, Chu, come over here. I’ve a surprise for
you.”

The boy came over from the orchard. He went under the house and looked down into the dust
hole where the puppies were suckling.

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University
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Ñor Pedro said, “Which one do you want, Chu?”

The boy said nothing.

“Do you want that brownish one?” his father asked.

Still he said nothing.

Ñor Pedro leaned down and took one of the small puppies. The bitch rose, and the puppies
hanged desperately on to her paps and some fell back into the hole. The bitch watched Ñor Pedro
for a while and then lay down, and the puppies scrambled back and began suckling again. Setting
the puppy in the boy’s arms, `Ñor Pedro said, “It’s a male.”

“Are they eating already?” asked Ingo.

“Not yet,” `Ñor Pedro replied. “You can give him milk with boiled rice.”

“Chu will take care of him,” he said. “Won’t you, hijo?” Ingo passed a hand down the puppy’s
back. The puppy was soft and small under his calloused hand. “He’s nice, no?” Then, “Say thank you
to your Tio.”

“Muchas gracias, Tio,” said Chu.

Then the three of them went back to the front yard, the boy following behind with the puppy in
his arms. Ingo stood beside the empty cart in the yard. Behind it, Ñor Pedro’s carabao was tied to
the scarred trunk of an old guyabano fruit tree. And beside the tree an old dung which was caked
dry on the top and lay on the ground like tiny crusted anthills.

“You must come more often,” says Ñor Pedro. “And Chu, you also.”

“Si,” said the boy. “I’ll come with Papa.”

“Come here any time you want another puppy.”

Ñor Pedro smiled at the boy. But there was nothing in the boy’s face to tell what’s now going on
in his little head. He wished he could help him.

“We will go now,” said the father. “Say good-bye, Chu.”

“Adios, Tio Pedro.”

“Take good care of your puppy, Chu,” said Ñor Pedro.

“Yes,” said the boy. Still there was nothing in his face, not even in his voice.

The father and his son left the yard, smelling the fresh, warm dung, and then went down the hill
the same way they had come. Then the father felt it. He felt it, somehow, without the boy saying
anything. He felt it while going down the slope and turning around the mountain and going easily

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down the footpath, as he felt the wind blowing on the top of the trees and down in the brush below
the small forest.

“Don’t you want the puppy Tio Pedro gave you?” he asked.

“Pa,” said the boy. “Papa——” and he stopped speaking.

The farmer felt it again, now feeling it and hearing it clearly in his son’s voice, quiet and soft, not
even rising above a whisper. “Qué pasa, hijo?”

“Is he a brave puppy?”

“Valiente.”

“Si, so when he becomes big he will bite Ñor Tomas.”

So that’s it, Ingo thought. The thing with Tomas Dayrit earlier this afternoon wasn’t yet over
with him. All the time talking there with Ñor Pedro I thought it was all over, finished. But here it’s
now, and how do you handle it?—saying, “Are you still thinking of your dog Leal, hijo?”

“Si, Papa.”

“I’m sorry about it, Chu. Truly I am.”

Now they went on without talking. Coming back seemed to the father to take them much longer
than going up. He wished he could see his own house now. Then he heard the boy say, his voice
seeming to come from a long way away, soft, still, quiet: “Why didn’t you fight him, Pa? Leal would
have bitten Ñor Tomas if he knew he was going to harm us.”

“It wouldn’t change anything,” said Ingo. “Fighting with Tomas wouldn’t bring Leal back to life.”

“I wish you had fought him though, Papa,” said his son.

The farmer Ingo was groping for the right words to say to his son, but before he could find them
he saw their house at the foot of the slope. He quickened his steps, as though he was chasing the
sun which was already low in the sky. When they reached home, it was already dusk, and a little gas
lamp shone in the sala window.

May Temple-Maravilles. Literatures of Mindanao. Languages Department. School of Liiberal Arts. Ateneo de Zamboanga University