WEDDING DANCE

By Amador Daguio
LITERARY CRITIC APPROACH: FEMINIST
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.
"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 are 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?"
"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 any more. 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.
"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 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.
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.
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 cold 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 though 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.
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
LITERARY CRITIC APPROACH: FORMALIST
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 apparel, their
proud flashing eyes, and their elegant mustaches 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.
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 hat 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.
"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 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 forge 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 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 maga 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."
 "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. l 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.
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!"

FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH
by Jose Garcia Villa
LITERARY CRITIC APPROACH: MORALIST
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. 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 straightglossy 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 marched obliquely to a creek. Dodong stripped himself and
laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts, on the grass. The he went into the
water, wet his body over, and rubbed at it vigorously. He was not long in bathing, then he marched
homeward again. The bath made him feel cool. It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum
lamp on the ceiling already was lighted and the low unvarnished square table was set for supper.
His parents and he sat down on the floor around the table to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish,
rice, bananas, and caked sugar. Dodong ate fish and rice, but didnot partake of the fruit. The
bananas were overripe and when one held them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong broke off a
piece of the cakes sugar, dipped it in his glass of water and ate it. He got another piece and wanted
some more, but he thought of leaving the remainder for his parents. Dodong's mother removed the
dishes when they were through and went out to the batalan to wash them. She walked with slow
careful steps and Dodong wanted to help her carry the dishes out, but he was tired and now felt
lazy. He wished as he looked at her that he had a sister who could help his mother in the
housework. He pitied her, doing all the housework alone. His father remained in the room, sucking
a diseased tooth. It was paining him again, Dodong knew. Dodong had told him often and again to
let the town dentist pull it out, but he was afraid, his father was. He did not tell that to Dodong, but
Dodong guessed it. Afterward Dodong himself thought that if he had a decayed tooth he would be
afraid to go to the dentist; he would not be any bolder than his father. Dodong said while his
mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There it was out, what he had to say, and over
which he had done so much thinking. He had said it without any effort at all and without self-
consciousness. Dodong felt relieved and looked at his father expectantly. A decrescent moon outside
shed its feeble light into the window, graying the still black temples of his father. His father looked
old now. "I am going to marry Teang," Dodong said.His father looked at him silently and stopped
sucking the broken tooth. The silence became intense and cruel, and Dodong wished his father
would suck that troublous tooth again. Dodong was uncomfortable and then became angry because
his father kept looking at him without uttering anything.
"I will marry Teang," Dodong repeated. "I will marry Teang." His father kept gazing at him in
inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his seat. "I asked her last night to marry me and she
said...yes. I want your permission. I... want... it...." There was impatient clamor in his voice, an
exacting protest at this coldness, this indifference. Dodong looked at his father sourly. He cracked
his knuckles one by one, and the little sounds it made broke dully the night stillness. "Must you
marry, Dodong?" Dodong resented his father's questions; his father himself had married. Dodong
made a quick impassioned easy in his mind about selfishness, but later he got confused. "You are
very young, Dodong." "I'm... seventeen." "That's very young to get married at." "I... I want to
marry...Teang's good girl." "Tell your mother," his father said. "You tell her, tatay." "Dodong, you tell
your inay." "You tell her." "All right, Dodong." "You will let me marry Teang?"
"Son, if that is your wish... of course..." There was a strange helpless light in his father's
eyes. Dodong did not read it, too absorbed was he in himself. Dodong was immensely glad he had
asserted himself. He lost his resentment for his father. For a while he even felt sorry for him about
the diseased tooth. Then he confined his mind to dreaming of Teang and himself. Sweet young
dream.... Dodong stood in the sweltering noon heat, sweating profusely, so that his camiseta was
damp. He was still like 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." Of a sudden 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." "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 in..."
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 heart 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 child. Many more children came. For six successive years a new child came
along. Dodong did not want any more children, but they came. It seemed the coming of children
could not be helped. Dodong got angry with himself sometimes. Teang did not complain, but the
bearing of children told on her. She was shapeless and thin now, even if she was young. There was
interminable work to be done. Cooking. Laundering. The house. The children. She cried sometimes,
wishing she had not married. She did not tell Dodong this, not wishing him to dislike her. Yet she
wished she had not married. Not even Dodong, whom she loved. There has been another suitor,
Lucio, older than Dodong by nine years, and that was why she had chosen Dodong. Young Dodong.
Seventeen. Lucio had married another after her marriage to Dodong, but he was childless until now.
She wondered if she had married Lucio, would she have borne him children. Maybe not either. That
was a better lot. But she loved Dodong... Dodong whom life had made ugly. One night, as he lay
beside his wife, he roe and went out of the house. He stood in the moonlight, tired and querulous.
He wanted to ask questions and somebody to answer him. He wanted to be wise about many things.
One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youth's dreams. Why it must be so.
Why one was forsaken... after Love. Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question
was not to be answered. It must be so to make Youth. Youth. Youth must be dreamfully sweet.
Dreamfully sweet. Dodong returned to the house humiliated by himself. He had wanted to know a
little wisdom but was denied it. * * * When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered
and happy. It was late at night and Teang and the other children were asleep. Dodong heard 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. "You better go to sleep. It is late," Dodong said. Blas
raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice. Dodong did not
answer and tried to sleep. "Itay ...," Blas called softly. Dodong stirred and asked him what was it. "I
am going to marry Tena.
She accepted me tonight." Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving. "Itay, you think it
over." Dodong lay silent. "I love Tena and... I want her." Dodong rose f rom his mat and told Blas to
follow him. They descended to the yard, where everything was still and quiet. The moonlight was
cold and white. "You want to marry Tena," Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas
was very young. The life that would follow marriage would be heard... "Yes." "Must you marry?"
Blas's voice stilled with resentment. "I will marry Tena." Dodong kept silent, hurt. "You have
objections, Itay?" Blas asked acridly. "Son... n-none..." (But truly, God, I don't want Blas to marry
yet... not yet. I don't want Blas to marry yet....) But he was helpless. He could not do anything.
Youth must triumph... now. Love must triumph... now. Afterwards... it will be life. As long ago
Youth and Love did triumph for Dodong... and then Life. Dodong looked wistfully at his young son
in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad and sorry for him.

THE HARVEST
by Loreto Paras Sulit
LITERARY CRITIC APPROACH: MARXIST
HE first saw her in his brother’s eyes. The palay stalks were taking on gold in the late
afternoon sun, were losing their trampled, wind-swept look and stirring into little, almost inaudible
whispers. The rhythm of Fabian’s strokes was smooth and unbroken. So many palay stalks had to
be harvested before sundown and there was no time to be lost in idle dallying. But when he stopped
to heap up the fallen palay stalks he glanced at his brother as if to fathom the other’s state of mind
in that one, side-long glance.
The swing of Vidal’s figure was as graceful as the downward curve of the crescent-shaped
scythe. How stubborn, this younger brother of his, how hard-headed, fumed Fabian as he felled
stalk after stalk. It is because he knows how very good-looking he is, how he is so much runafter by
all the women in town. The obstinate, young fool! With his queer dreams, his strange adorations,
his wistfulness for a life not of these fields, not of their quiet, colorless women and the dullness of
long nights of unbroken silence and sleep. But he would bend… he must bend…one of these days.
Vidal stopped in his work to wipe off the heavy sweat from his brow. He wondered how his
brother could work that fast all day without pausing to rest, without slowing in the rapidity of his
strokes. But that was the reason the master would not let him go; he could harvest a field in a
morning that would require three men to finish in a day. He had always been afraid of this older
brother of his; there was something terrible in the way he determined things, how he always
brought them to pass, how he disregarded the soft and the beautiful in his life and sometimes how
he crushed, trampled people, things he wanted destroyed. There were flowers, insects, birds of
boyhood memories, what Fabian had done to them. There was Tinay… she did not truly like him,
but her widowed mother had some lands… he won and married Tinay.
I wonder what can touch him. Vidal thought of miracles, perhaps a vision, a woman… But
no…he would overpower them…he was so strong with those arms of steel, those huge arms of his
that could throttle a spirited horse into obedience.
“Harvest time is almost ended, Vidal.” (I must be strong also, the other prayed). “Soon the
planting season will be on us and we shall have need of many carabaos. Milia’s father has five.
You have but to ask her and Milia will accept you any time. Why do you delay…”
He stopped in surprise for his brother had sprung up so suddenly and from the look on his
face it was as if a shining glory was smiling shyly, tremulously in that adoring way of his that called
forth all the boyishness of his nature—There was the slow crunch, crunch of footsteps on dried soil
and Fabian sensed the presence of people behind him. Vidal had taken off his wide, buri hat and
was twisting and untwisting it nervously.
“Ah, it is my model! How are you, Vidal?” It was a voice too deep and throaty for a woman but
beneath it one could detect a gentle, smooth nuance, soft as silk. It affected Fabian very queerly, he
could feel his muscles tensing as he waited for her to speak again. But he did not stop in work nor
turn to look at her.
She was talking to Vidal about things he had no idea of. He could not understand why the
sound of her voice filled him with this resentment that was increasing with every passing minute.
She was so near him that when she gestured, perhaps as she spoke, the silken folds of her dress
brushed against him slightly, and her perfume, a very subtle fragrance, was cool and scented in the
air about him.
“From now on he must work for me every morning, possibly all day.”
“Very well. Everything as you please.” So it was the master who was with her.
“He is your brother, you say, Vidal? Oh, your elder brother.” The curiosity in her voice must
be in her eyes. “He has very splendid arms.”
 Then Fabian turned to look at her.
He had never seen anyone like her. She was tall, with a regal unconscious assurance in her
figure that she carried so well, and pale as though she had just recovered from a recent illness.
She was not exactly very young nor very beautiful. But there was something disquieting and
haunting in the unsymmetry of her features, in the queer reflection of the dark blue-blackness of
her hair, in her eyes, in that mole just above her nether lips, that tinged her whole face with a
strange loveliness. For, yes, she was indeed beautiful. One discovered it after a second, careful
glance. Then the whole plan of the brow and lip and eye was revealed; one realized that her pallor
was the ivory-white of rice grain just husked, that the sinuous folds of silken lines were but the
undertones of the grace that flowed from her as she walked away from you. The blood rushed hot to
his very eyes and ears as he met her grave, searching look that swept him from head to foot. She
approached him and examined his hot, moist arms critically.
“How splendid! How splendid!” she kept on murmuring.
Then “Thank you,” and taking and leaning on the arm of the master she walked slowly away.
The two brothers returned to their work but to the very end of the day did not exchange a
word. Once Vidal attempted to whistle but gave it up after a few bars. When sundown came they
stopped harvesting and started on their way home. They walked with difficulty on the dried rice
paddies till they reached the end of the rice fields. The stiffness, the peace of the twilit landscape
was maddening to Fabian. It augmented the spell of that woman that was still over him. It was
queer how he kept on thinking about her, on remembering the scent of her perfume, the brush of
her dress against him and the look of her eyes on his arms. If he had been in bed he would be
tossing painfully, feverishly. Why was her face always before him as though it were always focused
somewhere in the distance and he was forever walking up to it?
A large moth with mottled, highly colored wings fluttered blindly against the bough, its long,
feathery antennae quivering sensitively in the air. Vidal paused to pick it up, but before he could do
so his brother had hit it with the bundle of palay stalks he carried. The moth fell to the ground, a
mass of broken wings, of fluttering wing-dust.
After they had walked a distance, Vidal asked, “Why are you that way?”
“What is my way?”
“That—that way of destroying things that are beautiful like moths… like…”
“If the dust from the wings of a moth should get into your eyes, you would be blind.”
“That is not the reason.”
“Things that are beautiful have a way of hurting. I destroy it when I feel a hurt.”
To avoid the painful silence that would surely ensue Vidal talked on whatever subject entered
his mind. But gradually, slowly the topics converged into one. He found himself talking about the
woman who came to them this afternoon in the fields. She was a relative of the master. A cousin, I
think. They call her Miss Francia. But I know she has a lovely, hidden name… like her beauty. She
is convalescing from a very serious illness she has had and to pass the time she makes men out of
clay, of stone. Sometimes she uses her fingers, sometimes a chisel.
One day Vidal came into the house with a message for the master. She saw him. He was just
the model for a figure she was working on; she had asked him to pose for her.
“Brother, her loveliness is one I cannot understand. When one talks to her forever so long in
the patio, many dreams, many desires come to me. I am lost… I am glad to be lost.”
 It was merciful the darkness was up on the fields. Fabian could not see his brother’s face.
But it was cruel that the darkness was heavy and without end except where it reached the little,
faint star. For in the deep darkness, he saw her face clearly and understood his brother.
On the batalan of his home, two tall clay jars were full of water. He emptied one on his feet,
he cooled his warm face and bathed his arms in the other. The light from the kerosene lamp within
came in wisps into thebatalan. In the meager light he looked at his arms to discover where their
splendor lay. He rubbed them with a large, smooth pebble till they glowed warm and rich brown.
Gently he felt his own muscles, the strength, the power beneath. His wife was crooning to the
baby inside. He started guiltily and entered the house. Supper was already set on the table. Tinay
would not eat; she could not leave the baby, she said. She was a small, nervous woman still with
the lingering prettiness of her youth. She was rocking a baby in a swing made of a blanket tied at
both ends to ropes hanging from the ceiling. Trining, his other child, a girl of four, was in a corner
playing siklot solemnly all by herself.
Everything seemed a dream, a large spreading dream. This little room with all the people
inside, faces, faces in a dream. That woman in the fields, this afternoon, a colored, past dream by
now. But the unrest, the fever she had left behind… was still on him. He turned almost savagely on
his brother and spoke to break these two grotesque, dream bubbles of his life. “When I was your
age, Vidal, I was already married. It is high time you should be settling down. There is Milia.”
“I have no desire to marry her nor anybody else. Just—just—for five carabaos.” There! He had
spoken out at last. What a relief it was. But he did not like the way his brother pursed his lips
tightly That boded not defeat. Vidal rose, stretching himself luxuriously. On the door of the
silidwhere he slept he paused to watch his little niece. As she threw a pebble into the air he caught
it and would not give it up. She pinched, bit, shook his pants furiously while he laughed in great
amusement.
“What a very pretty woman Trining is going to be. Look at her skin; white as rice grains just
husked; and her nose, what a high bridge. Ah, she is going to be a proud lady… and what deep,
dark eyes. Let me see, let me see. Why, you have a little mole on your lips. That means you are very
talkative.”
“You will wake up the baby. Vidal! Vidal!” Tinay rocked the child almost despairingly. But the
young man would not have stopped his teasing if Fabian had not called Trining to his side.
“Why does she not braid her hair?” he asked his wife.
“Oh, but she is so pretty with her curls free that way about her head.”
“We shall have to trim her head. I will do it before going out to work tomorrow.”
Vidal bit his lips in anger. Sometimes… well, it was not his child anyway. He retired to his
room and fell in a deep sleep unbroken till after dawn when the sobs of a child awakened him.
Peering between the bamboo slats of the floor he could see dark curls falling from a child’s headto
the ground.
He avoided his brother from that morning. For one thing he did not want repetitions of the
carabao question with Milia to boot. For another there was the glorious world and new life opened
to him by his work in the master’s house. The glamour, the enchantment of hour after hour spent
on the shadow-flecked ylang-ylang scented patio where she molded, shaped, reshaped many kinds
of men, who all had his face from the clay she worked on.
In the evening after supper he stood by the window and told the tale of that day to a very
quiet group. And he brought that look, that was more than a gleam of a voice made weak by strong,
deep emotions. His brother saw and understood. Fury was a high flame in his heart… If that look,
that quiver of voice had been a moth, a curl on the dark head of his daughter… Now more than ever
he was determined to have Milia in his home as his brother’s wife… that would come to pass.
Someday, that look, that quiver would become a moth in his hands, a frail, helpless moth. When
Vidal, one night, broke out the news Fabian knew he had to act at once. Miss Francia would leave
within two days; she wanted Vidal to go to the city with her, where she would finish the figures she
was working on.
“She will pay me more than I can earn here, and help me get a position there. And shall
always be near her. Oh, I am going! I am going!”
“And live the life of a—a servant?”
“What of that? I shall be near her always.”
“Why do you wish to be near her?”
“Why? Why? Oh, my God! Why?”
That sentence rang and resounded and vibrated in Fabian’s ears during the days that
followed. He had seen her closely only once and only glimpses thereafter. But the song of loveliness
had haunted his life thereafter. If by a magic transfusing he, Fabian, could be Vidal and… and…
how one’s thoughts can make one forget of the world. There she was at work on a figure that
represented a reaper who had paused to wipe off the heavy sweat from his brow. It was Vidal in
stone.
Again—as it ever would be—the disquieting nature of her loveliness was on him so that all
his body tensed and flexed as he gathered in at a glance all the marvel of her beauty.
She smiled graciously at him while he made known himself; he did not expect she would
remember him.
“Ah, the man with the splendid arms.”
“I am the brother of Vidal.” He had not forgotten to roll up his sleeves.
He did not know how he worded his thoughts, but he succeeded in making her understand
that Vidal could not possibly go with her, that he had to stay behind in the fields. There was an
amusement rippling beneath her tones. “To marry the girl whose father has five carabaos. You see,
Vidal told me about it.” He flushed again a painful brick-red; even to his eyes he felt the hot blood
flow.
“That is the only reason to cover up something that would not be known. My brother has
wronged this girl. There will be a child.”
She said nothing, but the look in her face protested against what she had heard. It said, it
was not so. But she merely answered, “I understand. He shall not go with me.” She called a servant,
gave him a twenty-peso bill and some instruction. “Vidal, is he at your house?” The brother on the
patio nodded. Now they were alone again. After this afternoon he would never see her, she would
never know. But what had she to know? A pang without a voice, a dream without a plan… how
could they be understood in words.
“Your brother should never know you have told me the real reason why he should not go with
me. It would hurt him, I know.
“I have to finish this statue before I leave. The arms are still incomplete—would it be too
much to ask you to pose for just a little while?”
While she smoothed the clay, patted it and molded the vein, muscle, arm, stole the firmness,
the strength, of his arms to give to this lifeless statue, it seemed as if life left him, left his arms that
were being copied. She was lost in her work and noticed neither the twilight stealing into the patio
nor the silence brooding over them. Wrapped in that silver-grey dusk of early night and silence she
appeared in her true light to the man who watched her every movement. She was one he had
glimpsed and crushed all his life, the shining glory in moth and flower and eyes he had never
understood because it hurt with its unearthly radiance. If he could have the whole of her in the cup
of his hands, drink of her strange loveliness, forgetful of this unrest he called life, if… but his arms
had already found their duplicate in the white clay beyond… When Fabian returned Vidal was at
the batalan brooding over a crumpled twenty-peso bill in his hands. The haggard tired look in his
young eyes was as grey as the skies above.
He was speaking to Tinay jokingly. “Soon all your sampaguitas and camias will be gone, my
dear sister-in-law because I shall be seeing Milia every night… and her father.” He watched Fabian
cleansing his face and arms and later wondered why it took his brother that long to wash his arms,
why he was rubbing them as hard as that…
THE BIRD
by Tita Lacambra Ayala
LITERARY CRITIC APPROACH: READER- RESPONSE
It was all of Sisa’s fault anyway. She said that if I sat beside the window facing the sea
without moving, for hours on end, a bird would come and sit on my head and nest there. I mused
over these for a long time while I watched her comb her hair with a big red comb.
I really don’t know why she does that, lave her thick head of long hair with coconut oil and
comb it, unknotting all the snags from the scalp down over and over again until she looked like a
black waterfall a-glisten with brilliant lights with the water falling down in straight lines, falling all
over her front so that her body was fenced from sight, the tips of her hair touching her knees as she
knelt on the floor.
Her quiet black-red black-red strokes of comb to head and down lulled me into a hypnotic
state and all of a sudden I felt very lonely, like I wanted to go home somewhere but I didn’t know
where. I swam in the feeling for awhile, staring at the blue flowers on her brown dress, and at the
very pale undersides of her feet contrasted against the very dark sides of the rest of her.
When she was all oiled up like snake, she coiled her hair into a loose knot behind her head
freeing her face to the light again. Her face had the fine brown skin that glistened from her own
natural oils and the coconut essence, and I wondered vaguely if other parts of her body were just as
oily, knowing that in a day or two she would probably smell rancid and overripe and would have to
use steam or bathwater heated to boiling to wash away that oil again. Coconut cakes wrapped in
banana leaves occurred to me and I began to feel very hungry.
She left the room carrying her coconut shell of remaining coconut oil, her red combed hitched to the
back of her head. She left behind her a mixed smell in the small bamboo room which we shared, a
small bamboo in a not-so-small bamboo house facing the sea, with sawali walls over and under
which lizards wove their loveliness and housekeeping without a thought for human beings, leaving
their droppings and their eggs everywhere, sometimes inside my baul.
Sisa’s pillow will have an oily mark when she sleeps tonight, I thought, then turned towards
the window. The sea was especially calm in the early afternoon sun, brownish at the shoreline and
blue farther in, little ripples, just a few waves marking times of turning. If, as Sisa said, a bird
would come would it notice my eyes and peck at them, or get curious about my nose? And that
pearl earrings—would it think them seeds? The noonday sun cast a shining on everything, the
unquiet coconut fronds trembled their own greenish lights and if I were to sit here at all for the bird
I would have to lean with one side against the window, and face the bamboo cabinet where all the
red pillows were piled atop each other fatly over all the folded blankets, and the amts on top rolled
up like giant cigars.
I adjusted my seating on my baul, leaned my left elbow against the wide bamboo piece that
was the window sill, and prepared to wait for the bird. I burped my lunchburp and smelled the
gingerfish with pepper leaves all over again and longed mightily for a drink of water. But I would not
stir now that I was in the right place and state of mind for waiting. I stared at the stack of red
pillows and fell into a trance.
As it happened, it was not at trance at all- I had fallen asleep and with my left shoulder
aching I opened my eyes to see Sisa sitting cross-legged on the floor before a low table covered with
blankets, a glowing charcoal iron with a red handle to her left, its numerous scalloped eyes
smoldering as it moved back-forth back-forth over a garment in the falling afternoon light. A pile of
finished ironing was on a mat on her other side and at her elbow a wooden basin almost empty of
dampened rolled laundry. Sisa was flecked with orange dots from the dying sun.
There was no bird at all, I told Sisa, turning away, looking out into the sea.
 Sometimes when the waiting is strong the bird does not come, she said, her voice coming in
waves as she pressed down on her iron.Then one day if you’re patient enough but nearing the end
of your patience it will appear. I mused over that and slapped at a mosquito that was sucking
supper out of my toe.
Sometimes the bird takes a long time to come because it comes from a long way and the
journey is troublesome. So long that even as it flies to you its limbs grow and its feathers lengthen,
ageing in its flight. Some of them start as young birds and get to their destinations already adult
and mature.
Don’t they ever turn back from getting tired? Some come over a wide sea, some in a storm,
she answered, the waves in her voice growing like the rising tide. The orange in the sky turned
lavender as the sun set and soon the sea was part of the sky.
A year passed since Sisa told me about magical birds and, very often as I was attuned to
many other things, I decided that waiting for birds was not the best thing. For Sisa perhaps, yes,
and women like her who lived by the sea all their lives, rising with the first shimmering of light by
dawn and putting away their boats of charcoal irons when the sun set. But as for me I had breaks
in the monotony of my life. Occasionally I went to town to call the Chinaman when it was time to
haul away the coconuts, or hunted for the buyer of our vinegar and dried fishes, or helped Mother
buy cloth to sell in the adjoining barrios. It was the idle days that left me time to dream about Sisa’s
birds, and in that year that passed I must have sat by the window in all the hot searing days of
summer.
Sometimes as I dove into the water then turned to float on my back I imagined the shadow of
a wide winged white bird following me, beckoning to me out of the water and on to the house so that
I might sit there and wait its imperative arrival. The shadow of the bird would be a cool cloud over
my body.
At times in my sleep I would feel the clasp of its claws on my hip, its weight pressing me
closer to the mat, its tail fanning my backside. And I would wake up to find the cat Musang draped
asleep over me, her head hanging to my backside, her tail trailing against my thigh.
Sisa never said that the bird would come in the night but when the sea was still and the
moon was up I thought it came in the guise of a bat gliding strongly among the palms. Or it was
invisible like a wind and entered dead-blind into the bamboo house slapping against the sawali. Or
not wanting that, silently perched on the nipa roof scudding in the nipa, resting its travel-worn
head under its wing, hiding its eyes from the moonlight, its fine head feathers trembling in the
seawind.
Sometimes it would be white gray markings –like a dove but larger. Other times it would be a
bright blue like that of kingfishers, brilliant and elusive, the lone flash of color in the black of night.
It went for short dips into the sea to catch some fish then came back on the rooftop to dry its salty
feathers. Sometimes it was a silver with red markings at the tips of wings and tail, with red feet. But
half-blind. And it would circle endlessly above the house and higher searching for me, uttering a
forlorn cry, and never finding me would leave again, and my heart would yearn for it painfully in my
dreams and I would sigh and cry into my red pillow silently. Somehow, waiting for the bird in the
dark, in the night, was a more intense waiting than sitting up still by the window in the afternoon
hours. The mysteries of the dark made him more changeable and fascinating, the span of wings
wider, the song a deeper call. His reality extended from the sounds and shadows of the hours into
the immeasurable ravines of sleep.
The rainy nights were difficult to bear. The bird circled around in the forest of the night, its
feathers wet and heavy, its vision blinded by the rain. Sometimes it would find me and under all the
wet feathers I would feel its hot skin, its heartbeat fast and strong under my hand.
One clammy morning, the air heavy with damp from the night's rain, I walked the coconut
footpath towards the road inland from the sea. Father had complained that the Chinaman had not
comet o haul away the coconuts as he had promised. It was my duty to go into town and remind
him of what was to be done. Also, the last batch of fish drying on the fillet trays had not been salted
properly and on top of that the rain had started to fall heavily before the fish could be taken away
into the shade. Sisa had gone about the house in a distracted way as father scolded and mother
proceeded to the granary to bring out some bundles of palay to pound. That morning the sun had
risen too early and too hot, as if making up hastily for all the faults attributed to the rain that day
before. Even the jeepney driver that brought me and the other barrio folk into town seemed morose
and unhappy. My change when he handed it to me lacked a coin. I walked away without asking for
it.
The Chinaman was not at his warehouse when I got there. He had gone with his truck and
driver to the north to bring in some molasses. I waited till almost noon and while the molasses were
being unloaded he ate his lunch in between mouthfuls of which he promised to haul the coconuts
the same day. I rode with him and his two men in the truck. He rode in front with the driver and
another worker. I sat in the back of the truck shieldign my head and face with mother's checkered
shawl. When I closed my eyes against the dust I saw red and orange lights, spots of violet and light
green and blue dancing around in different sizes, advancing then re-arranging and blending inside
my eyes. The truck floor was hard and twice over stones on the road I bumped my head against the
wooden sides. The floor smelled of molasses and salted fish.
After father greeted the men from town I went to the water pump at the back of the house to
wash my face and feet to hang out the shawl on a bamboo pole beside the stairs. I was hot and
hungry and I called Sisa from the kitchen stairs, the smooth bamboo stairs creaking under my
damp bare feet. Sisa did not meet me at the door clutching at her skirt as she usually did when I
got back from town, asking questions about how the trip was and what I saw, or if what she had
asked me to buy I had bought.
The kitchen window was shuttered down and I wondered if a strong wind had come to blow
away the slender pole that held the shutter up like eyelashes over it.
I called to her again, meanwhile getting a wooden plate from the window shelf and lifting a
pot lid for some food. Not getting any answer I sat down on the floor to eat, moistening my fingers in
the water from a clay basin. The cold spicy sour fish with coconut milk and gabi leaves soothed me
and very soon I noticed the sound of grain winnowing in baskets in the rice shed nearby. That
means the pounding had been done and I would not be needed to help. My afternoon was free. I
would go for a swim in the sea later and watch fishermen prepare their nets and boats. Later on I
would go and look at the new litter of Carya's sow. Carya had promised me a female to keep as her
sow had benn bred to mother's boar.
The door to our bedroom was barred when I tried to get in and wondered if Sisa was ill. I
peeped through a crack between the fat wooden frame of the door and the door but I could see
nothing because the room was dark.
Sisa, Sisa, open the door, I'm back from town and I need my towel, I called through. What are
you doing in there?
Go away, came her voice. She sounded urgent and threatening. She sounded like she had a
sore throat. I'm making a nest.
A nest? Where?
Here in the room.
With what are you building a nest? Straw?
My dreamworld of birds that Sisa had started in my mind was being quickly spurred on
again and what she was doing in there suddenly seemed the most exciting thing. A dreamworld
come to earth. A fantasy coming true. I imagined myself likewise making a nest with straw and
palm fronds. Mother's shawl, soft and downy things. Anything. Anything.
 People's clothes, she said. And blankets. I want to see. I almost shrieked. Let me in. She
made no sound except shuffling, and I could hear the bamboo slats of the floor moving under her
feet as she negotiated distance. Let me in! I went back to the kitchen for the bolo used for cutting
firewood. I inserted the bolo into the door crack and pushed upwards to disloge the strip of wood
that was used to bar down the door. The bar fell to the bamboo floor with a clatter and I pushed my
way in.
My eyes widened in the closed room. Sisa was seated on the floor beside my baul. She was
completely naked, her hair undone from its neat oily topknot. She was surrounded by a circular pile
of clothing which I recognized as the laundry that had been out on the poles the day before. They
were the clothing that she should have been ironing at that time of the day. The pillow rack was
empty and I recognized the pillows among the surrounding humps of material around her. She was
just there sitting in the middle of her nest, staring at me with dark round eyes with something like
amusement and smugness in them, just as if she expected me to envy her.
An invisible breath of wind pushed in through the door and I felt cold. Outside I could hear
grain being winnowed in baskets, and a coconut midrib broom scraping the dried cowdung floor to
gather up fallen grain. I looked cautiously around the room as I backed out slowly, half expecting
to be confronted by the presence of something that has long been expected and had finally arrived. I
could see nothing else, I could see no one. Only Sisa smiling at me with strange sharp eyes. And I
knew that even as I did not see the one who had arrived, that it was there in that room and it was
eyeing me curiously, questioning my impertinent presence.
I closed the door as quietly as I could, pulling it into place onto the door frame, picked up the
bolo, tiptoed the kitchen and down the stairs towards the rice shed to call mother.
THE WITCH
By Edilberto K. Tiempo
LITERARY CRITIC APPROACH: HISTORICAL
When I was twelve years old, I used to go to Libas, about nine kilometers from the town, to
visit my favorite uncle, Tio Sabelo, the head teacher of the barrio school there. I like going to Libas
because of the many things to eat at my uncle’s house: cane sugar syrup, candied meat of young
coconut, corn and rice cakes, ripe jackfruit, guavas from trees growing wild on a hill not far from
Tio Sabelo’s
house. It was through these visits that I heard many strange stories about Minggay Awok.
Awok is the word for witch in southern Leyte. Minggay was known as a witch even beyond Libas, in
five outlying sitios, and considering that not uncommonly a man’s nearest neighbor was two or
three hills away, her notoriety was wide. Minggay lived in a small, low hut as the back of the creek
separating the barrios of Libas and Sinit-an. It squatted like a soaked hen on a steep incline and
below it, six or seven meters away, two trails forked, one going to Libas and the other to Mahangin,
a mountain sitio. The hut leaned dangerously to the side where the creek water ate away large
chunks of earth during the rainy season. It had two small openings, a small door through which
Minggay probably had to stoop to pass, and a window about two feet square facing the creek. The
window was screened by a frayed jute sacking which fluttered eerily even in the daytime.
What she had in the hut nobody seemed to know definitely. One daring fellow who boasted of
having gone inside it when Minggay was out in her clearing on a hill nearby said he had seen dirty
stoppered bottles hanging from the bamboo slats of the cogon thatch. Some of the bottles contained
scorpions, centipedes, beetles, bumble bees, and other insects; others were filled with ash-colored
powder and dark liquids. These bottles contained the paraphernalia of her witchcraft. Two or three
small bottles she always had with her hanging on her waistband with a bunch of iron keys, whether
she went to her clearing or to the creek to catch shrimps or gather fresh-water shells, or even when
she slept.
It was said that those who had done her wrong never escaped her vengeance, in the form of
festering carbuncles, chronic fevers that caused withering of the skin, or a certain disease of the
nose that eventually ate the nose out. Using an incantation known only to her, Minggay would take
out one insect from a bottle, soak it in colored liquid or roll it in powder, and with a curse let it go to
the body of her victim; the insect might be removed and the disease cured only rarely through
intricate rituals of an expensive tambalan.
Thus Minggay was feared in Libas and the surrounding barrios. There had been attempts to
murder her, but in some mysterious way she always came out unscathed. A man set fire to her hut
one night, thinking to burn her with it. The hut quickly burned down, but Minggay was unharmed.
On another occasion a man openly declared that he had killed her, showing the blood-stained bolo
with which he had stabbed her; a week later she was seen hobbling to her clearing. This man
believed Minggay was the cause of the rash that his only child had been carrying for over a year.
One day, so the story went, meeting his wife, Minggay asked to hold her child. She didn’t want to
offend Minggay. As the witch gave the child back she said, “He has a very smooth skin.” A few days
later the boy had skin eruptions all over his body that never left him.
Minggay’s only companions were a lean, barren sow and a few chickens, all of them charcoal
black. The sow and the chickens were allowed to wander in the fields, and even if the sow dug up
sweet potatoes and the chickens pecked rice or corn grain drying in the sun, they were not driven
away by the neighbors because they were afraid to arouse Minggay’s wrath.
Besides the sow and the chickens, Minggay was known to have a wakwak and a sigbin.
Those who claimed to have seen the sigbin described it as a queer animal resembling a kangaroo:
the forelegs were shorter than the hind ones: its fanlike ears made a flapping sound when it walked.
The wakwak was a nocturnal bird, as big and black as a crow. It gave out raucous cries when a
person in the neighborhood had just died. The bird was supposed to be Minggay’s messenger, and
the sigbin caried her to the grave; then the witch dug up the corpse and feasted on it. The times
when I passed by the hut and saw her lean sow and her black chickens, I wondered if they
transformed themselves into fantastic creatures at night. Even in the daytime I dreaded the
possibility of meeting her; she might accost me on the trail near her hut, say something about my
face or any part of it, and then I might live the rest of my life with a harelip, a sunken nose, or
crossed eyes. But I never saw Minggay in her house or near the premises. There were times when I
thought she was only a legend, a name to frighten children from doing mischief. But then I almost
always saw her sow digging banana roots or wallowing near the trail and the black chickens
scratching for worms or pecking grains in her yard, and the witch became very real indeed.
Once I was told to go to Libas with a bottle of medicine for Tio Sabelo’s sick wife. I started
from the town at half past five and by the time I saw the balete tree across the creek from Minggay’s
hut, I could hardly see the trail before me. The balete was called Minggay’s tree, for she was known
to sit on one of the numerous twisting vines that formed its grotesque trunk to wait for a belated
passer-by. The balete was a towering monstrous shadow; a firefly that flitted among the vines was
an evil eye plucked out searching for its socket. I wanted to run back, but the medicine had to get
to Tio Sabelo’s wife that night. I wanted to push through the thick underbrush to the dry part of the
creek to avoid the balete, but I was afraid of snakes. I had discarded the idea of a coconut frond
torch because the light would catch the attention of the witch, and when she saw it was only a little
boy... Steeling myself I tried to whistle as I passed in the shadow of the balete, its overhanging vines
like hairy arms ready to hoist and strangle me among the branches.
Emerging into the stony bed of the creek, I saw Minggay’s hut. The screen in the window
waved in the faint light of the room and I thought I saw the witch peering behind it. As I started
going up the trail by the hut, each moving clump and shadow was a crouching old woman. I had
heard stories of Minggay’s attempts to waylay travelers in the dark and suck their blood. Closing my
eyes twenty yards from the hut of the witch, I ran up the hill. A few meters past the hut I stumbled
on a low stump. I got up at once and ran again. When I reached Tio Sabelo’s house I was very tired
and badly shaken.
Somehow after the terror of the balete and the hut of the witch had lessened, although I
always had the goose flesh whenever I passed by them after dusk. One moonlight night going home
to town I heard a splashing of the water below Minggay’s house. I thought the sound was made by
the witch, for she was seen to bathe on moonlit nights in the creek, her loose hair falling on her
face. It was not Minggay I saw. It was a huge animal. I was about to run thinking it was the sigbin
of the witch, but when I looked at it again, I saw that it was a carabao wallowing in the creek.
One morning I thought of bringing home shrimps to my mother, and so I went to a creek a
hundred yards from Tio Sabelo’s house. I had with me my cousin’s pana, made of a long steel rod
pointed at one end and cleft at the other and shot through the hollow of a bamboo joint the size of a
finger by means of a rubber band attached to one end of the joint. After wading for two hours in the
creek which meandered around bamboo groves and banban and ipil clumps with only three small
shrimps strung on a coconut midrib dangling from my belt, I came upon an old woman taking a
bath in the shade of a catmon tree. A brown tapis was wound around her to three fingers width
above her thin chest. The bank of her left was a foot-wide ledge of unbroken boulder on which she
had set a wooden basin half full of wet but still unwashed clothes.
In front of her was a submerged stone pile topped by a platter size rock; on it were a heap of
shredded coconut meat, a small discolored tin basin, a few lemon rinds, and bits of pounded gogo
bark. The woman was soaking her sparse gray hair with the gogo suds. She must have seen me
coming because she did not look surprised.
Seeing the three small shrimps hanging at my side she said, “You have a poor catch.”
She looked kind. She was probably as old as my grandmother; smaller, for this old woman
was two or three inches below five feet. Her eyes looked surprisingly young, but her mouth, just a
thin line above the little chin, seemed to have tasted many bitter years.
 “Why don’t you bait them out of their hiding? Take some of this.” She gave me a handful of
shredded coconut meat whose milk she had squeezed out and with the gogo suds used on her hair.
She exuded a sweet wood fragrance of gogo bark and the rind of lemons. “Beyond the first
bend,” she said pointing, “the water is still. Scatter the shreds there. That’s where I get my shrimps.
You will see some traps. If you find shrimps in them they are yours.”
I mumbled my thanks and waded to the bend she had indicated. That part of the creek was
like a small lake. One bank was lined by huge boulders showing long, deep fissures where the roots
of gnarled dapdap trees had penetrated. The other bank was sandy, with bamboo and catmon trees
leaning over, their roots sticking out in the water. There was good shade and the air had a twilight
chilliness. The water was shallow except on the rocky side, which was deep and murky.
I scattered the coconut shreds around, and not long after they had settled down shrimps
crawled from boles under the bamboo and catmon roots and from crevices of the boulders. It did
not take me an hour to catch a midribful, some hairy with age, some heavy with eggs, moulters,
dark magus, leaf-green shrimps, speckled.
I saw three traps of woven bamboo strips, round-bellied and about two feet long, two hidden
behind a catmon root. I did not disturb them because I had enough shrimps for myself.
“No, no, iti. Your mother will need them. You don’t have enough. Besides I have freshwater
crabs at home.” She looked up at me with her strange young eyes and asked, “Do you still have a
mother?”
I told her I had, and a grandmother, too.
“You are not from Libas, I think. This is the first time I have seen you.”
I said I was from the town and my uncle was the head teacher of the Libas barrio school.
“You remind me of my son when he was your age. He had bright eyes like you, and his voice
was soft like yours. I think you are a good boy.”
“Where is your son now?”
“I have not heard from him since he left. He went away when he was seventeen. He left in
anger, because I didn’t want him to marry so young. I don’t know where he went, where he is.”
She spread the length of a kimona on the water for a last rinsing. The flesh hanging from her
skinny arms was loose and flabby.
“If he’s still living,” she went on, “he’d be as old as your father maybe. Many times I feel in my
bones he is alive, and will come back before I die.”
“Your husband is still living?”
“He died a long time ago, when my boy was eleven.”
She twisted the kimona like a rope to wring out the water.
“I’m glad he died early. He was very cruel.”
I looked at her, at the thin mouth, wondering about her husband’s cruelty, disturbed by the
manner she spoke about it.
“Do you have other children?”
“I wish I had. Then I wouldn’t be living alone.”
A woman her age, I thought, should be a grandmother and live among many children.
 “Where do you live?”
She did not speak, but her strange young eyes were probing and looked grotesque in the old
woman’s face. “Not far from here--the house on the high bank, across the balete.”
She must have seen the fright that suddenly leaped into my face, for I thought she smiled at
me queerly.
“I’m going now,” I said.
I felt her following me with her eyes; indeed they seemed to bore a hot hole between my
shoulder blades. I did not look back. Don’t run, I told myself. But at the first bend of the creek,
when I knew she couldn’t see me, I ran. After a while I stopped, feeling a little foolish. Such a
helpless-looking little old woman couldn’t be Minggay, couldn’t be the witch. I remembered her kind
voice and the woodfragrance. She could be my own grandmother.
As I walked the string of shrimps kept brushing against the side of my leg. I detached it from
my belt and looked at the shrimps. Except for the three small ones, all of them belonged to the old
woman. Her coconut shreds had coaxed them as by magic out of their hiding. The protruding eyes
of the biggest, which was still alive, seemed to glare at me---and then they became the eyes of the
witch. Angrily, I hurled the shrimps back into the creek.