FILIPINOS ARE MILD DRINKERS

by Alejandro Roces

We Filipinos are mild drinkers. We drink for only three good reasons. We drink when we are very
happy. We drink when we are very sad. And we drink for any other reason.
When the Americans recaptured the Philippines, they built an air base a few miles from our barrio.
Yankee soldiers became a very common sight. I met a lot of GIs and made many friends. I could not
pronounce their names. I could not tell them apart. All Americans looked alike to me. They all looked
white.
One afternoon I was plowing our rice field with our carabao named Datu. I was barefooted and
stripped to the waist. My pants that were made from abaca fibers and woven on homemade looms
were rolled up to my knees. My bolo was at my side.
An American soldier was walking on the highway. When he saw me, he headed toward me. I stopped
plowing and waited for him. I noticed he was carrying a half-pint bottle of whiskey. Whiskey bottles
seemed part of the American uniform.
“Hello, my little brown brother,” he said, patting me on the head.
“Hello, Joe,” I answered.
All Americans are called Joe in the Philippines.
“I am sorry, Jose,” I replied. “There are no bars in this barrio.”
“Oh, hell! You know where I could buy more whiskey?”
“Here, have a swig. You have been working hard,” he said, offering me his half-filled bottle.
“No, thank you, Joe,” I said. “We Filipinos are mild drinkers.”
“Well, don’t you drink at all?”
“Yes, Joe, I drink, but not whiskey.”
“What the hell do you drink?”
“I drink lambanog.”
“Jungle juice, eh?”
“I guess that is what the GIs call it.”
“You know where I could buy some?”
“I have some you can have, but I do not think you will like it.”
“I’ll like it all right. Don’t worry about that. I have drunk everything—whiskey, rum, brandy, tequila,
gin, champagne, sake, vodka. . . .” He mentioned many more that I cannot spell.
“I not only drink a lot, but I drink anything. I drank Chanel Number 5 when I was in France. In New
Guinea I got soused on Williams’ Shaving Lotion. When I was laid up in a hospital I pie-eyed with
medical alcohol. On my way here on a transport I got stoned on torpedo juice. You ain’t kidding when
you say I drink a lot. So let’s have some of that jungle juice, eh?”
“All right, “I said. “I will just take this carabao to the mud hole then we can go home and drink.”
“You sure love that animal, don’t you?”
“I should,” I replied. “It does half of my work.”
“Why don’t you get two of them?”
I didn’t answer.
I unhitched Datu from the plow and led him to the mud hole. Joe was following me. Datu lay in the
mud and was going: Whooooosh! Whooooosh!
Flies and other insects flew from his back and hovered in the air. A strange warm odor rose out of the
muddle. A carabao does not have any sweat glands except on the nose. It has to wallow in the mud or
bathe in a river every three hours. Otherwise it runs amok.
Datu shook his head and his widespread horns scooped the muddy water on his back. He rolled over
and was soon covered with slimy mud. An expression of perfect contentment came into his eyes. Then
he swished his tail and Joe and I had to move back from the mud hole to keep from getting splashed. I
left Datu in the mud hole. Then turning to Joe, I said.“Let us go.”

1
MY FATHER GOES TO COURT
by Carlos Bulosan

When I was four, I lived with my mother and brothers and sisters in a small town on the island of
Luzon. Father’s farm had been destroyed in 1918 by one of our sudden Philippine floods, so for
several years afterward we all lived in the town, though he preffered living in the country. We had a
next-door neighbor, a very rich man, whose sons and daughters seldom came out of the house. While
we boys and girls played and sand in the sun, his children stayed inside and kept the windows closed.
His house was so tall that his children could look in the windows of our house and watch us as we
played, or slept, or ate, when there was any food in the house to eat.
Now, this rich man’s servants were always frying and cooking something good, and the aroma of the
food was wafted down to us from the windows of the big house. We hung about and took all the
wonderful smell of the food into our beings. Sometimes, in the morning, our whole family stood
outside the windows of the rich man’s house and listened to the musical sizzling of thick strips of
bacon or ham. I can remember one afternoon when our neighbor’s servants roasted three chickens.
The chickens were young and tender and the fat that dripped into the burning coals gave off an
enchanting odor. We watched the servants turn the beautiful birds and inhaled the heavenly spirit
that drifted out to us.
Some days the rich man appeared at a window and glowered down at us. He looked at us one by one,
as though he were condemning us. We were all healthy because we went out in the sun every day and
bathed in the cool water of the river that flowed from the mountains into the sea. Sometimes we
wrestled with one another in the house before we went out to play.
We were always in the best of spirits and our laughter was contagious. Other neighbors who passed
by our house often stopped in our yard and joined us in our laughter.
Laughter was our only wealth. Father was a laughing man. He would go in to the living room and stand
in front of the tall mirror, stretching his mouth into grotesque shapes with his fingers and making
faces at himself, and then he would rush into the kitchen, roaring with laughter.
There was plenty to make us laugh. There was, for instance, the day one of my brothers came home
and brought a small bundle under his arm, pretending that he brought something to eat, maybe a leg
of lamb or something as extravagant as that to make our mouths water. He rushed to mother and
through the bundle into her lap. We all stood around, watching mother undo the complicated strings.
Suddenly a black cat leaped out of the bundle and ran wildly around the house. Mother chased my
brother and beat him with her little fists, while the rest of us bent double, choking with laughter.
Another time one of my sisters suddenly started screaming in the middle of the night. Mother reached
her first and tried to calm her. My sister criedand groaned. When father lifted the lamp, my sister
stared at us with shame in her eyes.
“What is it?” other asked.
“I’m pregnant!” she cried.
“Don’t be a fool!” Father shouted.
“You’re only a child,” Mother said.
“I’m pregnant, I tell you!” she cried.
Father knelt by my sister. He put his hand on her belly and rubbed it gently. “How do you know you
are pregnant?” he asked.
“Feel it!” she cried.
We put our hands on her belly. There was something moving inside. Father was frightened. Mother
was shocked. “Who’s the man?” she asked.
“There’s no man,” my sister said.
‘What is it then?” Father asked.

Suddenly my sister opened her blouse and a bullfrog jumped out. Mother fainted, father dropped the
lamp, the oil spilled on the floor, and my sister’s blanket caught fire. One of my brothers laughed so
hard he rolled on the floor.

2
THE SUMMER SOLSTICE
by Nick Joaquin

THE MORETAS were spending St. John’s Day with the children’s grandfather, whose feast day it was.
Doñ a Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound of screaming in her ears. In the dining room
the three boys already attired in their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her,
talking all at once.
“How long you have slept, Mama!”
“We thought you were never getting up!”
“Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?”
“Hush, hush I implore you! Now look: your father has a headache, and so have I. So be quiet this
instant—or no one goes to Grandfather.”
Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnace, the windows dilating with the
harsh light and the air already burning with the immense, intense fever of noon.
She found the children’s nurse working in the kitchen. “And why is it you who are preparing
breakfast? Where is Amada?” But without waiting for an answer she went to the backdoor and opened
it, and the screaming in her ears became wild screaming in the stables across the yard. “Oh my God!”
she groaned and, grasping her skirts, hurried across the yard.
In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams, was hitching the pair of piebald ponies
to the coach.
“Not the closed coach, Entoy! The open carriage!” shouted Doñ a Lupeng as she came up.
“But the dust, señ ora—“
“I know, but better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your wife, eh? Have you been
beating her again?”
“Oh no, señ ora: I have not touched her.”
“Then why is she screaming? Is she ill?”
“I do not think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, señ ora. She is up there.”
When Doñ a Lupeng entered the room, the big half-naked woman sprawled across the bamboo bed
stopped screaming. Doñ a Lupeng was shocked.
“What is this Amada? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in such a posture! Come, get up at
once. You should be ashamed!”
But the woman on the bed merely stared. Her sweat-beaded brows contracted, as if in an effort to
understand. Then her face relax her mouth sagged open humorously and, rolling over on her back and
spreading out her big soft arms and legs, she began noiselessly quaking with laughter—the mute
mirth jerking in her throat; the moist pile of her flesh quivering like brown jelly. Saliva dribbled from
the corners of her mouth.
Doñ a Lupeng blushed, looking around helplessly, and seeing that Entoy had followed and was leaning
in the doorway, watching stolidly, she blushed again. The room reeked hotly of intimate odors. She
averted her eyes from the laughing woman on the bed, in whose nakedness she seemed so to
participate that she was ashamed to look directly at the man in the doorway.
“Tell me, Entoy: has she had been to the Tadtarin?”
“Yes, señ ora. Last night.”
“But I forbade her to go! And I forbade you to let her go!”
“I could do nothing.”
“Why, you beat her at the least pretext!”
“But now I dare not touch her.”
“Oh, and why not?”
“It is the day of St. John: the spirit is in her.”
“But, man—“
“It is true, señ ora. The spirit is in her. She is the Tadtarin. She must do as she pleases. Otherwise, the
grain would not grow, the trees would bear no fruit, the rivers would give no fish, and the animals
would die.”

3
FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH
by Jose Garcia Villa

The sun was salmon and hazy in the west. Dodong thought to himself he would tell his father about
Teang when he got home, after he had unhitched the carabao from the plow, and let it to its shed and
fed it. He was hesitant about saying it, but he wanted his father to know. What he had to say was of
serious import as it would mark a climacteric in his life. Dodong finally decided to tell it, at a thought
came to him his father might refuse to consider it. His father was silent hard-working farmer who
chewed areca nut, which he had learned to do from his mother, Dodong’s grandmother.
I will tell it to him. I will tell it to him.
The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish earthy smell. Many
slender soft worms emerged from the furrows and then burrowed again deeper into the soil. A short
colorless worm marched blindly to Dodong’s foot and crawled calmly over it. Dodong go tickled and
jerked his foot, flinging the worm into the air. Dodong did not bother to look where it fell, but thought
of his age, seventeen, and he said to himself he was not young any more.
Dodong unhitched the carabao leisurely and gave it a healthy tap on the hip. The beast turned its head
to look at him with dumb faithful eyes. Dodong gave it a slight push and the animal walked alongside
him to its shed. He placed bundles of grass before it land the carabao began to eat. Dodong looked at it
without interests.
Dodong started homeward, thinking how he would break his news to his father. He wanted to marry,
Dodong did. He was seventeen, he had pimples on his face, the down on his upper lip already was
dark–these meant he was no longer a boy. He was growing into a man–he was a man. Dodong felt
insolent and big at the thought of it although he was by nature low in statue. Thinking himself a man
grown, Dodong felt he could do anything.
He walked faster, prodded by the thought of his virility. A small angled stone bled his foot, but he
dismissed it cursorily. He lifted his leg and looked at the hurt toe and then went on walking. In the cool
sundown he thought wild you dreams of himself and Teang. Teang, his girl. She had a small brown face
and small black eyes and straight glossy hair. How desirable she was to him. She made him dream
even during the day.
Dodong tensed with desire and looked at the muscles of his arms. Dirty. This field
work was healthy, invigorating but it begrimed you, smudged you terribly. He turned back the way he
had come, then he marched obliquely to a creek.
Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts, on the grass.
The he went into the water, wet his body over, and rubbed at it vigorously. He was not long in bathing,
then he marched homeward again. The bath made him feel cool.
It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already was lighted and the
low unvarnished square table was set for supper. His parents and he sat down on the floor around the
table to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish, rice, bananas, and caked sugar.
Dodong ate fish and rice, but did not partake of the fruit. The bananas were overripe and when one
held them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong broke off a piece of the cakes sugar, dipped it in his
glass of water and ate it. He got another piece and wanted some more, but he thought of leaving the
remainder for his parents.
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.

4
LOVE IN THE CORNHUSKS
by Aida L. Rivera

Tinang stopped before the Señ ora’s gate and adjusted the baby’s cap. The dogs that came to bark at
the gate were strange dogs, big-mouthed animals with a sense of superiority. They stuck their heads
through the hogfence, lolling their tongues and straining. Suddenly, from the gumamela row, a little
black mongrel emerged and slithered through the fence with ease. It came to her, head down and body
quivering.
“Bantay. Ay, Bantay!” she exclaimed as the little dog laid its paws upon her shirt to sniff the baby on
her arm. The baby was afraid and cried. The big animals barked with displeasure.
Tito, the young master, had seen her and was calling to his mother. “Ma, it’s Tinang. Ma, Ma, it’s
Tinang.” He came running down to open the gate.
“Aba, you are so tall now, Tito.”
He smiled his girl’s smile as he stood by, warding the dogs off. Tinang passed quickly up the veranda
stairs lined with ferns and many-colored bougainville. On landing, she paused to wipe her shoes
carefully. About her, the Señ ora’s white and lavender butterfly orchids fluttered delicately in the
sunshine. She noticed though that the purple waling-waling that had once been her task to shade from
the hot sun with banana leaves and to water with mixture of charcoal and eggs and water was not in
bloom.
“Is no one covering the waling-waling now?” Tinang asked. “It will die.”
“Oh, the maid will come to cover the orchids later.”
The Señ ora called from inside. “Tinang, let me see your baby. Is it a boy?”
“Yes, Ma,” Tito shouted from downstairs. “And the ears are huge!”
“What do you expect,” replied his mother; “the father is a Bagobo. Even Tinang looks like a Bagobo
now.”
Tinang laughed and felt warmness for her former mistress and the boy Tito. She sat self-consciously
on the black narra sofa, for the first time a visitor. Her eyes clouded. The sight of the Señ ora’s flaccidly
plump figure, swathed in a loose waist-less housedress that came down to her ankles, and the faint
scent of agua de colonia blended with kitchen spice, seemed to her the essence of the comfortable
world, and she sighed thinking of the long walk home through the mud, the baby’s legs straddled to
her waist, and Inggo, her husband, waiting for her, his body stinking of tuba and sweat, squatting on
the floor, clad only in his foul undergarments.
“Ano, Tinang, is it not a good thing to be married?” the Señ ora asked, pitying Tinang because her dress
gave way at the placket and pressed at her swollen breasts. It was, as a matter of fact, a dress she had
given Tinang a long time ago.
“It is hard, Señ ora, very hard. Better that I were working here again.”
“There!” the Señ ora said. “Didn’t I tell you what it would be like, huh? . . . that you would be a slave to
your husband and that you would work a baby eternally strapped to you. Are you not pregnant
again?”
Tinang squirmed at the Señ ora’s directness but admitted she was.
“Hala! You will have a dozen before long.” The Señ ora got up. “Come, I will give you some dresses and
an old blanket that you can cut into things for the baby.”
They went into a cluttered room which looked like a huge closet and as the Señ ora sorted out some
clothes, Tinang asked, “How is Señ or?”
“Ay, he is always losing his temper over the tractor drivers. It is not the way it was when Amado was
here. You remember what a good driver he was. The tractors were always kept in working condition.
But now . . . I wonder why he left all of a sudden. He said he would be gone for only two days . . . .”
“I don’t know,” Tinang said. The baby began to cry. Tinang shushed him with irritation.
“Oy, Tinang, come to the kitchen; your Bagobito is hungry.”
For the next hour, Tinang sat in the kitchen with an odd feeling; she watched the girl who was now in
possession of the kitchen work around with a handkerchief clutched I one hand. She had lipstick on
too, Tinang noted. the girl looked at her briefly but did not smile. She set down a can of evaporated
milk for the baby and served her coffee and cake. The Señ ora drank coffee with her and lectured about
keeping the baby’s stomach bound and training it to stay by itself so she could work.

5
SCENT OF APPLES
by Bienvenido Santos

I arrived in Kalamazoo it was October and the war was still on. Gold and silver stars hung on pennants
above silent windows of white and brick-red cottages. In a backyard an old man burned leaves and
twigs while a gray-haired woman sat on the porch, her red hands quiet on her lap, watching the smoke
rising above the elms, both of them thinking the same thought perhaps, about a tall, grinning boy with
his blue eyes and flying hair, who went out to war: where could he be now this month when leaves
were turning into gold and the fragrance of gathered apples was in the wind?
It was a cold night when I left my room at the hotel for a usual speaking engagement. I walked but a
little way. A heavy wind coming up from Lake Michigan was icy on the face. If felt like winter straying
early in the northern woodlands. Under the lampposts the leaves shone like bronze. And they rolled
on the pavements like the ghost feet of a thousand autumns long dead, long before the boys left for
faraway lands without great icy winds and promise of winter early in the air, lands without apple
trees, the singing and the gold!
It was the same night I met Celestino Fabia, "just a Filipino farmer" as he called himself, who had a
farm about thirty miles east of Kalamazoo.
"You came all that way on a night like this just to hear me talk?"
"I've seen no Filipino for so many years now," he answered quickly. "So when I saw your name in the
papers where it says you come from the Islands and that you're going to talk, I come right away."
Earlier that night I had addressed a college crowd, mostly women. It appeared they wanted me to talk
about my country, they wanted me to tell them things about it because my country had become a lost
country. Everywhere in the land the enemy stalked. Over it a great silence hung, and their boys were
there, unheard from, or they were on their way to some little known island on the Pacific, young boys
all, hardly men, thinking of harvest moons and the smell of forest fire.
It was not hard talking about our own people. I knew them well and I loved them. And they seemed so
far away during those terrible years that I must have spoken of them with a little fervor, a little
nostalgia.
In the open forum that followed, the audience wanted to know whether there was much difference
between our women and the American women. I tried to answer the question as best I could, saying,
among other things, that I did not know that much about American women, except that they looked
friendly, but differences or similarities in inner qualities such as naturally belonged to the heart or to
the mind, I could only speak about with vagueness.
While I was trying to explain away the fact that it was not easy to make comparisons, a man rose from
the rear of the hall, wanting to say something. In the distance, he looked slight and old and very
brown. Even before he spoke, I knew that he was, like me, a Filipino.
"I'm a Filipino," he began, loud and clear, in a voice that seemed used to wide open spaces, "I'm just a
Filipino farmer out in the country." He waved his hand toward the door. "I left the Philippines more
than twenty years ago and have never been back. Never will perhaps. I want to find out, sir, are our
Filipino women the same like they were twenty years ago?"
As he sat down, the hall filled with voices, hushed and intrigued. I weighed my answer carefully. I did
not want to tell a lie yet I did not want to say anything that would seem platitudinous, insincere. But
more important than these considerations, it seemed to me that moment as I looked towards my
countryman, I must give him an answer that would not make him so unhappy. Surely, all these years,
he must have held on to certain ideals, certain beliefs, even illusions peculiar to the exile.
"First," I said as the voices gradually died down and every eye seemed upon me, "First, tell me what
our women were like twenty years ago."
The man stood to answer. "Yes," he said, "you're too young . . . Twenty years ago our women were
nice, they were modest, they wore their hair long, they dressed proper and went for no monkey
business. They were natural, they went to church regular, and they were faithful." He had spoken
slowly, and now in what seemed like an afterthought, added, "It's the men who ain't."

6
ZITA
by Arturo B. Rotor

TURONG brought him from Pauambang in his small sailboat, for the coastwise steamer did not stop at
any little island of broken cliffs and coconut palms. It was almost midday; they had been standing in
that white glare where the tiniest pebble and fluted conch had become points of light, piercing-
bright--the municipal president, the parish priest, Don Eliodoro who owned almost all the coconuts,
the herb doctor, the village character. Their mild surprise over when he spoke in their native dialect,
they looked at him more closely and his easy manner did not deceive them. His head was uncovered
and he had a way of bringing the back of his hand to his brow or mouth; they read behind that too, it
was not a gesture of protection. "An exile has come to Anayat… and he is so young, so young." So
young and lonely and sufficient unto himself. There was no mistaking the stamp of a strong decision
on that brow, the brow of those who have to be cold and haughty, those shoulders stooped slightly,
less from the burden that they bore than from a carefully cultivated air of unconcern; no common
school-teacher could dress so carelessly and not appear shoddy.
They had prepared a room for him in Don Eliodoro's house so that he would not have to walk far to
school every morning, but he gave nothing more than a glance at the big stone building with its
Spanish azotea, its arched doorways, its flagged courtyard. He chose instead Turong's home, a shaky
hut near the sea. Was the sea rough and dangerous at times? He did not mind it. Was the place far
from the church and the schoolhouse? The walk would do him good. Would he not feel lonely with
nobody but an illiterate fisherman for a companion? He was used to living alone. And they let him do
as he wanted, for the old men knew that it was not so much the nearness of the sea that he desired as
its silence so that he might tell it secrets he could not tell anyone else.
They thought of nobody but him; they talked about him in the barber shop, in the cockpit, in the sari-
sari store, the way he walked, the way he looked at you, his unruly hair. They dressed him in purple
and linen, in myth and mystery, put him astride a black stallion, at the wheel of a blue automobile. Mr.
Reteche? Mr. Reteche! The name suggested the fantasy and the glitter of a place and people they never
would see; he was the scion of a powerful family, a poet and artist, a prince.
That night, Don Eliodoro had the story from his daughter of his first day in the classroom; she perched
wide-eyed, low-voiced, short of breath on the arm of his chair.
"He strode into the room, very tall and serious and polite, stood in front of us and looked at us all over
and yet did not seem to see us.
" 'Good morning, teacher,' we said timidly.
"He bowed as if we were his equals. He asked for the fist of our names and as he read off each one we
looked at him long. When he came to my name, Father, the most surprising thing happened. He started
pronouncing it and then he stopped as if he had forgotten something and just stared and stared at the
paper in his hand. I heard my name repeated three times through his half-closed lips, 'Zita. Zita. Zita.'
" 'Yes sir, I am Zita.'
"He looked at me uncomprehendingly, inarticulate, and it seemed to me, Father, it actually seemed
that he was begging me to tell him that that was not my name, that I was deceiving him. He looked so
miserable and sick I felt like sinking down or running away.
" 'Zita is not your name; it is just a pet name, no?'
" 'My father has always called me that, sir.'
" 'It can't be; maybe it is Pacita or Luisa or--'
"His voice was scarcely above a whisper, Father, and all the while he looked at me begging, begging. I
shook my head determinedly. My answer must have angered him. He must have thought I was very
hard-headed, for he said, 'A thousand miles, Mother of Mercy… it is not possible.' He kept on looking at
me; he was hurt perhaps that he should have such a stubborn pupil. But I am not really so, Father?"
"Yes, you are, my dear. But you must try to please him, he is a gentleman; he comes from the city. I was
thinking… Private lessons, perhaps, if he won't ask too much." Don Eliodoro had his dreams and she
was his only daughter.

7
HOW MY BROTHER LEON BROUGHT HOME A WIFE
by Manuel Arguilla

She stepped down from the carretela of Ca Celin with a quick, delicate grace. She was lovely. SHe was
tall. She looked up to my brother with a smile, and her forehead was on a level with his mouth.

"You are Baldo," she said and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. Her nails were long, but they
were not painted. She was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in bloom. And a small dimple
appeared momently high on her right cheek. "And this is Labang of whom I have heard so much." She
held the wrist of one hand with the other and looked at Labang, and Labang never stopped chewing
his cud. He swallowed and brought up to his mouth more cud and the sound of his insides was like a
drum.

I laid a hand on Labang's massive neck and said to her: "You may scratch his forehead now."

She hesitated and I saw that her eyes were on the long, curving horns. But she came and touched
Labang's forehead with her long fingers, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud except that his
big eyes half closed. And by and by she was scratching his forehead very daintily.

My brother Leon put down the two trunks on the grassy side of the road. He paid Ca Celin twice the
usual fare from the station to the edge of Nagrebcan. Then he was standing beside us, and she turned
to him eagerly. I watched Ca Celin, where he stood in front of his horse, and he ran his fingers through
its forelock and could not keep his eyes away from her.

"Maria---" my brother Leon said.

He did not say Maring. He did not say Mayang. I knew then that he had always called her Maria and
that to us all she would be Maria; and in my mind I said 'Maria' and it was a beautiful name.

"Yes, Noel."

Now where did she get that name? I pondered the matter quietly to myself, thinking Father might not
like it. But it was only the name of my brother Leon said backward and it sounded much better that
way.

"There is Nagrebcan, Maria," my brother Leon said, gesturing widely toward the west.

She moved close to him and slipped her arm through his. And after a while she said quietly.

"You love Nagrebcan, don't you, Noel?"

Ca Celin drove away hi-yi-ing to his horse loudly. At the bend of the camino real where the big duhat
tree grew, he rattled the handle of his braided rattan whip against the spokes of the wheel.

We stood alone on the roadside.

The sun was in our eyes, for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide and deep and very
blue above us: but along the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the southwest flamed huge
masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a golden haze through which floated big purple and red
and yellow bubbles when I looked at the sinking sun. Labang's white coat, which I had wshed and
brushed that morning with coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and his
horns appeared tipped with fire.

8
MAY Day Eve
By Nick Joaquin

The old people had ordered that the dancing should stop at ten o’clock but it was almost midnight
before the carriages came filing up the departing guests, while the girls who were staying were
promptly herded upstairs to the bedrooms, the young men gathering around to wish them a good
night and lamenting their ascent with mock signs and moaning, proclaiming themselves disconsolate
but straightway going off to finish the punch and the brandy though they were quite drunk already
and simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment, arrogance and audacity, for they were young bucks
newly arrived from Europe; the ball had been in their honor; and they had waltzed and polka-ed and
bragged and swaggered and flirted all night and where in no mood to sleep yet--no, caramba, not on
this moist tropic eve! not on this mystic May eve! --with the night still young and so seductive that it
was madness not to go out, not to go forth---and serenade the neighbors! cried one; and swim in the
Pasid! cried another; and gather fireflies! cried a third—whereupon there arose a great clamor for
coats and capes, for hats and canes, and they were a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last
carriage rattled away upon the cobbles while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tile
roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wile sky murky with clouds, save where an evil
young moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining,
smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable childhood
fragrances or ripe guavas to the young men trooping so uproariously down the street that the girls
who were desiring upstairs in the bedrooms catered screaming to the windows, crowded giggling at
the windows, but were soon sighing amorously over those young men bawling below; over those
wicked young men and their handsome 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:

9
THE WITCH
By Edilberto K. Tiempo

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.

10
WEDDING DANCE
By Amador Daguio

Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the headhigh threshold.
Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound that carried him across to the narrow door. He
slid back the cover, stepped inside, then pushed the cover back in place. After some moments during
which he seemed to wait, he talked to the listening darkness.
"I'm sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it."
The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house like muffled roars of falling waters.
The woman who had moved with a start when the sliding door opened had been hearing the gangsas
for she did not know how long. There was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave no sign that she heard
Awiyao, but continued to sit unmoving in the darkness.
But Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on all fours to the middle of
the room; he knew exactly where the stove was. With bare fingers he stirred the covered smoldering
embers, and blew into the stove. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of pine on them,
then full round logs as his arms. The room brightened.
"Why don't you go out," he said, "and join the dancing women?" He felt a pang inside him, because
what he said was really not the right thing to say and because the woman did not stir. "You should join
the dancers," he said, "as if--as if nothing had happened." He looked at the woman huddled in a corner
of the room, leaning against the wall. The stove fire played with strange moving shadows and lights
upon her face. She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger or hate.
"Go out--go out and dance. If you really don't hate me for this separation, go out and dance. One of the
men will see you dance well; he will like your dancing, he will marry you. Who knows but that, with
him, you will be luckier than you were with me."
"I don't want any man," she said sharply. "I don't want any other man."
He felt relieved that at least she talked: "You know very well that I won't want any other woman
either. You know that, don't you? Lumnay, you know it, don't you?"
She did not answer him.
"You know it Lumnay, don't you?" he repeated.
"Yes, I know," she said weakly.
"It is not my fault," he said, feeling relieved. "You cannot blame me; I have been a good husband to
you."
"Neither can you blame me," she said. She seemed about to cry.
"No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have nothing to say against you." He
set some of the burning wood in place. "It's only that a man must have a child. Seven harvests is just
too long to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance before it is too late for
both of us."
This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in. She wound the
blanket more snugly around herself.
"You know that I have done my best," she said. "I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed
many chickens in my prayers."
"Yes, I know."
"You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in the terrace
because I butchered one of our pigs without your permission? I did it to appease Kabunyan, because,
like you, I wanted to have a child. But what could I do?"
"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. "
11
Midsummer
(American Colonial Literature)
By Manuel E. Arguilla

He pulled down his hat until the wide brim touched his shoulders. He crouched lower under the cover
of his cart and peered ahead. The road seemed to writhe under the lash of the noon-day heat; it swum
from side to side, humped and bent itself like a feeling serpent, and disappeared behind the spur of a
low hill on which grew a scrawny thicket of bamboo.
There was not a house in sight. Along the left side of the road ran the deep, dry gorge of a stream, the
banks sparsely covered by sun-burned cogon grass. In places, the rocky, waterless bed showed aridly.
Farther, beyond the shimmer of quivering heat waves rose ancient hills not less blue than the cloud-
palisaded sky. On the right stretched a land waste of low rolling dunes. Scattered clumps of hardy
ledda relieved the otherwise barren monotony of the landscape. Far away he could discern a thin
indigo line that was the sea.
The grating of the cartwheels on the pebbles of the road and the almost soundless shuffle of the weary
bull but emphasized the stillness. Now and then came the dry rustling of falling earth as lumps from
the cracked sides of the gorge fell down to the bottom.
He struck at the bull with the slack of the rope. The animal broke into a heavy trot. The dust stirred
slumbrously. The bull slowed down, threw up his head, and a glistening thread of saliva spun out into
the dry air. The dying rays of the sun were reflected in points of light on the wet, heaving flanks.
The man in the cart did not notice the woman until she had rounded the spur of land and stood
unmoving beside the road, watching the cart and its occupant come toward her. She was young,
surprisingly sweet and fresh amidst her parched surroundings. A gaily stripped kerchief covered her
head, the ends tied at the nape of her neck. She wore a homespun bodice of light red cloth with small
white checks. Her skirt was also homespun and showed a pattern of white checks with narrow stripes
of yellow and red. With both hands she held by the mouth a large, apparently empty, water jug, the
cool red of which blended well with her dress. She was barefoot.
She stood straight and still beside the road and regarded him with frank curiosity. Suddenly she
turned and disappeared into the dry gorge. Coming to where she had stood a few moments before, he
pulled up the bull and got out of the cart. He saw where a narrow path had been cut into the bank and
stood a while lost in thought, absently wiping the perspiration from his face. Then he unhitched his
bull and for a few moments, with strong brown fingers, kneaded the hot neck of the beast. Driving the
animal before him, he followed the path. It led up the dry bed of the stream; the sharp fragments of
sun-heated rocks were like burning coals under his feet. There was no sign of the young woman.
He came upon her beyond a bed in the gorge, where a big mango tree, which had partly fallen from the
side of the ravine, cast its cool shade over a well.
She had filled her jar and was rolling the kerchief around her hand into a flat coil which she placed on
her head. Without glancing at him, where he had stopped some distance off, she sat down of her heels,
gathering the fold of her skirt between her wide-spread knees. She tilted the brimful jar to remove
part of the water. One hand on the rim, the other supporting the bottom, she began to raise it to her
head. She knelt on one kneeresting, for a moment, the jar onto her head, getting to her feet at the same
time. But she staggered a little and water splashed down on her breast. The single bodice instantly
clung to her bosom molding the twin hillocks of her breasts warmly brown through the wet cloth. One
arm remained uplifted, holding the jar, while the other shook the clinging cloth free of her drenched
flesh. Then not once having raised her eyes, she passed by the young man, who stood mutely gazing
beside his bull. The animal had found some grass along the path and was industriously grazing.
He turned to watch the graceful figure beneath the jar until it vanished around a bend in the path
leading to the road. Then he led the bull to the well, and tethered it to a root of the mango tree.
"The underpart of her arm is white and smooth," he said to his blurred image on the water of the well,
as he leaned over before lowering the bucket made of half a petroleum can. "And her hair is thick and
black." The bucket struck with a rattling impact. It filled with one long gurgle. He threw his hat on the
grass and pulled the bucket up with both hands.

12
THE MATS
By Francisco Arcellana

For the Angeles family, Mr. Angeles'; homecoming from his periodic inspection trips was always an
occasion for celebration. But his homecoming--from a trip to the South--was fated to be more
memorable than, say, of the others.
He had written from Mariveles: "I have just met a marvelous matweaver--a real artist--and I shall have
a surprise for you. I asked him to weave a sleeping-mat for every one of the family. He is using many
different colors and for each mat the dominant color is that of our respective birthstones. I am sure
that the children will be very pleased. I know you will be. I can hardly wait to show them to you."
Nana Emilia read the letter that morning, and again and again every time she had a chance to leave the
kitchen. In the evening when all the children were home from school she asked her oldest son, José, to
read the letter at dinner table. The children became very much excited about the mats, and talked
about them until late into the night. This she wrote her husband when she labored over a reply to him.
For days after that, mats continued to be the chief topic of conversation among the children.
Finally, from Lopez, Mr. Angeles wrote again: "I am taking the Bicol Express tomorrow. I have the mats
with me, and they are beautiful. God willing, I shall be home to join you at dinner."
The letter was read aloud during the noon meal. Talk about the mats flared up again like wildfire.
"I like the feel of mats," Antonio, the third child, said. "I like the smell of new mats."
"Oh, but these mats are different," interposed Susanna, the fifth child. "They have our names woven
into them, and in our ascribed colors, too."
The children knew what they were talking about: they knew just what a decorative mat was like; it
was not anything new or strange in their experience. That was why they were so excited about the
matter. They had such a mat in the house, one they seldom used, a mat older than any one of them.
This mat had been given to Nana Emilia by her mother when she and Mr. Angeles were married, and it
had been with them ever since. It had served on the wedding night, and had not since been used
except on special occasions.
It was a very beautiful mat, not really meant to be ordinarily used. It had green leaf borders, and a lot
of gigantic red roses woven into it. In the middle, running the whole length of the mat, was the
lettering: Emilia y Jaime Recuerdo
The letters were in gold.
Nana Emilia always kept that mat in her trunk. When any one of the family was taken ill, the mat was
brought out and the patient slept on it, had it all to himself. Every one of the children had some time in
their lives slept on it; not a few had slept on it more than once.
Most of the time the mat was kept in Nana Emilia's trunk, and when it was taken out and spread on
the floor the children were always around to watch. At first there had been only Nana Emilia to see the
mat spread. Then a child--a girl--watched with them. The number of watchers increased as more
children came.
The mat did not seem to age. It seemed to Nana Emilia always as new as when it had been laid on the
nuptial bed. To the children it seemed as new as the first time it was spread before them. The folds
and creases always new and fresh. The smell was always the smell of a new mat. Watching the
intricate design was an endless joy. The children's pleasure at the golden letters even before they
could work out the meaning was boundless. Somehow they were always pleasantly shocked by the
sight of the mat: so delicate and so consummate the artistry of its weave.
Now, taking out that mat to spread had become a kind of ritual. The process had become associated
with illness in the family. Illness, even serious illness, had not been infrequent. There had been
deaths...
In the evening Mr. Angeles was with his family. He had brought the usual things home with him. There
was a lot of fruits, as always (his itinerary carried him through the fruit-growing provinces):
pineapples, lanzones, chicos, atis, santol, sandia, guyabano, avocado, according to the season. He had
also brought home a jar of preserved sweets from Lopez.

13
MORNING IN NAGREBCAN
by Manuel E. Arguilla

It was sunrise at Nagrebcan. The fine, bluish mist, low over the tobacco fields, was lifting and
thinning moment by moment. A ragged strip of mist, pulled away by the morning breeze, had caught
on the clumps of bamboo along the banks of the stream that flowed to one side of the barrio. Before
long the sun would top the Katayaghan hills, but as yet no people were around. In the grey shadow of
the hills, the barrio was gradually awaking. Roosters crowed and strutted on the ground while hens
hesitated on their perches among the branches of the camanchile trees. Stray goats nibbled the weeds
on the sides of the road, and the bull carabaos tugged restively against their stakes.In the early
morning the puppies lay curled up together between their mother’s paws under the ladder of the
house. Four puppies were all white like the mother. They had pink noses and pink eyelids and pink
mouths. The skin between their toes and on the inside of their large, limp ears was pink. They had
short sleek hair, for the mother licked them often. The fifth puppy lay across the mother’s neck. On the
puppy’s back was a big black spot like a saddle. The tips of its ears were black and so was a patch of
hair on its chest.The opening of the sawali door, its uneven bottom dragging noisily against the
bamboo flooring, aroused the mother dog and she got up and stretched and shook herself, scattering
dust and loose white hair. A rank doggy smell rose in the cool morning air. She took a quick leap
forward, clearing the puppies which had begun to whine about her, wanting to suckle. She trotted
away and disappeared beyond the house of a neighbor.The puppies sat back on their rumps, whining.
After a little while they lay down and went back to sleep, the black-spotted puppy on top.Baldo stood
at the threshold and rubbed his sleep-heavy eyes with his fists. He must have been about ten years old,
small for his age, but compactly built, and he stood straight on his bony legs. He wore one of his
father’s discarded cotton undershirts.The boy descended the ladder, leaning heavily on the single
bamboo railing that served as a banister. He sat on the lowest step of the ladder, yawning and rubbing
his eyes one after the other. Bending down, he reached between his legs for the black-spotted puppy.
He held it to him, stroking its soft, warm body. He blew on its nose. The puppy stuck out a small red
tongue, lapping the air. It whined eagerly. Baldo laughed – a low gurgle.He rubbed his face against that
of the dog. He said softly, “My puppy. My puppy.” He said it many times. The puppy licked his ears, his
cheeks. When it licked his mouth, Baldo straightened up, raised the puppy on a level with his eyes.
“You are a foolish puppy,” he said, laughing. “Foolish, foolish, foolish,” he said, rolling the puppy on his
lap so that it howled.
The four other puppies awoke and came scrambling about Baldo’s legs. He put down the black-
spotted puppy and ran to the narrow foot bridge of woven split-bamboo spanning the roadside ditch.
When it rained, water from the roadway flowed under the makeshift bridge, but it had not rained for a
long time and the ground was dry and sandy. Baldo sat on the bridge, digging his bare feet into the
sand, feeling the cool particles escaping between his toes. He whistled, a toneless whistle with a
curious trilling to it produced by placing the tongue against the lower teeth and then curving it up and
down.
The whistle excited the puppies; they ran to the boy as fast as their unsteady legs could carry
them, barking choppy little barks.
Nana Elang, the mother of Baldo, now appeared in the doorway with handful of rice straw. She
called Baldo and told him to get some live coals from their neighbor.
“Get two or three burning coals and bring them home on the rice straw,” she said. “Do not wave
the straw in the wind. If you do, it will catch fire before you get home.” She watched him run toward
Ka Ikao’s house where already smoke was rising through the nipa roofing into the misty air. One or
two empty carromatas drawn by sleepy little ponies rattled along the pebbly street, bound for the
railroad station.
Nana Elang must have been thirty, but she looked at least fifty. She was a thin, wispy woman, with
bony hands and arms. She had scanty, straight, graying hair which she gathered behind her head in a
small, tight knot. It made her look thinner than ever. Her cheekbones seemed on the point of bursting
through the dry, yellowish-brown skin. Above a gray-checkered skirt, she wore a single wide-sleeved
cotton blouse that ended below her flat breasts. Sometimes when she stooped or reached up for
anything, a glimpse of the flesh at her waist showed in a dark, purplish band where the skirt had been
tied so often.

14
THE CHIEFTEST MOURNER
by Aida Rivera-Ford

He was my uncle because he married my aunt (even if he had not come to her these past ten
years), so when the papers brought the news of his death, I felt that some part of me had died, too. I
was boarding then at a big girls’ college in Manila and I remember quite vividly that a few other girls
were gathered about the lobby of our school, looking very straight and proper since it was seven in
the morning and the starch in our long-sleeved uniform had not yet given way. I tried to be brave
while I read that my uncle had actually been “the last of a distinct school of Philippine poets.” I was
still being brave all the way down the lengthy eulogies, until I got to the line which said that he was
“the sweetest lyre that ever throbbed with Malayan chords.” Something caught at my throat and I let
out one sob–the rest merely followed. When the girls hurried over to me to see what had happened, I
could only point to the item on the front page with my uncle’s picture taken when he was still
handsome. Everybody suddenly spoke in a low voice and Ning who worshipped me said that I
shouldn’t be so unhappy because my uncle was now with the other great poets in heaven–at which I
really howled in earnest because my uncle had not only deserted poor Aunt Sophia but had also been
living with another woman these many years and, most horrible of all, he had probably died in her
embrace! Perhaps I received an undue amount of commiseration for the death of the delinquent
husband of my aunt, but it wasn’t my fault because I never really lied about anything; only, nobody
thought to ask me just how close an uncle he was. It wasn’t my doing either when, some months after
his demise, my poem entitled The Rose Was Not So Fair O Alma Mater was captioned “by the niece of
the late beloved Filipino Poet.” And that having been printed, I couldn’t possibly refuse when I was
asked to write on My Uncle–The Poetry of His Life. The article, as printed, covered only his boyhood
and early manhood because our adviser cut out everything that happened after he was married. She
said that the last half of his life was not exactly poetic, although I still maintain that in his vices, as in
his poetry, he followed closely the pattern of the great poets he admired. My aunt used to relate that
he was an extremely considerate man–when he was sober, and on those occasions he always tried to
make up for his past sins. She said that he had never meant to marry, knowing the kind of husband he
would make, but that her beauty drove him out of his right mind. My aunt always forgave him but one
day she had more than she could bear, and when he was really drunk, she tied him to a chair with a
strong rope to teach him a lesson. She never saw him drunk again, for as soon as he was able to, he
walked out the door and never came back. I was very little at that time, but I remembered that shortly
after he went away, my aunt put me in a car and sent me to his hotel with a letter from her. Uncle
ushered me into his room very formally and while I looked all around the place, he prepared a special
kind of lemonade for the two of us. I was sorry he poured it out into wee glasses because it was unlike
any lemonade I had ever tasted. While I sipped solemnly at my glass, he inquired after my aunt. To my
surprise, I found myself answering with alacrity. I was happy to report all details of my aunt’s health,
including the number of crabs she ate for lunch and the amazing fact that she was getting fatter and
fatter without the benefit of Scott’s Emulsion or Ovaltine at all. Uncle smiled his beautiful sombre
smile and drew some poems from his desk. He scribbled a dedication on them and instructed me to
give them to my aunt. I made much show of putting the empty glass down but Uncle was dense to the
hint. At the door, however, he told me that I could have some lemonade every time I came to visit him.
Aunt Sophia was so pleased with the poems that she kissed me. And then all of a sudden she looked at
me queerly and made a most peculiar request of me. She asked me to say ha-ha, and when I said ha-ha,
she took me to the sink and began to wash the inside of my mouth with soap and water while calling
upon a dozen of the saints to witness the act. I never got a taste of Uncle’s lemonade. It began to be a
habit with Aunt Sophia to drop in for a periodic recital of woe to which Mama was a sympathetic
audience. The topic of the conversation was always the latest low on Uncle’s state of misery. It gave
Aunt Sophia profound satisfaction to relay the report of friends on the number of creases on Uncle’s
shirt or the appalling decrease in his weight. To her, the fact that Uncle was getting thinner proved
conclusively that he was suffering as a result of the separation. It looked as if Uncle would not be able
to hold much longer, the way he was reported to be thinner each time, because Uncle didn’t have
much weight to start with. The paradox of the situation, however, was that Aunt Sophia was now
crowding Mama off the sofa and yet she wasn’t looking very happy either.

15
 WAYWAYA
by F. Sionil José

The first time Dayaw crossed the river, he felt fulfilled, as if he had finally passed the greatest test of
all. It was so unlike that leap over the flaming pit the feat of strength that would have assured his
father, the Ulo, that he was no weakling, that in spite of his seeming indolence and love of poetry and
singing, he was capable nonetheless of courage as were the bravest warriors of Daya. All his life he had
been cooped up like the pigs his mother fattened in the pit before they were taken out for the feasts.
Daya, after all, was hemmed in to the east by the sea, vast and mysterious, and to the west, this mighty
river, for beyond it was forest and mountain, land of the Laga Laud, the ancient and indomitable
enemy of his people.
He had made the crossing at night after he had blackened his face and body with soot, carrying with
him nothing but a coil of maguey twine and his long knife, he had dashed from the cover of reeds near
the river's bank, for while Apo Bufan showed the way, it would also reveal him to whoever watched
the river. Days afterwards, he tried to fathom the reasons for the deed, why he went alone, and for
what. For one the river was there, a barrier to knowledge of new things, new sights, and perhaps a
new life. He was, indeed, aglow with wanting to know; how many times he had mused, gazing at the
changing cloud patterns in the sky, the shapes of the waves as they broke and foamed on the beach,
the track of ants, the wheeling of birds they all seemed to follow a design that could not know what lay
beyond the river and the sea without crossing them.
Once, he climbed the lofty dalipawen at the edge of the communal farms and as if he was on some
promontory, he scanned the world around him the shining sea in the east and beyond the green,
mangy top of the forest, far down the horizon to the west, the mountains, purplish green in the last
light of day. He envied those who lived there for they could see everything. Was it possible for them to
know everything as well? Wading across the river in the dry season was not difficult; there were
islands of reeds and upturned trees ragged down from the mountains with their catch of moss of dried
leaves, and clear pools where there would be silverfish and shells. This was how it felt then, to ford
this limit of what was safe. From the very beginning, it was dinned to him, and to all the young Taga
Daya to cross the river meant going to war.
The first time he came to this river was when he was thirteen and was with some twenty boys of the
same age; they had marched for one day and one night, in anxiety and fear, for they had no warriors to
protect them but this old, shriveled healer who made this journey every year. They had been taught
stealth and cunning, and once they entered the forest beyond the cultivated fields and cogon wastes, it
was possible for the enemy to be lurking there. They were not warriors they would be hog-tied and
brought to Laud as slaves. For a day, they walked without eating and by the morning of the next day,
when they finally reached the river, they were weak, hungry and ready to die. Only the fear of capture
kept them alive. There, on the sandy bank, behind the tall reeds that had flowered with plumes of
dazzling white, they lined up, squatting while the healer sharpened his knife and prepared the strange
mixture of tobacco and weeds with which he treated their wounds after he had circumcised them.
He was now on his third night and the relentless sense of danger that hounded him was no longer as
keen as it had been on the first, particularly when a dog had howled and a man had come out with a
lighted pine splinter and a spear, wondering perhaps what lizard was out there after his chickens. He
had slithered into the recesses of the bush and returned afterwards. He knew the town by then, and in
the waning moonlight, he stole away from it, detoured through terraces in the mountains, then down
to the forest of scrub and cogon, making a new way each time. It was still dark when he reached the
river. He had already satisfied most of his curiosities, heard their songs, their conversations. He had
looked at their handiwork, their fields of sweet potato and rice, and marveled at the quality of their
crafts. He returned to the cove which was actually a small turn of the river that was hidden by a wall of
low branches. Within it was a pool that was fed by a spring and beyond the spring, up a sandy bar, was
a sprout of cogon behind which he had slept the night before. He had taken care that there was no
trace of him in the sand so that when he went to the spring to drink, he had wiped out his tracks
carefully.

16
THE WEDDING DANCE
by Amador T. Daguio

Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the head high 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, and 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 is just
too long to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance before it is too late for
both of us."
This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in. She wound the
blanket more snugly around herself.
"You know that I have done my best," she said. "I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed
many chickens in my prayers."
"Yes, I know."
"You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in the terrace
because I butchered one of our pigs without your permission? I did it to appease Kabunyan, because,
like you, I wanted to have a child. But what could I do?"
"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, and 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.

17
DEAD STARS
By Paz Marquez – Benitez

Through the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him,
stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come
even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless
melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian
and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.
"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"
"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."
Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not?
And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."
"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose
scissors busily snipped away.
"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a
worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"
"In love? With whom?"
"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with good-
natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades,
notes, and things like that--"
Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four
years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of
the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the
dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he
seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid
imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made
up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those
days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he
divined it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of
tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on
somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone
had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for
a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much
engaged to Esperanza.
Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the
desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion
it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future
fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the
hand of Time, or of Fate.
"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.
"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool
than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain
placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to
philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned
down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning.
Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"
Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--
disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.
"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.
Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed
his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an
indolent ease that verged on grace.
THE SMALL KEY
by Paz M. Latorena

18
It was very warm. The sun, up above a sky that was blue and tremendous and beckoning to birds ever
on the wing, shone bright as if determined to scorch everything under heaven, even the low, square
nipa house that stood in an unashamed relief against the gray-green haze of grass and leaves.
It was lonely dwelling located far from its neighbors, which were huddled close to one another as if for
mutual comfort. It was flanked on both sides by tall, slender bamboo tree which rustled plaintively
under a gentle wind.
On the porch a woman past her early twenties stood regarding the scene before her with eyes made
incurious by its familiarity. All around her the land stretched endlessly, it seemed, and vanished into
the distance. There were dark, newly plowed furrows where in due time timorous seedling would give
rise to sturdy stalks and golden grain, to a rippling yellow sea in the wind and sun during harvest time.
Promise of plenty and reward for hard toil! With a sigh of discontent, however, the woman turned and
entered a small dining room where a man sat over a belated a midday meal.
Pedro Buhay, a prosperous farmer, looked up from his plate and smiled at his wife as she stood
framed by the doorway, the sunlight glinting on her dark hair, which was drawn back, without
relenting wave, from a rather prominent and austere brow.
“Where are the shirts I ironed yesterday?” she asked as she approached the table.
“In my trunk, I think,” he answered.
“Some of them need darning,” and observing the empty plate, she added, “do you want some more
rice?”
“No,” hastily, “I am in a burry to get back. We must finish plowing the south field today because
tomorrow is Sunday.”
Pedro pushed the chair back and stood up. Soledad began to pile the dirty dishes one on top of the
other.
“Here is the key to my trunk.” From the pocket of his khaki coat he pulled a string of non-descript red
which held together a big shiny key and another small, rather rusty looking one.
With deliberate care he untied the knot and, detaching the big key, dropped the small one back into
his pocket. She watched him fixedly as he did this. The smile left her face and a strange look came into
her eyes as she took the big key from him without a word. Together they left the dining room.
Out of the porch he put an arm around her shoulders and peered into her shadowed face. “You look
pale and tired,” he remarked softly. “What have you been doing all morning?”
“Nothing,” she said listlessly. “But the heat gives me a headache.”
“Then lie down and try to sleep while I am gone.” For a moment they looked deep into each other’s
eyes.
“It is really warm,” he continued. “I think I will take off my coat.”
He removed the garment absent minded and handed it to her. The stairs creaked under his weight as
he went down.
“Choleng,” he turned his head as he opened the gate, “I shall pass by Tia Maria’s house and tell her to
come. I may not return before dark.”
Soledad nodded. Her eyes followed her husband down the road, noting the fine set of his head and
shoulders, the case of his stride. A strange ache rose in her throat.
She looked at the coat he had handed to her. It exuded a faint smell of his favourite cigars, one of
which he invariably smoked, after the day’s work, on his way home from the fields. Mechanically, she
began to fold the garment.
As she was doing so, s small object fell from the floor with a dull, metallic sound. Soledad stooped
down to pick it up. It was the small key! She stared at it in her palm as if she had never seen it before.
Her mouth was tightly drawn and for a while she looked almost old.
She passed into the small bedroom and tossed the coat carelessly on the back of a chair. She opened
the window and the early afternoon sunshine flooded in. On a mat spread on the bamboo floor were
some newly washed garments.

19
MAGNIFICENCE
by Estrella D. Alfon

There was nothing to fear, for the man was always so gentle, so kind. At night when the little girl and
her brother were bathed in the light of the big shaded bulb that hung over the big study table in the
downstairs hall, the man would knock gently on the door, and come in. he would stand for a while just
beyond the pool of light, his feet in the circle of illumination, the rest of him in shadow. The little girl
and her brother would look up at him where they sat at the big table, their eyes bright in the bright
light, and watch him come fully into the light, but his voice soft, his manner slow. He would smell very
faintly of sweat and pomade, but the children didn’t mind although they did notice, for they waited for
him every evening as they sat at their lessons like this. He’d throw his visored cap on the table, and it
would fall down with a soft plop, then he’d nod his head to say one was right, or shake it to say one
was wrong.
It was not always that he came. They could remember perhaps two weeks when he remarked to their
mother that he had never seen two children looking so smart. The praise had made their mother look
over them as they stood around listening to the goings-on at the meeting of the neighborhood
association, of which their mother was president. Two children, one a girl of seven, and a boy of eight.
They were both very tall for their age, and their legs were the long gangly legs of fine spirited colts.
Their mother saw them with eyes that held pride, and then to partly gloss over the maternal gloating
she exhibited, she said to the man, in answer to his praise, but their homework. They’re so lazy with
them. And the man said, I have nothing to do in the evenings, let me help them. Mother nodded her
head and said, if you want to bother yourself. And the thing rested there, and the man came in the
evenings therefore, and he helped solve fractions for the boy, and write correct phrases in language
for the little girl.
In those days, the rage was for pencils. School children always have rages going at one time or
another. Sometimes for paper butterflies that are held on sticks, and whirl in the wind. The Japanese
bazaars promoted a rage for those. Sometimes it is for little lead toys found in the folded waffles that
Japanese confection-makers had such light hands with. At this particular time, it was for pencils.
Pencils big but light in circumference not smaller than a man’s thumb. They were unwieldy in a child’s
hands, but in all schools then, where Japanese bazaars clustered there were all colors of these pencils
selling for very low, but unattainable to a child budgeted at a baon of a centavo a day. They were all of
five centavos each, and one pencil was not at all what one had ambitions for. In rages, one kept a
collection. Four or five pencils, of different colors, to tie with strings near the eraser end, to dangle
from one’s book-basket, to arouse the envy of the other children who probably possessed less.
Add to the man’s gentleness and his kindness in knowing a child’s desires, his promise that he would
give each of them not one pencil but two. And for the little girl who he said was very bright and
deserved more, ho would get the biggest pencil he could find.
One evening he did bring them. The evenings of waiting had made them look forward to this final
giving, and when they got the pencils they whooped with joy. The little boy had two pencils, one green,
one blue. And the little girl had three pencils, two of the same circumference as the little boy’s but
colored red and yellow. And the third pencil, a jumbo size pencil really, was white, and had been
sharpened, and the little girl jumped up and down, and shouted with glee. Until their mother called
from down the stairs. What are you shouting about? And they told her, shouting gladly, Vicente, for
that was his name. Vicente had brought the pencils he had promised them.
Thank him, their mother called. The little boy smiled and said, Thank you. And the little girl smiled,
and said, Thank you, too. But the man said, are you not going to kiss me for those pencils? They both
came forward, the little girl and the little boy, and they both made to kiss him but Vicente slapped the
boy smartly on his lean hips, and said, Boys do not kiss boys. And the little boy laughed and scampered
away, and then ran back and kissed him anyway.
The little girl went up to the man shyly, put her arms about his neck as he crouched to receive her
embrace, and kissed him on the cheeks.

20
THE DAY THE DANCERS CAME
by Bienvenido N. Santos

As soon as Fil woke up, he noticed a whiteness outside, quite unusual for the November mornings they
had been having. That fall, Chicago was sandman's town, sleepy valley, drowsy gray, slumberous
mistiness from sunup till noon when the clouds drifted away in cauliflower clusters and suddenly it
was evening. The lights shone on the avenues like soiled lamps centuries old and the skyscrapers
became monsters with a thousand sore eyes. Now there was a brightness in the air land Fil knew what
it was and he shouted, "Snow! It's snowing!" Tony, who slept in the adjoining room, was awakened.
"What's that?" he asked. "It's snowing," Fil said, smiling to himself as if he had ordered this and was
satisfied with the prompt delivery. "Oh, they'll love this, they'll love this." "Who'll love that?" Tony
asked, his voice raised in annoyance. "The dancers, of course," Fil answered. "They're arriving today.
Maybe they've already arrived. They'll walk in the snow and love it. Their first snow, I'm sure." "How
do you know it wasn't snowing in New York while they were there?" Tony asked. "Snow in New York
in early November?" Fil said. "Are you crazy?" "Who's crazy?" Tony replied. "Ever since you heard of
those dancers from the Philippines, you've been acting nuts. Loco. As if they're coming here just for
you. Tony chuckled. Hearing him, Fil blushed, realizing that he had, indeed, been acting too eager, but
Tony had said it. It felt that way--as if the dancers were coming here only for him. Filemon Acayan,
Filipino, was fifty, a U.S., citizen. He was a corporal in the U.S. Army, training at San Luis Obispo, on the
day he was discharged honorably, in 1945. A few months later, he got his citizenship papers.
Thousands of them, smart and small in their uniforms, stood at attention in drill formation, in the
scalding sun, and pledged allegiance to the flat and the republic for which it stands. Soon after he got
back to work. To a new citizen, work meant many places and many ways: factories and hotels, waiter
and cook. A timeless drifting: once he tended a rose garden and took care of a hundred year old
veteran of a border war. As a menial in a hospital in Cook Country, all day he handled filth and gore.
He came home smelling of surgical soap and disinfectant. In the hospital, he took charge of row of
bottles on a shelf, each bottle containing a stage of the human embryo in preservatives, from the
lizard-like fetus of a few days, through the newly born infant, with its position unchanged, cold and
cowering and afraid. He had nightmares through the years of himself inside a bottle. l That was long
ago. Now he had a more pleasant job as special policemen in the post office. AMCM [82]

He was a few years younger than Tony-Antonio Bataller, a retired pullman porter but he looked older
in inspite of the fact that Tony had been bedridden most of the time for the last two years, suffering
from a kind of wasting disease that had frustrated doctors. All over Tony's body, a gradual peeling was
taking place. l At first, he thought it was merely tiniaflava, a skin disease common among adolescent in
the Philippines. It had started around the neck and had spread to his extremities. His face looked as if
it was healing from severe burns. Nevertheless, it was a young face much younger than Fil's, which
had never looked young. "I'm becoming a white man," Tony had said once, chuckling softly. It was the
same chuckle Fil seemed to have heard now, only this time it sounded derisive, insulting. Fil said, "I
know who's nuts. It's the sick guy with the sick thoughts. You don't care for nothing but your pain,
your imaginary pain." "You're the imagining fellow. I got the real thing," Tony shouted from the room.
He believed he had something worse than the whiteness spreading on his skin. There was a pain in his
insides, like dull scissors scraping his intestines. Angrily he added, "What for I got retired?" "You're
old, man, old, that's what, and sick, yes, but not cancer," Fil said turning towards the snow-filled sky.
He pressed his faced against the glass window. There's about an inch now on the ground, he thought,
maybe more. Tony came out of his room looking as if he had not slept all night. "I know what I got," he
said, as if it were an honor and a privilege to die of cancer and Fill was trying to deprive him of it.
"Never a pain like this. One day, I'm just gonna die." "Naturally. Who says you won't?" Fil argued,
thinking how wonderful it would be if he could join the company of dancers from the Philippines,
show them around walk with them in the snow, watch their eyes as they stared about them, answer
their questions, tell them everything they wanted to know about the changing seasons in this strange
land. They would pick up fistfuls of snow, crunch it in their fingers or shove it into their mouths.

21
THE HAPPIEST BOY IN THE WORLD
By N.V.M. Gonzales
One warm July night Julio was writing a letter to-of all people-his landlord, Ka Ponso. It was about his
son Jose who wanted to go to school in Mansalay, the town where Ka Ponso lived.
They had moved here to the island of Mindoro about a year ago because Julio had been unable to find
any land of his own to farm. As it was, he thought himself lucky when Ka Ponso agreed to take him on
as a tenant.
"Dear Compadre," he started writing. A while before, his wife had given birth to a baby. Ka Ponso had
happened to be in the neighborhood and offered to be the baby's godfather. After that they had begun
to call each other compadre. Julio was writing in Tagalog, bending earnestly over a piece of paper torn
out of his son's school notebook.
It was many months since he had had a writing implement in his hand. That was when he had gone to
the municipal office in Mansalay to file a homestead application. Then he had used a pen and, to his
surprise, had been able to fill in the blank form neatly. Nothing had come of the application, although
Ka Ponso had assured him he had looked into the matter and talked with the officials concerned. Now,
using a pencil instead of a pen, Julio was sure he could make his latter legible enough for Ka Ponso.
"It's about my boy Jose," he wrote. "He's in the sixth grade now." He didn't add that Jose had had to
miss a year of school since coming here to Mindoro. "Since he's quite a poor hand at looking after your
carabaos, I thought it would be best that he go to school in the town."
He leaned back against the wall. He was sitting on the floor writing one end of the long wooden bench
that was the sole piece of furniture in their one-room house. The bench was in one corner. Across
from it stood the stove. To his right, his wife and the baby girl lay under a hemp mosquito net. Jose too
was here, sprawled beside a sack of un-husked rice by the doorway. He had been out all afternoon
looking for one of Ka Ponso's carabaos that had strayed away to the newly planted rice clearings along
the other side of the river. Now Jose was snoring lightly, like the tired youth he was. He was twelve
years old.
The yellow flame of the kerosene lamp flickered ceaselessly. The dank smell of food, mainly fish broth,
that had been spilled from many a bowl and dried on the bench now seemed to rise from the very
texture of the wood itself. The stark fact of their poverty, if Julio's nature had been sensitive to it,
might have struck him a hard and sudden blow; but as it was, he just looked about the room, even as
the smell assailed his nostrils, and stared a moment at the mosquito net and then at Jose as he lay
there by the door. Then he went on with his letter.
"This boy Jose, compadre," he wrote, "is quite an industrious lad. If only you can make him do
anything you wish, any work. He can cook rice, and I'm sure he'd do well washing dishes."
Julio recalled his last visit to Ka Ponso's place about three months ago, during the fiesta. It was a big
house with many servants. The floors were so polished you could almost see your own image under
your feet as you walked, and there was always a servant who followed you about with a rag to wipe
away the smudges of dirt that your feet left on the floor.
"I hope you will not think of this as a great bother," Julio continued, trying his best to phrase his
thoughts. He had a vague fear that Ka Ponso might not regard his letter favorably. But he wrote on,
slowly and steadily, stopping only from time to time to regard what he had written. "We shall repay
you for whatever you can do for us, compadre. It's true that we already owe you for many things, but
my wife and I will do all we can indeed to repay you."
Rereading the last sentence and realizing that he had mentioned his wife, Julio recalled that during the
first month after their arrival here they had received five large measures of rice from Ka Ponso. Later
he had been told that at harvest time he would have to pay back twice that amount. Perhaps this was
usury, but it was strictly in keeping with the custom in those parts, and Julio was not the sort to
complain. Besides, he never thought of Ka Ponso as anything other than his spiritual compadre, as
they say, his true friend.
Suddenly he began wondering how Jose would act in Ka Ponso's house, unaccustomed as he was to so
many things there. The boy might even stumble over a chair and break some dishes. . . . On and on
went his thoughts, worrying about the boy.

22
GRADUATION
by F. Sionil Jose

I always knew that someday after I finished high school, I’d go to Manila and to college. I had
looked ahead to the grand adventure with eagerness but when it finally came, my leaving Rosales
filled me with a nameless dread and a great, swelling unhappiness that clogged my chest.
I couldn’t be sure now. Maybe it was friendship, huge and granite-like, or just plain sympathy. I
couldn’t be sure anymore; maybe I really fell in love when I was sixteen.
Her name was Teresita. She was a proud, stubborn girl with many fixed ideas and she even
admonished me: “Just because you gave will be accepted.”
It was until after sometime that I understootd what she meant and when she did, I honored her all the
more. She was sixteen, too, lovely like the banaba when it’s bloom.
I did not expect her to be angry with me when I bought her a dress for it wasn’t really expensive.
Besides, as the daughter of one of Father’s tenants, she knew me very well, better perhaps than any of
the people who lived in Carmay, the young folks who always greeted me politely, doffed their straw
hats then, close-mouthed, went their way.
I always had silver coins in my pockets but that March afternoon, after counting all of them and the
stray pieces, too that I had tucked away in my dresser I knew I needed more.
I approach Father. He was at his working table, writing on a ledger while behind him, one of the new
servants stood erect, swinging a palm leaf fan over Father’s head. I stood beside Father, watched his
hand scrawl the figures on the ledger, his wide brow and his shirt damp with sweat.
When he finally noticed me, I couldn’t tell him what I wanted. He unbuttoned his shirt to his paunch.
“Well, what is it?”
“I’m going to take my classmates this afternoon to the restaurant, Father.” I said. Father turned to the
sheaf of papers before him. “Sure,” he said. “You can tell Bo King to take off what you and your friends
can eat from his rent this month.”
I lingered uneasily, avoiding the servant’s eyes. “Well, won’t that do?” Father asked. It was March and
the high school graduation was but a matter of days away. “ I also need a little money, Father.” I said. “
I have to buy something.”
Father nodded. He groped for his keys in his drawer the he opened the iron money box beside him and
drew out a ten-peso bill. He laid it on the table.
“I’m going to buy…” I tried to explain but with a wave of his hand, he dismissed me. He went back to
his figures. It was getting late. Sepa, our eldest maid, was getting the chickens to their coops. I hurried
to the main road which was quite deserted now except in the vicinity of the round cement
embankment in front of the municipal building where loafers were taking in the stale afternoon sun.
The Chinese storekeepers who occupied Father’s buildings had lighted their lamps. From the ancient
artesian well at the rim of the town plaza, the water carriers and servant girls babbled while they
waited for their turn at the pump. Nearby, travelling merchants had unhitched their bullcarts after a
whole day of travelling from town to tonw and were cooking their supper on broad, blackened stones
that littered the place. At Chan Hai’s \store there was a boy with a stick of candy in his mouth, a couple
of men drinking beer and smacking their lips portentously, and a woman haggling over a can of
sardines.
I went to the huge bales of cloth that slumped in one corner of the store, I picked out the silk, white
cloth with glossy printed flowers. I asked Chan Hai, who was perched on a stool smoking his long pipe,
how much he’d ask for the material I had picker for a gown.
Chan Hai peered at me in surprise; “Ten pesos” he said.
With the package, I hurried to Camay. In the thickening dusk the leaves of the acacias folded and the
solemn, mellow chimes of the Angelus echoed to the flat, naked stretches of the town. The women who
had been sweeping their yards paused; children reluctantly hurried to their homes for now the town
was draped with a dreamy stillness.Teresita and her father lived by the creek in Carmay. The house
was on a sandy lot which belonged to Father; it was apart front the cluster of huts peculiar to the
village. Its roof as it was with the other farmer’s homes, thatched and disheveled, its walls were of
battered buri leaves. It was washed away. Madre de cacao trees abounded in the vicinity but offered
scanty shade.

23
The Black Monkey
by Edith L. Tiempo

Two weeks already she had stayed in the hunt on the precipice, alone except for the visits of her
husband. Carlos came regularly once a day and stayed three or four hours, but his visits seemed to her
too short and far between. Sometimes, after he had left and she thought she would be alone again, one
or the other of the neighbors came up unexpectedly, and right away those days became different, or
she became different in a subtle but definite way. For the neighbors caused a disturbed balance in her
which was relieving and necessary. Sometimes it was one of the women, coming up with some fruits,
papayas, perhaps, or wild ink berries, or guavas. Sometimes the children, to grind her week’s supply of
corn meal in the cubbyhole downstairs. Their chirps and meaningless giggles broke the steady turn of
the stone grinder, scraping to a slow agitation the thoughts that had settled and almost hardened in
the bottom of her mind. She would have liked it better if these visits were longer, but they could not
be; for the folks came to see her, yet she couldn’t come to them, and she, a sick woman, wasn’t really
with her when they sat there with her. The women were uneasy in the hut and she could say nothing
to the children, and it seemed it was only when the men came to see her when there was the presence
of real people. Real people, and she real with them.

As when old Emilio and Sergio left their carabaos standing in the clearing and crossed the river at low
tide to climb solemnly up the path on the precipice, their faces showing brown and leathery in the
filtered sunlight of the forest as they approached her door. Coming in and sitting on the floor of the
eight-by-ten hut where she lay, looking at her and chewing tobacco, clayey legs crossed easily, they
brought about them the strange electric of living together, of showing one to another lustily across the
clearing, each driving his beast, of riding the bull cart into the timber to load dead trunks of firewood,
of listening in a screaming silence inside their huts at night to the sound of real or imagined shots or
explosions, and mostly of another kind of silence, the kid that bogged down between the furrows
when the sun was hot and the soils stony and the breadth for words lay tight and furry upon their
tongues. They were slow of words even when at rest, rousing themselves to talk numbingly and
vaguely after long periods of chewing.

Thinking to interest her, their talk would be of the women’s doings, soap-making and the salt project,
and who made the most coconut oil that week, whose dog has caught sucking eggs from whose poultry
shed, show many lizards and monkeys they trapped and killed in the corn fields and yards around the
four houses. Listening to them was hearing a remote story heard once before and strange enough now
to be interesting again. But it was last two weeks locatable in her body, it was true, but not so much a
real pain as a deadness and heaviness everywhere, at once inside of her as well as outside.

When the far nasal bellowing of their carabaos came up across the river the men rose to go, and
clumsy with sympathy they stood at the doorstep spiting out many casual streaks of tobacco and betel
as they stretched their leave by the last remarks. Marina wished for her mind to go on following them
down the cliff to the river across the clearing, to the group of four huts on the knoll where the smoke
spiraled blue glints and grey from charcoal pits, and the children chased scampering monkeys back
into forested slopes only a few feet away. But when the men turned around the path and disappeared
they were really gone, and she was really alone again.From the pallet where she lay a few inches from
the door all she could set were the tops of ipil trees arching over the damp humus soil of the forest,
and a very small section of the path leading from her hut downward along the edge of the precipice to
the river where it was a steep short drop of fifteen or twenty feet to the water.

24
ANT HILL
By Jose Marte Abueg

The real danger, I was told, was of big snakes. The small ones in the uplands were not deadly. They
had bitten nine of us and no one died. Also killers were mosquitoes; we took triple the normal dosage
of malaria pills.
A minor menace I discovered for myself. Appointed as scout in preparation for a trek, I ventured out
through a thicket that con-cealed a path to a known creek. In seconds, leeches were on my neck, arms
and legs. Some had fallen off, fat and sated, before I could remove the others. Blood oozed from the
wounds, and the wounds gave a terrible itch.
Often, after hours of non-stop walking—a moment’s halt could be fatal—we would take our shoes off
to remove the leeches that had entered them and were trapped, all the while sucking at our feet. In
those hours, we as well as they were damned.
When moving through dense woods, we needed continually to inspect our backs, necks, legs, even our
ears and faces. The sun scorched us and our bodies itched from contact with the foliage; we could not
feel the parasites on our skins. A number of times upon arriving in our camp we found leeches in our
armpits.
How long have you been here? Joven asked.
Two years.
Do you get in touch with your parents?
They are both dead. They were killed seven months before I came here.
Orlando asked, Do you think of Manila often, of school?
Sometimes, a few times.
What do you miss most? Totoy asked.
You won’t believe this, but last night, you know what I dreamed of? A bottle of Pepsi!
Hah! Ador slapped his thigh. The M-16 on his lap tilted to the ground. I was like that in my first year,
on Mount Arayat. I remember I was standing in a downpour when I was nearly overcome by a desire
to run down to the town, but then it occurred to me that what I wanted might not be there, either. The
rain was beating against my face. I was thinking how nice it would be to drink from a glass again.
A fighter in the woods needs and will be like a poet, Ador said to me, after reading a worn-out book, on
my first dusk, in a unique departure from teaching of doctrine. After months of sleeping on rocks,
eating roots dug up from the dirt, going thirsty for days and nights, you will come to be like an animal.
You will change clothes as seldom as the forest floor changes grass. There will be delight in the discov-
ery of a brook or a pond with its promise of drink and possibly fish. But you will view the water with
suspicion. Its being there could mean the presence of another human. So you must move like a snake,
soundlessly and without a trace; for that reason, you will appreciate the grass. The air carries scents;
be alert to what they convey. The sound of a twig breaking may signal mortal danger. You will learn to
sleep standing against a tree while a storm rages over you and around you. Your skin will change. The
feel of blood streaming from a wound may become as familiar as that of water from a fresh spring. But
make no mistake: It will all be like a baptism of blood, or of fire.
We were about three hours on the way to camp via an invisible, twisting route when a clanking sound
came from up a slope behind the dense bushes to our right. We scattered quickly and noise-lessly. I
dropped to the ground behind a tree, my breathing halted, my vision clear over my M-1. Above me, to
my left, Ador stood with his knapsack hanging by its strap from his teeth while he trained his M-16 at
the bushes.
Corn, water cabbage, young coconuts and bananas were the object of our trip to a small field that was
more than four hours’ walk from the camp. We calculated the field would be untraceable from likely
sources of food on that particular mountain, so that if it were discovered, we would have time to
decamp.
I glanced at Ador. He had slowly put his rifle down between his legs and now had his fists by his chest.
I could see he was preparing to unpin a hand grenade. In my mind I scanned the situation quickly.
Orlando, Joven and Totoy could be counted on in such an engagement.

25
THE GOD STEALER
by Francisco Sionil Jose

They were the best of friends and that was possible because they worked in the same office and both
were young and imbued with a freshness in outlook. Sam Christie was twenty – eight and his Filipino
assistant,
Philip Latak, was twenty – six and was – just as Sam had been at the Agency before he assumed his
post – intelligent and industrious.
“That is to be expected,” the official whom Sam replaced explained “because Philip is Ifugao and you
don’t know patience until you have seen the rice terraces his ancestors built.”
“You will find,” Sam Christie was also told, “that the Igorots, like the Ilocanos, no matter how
urbanized they already are, entertain a sense of inferiority. Not Philip. He is proud of his being Ifugao.
He talks about it the first chance he gets.”
Now, on this December dawn, Sam Christie was on his way to Ifugao with his native assistant. It was
last month in the Philippines and in a matter of days he would return to Boston for that leave which he
had not had in years.
The bus station was actually a narrow sidestreet which sloped down to a deserted plaza, one of the
many in the summer capital. Sam could make out the shapes of the stone buildings huddled, it seemed,
in the cold, their narrow windows shuttered and the frames advertising Coca – Cola above their
doorways indistinct in the dark.
Philip Latak seemed listless. They had been in the station for over half an hour and still there was no
bus. He zipped his old suede jacket up to his neck. It had been four years that he had lived in Manila
and during all these years he had never gone home. Now, the cold of the pine – clad mountains seemed
to bother him. He turned to Sam and, with a hint of urgency – “One favour, Sam. Let me take a swig.”
Sam and Christie said, “Sure, you are welcome to it. Just make sure we have some left when we get
Ifugao.” He stopped, brought out a bottle of White Label – one of the four – in the bag which also
contained bars of candy and cartons of cigarettes and matches for the natives. He removed the tinfoil
and handed the bottle to his companion.
Phil raised it to his lips and made happy gurgling sounds. “Rice wine – I hope there’s still a jar around
when we get to my grandfather’s. He couldn’t be as seriously sick as my brother wrote. As long as he
has wine he will live. Hell, it’s not as potent as this, but it can knock out a man, too.”
Sam Christie kidded his companion about the weather. They had arrived in the summer capital the
previous day and the bracing air and the scent of pine had invigorated him. “It’s like New England in
the spring,” he said. “In winter, when it really gets cold, I can still go around quite naked by your
standards. I sent home a clipping this week, something in the Manila papers about it being chilly. And
it was only 68! My old man will get a kick out of that.”
“But it’s really cold!” Philip Latak said ruefully. He handed the bottle back to Sam Christie, who took a
swig, too. “You don’t know how good it is to have that along. Do you know how much it costs
nowadays? Twenty – four bucks.”
“It’s cheaper at the commissary,” Sam Christie said simply. He threw his chest out, flexed his lean arms
and inhaled. He wore a white, dacron shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“I’m glad you didn’t fall for those carvings in Manila,” Phil said after a while.
A Grecian urn, a Japanese sword, a Siamese mask – and now, an Ifugao God. The Siamese mask,” Sam
spoke in a monotone, “it was really a bargain. A student was going to Boston. He needed the dollars, so
I told him he could get the money from my father. Forty dollars – and the mask was worth more than
that.”
Now, the gray buildings around them emerged from the dark with white, definite shapes. The east was
starting to glow and more people had arrived with crates and battered rattan suitcases. In the chill
most of them were quiet. A coffee shop opened along the street with a great deal of clatter and in its
warm, golden light Sam Christie could see the heavy, peasant faces, their happy anticipation as the
steaming cups were pushed before them.

26
THE FENCE
by Jose Garcia Villa

They should have stood apart, away from each other, those two nipa houses. There should have been a
lofty impenetrable wall between them, so that they should not stare so coldly, so starkly, at each other
—just staring, not saying a word, not even a cruel word. Only a yard of parched soil separated them, a
yard of brittle-crusted earth with only a stray weed or two to show there was life still in its bosom.
They stood there on the roadside, they two alone, neighborless but for themselves, and they were like
two stealthy shadows, each avid to betray the other. Queer old houses. So brown were the nipa leaves
that walled and roofed them that they looked musty, gloomy. One higher than the other, pyramid-
roofed, it tried to assume the air of mastery, but in vain. For though the other was low, wind-bent,
supported without by luteous bamboo poles against the aggressiveness of the weather, it had its eyes
to stare back as haughtily as the other—windows as desolate as the souls of the occupants of the
house, as sharply angular as the intensity of their hatred.
From the road these houses feared no enemy—no enemy from the length, from the dust, of the road;
they were unfenced. But of each other they were afraid: there ran a green, house high, bamboo fence
through the narrow ribbon of thirsty earth between them, proclaiming that one side belonged to one
house, to it alone; the other side to the other, and to it alone.
Formerly there had been no bamboo fence; there had been no weeds. There had been two rows of
vegetables, one to each house, and the soil was not parched but soft and rich. But something had
happened and the fence came to be built, and the vegetables that were so green began to turn pale,
then paler and yellow and brown. Those of each house would not water their plants, for if they did,
would not water their water spread to the other side and quench too the thirst of pechays and
mustards not theirs? Little by little the plants had died, the soil had cracked with neglect, on both sides
of the fence.
Two women had built that fence. Two tanned country-women. One of them had caught her husband
with the other one night, and the next morning she had gone to the bamboo clumps near the river
Pasig and felled canes with her woman strength. She left her baby son at home, heeded not the little
cries. And one by one that hot afternoon she shouldered the canes to her home. She was tired, very
tired, yet that night she could not sleep. When morning dawned she rose and went back to the back of
the house and began to split the bamboos. Her husband noticed her, but said nothing. By noon, Aling
Biang was driving tall bamboo splits into the narrow ribbon of yard.
Pok, Pok, Pok, sounded her crude hammer. Pok, Pok, Pok-Pok, Pok, Pok.
When her husband asked her what she was doing, she answered, “I am building a fence.”
“What for?” he asked.
“I need a fence.”
And then, too, even Aling Sebia, the other woman, a child-less widow, asked inoffensively, “What are
you doing, Aling Biang?”
“I am building a fence.”
“What for?”
“I need a fence, Aling Sebia. Please do not talk to me again.”
And with that Aling Sebia had felt hurt. Out of spite she too had gone to the bamboo clumps to fell
canes. After she had split them, tried though she was, she began to thrust them into the ground, on the
same straight line as AlingBiang’s but from the opposite end. The building of the fence progressed
from the opposite end. The building of the fence progresses from the ends centerward. Aling Biang
drove in the last split. And the fence completed, oily perspiration wetting the brows of the two young
women, they gazed pridefully at the majestic wall of green that now separated them.
Not long after the completion of the fence Aling Biang’s husband disappeared and never came back.
Aling Biang took the matter passively, and made no effort to find him. She had become a hardened
woman.
The fence hid all the happenings in each house from those who lived in the other. The other side was
to each a beyond, dark in elemental prejudice, and no one dared encroach on it. So the months passed,
and each woman lived as though the other were nonexistent.

THE CENTIPEDE
27
by Rony V. Diaz

WHEN I saw my sister, Delia, beating my dog with a stick, I felt hate heave like a caged, angry beast in
my chest. Out in the sun, the hair of my sister glinted like metal and, in her brown dress, she looked
like a sheathed dagger. Biryuk hugged the earth and screamed but I could not bound forward nor cry
out to my sister. She had a weak heart and she must not be surprised. So I held myself, my throat
swelled, and I felt hate rear and plunge in its cage of ribs.

I WAS thirteen when my father first took me hunting. All through the summer of that year, I had
tramped alone and unarmed the fields and forest around our farm. Then one afternoon in late July my
father told me I could use his shotgun.
Beyond the ipil grove, in a grass field we spotted a covey of brown pigeons. In the open, they kept
springing to the air and gliding away every time we were within range. But finally they dropped to the
ground inside a wedge of guava trees. My father pressed my shoulder and I stopped. Then slowly, in a
half-crouch, we advanced. The breeze rose lightly; the grass scuffed against my bare legs. My father
stopped again. He knelt down and held my hand.
“Wait for the birds to rise and then fire,” he whispered.
I pushed the safety lever of the rifle off and sighted along the barrel. The saddle of the stock felt
greasy on my cheek. The gun was heavy and my arm muscles twitched. My mouth was dry; I felt
vaguely sick. I wanted to sit down.
“You forgot to spit,” my father said.
Father had told me that hunters always spat for luck before firing. I spat and I saw the breeze bend
the ragged, glassy threads of spittle toward the birds.
“That’s good,” Father said.
“Can’t we throw a stone,” I whispered fiercely. “It’s taking them a long time.”
“No, you’ve to wait.”
Suddenly, a small dog yelping shrilly came tearing across the brooding plain of grass and small
trees. It raced across the plain in long slewy swoops, on outraged shanks that disappeared and flashed
alternately in the light of the cloud-banked sun. One of the birds whistled and the covey dispersed like
seeds thrown in the wind. I fired and my body shook with the fierce momentary life of the rifle. I saw
three pigeons flutter in a last convulsive effort to stay afloat, then fall to the ground. The shot did not
scare the dog. He came to us, sniffing cautiously. He circled around us until I snapped my fingers and
then he came me.
“Not bad,” my father said grinning. “Three birds with one tube.” I went to the brush to get the
birds. The dog ambled after me. He found the birds for me. The breast of one of the birds was torn. The
bird had fallen on a spot where the earth was worn bare, and its blood was spread like a tiny, red rag.
The dog scraped the blood with his tongue. I picked up the birds and its warm, mangled flesh clung to
the palm of my hand.
“You’re keen,” I said to the dog. “Here. Come here.” I offered him my bloody palm. He came to me
and licked my palm clean.
I gave the birds to my father. “May I keep him, Father?” I said pointing to the dog. He put the birds
in a leather bag which he carried strapped around his waist.
Father looked at me a minute and then said: “Well, I’m not sure. That dog belongs to somebody.”
“May I keep him until his owner comes for him?” I pursued.
“He’d make a good pointer,” Father remarked. “But I would not like my son to be accused of dog-
stealing.”
“Oh, no!” I said quickly. “I shall return him when the owner comes to claim him.”
“All right,” he said, “I hope that dog makes a hunter out of you.”
Biryuk and I became fast friends. Every afternoon after school we went to the field to chase quails
or to the bank of the river which was fenced by tall, blade-sharp reeds to flush snipes. Father was
away most of the time but when he was home he hunted with us.
WOMAN WITH HORNS
by Cecilia Menguera - Brainard

28
Dr. Gerald McAllister listened to the rattle of doors being locked and footsteps clattering on the
marble floors. The doctors and nurses were hurrying home. It was almost noon and the people of Ubec
always lunched in their dining rooms their high ceilings, where their servants served soup, fish, meat,
rice, and rich syrupy flan for dessert. After, they retired to their spacious, air rooms for their midday
siesta. At three, they resumed work or their studies.

His assistant, Dr. Jaime Laurel, had explained that the practice was due to the tropical heat and high
humidity. Even the dogs, he had pointed out, retreated under houses and shade trees.

Gerald could not understand this local custom. An hour for lunch should be more than enough. He
barely had that when he was a practising physician in New York.

He reread his report about the cholera epidemic in the southern town of Carcar. It was an impressive
report, well written, with numerous facts. Thanks to his vaccination program, the epidemic was now
under control. This success was another feather in his cap, one of many he had accumulated during his
stay in the Philippine Islands. No doubt Governor General Taft or perhaps even President McKinley
would send him a letter of commendation. Politicians were like that; they appreciated information
justifying America’s hold on the archipelago.

He glanced at the calendar on his ornate desk. It was March 16, 1903, a year and a half since he arrived
at the port of Ubec aboard the huge steamship from San Francisco. Three years since Blanche died.

His head hurt and removed his glasses to stroke his forehead. When the headache passed, he
straightened the papers on his desk and left the office. He was annoyed at how quiet his wing at the
Ubec General Hospital was, as he walked past locked doors, potted palms, and sand – filled spittoons.

In front of Dr, Laurel’s office, he saw a woman trying to open the door. She looked distraught and
wrung her hands. She was a native Ubecan – Gerald had seen her at the Mayor’s functions – a comely
woman with bronze skin and long hair so dark it looked blue. She wore a long hair so dark it turned
blue. She wore a long blue satin skirt. An embroidered panuelo over her camisa was pinned to her
bosom with a magnificent brooch of gold and pearls.

“It is lunchtime,” he said. “His Spanish was bad and his Ubecan dialect far worse.
Dark fiery eyes flashed at him.
“Comer,” he said, gesturing with his right hand to his mouth.
“I know its lunchtime. It wasn’t, fifteen minutes ago.” She tried the door once more and slapped her
skirt in frustration. Tears started welling in her eyes. “My husband died over a year ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. He was in pain for years; consumption. I have been coughing and last night, I dreamt of a
funeral. I became afraid. I have a daughter, you see.”
“Dr. Laurel will return at three.”
“You are a doctor. American doctors are supposed to be the best. Can you help me?”
“I don’t see patients.”
“Ah,” she said, curved eyebrows rising. She picked up her fan with a gold chain pinned to her skirt.
“Ah, a doctor who doesn’t see patients.” She fanned herself slowly.
Her words irritated him and he brusquely said, “Come back in a few hours; Dr. Laurel will be back
then.” She stood there with eyes still moist, her neck tilted gracefully to one side and her hand
languorously moving the fan back and forth.

FAITH, LOVE, TIME AND DR. LAZARO

by Greg Brillantes

From the upstairs veranda, Dr. Lazaro had a view of stars, the country darkness, the lights on the
distant highway at the edge of town. The phonograph in the sala played Chopin – like a vast sorrow
controlled, made familiar, he had wont to think. But as he sat there, his lean frame in the habitual slack
repose took after supper, and stared at the plains of night that had evoked gentle images and even a
kind of peace (in the end, sweet and invincible oblivion), Dr. Lazaro remembered nothing, his mind lay
29
untouched by any conscious thought, he was scarcely aware of the April heat; the pattern of music fell
around him and dissolved swiftly, uncomprehended. It was as though indifference were an infection
that had entered his blood it was everywhere in his body. In the scattered light from the sala his
angular face had a dusty, wasted quality, only his eyes contained life. He could have remained there all
evening, unmoving, and buried, it is were, in a strange half-sleep, had his wife not come to tell him he
was wanted on the phone.
Gradually his mind stirred, focused; as he rose from the chair he recognized the somber passage in the
sonata that, curiosly, made him think of ancient monuments, faded stone walls, a greyness. The brain
filed away an image; and arrangement of sounds released it… He switched off the phonograph,
suppressed and impatient quiver in his throat as he reached for the phone: everyone had a claim on
his time. He thought: Why not the younger ones for a change? He had spent a long day at the
provincial hospital.
The man was calling from a service station outside the town – the station after the agricultural high
school, and before the San Miguel bridge, the man added rather needlessly, in a voice that was frantic
yet oddly subdued and courteous. Dr. Lazaro thad heard it countless times, in the corridors of the
hospitals, in waiting rooms: the perpetual awkward misery. He was Pedro Esteban, the brother of the
doctor’s tenant in Nambalan, said the voice, trying to make itself less sudden remote.
But the connection was faulty, there was a humming in the wires, as though darkness had added to the
distance between the house in the town and the gas station beyond the summer fields. Dr. Lazaro
could barely catch the severed phrases. The man’s week-old child had a high fever, a bluish skin; its
mouth would not open to suckle. They could not take the baby to the poblacion, they would not dare
move it; its body turned rigid at the slightest touch. If the doctor would consent to come at so late an
hour, Esteban would wait for him at the station. If the doctor would be so kind…
Tetanus of the newborn: that was elementary, and most likely it was so hopeless, a waste of time. Dr.
Lazaro said yes, he would be there; he had committed himself to that answer, long ago; duty had taken
the place of an exhausted compassion. The carelessness of the poor, the infected blankets, the toxin
moving toward the heart: they were casual scribbled items in a clinical report. But outside the grilled
windows, the night suddenly seemed alive and waiting. He had no choice left now but action: it was
the only certitude – he sometimes reminded himself – even if it would prove futile, before, the descent
into nothingness.
His wife looked up from her needles and twine, under the shaded lamp of the bedroom; she had
finished the pullover for the grandchild in Bagiuo and had begun work, he noted, on another of those
altar vestments for the parish church. Religion and her grandchild certainly kept her busy … She
looked at him, into so much to inquire as to be spoken to: a large and placid woman.
He hurried down the curving stairs, under the votive lamps of the Sacred Heart. Ben lay sprawled on
the sofa, in the front parlor; engrossed in a book, one leg propped against the back cushions. “Come
along, we’re going somewhere,” Dr. Lazaro said, and went into the clinic for his medical bag. He added
a vial of penstrep, an ampule of caffeine to the satchel’s content’s; rechecked the bag before closing it;
the cutgut would last just one more patient. One can only cure, and know nothing beyond one’s work…
There had been the man, today, in the hospital: the cancer pain no longer helped by the doses of
morphine; the patients’s eyes flickering their despair in the eroded face. Dr. Lazaro brushed aside the
stray vision as he strode out of the whitewashed room; he was back in his element, among syringes,
steel instruments, quick decisions made without emotion, and it gave him a kind of blunt energy.

THE FARAWAY SUMMER

by Bienvenido N. Santos

Bob, I hope you're right, but I'm not sure. It might not be easy any more for me to get a passport back
to Washington, D.C., unless you can fix it up with my boss, you know him, I hope he still has some use
for a fellow like me. He might write to somebody at the Embassy. He used to ask me, are you sure,
Pablo, you want to go home now? at this time? You might not have easy sailing back home in the
Philippines, Pablo. Nothing but ruins there. Think it over.

Well, I thought it over and decided to come home anyhow.

30
But I got the bad breaks, that's all. Tell him, tell him everything, he will understand. And he knows you
well, Bob. He had seen you often with me. How's your family, how's Rose? Your girl sure could cook.
Tell her I often get hungry here just thinking of the broiled mackerel and lemon she used to fix for us.
You're lucky, Bob. Me, I got the bad breaks.

You heard of the typhoon. Left me flat broke. I had everything invested on my farm. Now everything is
gone, the crops, the tractor, my house, everything. I can't do nothing here. Been doing nothing at all
these past months, just twiddling my thumbs, trying to make up my mind whether to stay and try
again or go back to old Mr. Williams in Washington. Fix it up with him, will you? I can sell my land, but
just now nobody's buying. But I'll manage, I'm willing to start all over again. Or is there someone
working permanently for Mr. Williams now? But try. The old man liked me.

Yes, I've been to Manila. I remembered Steve. Of course, you do. Steve the doctor. Remember now?
Everytime you called him Doc, he'd get sore and say, just call me Steve. Boy, how long ago was that?
How's the housing conditon there now? It was terrific in those days. I had that little cottage on the
outskirts of the district near Silver Springs. Say, who's staying there now? Steve was kind of
wandering that summer, not knowing where to live so I gave him the extra room. Boy, he turned it
into something special, didn't he, though? Oh, we had fun, me cooking for him, and you and Rose and
some of the boys coming around Saturday nights, and Doc would be taking the blood pressure of the
fat ones and their drink-sotted girls, and he'd be telling us lots of things about the Philippines. He
looked funny with that embroidered apron around him, as he dried the dishes. He was real good.
When the war broke out, he joined, he had to, being a doctor, and it broke my heart to see him go. And
I couldn't go with him. The army didn't want an old man with trembling hands.

You'd remember Steve. He was nice looking in his uniform. The first time he got a furlough, he comes
up to my house and says he had only few hours left and he wanted fun. He carried a big bundle of
groceries and I called you up and you came in your car. It was winter, by golly, how deep the snow
was, but you came to celebrate with us. And you remember, of course, how it ended. That was funny. I
wonder if you ever told Rose about it.

I remember it all now, the three of us in the Chevy, driving through the snow just to get him to a house
where he could blow his money and his guts on some dame, he said it was his last fling. And we let
him. We stayed in the car and drove around and waited and waited. We got numb wth the cold. We
tried jumping up and down, cracking jokes, but no good. The cold was getting us, but we couldn't leave
him, didn't he say it might be the last fling in his life? After a long time, he came out, and there we were
sneezing, quite numb all over, but we were not sore. Don't worry, he said, I'll send you a prescription if
the cold gets worse. Well, we said goodbye and he sent us cards from overseas. We followed him in
our minds, through London, through the fog and the blitz, and how it was on D-Day, boy, the card from
him was like good-bye forever. Pray for me, he wrote, and we prayed as we knew how. We prayed
sitting in my room with whiskey bottles and stuff all around. I guess we didn't really pray, we just sat
there, thinking, thinking, till the tears stood in our eyes.
The Woman Who Had Two Navels
by Nick Joaquin

The story begins with Connie Escobar, daughter of a politician and a famous beauty, visiting Pepe
Monson, a horse doctor, in Hong Kong for a consultation because she has TWO NAVELS. She wanted
him to remove her other navel through a surgical operation because if she will be going to give birth,
where would the other umbilical cord be connected? In addition, she does not want to become a freak
when she has to undress for her husband. She said she is 30 years old and has just been married
hours ago. Then, she told Pepe about a story from her childhood. When she was a child, she thought
that everybody has two navels but when she discovered her doll, Minnie, has only one, she threw it
into the pond. Then she told Pepe that her mother is also in Hong Kong. Pepe talked to Senora Concha
Vidal and discovered from her that Connie was lying – that she is not 30 years old, only 18; that she

31
was not married a morning just before she came to consult him, but a year ago; that she has only ONE
navel. Senora de Vidal also told Pepe that she forced Connie to marry Macho Escobar because Connie
was upset about the rumor that her father, Manolo Vidal, spends the public fund to send his children
to school. Because Connie was just forced to marry to a man she really does not love, Senora Concha
told Pepe that Connie was chasing a bandleader named Paco Texeira, that’s why she is now in Hong
Kong. She and Macho followed Connie in Hong Kong they can bring her back to the Philippines.
Macho’s reason in taking her back is to avoid humiliation for her politician father by creating a scandal
because it is election times in the Philippines. Pepe told Senora de Vidal that Paco is married to Mary
and that he and Paco are gradeschool friends. After talking to Senora de Vidal, Pepe went to the
Texeira’s.

Pepe learned from his conversation with the Texeiras that Paco had been to Manila playing with his
band. From Manila, Paco had sent letters to Mary about Senora de Vidal. Senora de Vidal and Paco had
a good time together and they were interested in each other’s countries – Hong Kong and Philippines.
One day, when Paco was waiting for Senora Concha in her house, he found Connie and from that
moment on he started wanting Connie. Connie had watched Paco perform in the clubs until one night,
there were people fighting and someone had got shot. Because Connie was shocked, Paco comforted
her. Until some weeks, Paco drove Connie to his hotel, knowing that Connie also liked him. He was
about to rape Connie, not knowing her background. They only had a savage fight like wild beasts. After
2 days, Paco went back to Hong Kong. Pepe states that both Connie and Senora de Vidal have an evil
hold on him and he knows that he will go running to them when they call him. But he does not call it
love. Pepe also realized both his father and Paco have a similar traumatized look after they came back
from the Philippines. Pepe’s father could not answer most of Paco’s questions since he came back to
Hong Kong from Manila. All he said while he is in his room was “Dust and crabs.. dust and crabs.. dust
and crabs..”.

Meanwhile, in the art shop of Rita Lopez and Helen Silva, Rita received a call from Pepe. Rita is
Pepe’s wife and Helen is a friend. Pepe called Rita to invite her for a dinner with Paco and Mary to a
club in Tovarich. In Tovarich, they met Pete Alfonso, a bandleader who is seeking a pianist and a
singer. Paco applied and got hired. The next important thing that happened was that Pepe found
Connie Escobar naked inside the club and talked to her for he knows Connie needs him, with a
promise to Rita that he would just do it with a couple of minutes. After a short talk with Connie, Pepe
went back to Rita and told her and the rest of the group to go home without him so he can help Connie
in her problem, which made Rita get angry.

PUPPY LOVE
by Francisco Sionil Jose

My name is Jacobo Salcedo but after high school, since coming to Manila from the old hometown, I
have been called Jake, an American nickname about which I cannot do anything. Not that I dislike it
but there is something about the name my townmates called me, Jacobo, that I found distinctive for in
the old hometown, I was the only one with that name. This is also the name that a girl, Gina, and her
older brother who was my friend in grade school knew me. Gina belonged to a very rich family, in fact
the richest in our town. I was from way, way below her on the social ladder.
I was explaining to an English business associate the other day that, in the Philippines, the idea of class
so prevalent in Britain is not perceive as such, and there is no consciousness of class brought about by
speech, manners, breeding. The idea of class is not absent in the Philippines but is often disregarded
as long as an individual has money, lots of it-for money can buy everything, even honor.
I say all this now with some nostalgia and hindsight knowing that I realize it in childhood and aspired
early enough for class, for station in life similar to Gina's. This aspiration was not colored then by
32
political hues but it was there, nurtured in the heart more than in the mind of a boy who came from a
village. This village where I was born was not, in a sense, isolated and extremely poor; in fact it was at
the rim of the town of San Jacinto which, as everyone in the town knew, was encompassed by the big
Garcia hacienda. Antonio Garcia the patriarch was Gina's father.
My father raised fighting cocks and sometimes I thought he loved those roosters more than my
mother and me for he was always with them, stroking them. He also liked liquor, usually Ginebra San
Miguel. He was very pleasant even when he lost in the cockpit, which was almost always. He would
come home with a dead bird which would end up in the pot. Mother work hard selling fish and salt in
the market, waking up early to get her share from the supplier. She also sold jueteng bets.
I was only a child and thought I never missed a meal, there always seemed to be so little food in the
house. Our home was empty expect for the basic things Filipinos need-a stove, utensils, grass sleeping
mats. We slept and ate on the bamboo floor. Both my parents were, fair, maybe there was some
Spanish or Chinese blood in our line although I never really knew my grandparents.
I went to the school in town and it was my very good fortune to be seated beside Lito Garcia, Gina's
older brother.
The attraction of the opposite sex does not start in puberty; it start much earlier judging from own
feelings at the time although, of course, it was a feeling so undefined and yet so tender and as real as
breathing. It is often called puppy love but I never really recognize it as such in later years and in such
a condescending manner I did not pass, it was certainly no trivial or hunger that could be quickly
quenched or appeased. It lasted oh so long-to this very day, as a matter of fact, when in my middle age
and in my decrepit state, it should have withered and died.
Lito and I often played truant, swimming in the creek or wandering around in the fields, fishing,
catching frogs. I never really got to understand why Lito liked me. He was a rich man's son, mestizo.
Maybe that was it-I was not too dark like the other peasant children. In fact, in Manila later on when I
was no longer exposed to the sun, I became quite fair.
In any case, children are bonded together not by racial affinity but by shared experience. Lito and I
played often in their big house at the northern edge of town, perhaps the biggest house in that part of
the province, a magnificent brick building with a tile roof and floors of thick, shiny planks of narra.
Living as I did with my parents in a small, thatched house of bamboo and buri palm walls built by
farmers and occasionally repaired by them, I had marveled at the great effort expended to erect such a
grand structure. We returned close to midnight from the district competition in a fleet of caretelas and
parted in the schoolhouse where we left the odds and ends we used, the athletes their athletic
equipment. We won in the dance competition. I walked Gina to her house. February and the cool night
had a full moon sailing in the sky. I was hungry and so was she; we met a few townspeople on their
way home from the movie house and they asked us how we fared. "We won! We won!" Gina gushed.

THE BREAD OF SALT

by NVM Gonzalez

Usually I was in bed by ten and up by five and thus was ready for one moreday of my fourteenth year.
Unless
Grandmother had forgotten, the fifteen centavos for the baker down Progreso Street – and how I
enjoyed jingling those coins in my pocket!- would be in the empty fruit jar in the cupboard. I would
remember then that rolls were what Grandmother wanted because recently she had lost three molars.
For young people like my cousins and myself, she had always said that the kind called pan de sal
ought to be quite all right.The read of salt! How did it get that name? From where did its flavor
come,through what secret action of flour and
east? At the risk of being jostled from the counter by early buyers, I would push my way into the shop
so that I might watch the men who, stripped to the waist, worked their long flat wooden spades in and
out of the glowing maw of the oven. Why did the bread come nut-brown and the size of my little fist?
And why did it have a pair of lips convulsed into a painful frown? In the half light of the street, and
hurrying, the paper bag pressed to my chest, I felt my curiosity a little gratified by the oven- fresh
warmth of the bread I was proudly bringing home for breakfast. Well I knew how Grandmother would
not mind if I nibbled away at one piece; perhaps, I might even eat two, to be charged later against my

33
share at the table. But that would be betraying a trust; and so, indeed, I kept myzpurchase intact. To
guard it from harm, I watched my steps and avoided the dark street corners.
For my reward, I had only to look in the direction of the sea wall and the fifty yards or so of riverbed
beyond it, where an old Spaniard's house stood. At low tide, when the bed was dry and the rocks
glinted with broken bottles, the stone fence of the Spaniard's compound set off the house as if it were
a castle. Sunrise
brought a wash of silver upon the roofs of the laundry and garden sheds which had been built low and
close to the fence. On dull mornings the light dripped from the bamboo screen which covered the
veranda and hung some four or five yards from the ground. Unless it was August, when the damp,
northeast monsoon had
to be kept away from the rooms, three servants raised the screen promptly at six- thirty until it was
completely hidden under the veranda eaves. From the sound of the pulleys, I knew it was time to set
out for school.
It was in his service, as a coconut plantation overseer, that Grandfather had spent the last thirty years
of his life. Grandmother had been widowed three years now. I often wondered whether I was being
depended upon to spend the years ahead in the service of this great house. One day I learned that
Aida, a classmate in high school, was the old Spaniard's niece. All my doubts disappeared. It was as if,
before his death, Grandfather had spoken to me about her, concealing the seriousness of the matter by
putting it over as a joke. If now I
kept true to the virtues, she would step out of her bedroom ostensibly to say Good Morning to her
uncle. Her real purpose, I knew, was to reveal thus her assent to my desire. On quiet mornings I
imagined the patter of her shoes upon the wooden veranda floor as a further sign, and I would hurry
off to school, taking the route she had fixed for me past the post office, the town plaza and the church,
the health center east of the plaza, and at last the school grounds. I asked myself whether I would to
walk with her and decided it would be the height of rudeness. Enough that in her blue skirt and white
middy she would be half a block ahead and, from that distance, perhaps throw a glance in my
direction, to bestow upon my heart a deserved and abundant blessing. I believed it was but right that,
in some such way as this, her mission in my life was disguised. Her name, I was to learn many years
later, was a convenient mnemonic for the qualities to which argument might aspire. But in those days
it was a living voice. "Oh that you might be worthy of uttering me," it said. And how I endeavored to
build my body so that I might live long to honor her. With every victory at singles at the handball court
the game was then the craze at school -- I could feel my body glow in the sun as though it had instantly
been cast in bronze.

THE DOG EATERS

by Leoncio P. Deriada

Mariana looked out of the window toward the other side of Artiaga Street. A group of men had
gathered around a low table in front of Sergio's sari-sari store. It was ten o'clock, Tuesday morning.
Yet these men did not find it too early to drink, and worse. They wanted her husband to be with them.
Victor was now reaching for his shirt hooked on the wall between Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos.
Mariana turned to him, her eyes wild in repulsion and anger.
"Those filthy men!" she snarled. "Whose dog did they slaughter today?"
Victor did not answer. He put on his shirt. Presently, he crawled on the floor and searched for his
slippers under the table. Mariana watched him strain his body toward the wall, among the rattan
tools. He looked like a dog tracking the smell hidden carrion.
"My God, Victor, do you have to join them every time they stew somebody's pet?"
Victor found his slippers. He emerged from under the table, smoothed his pants and unbutton his
shirt. He was sweating. He looked at his wife and smiled faintly, the expression sarcastic, and in an
attempt to be funny, "it's barbecue today."
"I'm not in the mood for jokes!" Mariana raised her voice. "It's time you stop going with those good-
for-nothing scavengers."

34
Her words stung. For now she noted an angry glint in Victor's eyes. "They are my friends, Mariana," he
said.
"You should have married one of them!" she snapped back. Suddenly, she straightened. She heard
Sergio's raspy voice, calling from his store across the street. It was an ugly voice, and it pronounced
Victor's name in a triumphant imitation of a dog's bark.
"Victor! Victor! Aw! Aw!" the canine growl floated across Artiaga Street. Mariana glared at her
husband as he brushed her aside on his way to the window. She felt like clawing his face, biting his
arms, ripping the smelly shirt off his back. "I'm coming," Victor answered, leaning out of the window.
Mariana opened her mouth for harsher invectives but a sharp cry from the bedroom arrested her. It
was her baby. She rushed to the table, pick a cold bottle of milk, and entered.
In his rattan crib that looked like a rat's nest, the baby cried louder. Mariana shook the crib
vehemently. The baby - all mouth and all legs - thrust in awkward arms into the air, blindly searching
for accustomed nipple.
The baby sucked the rubber nipple easily. But Mariana's mind was outside the room as she watched
her husband lean out of the window to answer the invitation of the dog-eaters of Artiaga Street.
"Aren't you inviting your wife?" she spoke loud, the hostility in her voice unchecked by the dirty
plywood wall. "Perhaps your friends have reserved the best morsel for me. Which is the most
delicious part of a dog, ha, Victor? Its heart? Its liver? Its brain? Blood? Bone? Ears? Tongue? Tail? I
wish to God you'd all die of hydrophobia!"
"Can you feed the baby and talk at the same time?" Victor said. She did not expect him to answer and
now that he had, she felt angrier. The heat from the unceilinged roof had become terrible and it had all
seeped into her head. She was ready for a fight.
The baby had gone back to sleep. Mariana dashed out of the room, her right hand tight around the
empty bottle. She had to have a weapon. She came upon her husband opening the door to little porch.
The porch was at the top of the stairs that led out into Artiaga Street.
"Why don't you do something instead of drinking their stinking tuba and eating that filthy meat? Why
don't you decent for a change?"
Victor turned her off. It seemed he was also ready for a fight. The glint in his eyes had become sinister.

LUNACY
by Leoncio Deriada

Suddenly he was awake. But the sound of the sea still echoed and he saw that the moonlight was in the
room. It filtered through the pomelo tree in the window.
The dream. He was on the beach throwing pebbles at the moon. He hit it, and like fireworks, its face
burst into rainbow flames. The peacock splinters filled the heavens. he poised his hands to catch the
drops of blue and red and green, but they all fell into the sea in sizzling magnificence. He watched the
pageant in a mixture of fear and admiration, till there was no more of the moon but the moan of the
tide… the darkness screamed. He was lost, afraid.
He woke up and saved himself from that chaos.
He felt his face and his mouth with his trembling hands. He was not dead. It was great to be alive
somehow, to rediscover that he was one of the inhabitants of this room of hanging shirts, unplanned
lesson plans, and the smell of tempera.
Alex’s tempera of trees and hills were carelessly thumb-tacked above Dardo’s cot. The moonbeams did
not hit the paintings but they concentrated on Dardo’s prosaic figure, zebra like in his pajamas. Inside
his mosquito net, he must be dreaming of the preserved animals in his biology room.
Alex hated biology back in college and so he ended up teaching grammar and economics. Economics!
There was nothing to dream about the law of diminishing returns; he would rather dream of
prehistoric flora and fauna. But there must be color and movement in all: tangerine toads jumping on
ponds of blue bordered by dragon-green thalophytes and bryophytes, while in the background, Van
Gogh inspired paramecia danced a bayanihan of mammoth slippers all fiery in Martian red.

35
Alex’s hand dangled out of the mosquito net (ah, Durer’s hand of the artist!), limp and graceful in a
ballet of its own. The wall above him was a wilderness of canvases – cardboard, cartolina, Manila
paper, formal theme notebook sheets – enough to shame any thin bloodied impressionist.
Three men in the room. They would have been four, but Rolly’s girl got him in mid-August before the
poor boy could find a boardinghouse for honeymooners. So right now, in the other room, Rolly and
Tina dreamed married people’s dreams. Children perhaps. Or a house of their own.
The dreamer of the moon got up. His cot creaked. He had slept with all his day clothes on. The
mosquito net was not hung; the tiny suckers must have feasted on his moon-maddened blood. It did
not matter anyway. Nobody thought of malaria in the moonlight.
For now his blood was thick, surging, boiling. The full moon had stirred a high tide in him, a passion or
a curse more intense than a vampire’s. There was a hunger in him, a thirst for something he did not
know yet was there reflected on the leaves the moment the moon painted the town white with silence.
And this silence roared with the strength of an ocean against a coral beach.
The beach was far away (90 kilometers) and long ago (five years), when he was still a college junior
tired of class meetings, lectures, and the school paper that printed his sobbing poems. During those
days a vacation or a sound sleep was as precious as diamonds. And when the summer vacation came,
the diamonds were found on the beach.
Moonlight on the beach in mid-May never became part of the lost summers. It cam again and again –
long after he had thrown all those tearful verses into the fire and Alex had become editor of the school
paper, long after a girl who could sing told him over barbecue and coke he had been a very good boy
and she liked him very much but sorry she loved somebody else very very much.
He could have cried. He could have screamed why didn’t you tell me long ago damn you damn you
damn you! But he was a good boy and he said I wish you all the luck in the world. The girl smiled and
he walked her home in the moonlight.
He did cry later, not because of his lost first love (that was something to laugh at), but because the
moonlight was so beautiful and the world wasted it by sleeping. That was the mid-May on the beach
far away and long ago.
Teaching poetry to high school seniors was a matter of God’s grace, he foolishly thought more than
thrice, or else he would not have stayed in this dusty-muddy town for four years. Then Alex and Dardo
came.

FOR DEATH IS DEAD IN DECEMBER

by Leoncio P. Deriada

1958.
It was December and the wind was cold over the pines in the park.
It was December and Dario said, I want to die.
But his friend Leo said, dream Dario dream. For death is dead in December.
Dead in December.
Leo wrote poetry. Dario wrote love letters and later he wanted to die. It was not because of a poetic
impulse but because he felt so alone – so alone in spite of Leo and Rolly and Henry and Miss
Cobangbang who taught him T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare and Descartes and Thomas Aquinas. It was not
once he had wished to die – to dissolve with the wind and wail over the pines in the park. The wind
was always a sadness and Dario fancied that to be one with the wind was to be away from the sadness
that it was.
For Dario was 17 and did not know what it was to be young. Philosophy could not make much of
youth. Literature only deepened melancholia and made intense the desire to die, to cease within the
midnight with no pain, to say, oh death where is thy sting!
For Dario was 17 and Nena said she didn’t love him.
For Dario was 17 and his father was dead. Long ago.
And December was the month of winds. There was a two-week vacation though – away from Miss
Cobangbang and the thick books and the blackboards that were not black but green and forever
powdered with chalk. Miss Cobangbang did not write much on the board and Henry and Rolly always
made use of the space by sketching legs and priests during the class breaks while Leo bent out of the
window and reached for the acacia blossoms.
Leo, Rolly and Henry wee the best friends in the world. And he went with them, laughed at them.
36
Ha ha ha!
Cut classes with them. But he would die alone.
It was December 24 and Dario was in the park. He sat on a bench under a pine tree. Above, the wind
strummed the pine needles into a peculiar thin sound that was neither noise nor music but a sadness.
He saw people, probably trying to be lost like him. But they talked, they laughed.
They sat on benches and ate ice cream and peanuts. Children ran around with balloons pregnant with
helium, on which Santa Claus said in colored greetings: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Tomorrow
is Christmas Day, Dario thought. But there was no excitement in it; the celebration had been there
since December 1 and the anticipation made the Day cheap, ordinary, uninteresting like Christmas
trees thick with tinsel leaves and bulbs that winked mischievously, even maliciously. Christmas was
nothing but bargain sales and populated parks and winds, sad winds.
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. The song was cold like the wind.
Sad.
The world was people, places, things. It was the wooden white building in Jacinto Street with acacia
trees and benches of wood. It was pens and compositions and debates and exams. It was the beach at
Kabacan and Talomo and Dumoy – white, free, forever related to sunburn. It was Nena – beautiful,
proud, tall and slim like the silhouette of a palm. The simile was Leo’s. One day in the beach:
That old pagatpat is Fr. Malasmas, said Rolly.
That rugged rock is Miss Cobangbang, said Henry.
That palm is Nena. Tall, proud, slim, beautiful, said Leo.
Let’s swim, said Dario.
Yes, the world was quite enjoyable, what with these crazy friends and Miss Cobangbang and her
popped eyes and her awful name and epistemology and romantic poetry. Apparently, Dario
remembered nothing but Byron’s defective foot and Keat’s nightingale. Henry called him Ram. Rolly
called him Dar. The arid instructors (except Miss Cobangbang – she wasn’t dry in spite of her pistol of
a name) called him Mr. Ramos. People were funny. Nobody called him by his pet name. At home his
mother called him Boy. At home, Mr. Santos, his mother’s husband, called him Boy. The neighbors
referred to him as Boy Santos or Santos Boy. Imagine to be called Boy when you were 17 and a
campus sensation.
HARVEST
by Loreto Paras Sulit

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 run-after 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
37
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.

PORTENTS
by Jessica Zafra

Positive, she said cheerily, as if I shouldn’t go out and hang myself this instant. I held on to the phone
for a long time; I was sure that if I let go I would fall down. The coffee turned to mud in my mouth—I
ran to the sink and heaved. Congratulations, it’s a fetus. You frigging idiot.

Afterwards I sat at the kitchen table and tried to make sense of the stuff swirling around in my head.
Visions of blood and umbilical cords and feeding bottles whirled before my eyes like malevolent
frisbees. The newspaper was lying next to the platter of toast; I read the headline about two hundred
times. “May use poison gas, Iraq warns.” Next to it a picture of a dead Kurdish woman clutching the
body of her dead child. Mother. Child. I felt like throwing up all over again. I imagined a creature
ripping out of my stomach in a gory mess, like the monster in Alien.

There was a Post-it note on the mirror: “Lunch with Lawrence, 12:30,” Lawrence being a fifty-fifty
candidate for the father. I painted a face on and stared at the mirror. I saw my belly swelling up, my
clothes rising like a circus tent, and all I could think about was the ten pounds I’d just lost, and the new
dress I bought to mark the occasion. Finally I got my new dress out of the closet and put it on while it
still fit.

In the elevator my next-door neighbor smiled and said Good morning. She had this sort of knowing
smile, and I found myself wondering if she knew about me. I wasn’t just being paranoid; this is Manila,
the neighbors know everything. They are extremely sympathetic, and if you let them they will take
over your life. It turned out she was just trying to sell me a watch. Her husband had managed to get
out of Kuwait by driving across the desert, and when he got home the banks refused to change his
Kuwaiti dinars. That’s why she was selling his watches. I felt kind of sorry for Mrs. Santos, setting out
with her imitation Gucci handbag and several dozen gold bracelets to sell her husband’s watches. Or

38
was it Mrs. San Juan, I can never remember.
A nervous breakdown would’ve been in order, or a fit of tears and keening, the kind that comes with a
runny nose and smeared mascara. But I’ve never been one for hysterics. Thanks to my parents, by the
time I was eight, the sight of a chair being hurled across the room was no longer cause for alarm.
Maybe there is something to be said for a lousy home life. Ramon says my emotional range is limited
to rage, guilt, and occasional hilarity. He neglected to mention blanknesss—there are times when I just
don’t feel anything.

Ramon also claims he can read my thoughts by looking at me—he says I’m transparent. I hope so; it’s
embarrassing to tell somebody there’s a fifty per cent chance that he may be a father in several
months.

By the time it occurred to me to catch a ride I was halfway to my office and decided to walk the rest of
the way. I was swallowed up by the crowd of people hurrying to work; rising above the din of traffic,
their footfalls sounded like the marching of a distant army.

In front of the church where rosaries and good-luck charms were sold under the baleful stare of the
Archangel Michael’s statue, a strange figure appeared on my right; a filthy man with long, matted hair.
A tattered bag was slung across his bare chest, upon which his ribs protruded like spikes. A thick layer
of soot covered his emaciated body—he looked like a walking pile of ashes. He started speaking to me
in urgent tones, as if he were revealing important secrets, and there was a crazy glint in his eyes. I
understood nothing. He was speaking either in dialect of in gibberish, I couldn’t tell, I looked on
stupidly. People stared, expecting perhaps that he would produce a cleaver and hack me to death. The
man went on with his weird recitation; why he chose me I had no idea, maybe he could see past the
designer clothes into my dark and grimy soul.

RECONNAISSANCE
by Tara FT Sering

The thin, feathery, tall grass swayed with the wind in an endless wave of goodbye. There was no
returning now. Beyond the grassy field, Bibi could glimpse her older sister Pia, their cousin Allen, their
neighbors Jaime, Joseph and Jasmine. They were waving and, Bibi could tell from afar, giggling.

The high afternoon sun rippled in its own heat, and with very little shade in the newly-developed
residential community in the outskirts of the city, everything wilted and baked and hardened under its
glare. There were no clouds.

It was the afternoon of the Third World War and the opposing camps—Pia, Bibi and Allen versus
Jaime, Joseph and Jasmine—were dressed in full battle gear: denim pants, waterproof jackets, lab
glasses, slingshots draped on their shoulders and bottle cap ammunition in plastic packets tied to their
belts. Midway into the conflict—both teams ducking behind parked cars, climbing an occasional short
tree, diving into shrubs, hurling rotten guavas and water balloons at each other—someone had
released a bottle cap from a slingshot and it went flying past a vacant lot where it landed somewhere
near the Arañ a house. A faint yet audible chink of glass breaking sent threads of cold apprehension
running through the backs of the sweat-soaked soldiers and, one by one, they emerged from their
hiding posts and gathered on the street.

No one would admit to the crime and yet, responsible Pia, the oldest in the group, declared that of
course someone had to go and check. On the basis of seniority, Pia had the authority to appoint
anyone on a mission to survey the damage; but Jaime could not be persuaded, Joseph followed
everything Jaime did and did not do and therefore could not be forced to go alone, and it seemed
unfair to send either of the smaller kids, Allen and Jasmine, who stood side by side, on the verge of
tears. Pia herself refused to go or explain why. It had to be Bibi, or their mama would soon find out
that someone was failing math in school, and it wasn’t Pia.

39
From where they stood, the Arañ a house looked quiet and undisturbed, a consolation for Bibi that the
house might be deserted. She only needed to wade through the waist-high grass to get to where the
silent house stood, check how much damage they had caused, report back to base, and everything
would be fine.

It was natural perhaps that Bibi, in the years that followed, would forget about that hot afternoon,
only to remember it at certain points in her life: for instance, when she returned home from work one
afternoon and found that her husband had cleared out his closet, she stood there at the doorway of
their bedroom, feeling the cool glass of the Arañ a house’s windows pressed against her nose, the one
that she had peered into years ago when she was nine.

Under the blazing sun, Bibi turned to the five tiny figures one more time, squinting through the white
glare. Sweat from her forehead trickled down her face and tears threatened to burst through her eyes.
Her hands were cold, electrified. Her feet were heavy and half-paralyzed as she stood in front of the
low, rusty grille gate. Her heart thumped, sank, slid down to her stomach.
She pushed open the creaking gate and waited for a sign of dogs. There were none. She began to take
small, careful steps along the pebble-washed path that led to the main door, but a gallery of windows
to the left of the large, intricately carved wooden door caught her attention. The orders were for her to
check for something broken and if it wasn’t a window, then the bottle cap must have hit something of
less importance.

TESTAMENT
by Katrina Tuvera

TITA GILDA didn’t know what it would do to me, years ago when she decided I should have a room of
my own. Or if she knew, it didn’t make a difference. Her biggest worry then was summer: it was simply
taking too long. All that month I stayed home, hardly a day passed when she didn’t catch me toying
with something she owned -- a prayer book, a locket, or her saints arranged like a chorus line on her
dresser. She said as much to Father when he came home for the weekend, and before that day was
over, she had moved my bed to the room across the hall.

Secretly I was thrilled, realizing the liberties instantly available. I could eat in bed, or keep the lamp on
for as long as I wanted. I stayed up later each night, playing cards and daydreaming, or reading until
daylight cut through the sky when I would set down my books, look out the window, and watch
summer taking its leave. Charmed by my solitude, I shunned sleep -- and soon, sleep eluded me.

Today, I’m twenty-nine and a true insomniac. Married, for three years now, to a man who snores. Our
neighbors devote three nights a week to the karaoke. Blue Bayou is a favorite and they render it many
ways in a single night, each variation growing more peculiar with every case of beer they consume.
Then there is Elmer, our dog, who won’t eat leftovers but well-fed or not stands all evening outside
our window, barking at every shadow under the moon. Roy, my husband, keeps a gun under the bed
and I tell him, One of these days I’ll put a bullet through that dog’s head.

And the crooners next door?

I’ll blast that karaoke to pieces.

Okay, he says, Anything to help you sleep. Then, patting my thigh, he turns away and snores.

I’ve tried everything to cure my condition. No alcohol, no TV after nine. No heavy supper, though there
are times when I eat so little but still stare at the ceiling for hours. I’ve given up smoking, except for
one cigarette I must have after climbing into bed. That one I can’t shake off, like locking the door or
turning off the light: without it, the day doesn’t feel over. I’ve been warned against sleeping pills but
two streets away a pharmacy sells Halcion over the counter, and who am I to tell them they should

40
know better?
At night, when I can’t sleep, I make all kinds of lists -- what’s left in the refrigerator, the clothes I’ll
wear for the week, the days I visit Dr. Luna. One of Roy’s uncles, an actor, formed a theater company
called Footlights two years ago and he pays me to write publicity. I do that too, even if Roy finds it
annoying when he wakes up and sees I have brought work to bed. He says I’ll sleep better if I stop
working early, and forbids sweets after supper. And he says, Stop thinking about your father. Yet he
knows I had insomnia long before the old man died.

SOME NIGHTS I drop in on Tita Gilda, now alone in her dead brother’s house but for a maid. I eat
supper there when I know Roy will come home late but I’m good about calling first to give notice. It’s
always the same when I visit: I arrive and she’s in her room, praying. She makes me wait in the terrace
where it is cool and I can stare at the guava tree I used to climb as a girl. When she finally joins me, she
asks, though she already knows, how long I’ve been waiting.

In her fifties now, my aunt is still a fair woman, hair in soft curls, back straight as a pole. She calls this
God’s reward, and it could well be: the signs of aging may not be so hidden today if she’d taken a
husband and had children of her own. But marriage was not for this desperately pious woman. If
Father hadn’t sent for her after Mother died when I was barely nine, Tita Gilda might have settled for a
convent. But then, Father’s house wasn’t much different after my aunt took over, with her candles and
the verses she posted

LOVE IN THE CORNHUSKS

by Aida L. Rivera

Tinang stopped before the Señ ora’s gate and adjusted the baby’s cap. The dogs that came to bark at
the gate were strange dogs, big-mouthed animals with a sense of superiority. They stuck their heads
through the hogfence, lolling their tongues and straining. Suddenly, from the gumamela row, a little
black mongrel emerged and slithered through the fence with ease. It came to her, head down and body
quivering.

“Bantay. Ay, Bantay!” she exclaimed as the little dog laid its paws upon her shirt to sniff the baby on
her arm. The baby was afraid and cried. The big animals barked with displeasure.

Tito, the young master, had seen her and was calling to his mother. “Ma, it’s Tinang. Ma, Ma, it’s
Tinang.” He came running down to open the gate.

“Aba, you are so tall now, Tito.”

He smiled his girl’s smile as he stood by, warding the dogs off. Tinang passed quickly up the veranda
stairs lined with ferns and many-colored bougainville. On landing, she paused to wipe her shoes
carefully. About her, the Señ ora’s white and lavender butterfly orchids fluttered delicately in the
sunshine. She noticed though that the purple waling-waling that had once been her task to shade from
the hot sun with banana leaves and to water with mixture of charcoal and eggs and water was not in
bloom.

“Is no one covering the waling-waling now?” Tinang asked. “It will die.”

“Oh, the maid will come to cover the orchids later.”

The Señ ora called from inside. “Tinang, let me see your baby. Is it a boy?”

“Yes, Ma,” Tito shouted from downstairs. “And the ears are huge!”
41
“What do you expect,” replied his mother; “the father is a Bagobo. Even Tinang looks like a Bagobo
now.”

Tinang laughed and felt warmness for her former mistress and the boy Tito. She sat self-consciously
on the black narra sofa, for the first time a visitor. Her eyes clouded. The sight of the Señ ora’s flaccidly
plump figure, swathed in a loose waist-less housedress that came down to her ankles, and the faint
scent of agua de colonia blended with kitchen spice, seemed to her the essence of the comfortable
world, and she sighed thinking of the long walk home through the mud, the baby’s legs straddled to
her waist, and Inggo, her husband, waiting for her, his body stinking of tuba and sweat, squatting on
the floor, clad only in his foul undergarments.

“Ano, Tinang, is it not a good thing to be married?” the Señ ora asked, pitying Tinang because her dress
gave way at the placket and pressed at her swollen breasts. It was, as a matter of fact, a dress she had
given Tinang a long time ago.

“It is hard, Señ ora, very hard. Better that I were working here again.”

AT WAR’S END
by Rony V. Diaz

THE evening before he killed himself, Virgilio Serrano gave a dinner party. He invited five guests—
friends and classmates in university— myself included. Since we lived on campus in barracks built by
the U.S. Army, he sent his Packard to fetch us.

Virgilio lived alone in a pre-war chalet that belonged to his family. Four servants and a driver waited
on him hand and foot. The chalet, partly damaged, was one of the few buildings in Ermita that
survived the bombardment and street fighting to liberate Manila.

It had been skillfully restored; the broken lattices, fretwork, shell windows and wrought iron fence
had been repaired or replaced at considerable expense. A hedge of bandera españ ola had been planted
and the scorched frangipani and hibiscus shrubs had been pruned carefully. Thus, Virgilio’s house was
an ironic presence in the violated neighborhood.

He was on the porch when the car came to a crunching halt on the graveled driveway. He shook our
hands solemnly, then ushered us into the living room. In the half-light, everything in the room glowed,
shimmered or shone. The old ferruginous narra floor glowed. The pier glass coruscated. The
bentwood furniture from the house in Jaen looked as if they had been burnished. In a corner,
surrounded by bookcases, a black Steinway piano sparkled like glass.

Virgilio was immaculate in white de hilo pants and cotton shirt. I felt ill at ease in my surplus khakis
and combat boots.

We were all in our second year. Soon we will be on different academic paths—Victor in philosophy;
Zacarias in physics and chemistry; Enrique in electrical engineering; and Apolonio, law. Virgilio and I
have both decided to make a career in English literature. Virgilio was also enrolled in the
Conservatory and in courses in the philosophy of science.

We were all in awe of Virgilio. He seemed to know everything. He also did everything without any
effort. He had not been seen studying or cramming for an exam in any subject, be it history,
anthropology or calculus. Yet the grades that he won were only a shade off perfection.

42
HE and I were from the same province where our families owned rice farms except that ours was tiny,
a hundred hectares, compared to the Serrano’s, a well-watered hacienda that covered 2,000 hectares
of land as flat as a table.

The hacienda had been parceled out to eleven inquilinos who together controlled about a thousand
tenants. The Serranos had a large stone house with a tile roof that dated back to the 17th century that
they used dur3ing the summer months. The inquilinos dealt with Don Pepe’s spinster sister, the
formidable Clara, who knew their share of the harvest to the last chupa. She was furthermore in
residence all days of the year.

Virgilio was the only child. His mother was killed in a motor accident when he was nine. Don Pepe
never remarried. He became more and more dependent on Clara as he devoted himself to books,
music and conversation. His house in Cabildo was a salon during the years of the Commonwealth. At
night, spirited debates on art, religion language, politics and world affairs would last until the first
light of dawn.

THE BIRD
by Tita Lacambra Ayala

I felt very lonely, like I wanted to go home somewhere but didn’t know where. I swam in the feeling
for a while, staring at the blue flowers on her brown dress…

Sisa’s skin glistens “from her own natural oils and the coconut essence” and the narrator wonders
vaguely “if other parts of her body were just as oily.” She also imagines that in a day or two, Sisa will
“probably smell rancid and overripe.”

The “repressed material” here has to do with sexuality. But because the narrator is so young, she is
barely aware of what is going on. This awakening happens in a “bamboo house” by the sea, drenched
alternately by sunlight or moonlight. Over and under its sawali walls, lizards “wove their loveliness
and housekeeping without a thought for human beings.”

Sisa has told the narrator of a bird that “comes from a long way,” so far away that “even as it flies to
you its limbs grow and its feathers lengthen ageing in its flight.”

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.

Is it simply a story designed to make a child keep still, or does Sisa actually believe in the big bird, or is
she trying to teach the protagonist something, and doing it through metaphoric language?

The bird is a powerful figure, and associated with maleness in the narrator’s mind. The imagery used
to describe it is undeniably sensuous, deliberately reminiscent of Leda and her swan.

The girl imagines the shadow of the bird’s wide wing falling over her as she floats on her back in the
sea, “beckoning me out of the water and on the house so that I might sit there and wait its arrival.” In
her sleep, she feels “the clasp of its claws” on her hip, “its weight pressing me closer to the mat, its tail
fanning my underside.” Sometimes it seems somewhat sinister… “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.” At others, it is
mysterious, “invisible like a wind,” entering “dead-blind into the bamboo house slapping against the
sawali.” She is both afraid of it, and sorry for it,
43
…Silently perched on the nipa roof… resting its travel-worn head under its wings, hiding its eyes front
the moonlight, its fine head feathers trembling in the wind.

She feels certain it is beautiful-either white-grey like a dove, or bright blue like a kingfisher “brilliant
and elusive, the lone flash of color in the black of night,” or sliver and red. But always, half blind, and
circling

…Endlessly above the house and higher searching for me, uttering a forlorn cry, and never finding me.

Why “half blind” or “blind?” Perhaps this is a reference to the undiscriminating force of sexuality. The
yearning for the bird, which invades her dreams and reduces her to tears is a yearning for love, a need
to be possessed, which she only half comprehends. It is a waiting which becomes more intense at
night.

MIST
by Joy Dayrit

THE ROOM’S RENT went two thousand pesos over budget but it had a front porch where she could
smoke. And the landlady said she had recently put a heater in the hall bathroom and courteously
showed her how it worked, how to blend the shower water from warm to hot, how hot the water
could be. Steam filled the bathroom. She liked the bathroom. A beveled mirror above the wash basin
and a full-length one behind the door gave it an illusion of space. She liked the wood floor of the room
that would be hers. Narra, she was told, and though she did not believe it, she knew she would like the
feel of it on her bare feet.

And an avocado tree grew in the garden behind, by the kitchen. She could smoke there, too. And there
were brick steps from the garden path going up the kitchen doorway, four of them, oro-plata-mata-
oro.

There was only one other boarder in the house. He looked her age. She saw him come in that noon
through the garden path, up the four steps, into the kitchen where the landlady showed her how the
gas stove worked. Without matches. You just turn it on, like an electric stove.

He moved briskly, with semi-grace, was on the path one instant and in the kitchen the next. The
landlady introduced them. He’s a dancer. She’s a VP of a firm in Greenhills. She was thinking, how
could a dancer afford to board here, and he answered her thoughts.

“I also sell condominiums.” Lives on commissions? She did not believe it.

“Buy and sell,” he read her thinking further. “I buy them when they’re still not there, and sell at profit
after they’re built.”

With what? Her mind computed: he needed capital to do that.

“With borrowed money you can do anything. What do you do?”

“Construction,” she said.
“Buildings?”

44
“And homes.”
“Condominiums?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, fate,” he said.
What she liked most about the house was the hall bathroom. Her room had a private bath, as did the
other room, but the hall bath have the shower heater, and mornings were cold. The heater was shared.
There was an unwritten schedule. She bathed in the morning before work. The dancer at any time
after that. The hall took in the morning sun from the porch, and she stepped into this light each day
before her bath, stretching in the sun, upward, downward, right, and left. In the bathroom she locked
the door. Here was her world of silence before the days storm at the office.
She made a ritual of dressing, one step after the other, in timed sequence. Routine secured in her
steadfastness, maintained devotion for competence at work, kept the mind watchful over the
vulnerability of heart.

FLIP GOTHIC
by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Dear Mama,

Thank you for agreeing to have Mindy. Jun and I just don’t know what to do with her. I’m afraid if we
don’t intervene, matters will get worse. Mia, her Japanese American friend, had to be sent to a drug
rehab place. You’d met her when you were here; she’s the tiny girl who got into piercing; she had a
nose ring, a belly ring - and something in her tongue. Her parents are distraught; they don’t know
what they’ve done, if they’re to blame for Mia’s problem. I talked to Mia’s Mom yesterday and Mia’s
doing all right; she’s writing angry poetry but is getting over the drug thing, thank God.

There’s so much anger in these kids, I can’t figure it out. They have everything - all the toys, clothes,
computer games and whatever else they’ve wanted. I didn’t have half the things these kids have; and
Jun and I had to start from scratch in this country - you know that. That studio we had near the
hospital was really tiny and I had to do secretarial work while Jun completed his residency. Everything
we own - this house, our cars, our vacation house in Connecticut - we’ve had to slave for. I don’t
understand it; these kids have everything served to them in a silver platter and they’re angry.

We’re sure Mindy’s not into drugs - she may have tried marijuana, but not the really bad stuff. We’re
worried though that she might eventually experiment with that sort of thing. If she continues running
around with these kids, it’s bound to happen. What made us decide to send her there was this
business of not going to school. Despite everything, Mindy had always been a good student, but this
school year, things went haywire. This was what alerted us, actually, when the principal told us she
hadn’t been to school for two weeks. We thought the worst but it turned out she and her friends had
been hanging out at Barnes and Noble. It’s just a bookstore; it’s not a bad place, but obviously she
should have gone to school. We had to do something. Sending her to the Philippines was all I could
think of.

She’ll be arriving Ubec on Wednesday, 10:45 a.m. on PAL Flight 101. Ma, don’t be shocked, but her hair
is purple. Jun has been trying to convince her to dye her hair black, for your sake at least, but Mindy
doesn’t even listen. Jun has had a particularly difficult time dealing with the situation. It’s not easy for
him to watch his daughter "go down the drain," as he calls it. He feels he has failed not only as a father
but as a doctor.

It’s true that it’s become impossible to reason with Mindy, but I’ve told him to let the hair go, to pick
his battles so to speak. But he gets terribly frustrated. He can’t stand the purple hair; he can’t stand the
black lipstick - yes, she uses black lipstick - and the black clothes and boots and metal. I’ve explained
to him that it’s just a fad. Gothic, they call it. I personally think it looks dreadful. I can’t stand the spikes

45
around her neck; but there are more important things, like school or her health. She’s just gotten over
not-eating. That was another thing her friends got into - not eating. Why eat dead cows, Mindy would
say. She was into tofu and other strange looking things. For months, she wasn’t eating and had gotten
very thin, we finally had to bring her to a doctor (very humbling for Jun). The doctor suggested a
therapist. One hundred seventy-five dollars an hour. She had several sessions then Mindy got bored
and started eating once again. She’s back to her usual weight, but well, the hair and clothing might
scare you, so I’m writing ahead of time to prepare you.Thanks once again Ma, for everything, and I
hope and pray that she doesn’t give you the kind of trouble she’s been giving us.

Your daughter,

Nelia

I am One of the Mountain People

by Macario D. Tiu

I did not want to go to Santa Barbara, but Ita Magdum forced me to go there. He wanted me to have a
Christian education. He told me that he was not going to let me remain idle in the mountains, and
consequently become as stupid as ignorant as the rest of his people. He said that I could learn many
things from the Christian and in that way I could help improve the lot of the whole tribe.

I was then seven summers old and I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Although he made
the prospect of going there very tempting, I refuse to go. Not even the trace of the three-storey school
building, of running houses and plenty of food and toys convinced me that I should leave my home and
my friends for Santa Barbara. And so Ita had to beat me to make me go with him to the Christian town.

We traveled for five days before we reached our destination. The trip was hazardous and formidable.
W crossed the river, Subangdaku, which was infested with deadly crocodiles, on a raft. We struggled in
the deep
marches and inched our way through thick forest.

It was nightfall when we reached the town. Ita immediately left me to the care of the elderly woman
called Nana Loling. She was a kind woman. She assured me that everything would be alright. But I was
not comforted. That night, a nagging desire to escape a run home kept me awake. But how? In the still
of the night, dogs were howling intermittently. A bad Omen? Then I feared I might get lost on the way
or a sawa might be waiting for me.

In school, I was the laughing stock, because I was not of their kind. How they laughed when I told them
I came from the Green Area, that part of land where no Christian had ever gone. For that, I was always
in trouble. And I was always brought to the principal’s office for disciplinary action. Why did you pull
Elinita’s hair, he would ask. Or why did you box Berto’s ears? And I would answer, because Elinita
kicked me and Berto called me “pig” and “monkey”. But I was whipped anyway, no matter what reason
I gave. That was the only way to tame me, I heard them say.

Ita visited me once every two months. Every time he would visit me, I’d plead with him to bring me
home. But he would refuse. It was not yet time for me to go home, he would say.

I was terribly homesick. How I wish I could be at Ina’s side. I’d plead with him to be with my own
people; to sit by the bonfire and listen to the weird stories of the long past – of how the early
Balangays at the seacoast of Caraga were attacked by fierce Allah worshippers and how gallantly our

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early forebears fought, but were forced to move out to the mountains. I loved to hear the vaunting of
the hunters on how they got the fangs of the wild boars and crocodile teeth that decorated their necks.
I wanted to be like them.

The three-storey building in Santa Barbara was indeed tall, but the trees in Kapalong were much
taller. These was nothing glamorous with those running houses either. They only frightened me as
they whizzed by carrying logs on their backs and screaming infernally at people to keep out of the
road. Food was plenty so were the fruits. But money was needed before we could get them. At
Kapatagan, I could get all the fruits I wanted for free.

THE PERIL IN THE LAGOON

By Loreto Paras- Sulit

The lagoon lay in a quiet hidden sort of splendour. The fine beach sloping gently into it from the green
hills beyond invited the first newcomer for a dip and swim in its clear waters.

“We are coming! Here we come!” gaily shouted the three boys, throwing their camping things right
and left their excitement.

“You have to put up the tent first,” quietly reminded nearby. “And you have to listen to a few must’s
and must- not’s before you go venturing in that lagoon.

“Oh Uncle!” chorused the three in disappointment. What was wrong with you uncle? He was not a
killjoy, no, not. Uncle Sidro who in the past was always the first to push them into adventure, hunting,
fishing, swimming, treasure- hunting. When the three boys first learned that Uncle Sidro had bought a
house near this lagoon, they knew that next summer they would surely be invited to come over. And
they were.

The plan for the summer was that the boys cook their own meals- and be on their own. For Tony the
eldest of the three fatherless brothers, was now sixteen, David was fourteen, and Berting was twelve.

After the summer heat and closeness of the city, after their examinations and lessons, all this was
certainly a boy’s dream of paradise. Now here was Uncle Sidro dampening their spirits with his must’s
and must not’s.

Swiftly they put up their tent, arranged their sleeping bags and things, which out of long practice and
frequent camping they did quite well and quickly.

In between, they threw sidelong glances at Uncle Sidro, who smoked cigar after cigar as he sat on
camp stool nearby. Finally when the boys at last few threw satisfied looks around, he spoke :”Well,
boys, I guess you are all set to begin your vacation. You can do anything you wish but swim in the
lagoon.”

“Oh, Uncle Sidro,” was all they could manage. The helpless glances they threw at the shining lagoon
beyond revealed more eloquently their shattered palns and dreams.

“You see boys,” Uncle Sidro started to explain, “you have to understand and help me, I am responsible
to your mother for your safety. She has always entrusted you to me as you know. When I invite you
here for a vacation, I did not count on a shark slipping in one night into the lagoon and upsetting all

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our plans.”
“Oh so it is only a shark,” laughed Tony.

There was no answering smile from Uncle Sidro, “Only one, but the most vicious and murderous man-
killer, if ever there was one,” he rejoined instead. “Unless it is killed or driven out of the lagoon, no one
can swim there in safety. I don’t dare to trust you in that lagoon even if only to wet your feet. And as
the past, boys, I shall always count on your ‘honor bright’. With that he left them.

DRIFTWOOD
By I.V. Mallari

I was a Kakawate tree. I grew on the bank of a river. I had been there for more years than I could
remember. And my branches spread out-some of them reaching almost halfway, across the river.

Usually I was covered with green leaves. They grew in such great masses, casting such deep shadow
all around, that nothing could grow under me. And when the wind blew, they rustled and danced to
their own music.

Once a year I shed off my old leaves. And for a while, I became covered all over with clusters of
pinkish-purple flowers. I was beautiful then, and I enjoyed watching my image on the quiet surface of
the river.

It was while I was in flower that bumble bees and butterflies came to see me in great swarms. They
hovered over my flowers, sucking the nectar in them. They ticked me, but I knew that they meant well.
Besides, I liked their company and the strange music they made. And I also needed them. For without
them, my flowers could never develop into fruit.

Birds came, too. They danced on my branches, or chased one another in the air above me. They
chattered and sang all the time, as they made love to each other. They were wonderful to watch and
listen to.

After their love-making, the birds paired off and set about building their nests in the crooks of my
branches. Each pair worked together, and they did not stop until their nest was ready.

The nests were made of grass and small twigs, which the birds wove together into what looked like
shallow baskets. But they were so strong that they did not fall off, no matter how hard the winds blew.

Soon each mother bird laid her eggs in the nest which she and her mate had build together-sometimes
tow, sometimes more. Then she and her mate took turns sitting on the eggs until the eggs were
hatched.

The baby birds kept their parents busy form sunrise until sunset. For they seemed to be hungry all the
time-crying for food every minute of the day.

But the father bird and the mother bird did not seem to mind. For they were good parents. While one
of them kept watch over the nest, ready to protect the young birds from any harm, the other went out
in search of food-seeds, small insects, and worms.

This went on until the young birds were able to fly and be on their own. But sometimes they did not

48
have a chance to grow up. For birds had many enemies-men and boys, as well as animals.
Sometimes the parent birds were killed, or caught, while they were in search of food. And the baby
birds, with no one to look after them, soon died of cold and hunger, Sometimes too, boys climbed up
my branches and raided the nests hidden in them, or even took the nests away with them. And I was
sure that the birds would die in the boys’ hands before the day was over.

Mill of the Gods

by Estrella Alfon

Among us who lived in Espeleta – that street that I love, about whose people I keep telling tales –
among us, I say, there was one named Martha, and she was the daughter of Pio and Engracia.

To all of us, life must seem like a road given us to travel, and it is up to Fate, that convenient blunderer,
whether, that road be broad and unwinding, or whether it shall be a tortuous lane, its path a hard and
twisted mat of dust and stones. And each road, whether lane or avenue, shall have its own landmarks,
that only the traveller soul shall recognize and remember, and remembering, continue the journey
again. To Martha, the gods gave this for a first memory: a first scar.

She was a girl of twelve, and in every way she was but a child. A rather dull child, who always lagged
behind the others of her age, whether in study or in play. Life had been so far a question of staying
more years in a grade than the others, of being told she would have to apply herself a little harder if
she didn’t want the infants catching up with her. But that was so dismal thing. She had gotten a little
bit used to being always behind. To always being the biggest girl in her class. Even in play there was
some part of her that never managed to take too great a part – she was so content if they always made
her “it” in a game of tag, if only they would let her play. And when she had dolls, she was eager to lend
them to other girls, if they would only include her in the fascinating games she could not play alone.

This was she, then. Her hair hung in pigtails each side of her face, and already it irked a little to have
her dresses too short. She could not help in her mother’s kitchen, and could be trusted to keep her
room clean, but she was not ready for the thing her mother told her one night when she was
awakened from sleep.

It was a sleep untroubled by dreams, then all of a sudden there was an uproar in the house, and she
could hear her mother’s frenzied sobbing, and it was not sobbing that held as much of sorrow as it did
of anger. She lay still for a while, thinking perhaps she was dreaming, until she could hear her father’s
grunted answers to the half – understood things her mother was mouthing at him. Then there were
sounds that was clearly the sound of two bodies struggling in terrible fury with each other. She stood
up, and like a child, cried into the night. Mother?

She wailed the word, in her panic finding a little relief in her own wailing, Mother? And she heard her
mother’s voice call her, panting out, saying, Martha, come quickly, come into this room!

Martha got up and stood at the door of the room, hesitating about opening it, until her mother, the
part of a terrible grasp, said Martha! So Martha pushed in the door, and found her mother and her
father locked in an embrace in which both of them struggled and panted and had almost no breath left
for words. Martha stood wide – eyed and frightened, not knowing what to do, just standing there, even
though she had seen what it was they struggled for. A kitchen knife, blade held upwards in her
mother’s hand. Her arms were pinioned to her sides by her husband, but her wild eyes, the frenzy
with which she stamped her feet on his feet, and kicked him in the shins, and tried to bite him with her

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teeth, these were more terrible than the glint of that shining blade. It was her father who spoke to her
saying urgently, Martha, reach for her knife, take it away. Yet Martha stood there and did not
comprehend until her mother spoke, saying No, no; Martha, your father deserves to be killed.

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