Small Town

Filipinos
by Kerima
Polotan

I have not seen Ligao in two years and here is another year ending and the
prospects of visiting this town I call home are as remote as ever. The last time I
went was in '62, on the eve of a departure that meant crossing an ocean for away
places, and that visit had been made on something deeper than impulse, squeezed
in between passports and vacation shots and yet, once in Ligao, what do I really
do?
I stayed only twelve hours, just long enough to pick up half a dozen blooms
from my aunt's garden and jump into a tricycle for the familiar ride to the
municipal cemetery where my father lies buried. People in my town have a way of
putting it that is unlike any other in the world-they speak of this as pag-i-sung- ko,
which literally means to go to the cemetery, meet one's dead, and converse with a
cherished presence indistinguishable from the fragrance or ripening grain, the
murmur of creeks, the whisper of bamboo groves.
He could have been buried nearer town but my father and the Church
rejected each other to the end, and so he lies there, many kilometers out of Ligao
proper, among his fellow Masons, the town's Aglipayans and Iglesias and
Adventists, a firm old man, who has loomed larger in my life by dying, about
whom I cannot think of now, even 15 years after, without a suggestion of tears. He
spent more years out of Ligao than in it, leaving town when he was 19, returning
when he was 53, to live out just three more years then to die. But he was always a
small-town Filipino, with small-town notions and small-town loyalties, something
he unwittingly passed on to me when he sent me off packing in the summer of '47
to Ligao, to recuperate from a touch of TB.
Before this, hometowns were hypothetical quantities in my life. I had been
born in Jolo and had spent portions of my childhood in various places in
Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, Laguna, Tarlac, Rizal, and in '47, it looked as if I was
going to be a Manilan after all when I took this fateful plane trip with him which
ended 500 miles and three hours later, in the town of Ligao, Albay. It was for me
like going back to the beginning: everyone ought to have one, a town where he
begins from, and probably ends in, remembrance of which tallies up the best of his
dreams, the purest of his joys.
Seeing the town my father had spoken of so evocatively, meeting his
relatives and his friends, being shown the very spot where his parents' hut had
stood, the ruins of a Spanish chimney be had haunted as a boy, the river, the
bridge, I began to understand a little why men write their tenderest stories and die
their fiercest deaths for their ow cannot imagine anyone killing for Quiapo, or
Central Market, or say Pa Lawton, but I have it in me, I think, to pick up a gun and
blow the bead anyone who changes by the littlest bit that walk,on a twilight to the
Barrion of Tuburan, a kilometer from the heart of town, a walk through evening
mist and trees, or the journey to Pandan on a sled, touching whip to carabao rump,
then alighting near the
barrio chapel to make it on foot to this spring, Males with its tricky bed, quicksand
in parts, firm in others, where the barrio fu stake out their fish traps and one can
scoop mudfish and catfish by the pail.
There are mountain ranges around the volcano, Mayon, dwarfs everything
else, and there is a lesser mountain whose name I never quite remember and
hillocks that undulate in and out of the horizon. One sees it all from the back of the
elementary school building, including the rice fields, the coconut groves, the abuca
plutaices: these are what sustain Ligao, and it is odd that I should speak of the
town with much knowledge when I never lived in it longer than a year. I have
returned to it whenever I could, for stretches of a week or a mon staying in an old
house in Guilid with people who are strictly more friends than relatives.
As a young girl, running home to them between jobs and disappointments. I
was always given the back room, the one near the avocado trees, the ducks, and the
tilapia pond. But with marriage and children, somente decided it was time I got the
front room and I established my rights to an enormous, ancient four- poster beside
which a votive candle burns night and day before the Virgin of Penafrancia. I speak
of it as my hometown and yet there is nothing in it I own, except for these
memories and the affection of some people, I hold no papers to any property in it,
having given up long ago trying to collect some debts owed my dead lather. But it
owns me, as completely as if I had been born in it, and all those other years, in all
those other towns, hazy remembrances of seashores and shady sen and town
plazas, come to a focus in Ligao.
It was in Ligao, too, I assure myself that this and that happened, some
vignette of childhood, though it could very well have been in Pangasinan or Nueva
Ecija, but having taken Papa's town my own, I desired to invest it with my own
past, even if I was a stranger to it until I was grown. Wrenching time and
geography, I forcibly transform recollections, reminiscences, and retrospections
from some unnamed setting in the back of my mind to Ligao, stopping only when
convinced I was as small a town as I could ever be. With my father's death and
interment there, it has since then become, for me, birthplace, beginning, base, my
country in minuscule.
You must meet my Uncle C. He is really a granduncle but there being a
word for that in the dialect, I have called him Uncle all these years. He should be
nearing 80, I think, but if I know him at all, he still walks his daily ten-kilometer
from Danao to Pandan, twice a day, barefoot, parting the grass ahead with the same
bamboo stick he has swung for years. He is the only man who can walk in formal
company dressed in camisa de chino, a pair of khaki pants, in his bare and still be
full of dignity no one dares jest about. For a long time, he distrusted me, speaking
of me as Jose's daughter from et, the city I was ill at ease before this man with the
weather-beaten face, who seemed everything seriously. He never had much of a
formal education but he old write a sensitive hand-he had been quite a swain in his
younger days. With a reputation for climbing up porches of pretty young girls, and
for drawing bolo quickly but life has tamed him and now he reads the lives of
saints and to church early in the mornings.
 Uncle C has not opened many books in his life but there are a number of
things outside of them that he knows. He can smell out a storm, he knows
everything there is about fields, and yields, and irrigation, what to do with poor,
when to cut down the bananas or strip the abacca or begin to smoke the copra, what
fish will bite today with what bait, and both in Danao where he lives, and in
Pandan where he owns a few parcels of land, he cannot walk by without a hundred
urchins running out to kiss his hand. Eventually, he learned to like me, I could tell
from the stories he told when we met. They were always stories of my father and
himself, stories of swooning girls and outraged parents, cocked guns and missing
bullets, mysterious bundles picked up by faithful servants in the dead of the night
and thrown into the river, conventos stoned and priests run out of town, and I never
asked him where fact died and fancy began. That he deigned to spin these tales for
me was manifest affection and, I would sit in my rocking chair till it was time to go
home to Guilid. I'd give my rocking chair a last push, feeling the packed earth
beneath my feet. His housekeeper would shuffle out to light the Petromax.
In the suddenness of the burning lamp, we would blink at each other, half a
hundred years between us. He would tilt the lamp to look at me better and let me
go with baskets of guavas and balls of native chocolate. I wish that I could say of
him he had been in the Revolution, but I do not know that he was, he has spoken of
it. I wish also I could say that he is full of wisdom, but he isn't-he is an old man and
has seen the stars come and go for 80 years, but I do not know if age and the stars
make a man wise. I wish I could say that he had been a hero, slaying dragon or
minotaur, befuddling the Sphinx, but he hasn't and all he's really done was to get
born and live with an instinct for goodness, subtracting from no one to add to his
own, respecting property lines, setting seasons of life with courage and kindness:
poor harvest and rich, bereavement and birth, drought and flood, just a man,
unlettered and unshod. He had come to the railroad station to see me off at the end
of one of my quick visits.
Once, I saw him with shoes on and I couldn't look—it was all wrong. He
gestures and I noticed his great dark feet encased in rubber shoes. He was Uncle C
still but there was nothing now to tell him from the baggage carriers, device
players, the chicken merchants—it was like seeing a magnificent wild nature, full
of natural splendor, suddenly festooned and painted for the circus.
"Don't they hurt?" I asked. "Don't they? Take them off," I insisted.
And he did, measuring his movements, bending down to untie the shoes,
knotting the laces together, and throwing the burden over an arm. It was strange
how quickly his dignity returned, even with his shoes dangling absurdly from an
arm. He waved his bamboo cane at me.
"You come back soon," he called as the trais started to move.
"And stay longer!" "You will meet me?" I said.
"Yes, with can and carabao, if you
wish." "But no shoes, Uncle," I
said, "No shoes.”
 He grinned suddenly and flung his arms upwards, a man cheering something
and wishing long life. Long live, I thought, watching him grow smaller as the train
raced towards the mountains, long live my uncle, I cheered, long live his bare feet I
have written before of this house in Guilid, and of the three spinsters in it.
There used to be four but Tinang died the year I went to Ligao for the first
time When I walked into that house in '47, everyone was mourning. Manay Tinang
had been a teacher, and so was Manay Tin. Manay Pina was the housekeeper and
Paz, the baby, was the merchant. Their father had built the house himself, put up
the posts and planed the shingles, every one of them, and built his house to last,
built it with an eye to space and sun and air. The bedrooms opened on the dining
room, the dining room opened on the sala, and the sala welcomed the world
outside.
I lived there for a year, getting well, constantly plied with Klim and fresh
eggs, and in and out of the rooms was an assortment of nieces and nephews and
cousins and whatnots My three Manays were sending I don't know how many
children to school, and once or twice, Manay Tin would sigh about the expense and
the trouble but it did not stop her from apportioning her treasury warrant each
month to ensure some child's future. She was for everyone's learning a trade,
typing or dressmaking or basket weaving. The brighter ones were pledged support
through normal school or nursing school or farm school, and from each was drawn
the tacit promise that when he was through he would, in turn, send a younger
brother or sister through school.
Two sins alone imperiled their help: drink and love. If a nephew took to the
bottle the news of it somehow filtered back to Ligao, and the monthly allowance
stopped even before he'd gotten over his first hangover. If a niece fell in love, she
was aware of the iron- clad rules-everything to be held in abeyance till after
graduation. She might marry the boy if he passed some acid tests, but there was
still her promise to help send her siblings to school. A marriage made no
difference. Until her first baby came, a married niece assigned a reasonable
percentage of her income to the general education fund. But after the baby, she was
released from this duty, and she thereafter kept every centavo she made. Her own
children might look forward to the continuation of the arrangement, which had its
disadvantages—nieces were wont to postpone marriage until it was impractical or
impossible to marry at all, but they stayed on in the house, upping the number of
spinsters in the rooms. But everyone got an education-only the wastrels remained
illiterate.
When I met Manay Tin in '47, she had been the head of the family for a
month, the length of time that her sister had been dead. They did not share their
grief easily with newcomers. I remember feeling like an interloper, the silences that
arrived suddenly at the dining table when someone had just said something
awkward, how one by one, they melted away into the darkness of the kitchen or the
bedroom or the garden below, returning after half an hour, white-faced, thin-lipped
but dry-eyed. long time before anyone laughed in that house. It was the children
who did it. There were always so many of them underfoot, to be taught
reading. It was a tutored in arithmetic, drilled in good manners, and to be made to
realize, by precept and example, the meaning of duty as the three spinsters saw it.
My Manays lives were circumscribed by church, school, and home, but
Manay Tin added a fourth dimension by visiting her sister's grave twice a day.
Manay Tin was heavy set when I met her for the first time but there were several
pictures around the house to show how she had looked at 18, slender and soft-
mouthed-1 imagine she broke a few hearts. But that house in Guilid meant more
than shelter, it stood for duty, tradition, filial obligations, and one did not leave it
while one's parents lived. When the old folk died, there were still the countless
nieces and nephews; no suitor had been plucky enough to sweep them aside and
carry off one of my aunts. And so it went. The children left for the city, and twice a
month, bundles of vegetables, salted meat, and rice, wrapped as carefully as CARE
packages, were shipped by train to the city, and the money. too, never too much
since there was not too much, but whoever studied in the city could depend on
Manay T's 20 or 30 pesos at a time.
Each summer I went home to Ligao, there was always someone with brand-
new degree, who used to toddle beneath the tables, between the chairs, who was
now a nurse or a teacher. Implacably, she was held to her end of the bargain, and
the consequences of rebelling were terrifying the house in Guilid forever
inaccessible to her, an absolute ostracism, the Manays walking by like strangers. A
villa girl fell in love before graduation, she weighed the chances of her passion
against the tradition of the house, and invariably, the house won. The boy was
dispatched with some comfort, perhaps told to come back in five or eight years, the
fact that he had to court the niece all over again, court her, her aunts, and if he was
foolhardy enough to do so, he found his wooing compounded by Current crop of
children in the front porch.
The nephews got off more lightly. After a year or two of token support, they
were allowed to go, with no hard feelings, and they married women from Batangas
or Laguna and either went to their wives' provinces or brought the women back to
 town to live. Their first babies were brought around, to visit the aunts who spoiled
them with cuddling and too much candy. The system was harsher on the nieces.
The last time I was home, there were marriageable girls in the house, no great
beauties, but charming quiet-mannered girls. The younger one was going to be a
school nurse in a town nearby, but she would be home for the holidays. The
second had just had an engagement broken off and it did not look as if another
suitor was coming by quickly. She had been betrothed to this young man for more
than ten years but the aunts had not liked him, and he received his walking papers.
The latest news we got, he was buying a bridal bed for another girl. Gely took the
news calmly, but she and I talked in the old kitchen, beneath the swinging bulb.
She would not come right out and say that she had loved him deeply or that her
heart was broken-
would do her no good to admit either. "But," she said, wistful, "I thought," she
began again, "I thought-of running," and covered her mouth. I remembered her
from her childhood, a sweet-faced, rather skinny child annoying the per monkey in
the yard, coming home on weekends from a girls' academy in Legaspi bringing
into the house her laughter and her muddy shoes. If she grieved tonight, only her
large, luminous eyes showed it. She pushed 30 and in a few more years, she would
be a spinster herself. It was very likely that she would succeed Manay Tin as head
of the family, but that evening in the old kitchen, her mouth trembled a little, her
eyes shone with unshed tears. How many renunciations the women had to make for
that house in Guild! Yet it was a matriarchy and the young girls who now gave up
love would in time become unmarried matriarchs themselves, demanding the same
sacrifice of later flocks of nieces. But no one turned hard and bitter: all in that
house were women to the last, fussing over shoes and clothes and jewelry. They set
a festive table each year, with guests coming from Sorsogon and Naga, and
everything went as well as if the men had planned it. When a storm was up, a
brother or nephew might be sent for to tie the trees down and lash the windows, but
otherwise, the women ran the show, worrying about the crops, buying up
mortgages, making all their devotion to the Virgin of Peñafrancia.
"When you come again," Manay Tin likes to say, "the house may not be
here." But each year that I manage to make it to Ligao to turn around the corner in
Guilid where I can see the kakawati fence, the roof, and the walls rise brown and
sturdy as ever. As surely as the sun rises and sets in Ligao, Manay Tin will wait for
me at the door, telling me which flowers I might pick in the garden so I can my
dead father and thus begin my visit properly.