Don Vicente: Two Novels

CHAPTER 1

This is a journey to the past — a hazardous trek through byways dim and forgotten — forgotten because that is how I choose to regard many things about this past. In moments of great lucidity, I see again people who — though they may no longer be around — are ever present still; I can almost hear their voices and reach out to touch them — my friends, cousins, uncles and aunts, and most of all, Father.

My doctor says it is good that I should remember, for in memory is my salvation. I should say, my curse. This, then, is a recollection as well, of sounds and smells, and if the telling is at times sketchy, it is because there are things I do not want to dwell upon — things that rile and disturb because they lash at me and crucify me in my weakness, in my knowledge of what was. So it was — as Father has said again and again — that the boy became a man.

I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this quite frequently; I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be, and it is this commuting, at lightning speed, at the oddest hours, that has done havoc to me. My doctor flings at me clichés like “alienation,” “guilt feelings,” and all the urban jargon that has cluttered and at the same time compartmentalized our genteel, middle-class mores, but what ails me are not these. I can understand fully my longing to go back, to “return to the womb”—even the death wish that hounds me when I find it so difficult and enervating to rationalize a middle-aged life that has been built on a rubble of compromise and procrastination. It is this commuting, the tension and knowledge of its permanence, its rampage upon my consciousness, that must be borne, suffered, and vanquished, if I am to survive in this arid plateau called living.

At times it can be unbearable, and neither pills nor this writing can calm my mind; but then, I must go on — that is what the arteries and the gonads are for — so I hie back to this past wherefrom I can draw sustenance and the ability to see more clearly how it was and why it is.

I was born and I grew up in a small town — any town. I suppose that from the very beginning, I have always been thus — a stranger to Rosales, even to the people who knew me — relatives, friends, tenants, and all those fettered beings who had to serve Father as he, too, had to serve someone bigger than himself. A stranger because that is how I feel now; the years have really numbed a host of memories — dew-washed mornings, the tolling of church bells, the precision and color of my own language.

Sometimes, when I go north to Baguio to recuperate, I stop by Rosales; it cannot be missed, for Carmen — perhaps the town’s biggest barrio — sits at the crossroad before the long bridge that spans the Agno; turn right, through Tomana and its makeshift houses, along what is now an asphalted road, and drive on till a thin line of decrepit houses forms by the road. They are roofed with nipa and walled with buri leaves; then the houses multiply — wooden frames with rusting tin roofs, the marketplace, the main street and its stores. I sometimes stop here, walk the familiar streets — how narrow, how weed-choked they are. I pass the creek where I swam, and its banks are littered with garbage. The old cement schoolhouse still stands — how shabby it looks, surrounded by scraggly acacia. I go past broken-down bamboo fences, meet people who sometimes smile and greet me but move on. Many of them I do not recognize, but I know those faces and the stolid endurance imprinted in them.

My steps lead to the middle of the town, and there, by the side of the road, the balete tree stands — tall, leafy, majestic, and as huge as it has always been. Our house, at one end of the wide yard, is no longer there; it was dismantled long ago, shortly after Father’s death, and so was the old brick wall. But the balete tree will perhaps be there for always. There are very few trees of this kind in this part of the province. It has taken decades, perhaps a century, for it to reach this spread and height, taller than the church, than any building in the town — its trunk so huge and veined with vines that six men with their hands joined could not embrace it.

All my life, it has always been to me what Father said it was meant to be — a shade. It was this to countless farmers who came to our yard with their bull carts loaded with grain, or with their problems that only Father could solve — debts that had not been paid and debts that were to be incurred because somebody was dying, somebody was getting married, somebody was born. It was shade from the sun and also from the rain when they who had come to ask Father’s favor would get wet under its canopy rather than presume to enter the house.

No one could really say who planted the tree; it seemed ageless like the creek that courses through the town. Father’s grandfather had told him he had seen it already crowned with fireflies at night, and though Father did not believe him, he respected the feelings of people, they who believe that this giant tree was endowed with a talisman, that it was more than a tree — it was a guardian over the land and our lives, immemorial like our griefs.

In time, therefore, when the harvest was good, there would be offerings at its base, rice cakes in tin plates, embedded with hard-boiled eggs and hand-rolled cigars between the big roots that cascaded down the trunk and looped into the earth. There were offerings, too, when someone got sick, for the farmers did not consult the town doctor — they relied first on the herbolario and sacristan, who recited Latin phrases and plastered the forehead and other afflicted parts of the body with nameless leaves, and then they brought their gifts to the balete tree and, in solemn tones, invoked the spirits—“Come now and accept this humble token of our respect — and please make our dear and loved one well again …”

It had provided shade for politicians, for during election time meetings were held beneath it. In the light of kerosene lamps, the politicians would harangue whoever was there to listen, and they would shout their virtues and vilify their enemies. They would butcher a carabao or two, and with Father’s amen, they would mount wooden planks beneath the tree, spread banana leaves on them, then feed the electorate. Here, too, no less than Quezon had met with the provincial leaders at the behest of Don Vicente, the wealthiest landlord in our part of the country and the man for whom Father worked. And there was the photograph in the living room for all to see — the great man in his drill de hilo suit, Don Vicente — plump and smug beside him — and Father at Quezon’s right, looking frightened and stiff, and all around them the provincial great. Father had recounted it so often, how the train from Paniqui got in late and how a thousand waiting people had dispersed and Don Vicente would have been put to shame had not Father ridden in great haste out to Carmay and the other barrios, asking the people to return.

During the town fiesta — June 12 and 13—the feast day of San Antonio de Padua, it was shade again for the farmers who rested in the wide yard, unhitched their bull carts, and did their cooking there so that for two days they could watch the freak shows, the garish coronation night in the public market, and the comedia, in which brightly clothed farmers and their sons and daughters acted out and danced the ancient drama of the Christian and Moro wars.

Beyond the balete tree and the yard, down the incline of barren ground, is the river, marked on Tio Baldo’s maps as the Totonoguen Creek, but because its waters were always swift during the rainy season, I always called it a river. When the rains started in June, continuing all through the early days of the planting season, its waters would be deep and muddy brown. As the rains intensified, within a matter of hours after the first downpour, we could see it rise in a rage of whirlpools, and it would carry the flotsam of the Cordilleras where it had started — the gnarled and twisted roots and branches of trees. Men would line the banks and the wooden bridge, and with wire loops at the end of long poles they would ensnare these gifts of the mountain for firewood. There were times when the river would rise so high it would flood portions of the town and even the bodega, which at this time would be quite empty of grain, for almost everything would have been sold by then to Chan Hai. Once it even swept away the wooden bridge, and for weeks the village of Cabugawan was isolated. The floods delighted us, for then we could float our wooden fishes in the ditches.

As the rains subsided and the fields turned green, the mud settled and the river acquired a clear, green hue. It would no longer be swift; it flowed with a rhythm, broken by small ripples in the shallows. It was at this time that we bathed in it and dove to its depths to discover what secrets it held. Now, too, the women took their washing to the banks; they would squat before wide tin basins and whack at clothes with wooden paddles. Where the banks were even and stony or sandy, they laid the clothes to bleach, for now the sun came out not only to help the washerwomen but to ripen the grain. It was also at this time of the year that, once more, Father could go down the riverbank and follow it down, down and beyond to the village of Cabugawan, to a place everyone in town knew; he usually went down at dusk, perhaps because at this time few people would see him, and he did not have to smile at those he met or wave his hand in greeting, for they all knew that at the end of the trail was his secret place.

It was also at this time that Old David, who took care of the horses and the calesa, would go to the river with his fine mesh net and kerosene lamp, and before midnight he would be back with a basket of shrimp and silverfish.

By November, the river ceased to move. The smaller streams up in the Cordilleras would have dried, too, and now its sandy bed would be burned, and in between, where there were slivers of earth, thorny weeds and the hardy cogon would thrust out. The depths where we swam would now be shallow pools turned murky with moss that laced the river bottom. It is here where the mudfish and a few silverfish have sought final refuge from Old David’s net. Beyond the river that was now dead, the fields would be golden brown and ready for the scythe, and the banks and the narrow delta that could be planted on would be now laced with eggplant, tomato, and watermelon plots that are also ready for harvesting.

I know where the Totonoguen links up with the Andolan creek and how this new river joins the Agno, which never dries even in the years of drought. I have swum in the Agno itself, brought home from its sandy bottom the pieces of pine washed down from the mountains, and these we have splintered to use as kindling wood.

I left Rosales a long time ago; I was grieving then, but they told me I was lucky because I had no quarrel with anyone, that I had everything to look forward to, and that when it would be time for me to return, things would be so changed I would not recognize anything anymore.

Cousin Marcelo was particularly emphatic on that sad, memorable day; I had been away only a year then, and nothing, nothing had changed, and yet he said, “Did you notice that a change has come upon the town? Look at the faces of people — there’s hope there, in spite of everything. I tell you, you will forget what happened to your father, and more important, you will forget the past. Even now, people have forgotten that a year has passed and people died, not by ones and twos but by the hundreds. Think of it. You will remember only what is important.”

But what is important? I looked around me, at the wide, parched plaza, the shriveled people, the balete tree. All will be the same. I refused to believe that people changed merely because some holocaust had coursed through their lives. They will still know happiness as I had known it, they will still talk of pleasant hours as they have lived them. It is going to be this way with me.

“You will not be coming back until you’ve finished college then?” Cousin Marcelo asked.

He was past thirty, and he wore his hair unduly long at a time when it was not fashionable to do so. “I don’t know,” I told him. “I will return, perhaps, on the Day of the Dead, to visit them. And if I cannot come, you will look after them, won’t you?”

It was not necessary for me to have told him thus; he held my hand and pressed it. “Yes,” he said, trying to smile.

It did not take me long to pack, for I was leaving many things behind. Sepa, our cook, had found some of my old books and had brought them in; I picked out one — the Bible — and tucked it in with my clothes. There was still time to look around, to wander around the town, but there was nothing for me to see, no one to visit. I gazed around my room; the hardwood narra floor shone from constant polishing, sometimes with banana leaves, sometimes with coconut meat after the milk had been squeezed. My mementoes were everywhere — the air rifle Cousin Marcelo bought for me, the stuffed squirrel Tio Benito brought home from America. The photographs on the wall were starting to brown — me in a white sailor suit when I had my First Communion, my Cousin Pedring and Clarissa when they were married. And there was a big one — dusty yellow with years although all the faces were still very clear as if the picture had been taken only yesterday but it was years ago when we were mourning Grandfather’s death. Indeed, here was the entire clan — my relatives, uncles and aunts, the servants, too, and the old, faithful people who had served our household.

I remembered the crowd in the yard, the long table under the balete tree laden with pancit, dinardaraan, and basi for all the servants and tenants who had come to pay their respects to Grandfather’s memory.

In Rosales as in many other Ilokano towns of northern and central Luzon, the ninth day of the burial of the dead is celebrated with dining and drinking, depending on the finances of the bereaved family. We call the feast the pasiam—meaning “for the ninth.” On this day, those who are not directly related to the deceased may stop wearing the black clothes of mourning, but not the direct descendants — the children and grandchildren.

A host of relatives had descended upon us, cousins to the third degree whom I’d never seen before, aunts and uncles from Manila, and grown-up nephews and nieces who called me Tio with all the respect that the name demands although I still wore short pants. They crowded the house and spilled out into the yard, and some of the menfolk and the entourage of servants had to sleep in the storehouse, where the grain and the corn in jute sacks were piled high. During the last nine days that preceded the pasiam, every evening at seven a novena was held in the house. Tomas, the old acolyte, had presided over this, singing in a loud, cracked voice “Ora pro nobis” after each of the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. Although the neighbors and the servants prayed with us, we barely filled a corner of the hall. But on the pasiam, it was the parish priest himself, Padre Andong, who led the prayers and Tomas — past sixty and a little hard of hearing — bungled as usual his answers as acolyte. The living room could hardly hold all the members of the clan and the servants, and most of the neighbors had to pray in the adjoining room and in the azotea.

After Padre Andong had sprinkled holy water on the assemblage, our relatives who were not related directly to Grandfather took off their black mourning clothes, but we who were direct descendants still wore black bands on our sleeves or wore black for another year, after which the period of mourning would end.

At around ten in the morning, the prayers concluded, someone in the yard ignited a rocket, which swished up and exploded — the signal for the festivities to begin, for the gin and the basi to flow; it would need another minor calamity for the clan to gather, and for this occasion the town photographer was on hand. His camera, a bulky contraption, staggered him when he carried it up the stairs and posed us all at one end of the hall. “It is not bright,” he complained after he had peeped out of his red velvet shroud, so he poured some powder on a rack, told us to stand still, and at the appropriate signal sent an orange flame spurting up. For some time the smoke and the acrid odor filled the hall. It was then that Father said he would like a bigger picture, which would show part of the house, so we broke up, the cameraman bundling his huge camera again, and filed after him in one burbling procession down the stairs into the yard. There was much laughter and joking as he lined us up on one of the benches before the eating table, the morning sun blazing on our faces.

Looking about him, a bit uncomfortable perhaps in his close-necked alpaca suit, Tio Doro said aloud above the sonorous talk: “We are such a big family, why don’t we have a coat of arms like the great families during the Spanish times?”

Cousin Andring, the perennial jester, shouted: “That’s an excellent idea, Tio. I suggest that our coat of arms shows a demijohn of basi, which shall symbolize our hardiness and, of course, our pleasant disposition.”

In spite of his mother’s angry glare, Cousin Andring was unruffled, and his remark was greeted with prolonged laughter. “And we will have Tio Marcelo do the design, too,” he continued.

My relatives must have considered his second joke in bad taste, for now most of them scowled. It was not difficult to understand their reaction; Cousin Marcelo, though he was pleasant and reliable to some extent, had long been regarded as “the problem” in the family because they considered him unstable. He was the only one who greeted the reference to him with laughter.

Tio Doro was alive with ideas. “We should have someone chronicle our lives, our successes and failures.”

“Mostly the failures — particularly when there is too much gin,” Cousin Andring remarked, happy again.

Tio Doro turned around to look at his relatives, almost all of us still in identical black. Then his eyes rested on me.

“Espiridion,” he called to Father, who sat on the bench behind me. “That’s the job for your boy — he may grow up to be a writer and give us some permanence.”

The blood rushed to my head, and I glowed all over. Behind me, Father said happily, “You can depend on him to do that.”

The photographer shouted that he was ready, and everyone preened. Almost everyone. I saw them then in the shade of the balete tree — the servants, Old David, Sepa, Angel, Tio Baldo — all of them watching us and seeming left out. I turned to Father, who was straightening the creases of his white alpaca suit. “Father, couldn’t we have Sepa and all the others with us in the picture?”

He frowned at me.

“Just one,” I pleaded.

“All right,” he said, still frowning, then he called out to them to stand on the low benches in our rear. They hastened to their places, smiling.

Now the picture is before me. Where are they now, these familiar faces? Tio Baldo, Ludovico, and, perhaps, Angel were already dead. Others have left for places unknown — perhaps to Mindanao and the promise of new lands, perhaps to the labyrinths of Tondo and Santa Cruz, where they would work as drivers and house servants, in places where there will be little light and they, too, will be among strangers just as I am now in this blighted town. I knew this from the very beginning — that oil and water could not mix, just as Teresita had told me once.

I am also my father’s son.

CHAPTER 2

All who served us used to tell me that I was born under a dark cloud not so much because my mother died giving birth to me, but because I never saw her. She was, they said with candor and reverence, the most beautiful woman they ever saw, and whenever they would start talking about her who nourished me in her womb, I listened attentively. I would be vastly proud and at the same time feel this sense of loss and futility, and foolishly I would wish to see her even though she be but a pallid ghost.

But I never did, although she lingered in every nook of the house, among the old iron pedestals and the tarnished mirrors, in the garden she once tended, and most of all in the big and troubled room that she had shared with Father. Her portrait there, by Cousin Marcelo, the servants told me, was lifelike. I often stood before it and marveled, for in the light that came in a flood when the sash shutters were open, I could almost feel her long hair, her benign smile upon me, her oval face, her dark eyes. Her expression exuded tenderness, patience, and that virtue of compassion, of forgiveness for even the deepest hurt such as that which Father could inflict.

The painting hung before Father’s writing desk — an old narra masterpiece with a cover that slid down. Cousin Marcelo knew how to capture every nuance in a person’s face, but more than this, he had also rendered in paint my mother’s luminous skin, the very flutter of her eyelashes.

Seeing me there gazing at the picture once, Sepa said: “Don’t you ever think she was that homely; she was much prettier than that — and her hair, her beautiful hair!” Then she called me to the kitchen, and among her shining pots and pans, she told of those times when she helped my mother wash her hair with lye from straw ash, treat it with coconut oil when it was dry, and comb it slowly as if she were combing fragile threads of gold.

Sepa was past fifty and stout like a pampered sow. Like Old David, who looked after the horses, she could not read or write. She used those black, thick slippers called cochos, and she always wore the traditional Ilokano handwoven skirt and rough cotton blouse. She had served the family all her life, and she spoke to Father and me with an intimacy none of the other help ventured to imitate. “If your mother were here now — if she were only here now.”

I remember my first visit to my mother’s grave on a windy October afternoon a few days before All Saints’ Day. I was five or six years old. I was chasing dragonflies in the yard under the watchful eyes of one of the maids when Old David scooped me up in his arms and took me to the house, where Sepa gave me a good scrubbing. She dressed me in my sailor suit, and when I was ready, Father emerged from his room in a white drill suit looking as if he was going to an important feast, for his hair was neatly combed and his robust cheeks shone.

Near the family altar in the sala he picked up a bouquet of roses wrapped in palm leaves. They came from my mother’s rose garden, which Father now tended. Then, taking my hand, he led me down to the yard, where Old David was waiting for us in the calesa. The drive to the cemetery was pleasant; the afternoon was mild, and the smell of grass, the good earth, and the fields yellow with grain filled the air. The wind whistled in the bamboo groves by the side of the road, and Old David sang snatches of his favorite Ilokano song, “If You Still Doubt.”

Father was silent all the way, his eyes at the distance. The road narrowed and was now devoid of gravel; rutted in the rainy season, it was now drying up, the deep lines drawn by bull carts and sleds hardening into neat furrows. We reached the cemetery, its low stone wall shrouded by vagabond cadena de amor. The earth was carpeted in amorseco weeds, and in the empty spaces stood leafless sineguelas trees. The cemetery was busy with people painting the crosses and the slabs with white lime. At the dead end Old David stopped, jumped down, and helped us off.

We walked down a gravel path bordered with rosal, bloomless now till next June, when it would sprout white, scented flowers, to the small chapel at the center of the cemetery. It was already quite late in the afternoon, and the sun was soft on the skin. The vestiges of work were everywhere — the freshly cut grass and the splashes of whitewash on the picket fences and on the figures of plump baby angels that adorned the tombs.

Father held my hand and guided me through the narrow passageways between the tombs. We reached a lot fenced off from the rest by a low iron grill, and in its center was a narrow slab of black marble, bordered with freshly trimmed San Francisco. Father let go of my hand. He removed the palm wrap of the bouquet and placed it at the foot of the slab, then, as if his legs were suddenly knocked away from under him, he fell on his knees on the grass and I, too, compelled by some magic force, knelt beside him. When he spoke, his voice was hollow and sounded far away. “Nena, I’ve brought your son to you now that he is old enough …”

I glanced at Father in the thickening dusk; his hair was tousled by the wind, his white unbuttoned coat flapped about him, and tears streamed down his cheeks.

It was the first time I saw him cry, and I realized how much he must have loved — and still loved — her who was no more.

Ours was an old house with a steep, galvanized-iron roof grown rusty red over the years. It had unpainted wooden siding and sash windows with balustrades that could be flung open to let the breeze in when the days were hot. The ground floor was red tile, and its walls were red brick, scarred in places but whitewashed. The flooring was solid mahogany — long planks two inches thick and a foot wide — laid side by side without a single nail piercing them. When the servants scrubbed the floor, the fine grain of the wood shone.

The furniture was just as old; though some pieces were lost during the Japanese occupation, most of the bigger ones were still with us: the mirrored lockers, the steel pedestals, the marble-topped tables.

A few paintings hung in the living room — just pretty pictures done by my Cousin Marcelo. One that should not have been there was the picture of Don Vicente. The modern frame, a media cuerpo, shows Don Vicente, massive and impregnable, wearing a Panama hat, his corpulent chest almost breaking out from his tight-fitting, collarless suit. The picture hung on the wall by the big clock as a symbol, I think, of the vast authority the rich man wielded over us, particularly Father.

I could not understand then why Father worked for Don Vicente. We had enough to get by, and Father had his own lands to look after. Maybe, as Cousin Marcelo said, he did not have enough courage to leave Don Vicente, or maybe Father knew that if he ceased being close to the Great Man, there would be a hundred fawning and greedy men who would be only too glad to take on his job. This could be the reason, but I don’t think it was; Father took the job because Don Vicente trusted him and, more than that, it gave Father a sense of power such as he would never have known if he tended no more than the land and properties under his name. Once I heard him say to a tenant, “Don’t you know that I can drive you all away from your homes today, right now, if I wanted to? Where will you live? Don Vicente’s word is law, and I am that law!”

But knowing Father, his bluster seldom meant anything, for he was, I always like to believe, just and fair.

The living room, through a door at the right, led to the dining room and the kitchen, which were in a separate structure roofed with clay tile upon which weeds sprouted. At the left of the kitchen, which was Sepa’s domain, was a stone azotea that stretched to the wing of the house including the living room. On warm evenings, when the moon bloomed over the town, it was Father’s haunt and mine.

The wide yard — all the way up to the storehouse roofed and walled with galvanized-iron sheets, too — was not grassy like the plaza. The earth was bare and packed tight and clean with carabao dung but for the green patch of garden planted with roses, azucenas, and other flowering plants. Guava trees — their slender branches seldom laden with fruit — stood in the yard, and to their trunks the carabaos of the tenants were often tethered when they came during the harvest season with their bull carts. A woodshed and a stable stood near the storehouse. In all three buildings, big rodents lived, burrowing under the piles of chopped acacia boughs or in the sacks of grain.

One of the pleasant pastimes I used to enjoy as a child was to discover the alien things in the crannies of our home. I used to climb to the attic, endure the sun as it lashed on the iron roof. There, among the dust of years, I poked at old boxes that stored strange shapes and wanton objects. The place I enjoyed best, however, was Father’s room. It adjoined mine, but I seldom had freedom in it except when he was in the field during the planting and harvesting seasons looking after the hacendero’s tenants under his care as encargado and also after our own. Then I would sneak into the room, open his drawers and trunks. There was one beside his dresser that fascinated me most, because it was made of handsome and polished Chinese rosewood embedded with ivory carved into birds and bamboo. It was always locked, and though I had seen him open the other trunks, I never saw him touch this one. I heard him riding down from the stable to the street one Sunday morning, and after he had galloped toward the creek, I was in his room before the rosewood trunk. I lifted the lid, and this time, to my surprise, it was open. The biting scent of naphthalene balls assailed my nostrils. There before me, filled to the brim, were women’s things. I knew at once I had opened my mother’s wardrobe.

I picked up a garment and held it in the light — a bright silk shawl embroidered with red roses and edged with lace. I placed it back, then lifted a thick wad of clothes, and underneath, close to the bottom of the trunk, was a small wooden box with two small ivory angels on its lacquered cover. I opened it and found a heap of letters and dried petals of what looked like a big red rose. The box smelled of perfume, and in a moment the heavy and wonderful scent pervaded the room. It was then that Martina, one of the new maids, drifted by the open door and for a moment stood there, watching me. I opened one of the letters. It was in fine, feminine script, and addressed to Father. I could not read all of it; at the end, “Always — Nena.” I felt as if I was trespassing into a secret realm, where I belonged but was not, at the moment, allowed in. Trembling, I put the letters back and gently placed the box under the pile of clothes.

Her pert brown face screwed up, Martina asked, “What is that?” She did not dare venture into Father’s room.

“Letters,” I said. “My mother’s letters to my father.”

“Those are her clothes?”

I nodded.

“They look beautiful,” she said, still standing at the door. “Why don’t you try one?”

“I am a man,” I said, frowning at her.

“Go on,” she said. “I just want to see how women’s clothes looked years ago. I won’t tell anyone.”

In another moment, I was flailing my arms and thrashing as I put on a blue silk dress.

It did not fit, of course; it hung loose, well below my feet, and seeing me attired thus, Martina let go a delighted squeal. I laughed with her and was, in fact, enjoying myself so much I did not realize that Father had returned, was at the door in his riding breeches, the whip in his hand. Martina must have seen him approach, for she had disappeared.

Although his countenance was severe, Father did not whip me; in fact, there was more sadness in his eyes than anger. “Never again,” he said softly but sternly. “Never again shall I see you open this trunk.”

And never again did I do it. After Father died I kept the trunk, and it has always been closed as he had willed it; with the years its locks rusted, and there came a time when the key no longer worked and it would take a crowbar and a sturdy hand to open it — but that hand would not be mine.

CHAPTER 3

Next to December and its holidays, June was the most welcome month in our town. The floodgates of heaven were finally opened, the rains started, and the rice planting began. The fields that were brown began to stir with the emerald of new grass. Grasshoppers were on the wing, and the frogs came alive. But more than these, June was the time when we celebrated our town fiesta. A full month before the festivities, they had already started coming, the feria people who erected tin sheds near the church, in which they sold cheap dolls with plump cheeks and bright eyes, and ran shooting galleries and stalls for other forms of gambling.

It was during this time, too, that the comedia players — the farmers and their children — from Carmay came and stayed in the bodega, where they practiced their prancing and their lines before they acted them out on the stage in the plaza. As fiesta patron, Father provided for their meals, their mirror-spangled clothes, the papier-mâché helmets and wooden swords, as well as the five-piece band that accompanied their acting.

The year I was twelve, two weeks before the fiesta, a circus came. Three big trucks immediately transformed the plaza into a mud puddle as they manueuvered into position. I did not know anyone from the circus except a girl about my age; she walked the tightrope — so well, up there in the heights, she could have been walking on even ground. Her name was Hilda.

She and I did not have much in common, but during the two weeks that she was in Rosales, we became friends. I lived in a big house with old people. The young sons of Father’s tenants acted ill at ease in my presence, but Hilda did not. She lived in a tent — that was the home she knew — with old people, too, who did not care about what went on inside young minds, what made them want to go swimming even in dirty creeks the whole day, or what drove them, naked, splashing and singing in the rain.

I should not have told Hilda about my going to Grandfather’s house, but we got to talking about where we would like to be most; she had come that morning as usual to draw water from our artesian well, and I was waiting for her there. She had a ready answer for me: “I would like to be up there, feeling the height, knowing that people are looking at you — tensely, waiting for you to fall.”

She said she started walking the tightrope when she was five years old along with her parents, who were trapeze artists. She did not sound boastful at all. At six, when she should have been in school, she was already earning, starring in the circus act.

I described to her what Carmay was, and I did not exaggerate. I told her about the buri palms, how in the dry season they were tapped and the sap was boiled in huge iron vats into sugar or drunk sweet and cool and soothing in the sweaty afternoons. Cornfields laced Carmay, and water lilies decked its irrigation ditches in flaming violet. Beyond the village was the Agno, swift and murky during the wet season, and in its wide delta, corn and watermelons grew. In Grandfather’s yard were fruit trees — santol, duhat, and orange — all of which I climbed. I also often went with the men to the river to watch them fish till their bamboo baskets were full. And now that the rains had come, the banabas lining the paths were flowering. It is a heavenly place, Carmay!

“I must go with you,” Hilda said.

During the first week of June, the vacant lot beyond the house, which was often regarded as an extension of the plaza — which it was not — was transformed into a field of green amorseco weeds that had started to flower. Before Father built the storehouse behind the house, his tenants used to fill the place with their loaded bull carts while waiting for Chan Hai, the Chinese merchant who came for the grain with his battered truck and a huge weighing machine. But every time there was an athletic competition of the grade schools in the district, the town mayor always asked Father’s permission to use the place in addition to the plaza. Father did not ask for any rent, and perhaps in recognition of his charity, his name was always prominently included in the programs.

The balloting for the fiesta queen was not yet over — it was usually held two weeks before the fiesta — when the circus came. The trucks — their radiators spewing steam, their tops brimming with poles, trunks, and people — rumbled past the house, drawing the servants from their chores to the windows. They proceeded to the plaza and to Father’s vacant lot and started to unload.

Father saw the crates spilled on the grass, the wooden stakes piled high, the lot now churned by heavy tires. Shaking his head, he went on with his figures. In a while, three policemen from the nearby municipio approached the visitors, who had already started driving stakes on Father’s land. They went into a huddle and finally broke up, the policemen leading the way to our house.

Ever correct and polite, Father met them in the hall where they piled in with their muddy shoes and flopped on the rattan sofas with their brash city ways. From their ranks, a well-built man with a balding top came forward; his tone was apologetic, and he was saying how sorry he was that they had used Father’s land without realizing it was not part of the town plaza. A girl tugged at his hand continually, and when he could not ignore her anymore, he said, “This is my daughter. She walks the tightwire.” Another tug. “And she is the star of the show.”

She was not even ten, I think; she certainly was no taller than I. She preened her faded overalls and grinned exuberantly, her big eyes shining, then she stepped back a little and executed a neat curtsy. Everyone broke into laughter, even Father, then she walked away from the assembly. I followed her to the middle of the hall near the picture of Father’s grandfather; from it her gaze turned to the chandelier in the rose-colored ceiling as it tinkled to a slight breeze, then she walked to the grandfather clock by the foot of the stairs, and finally, catching a glimpse of me watching her, she came to me and asked if I lived in the house.

I nodded.

“It looks so big,” she said, scowling. She was on the verge of another question, but the circus people seemed to have obtained Father’s permission, for they started for the stairs, her father still profuse with thanks. Hilda joined them.

“Please come when we start,” her father said at the top of the stairs. “We have a good program, and it is known through all of the province. There will be people from as far as Lingayen, Dagupan, and, of course, from Urdaneta.”

Father nodded, then went back to his seat in the sala.

“It is not much of a circus,” he told me afterward. It was dusk, and I had lingered by the window watching the men work, listening to the rhythmic pounding of their sledgehammers on the wooden stakes. A stage took shape, and a wire fence, and within the enclosure they rolled out a mound of canvas that occupied one whole truck. Amid shouts and creaking pulleys, they hoisted the giant tent.

“When you go to the city,” Father continued, “you will see a real circus at the carnival. This is just a big sideshow, although it is quite famous. A circus has wild animals, maybe five elephants, lions, and tigers. And look at them — they have only two elephants.”

“Father said yours is not a real circus,” I told Hilda the next morning. She had come to the backyard where the artesian well was, as did the other members of the troupe before her. They had also parked some of the trailers near our bodega, and in the wide threshold of the building they had set up some of their cots. “A real circus,” I went on reciting what Father had said, “has lions and tigers.”

“It is a real circus,” Hilda retorted. She put down her battered pail, braced herself before the pump, and glared at me. I did not move from the bottom rung of the stone stairs that led to the azotea. For a while, it seemed that she would shout at me or do something rash, but she lowered her pail and started to pump.

“There was a time,” she said, throwing angry glances at me, “we had two lions and two tigers. Three elephants, tall and strong as trucks.”

“They are not here now,” I said.

“No,” she said, pumping furiously. “The trainer was killed by the tigers. They were all sold to the zoo — but not the elephants because they are easy to take care of. And they work — but even without them ours is still a real circus. Come with me.” Her pail was full. I turned apprehensively to the house to see if anyone was watching. Sensing my reluctance, she taunted, “Don’t be a sissy.”

I helped her with the bucket, spilling the water on our legs as we hurried behind the house and out to the plaza until we were behind the tent. The previous night, rain had fallen, and now the morning was polished to a sheen. The tent was a dull white hump fringed by acacias. In its cool shadow, on planks that were laid side by side, the menfolk rested. The women were washing and cooking, and when they saw me, they smiled in recognition. Hilda was holding my hand, and as we entered the wide awning, her grip tightened. “Wait here,” she said, and darted out. It was warm inside the tent. Tufts of grass rose above the narrow slits between the boards that were laid in the middle for a stage. Around it, on the sides, were boards fastened together, tier upon tier. From the top of the tent, which now looked patched up from within, bits of sun stole in and lay in bright silver puddles on the ground. The two poles crowned by a blue halo of the June sky soared up, and near the halos were swings and ropes that stretched from one pole to the other.

Hilda returned wearing red tights. Her feet were encased in thin-soled leather shoes, and she trotted to one of the poles where the end of a rope ladder dangled. She bade me follow her as she started the climb, nimbly scaling each swaying rung. It was warmer up on the precarious perch near the top, but Hilda did not seem to care. She smiled when she turned and saw me holding tightly to the pole, not venturing as high as she had climbed. She put one foot forward on the high wire that extended out into space — and there was no net beneath her. I called at her to stop, but she answered with a resonant laugh. As she lifted each foot in her slow progress, the wire swayed. Balancing on her right foot, she raised her hands. The wire ominously zagged, and by then, I thought that even the poles were swaying. I turned away, unable to look.

When I looked again at her urging, the swaying had ceased. Hilda was not on the wire anymore; she was perched safe and smiling on the small platform near the other pole.

I was weak and trembling when I got down. Hilda waited for me at the entrance and walked cheerfully with me to the outside, where the sunlight was waiting.

Hilda’s father dropped by the house again the next afternoon, reiterating his invitation. But Father, always enigmatic and aloof, merely nodded and said he would try.

The plaza was in a gala mood that night; the small town band whose services the circus had secured started tooting around the town, even before dusk, carrying placards about Hilda’s death-defying act and the world’s strongest man pitting his strength against an elephant. After a hurried supper, I asked Father if I could go. He called Tio Baldo — I don’t know why I called him Tio when he was really just one of the help; perhaps it was because Father had considered him bright enough to be patron to him; perhaps because of all those who helped in the house, it was only he who attended to my school problems. He was to accompany me with no less than the circus manager, so that I would be given the best seat that night.

The plaza was illuminated by carbide lamps of dice tables and other enticements. Before the makeshift stage that was actually part of a truck with the sides removed, a big electric bulb blazed, drawing many moths, showing the painted faces, the baggy pants of the circus clown, and the barker, urging the crowd to hurry, hurry — the seats were being filled. Some members of the troupe were seated at one end of the stage, and I recognized Hilda at once in the same red tights she had worn that morning, but her face was now thick with paint. She did not recognize me in the crowd as she sat there in the center, basking in her glory while the barker pointed to her and shouted her virtues, her mockery of death. The band stopped playing and went inside the tent, followed by the troupe; the show was about to begin.

Tio Baldo and I had the best seats, beside the mayor and his wife, at the rim of the circular stage. Although outside it was cool, within the tent it was warm, and the smells of perspiration and tobacco smoke were all around us. I did not mind this so much, for soon the clown came out, Hilda’s father recognizable even in his baggy pants and with a pillow tied to his girth; he and the other clowns went through their paces while the kids up on the tiers squealed at their pratfalls. A magician enthralled us as he made balls vanish, drew doves out of a black hat, put a woman to sleep, then proceeded to saw her in two. Next, the strongest man in the world — a hefty six-footer with bulging biceps — bent a steel rod, let a truck run him over slowly, and, as a finale, pushed an elephant toward the other end of the stage. Then the trapeze artists, and finally, Hilda.

Now the lights blinked out except for one spotlight atop a tall tripod. In the middle of the stage, in that circle of white, she seemed so tiny and fragile. While the barker described what she would do, she did somersaults, splits, and back bends; it was as if she were made of rubber. She could put her head down between her feet and contort into every imaginable shape. She did several curtsies, turning around to face the audience, then she trotted to the pole and went up, up to her perch, the spotlight never leaving her. The band ceased playing, only the snare drum rumbled, and now an apprehensive murmur coursed through the audience. The beat of the snare drum quickened as she rose from the narrow platform; she stepped onto the high taut wire on her dainty feet, tested it like a frightened child learning how to walk. One shaky step forward, then a short, ominous pause. Balancing herself, she repeated the same staggering process until — or almost until — she got to the center, for now the wire had started to sway, and from the audience exploded one despairing cry as she slipped and then toppled.

But Hilda did not fall. Below the first wire was another; she had jumped into a dance, each step sure and steady this time, below her no net at all. When she had finished, the applause was deafening.

Hilda was in the yard again the following morning and, of course, in the succeeding mornings with the same battered pail. She worked like the others and did not seem to mind. She did not have much to say when I asked about the different towns she had visited, but her face always brightened as she recounted each.

“I will go to the city someday,” I told her a week later when she said she liked performing best in Manila, for she did not have to work so hard helping in the kitchen. Her chores for the day were over, and we were idling in the bodega, which was now, save for a few sacks of seed rice, almost empty.

“I will study there,” I said, and she told me, too, how she had taken snatches of schooling during the rainy season; Rosales, as a matter of fact, was their last performance for the season, for the circus closed when the rains came, and they started on the road again in November.

Within the week, more sideshows came to town and decked the main street with their gaudy fronts and raucous shooting galleries. The people flocked to them — children wide-eyed and amazed at the freaks, the wild man from Borneo who ate live animals, the cobra woman, half snake, half human — but it was really the circus that attracted people, for this was the first time it traveled to our part of the country. The two elephants alone, feeding on sugarcane and mountains of grass — drew crowds from other towns and the distant villages. Two weeks before the actual fiesta, the streets were rigged up with varicolored bulbs and from all the houses stretched bunting of brightly colored Japanese paper. Above every street corner soared a bamboo arch, festooned with woven palm flowers, proclaiming Her Majesty, the Queen, for whom the town market was decorated, and on one end a stage with a throne and across the white canvas, Her Majesty’s name and that of her two princesses — the annual handiwork of Cousin Marcelo.

The day before the feast of San Antonio de Padua, Hilda came as usual to the artesian well. I was in the yard, waiting for Old David to hitch the calesa; beside me was my air rifle and my canvas bag. Father had expected a few guests to arrive in the afternoon for the fiesta; as a matter of fact, some of the tenants had already appropriated places under the balete tree and others were camped inside the bodega. We needed some chicken and fresh vegetables, perhaps fruits from the farm. We fell to talking again about Carmay, and when the calesa was ready, Hilda cast her pail aside and said firmly, “Take me with you.”

“But your folks might look for you,” I tried to dissuade her.

“They won’t,” she replied. “They do that only if they don’t see me on the high wire. I haven’t been to any farm, really. You know, I have ridden two elephants in the parade, but I have not ridden any carabao yet.”

All argument was useless. She clambered up the calesa after me, and we drove out. From the asphalted main street we veered to the left, to the graveled provincial road and Carmay three kilometers away. The calesa jerked over the ruts, but Hilda did not mind. Beyond the town, Father’s fields lay green and vast, extending to the banks of the Agno. Some of these he had bought from Don Vicente, whose lands were in the opposite end of the town; some were cleared by his grandfather, who had come with the first settlers from the Ilocos; some he had taken bit by bit from farmers who owed him money and could not pay. The sun punctuated every tree, the buri palms, the mounds that dotted the fields and on whose crests tall grass waved with each breath of wind.

We reached Carmay, a neat huddle of farmhouses beside a creek. She crinkled her nose and said it was not much — just like all the other villages in this part of the country. We dipped down the provincial road into a narrow path and got off before the biggest house in the village, the only one roofed with tin. We found Grandfather knitting fishnets by the stairs. In his old age, he should not have been living alone, but he preferred the Carmay, where he was born and where he grew, where he worked and saved enough not only to buy out his other neighbors’ farms but also to send all his children to college, so that they would not be farmers like him.

I kissed his gnarled and wrinkled hand, then embraced him, smelling once again his tobacco. Old David told him what we had come for, and while our servant tended to his chores, Hilda and I went to the irrigation ditches, which had begun to fill. We romped in the newly stirring fields and chased grasshoppers. For lunch, Old David had brought hard-boiled eggs and broiled catfish; he then broiled a slice of dried carabao meat, tough as rubber, all of which we ate with our hands in Grandfather’s cluttered kitchen. After this, we went back to the cornfields and gathered a few ears, which we roasted over coals that Grandfather had kept alive for us in the shade of one of his mango trees. Under the tree, with the scent of June and the living world around us, we were shielded from the sun, which was shining on the rich brown earth, freshly plowed and shining still where the plowshares had ripped into it. I went to the furrow and picked up a clod. It was warm and moist.

Hilda was lying on the sled. I sat beside her and told her to raise the hem of her dress up to the navel. She turned to me, half-rising, and said angrily, “I will not do such a thing.”

I told her then, “I want you to belong to Carmay, to be free from the sickness of other earths. I will rub this on your stomach”—I held the clod before her eyes—“and just as Grandfather said, you will never get sick, not while you are here.”

She seemed apprehensive, but she smiled. Though she did not seem fully convinced about the efficacy of my magic, she finally raised her dress. “You are like an old man,” she said, shaking her head. “You believe in spirits.”

I did not speak. Her legs were white and clean, and her skin was smooth. I crushed the clod and let particles trickle on her skin. The grains fell on her navel and rolled down her sides. With my palm, I spread the clod on her belly, slowly, softly, and when this was done, she snapped her dress down and pinched my hand. “Foolish!” she said, laughing.

It was late afternoon when we headed for home. Shortly before dusk, rain fell in torrents and flooded the newly dug canals along the streets. When she saw the clouds darken, Hilda had hoped it would not rain so hard so that the tent entrance would not be muddy. She had asked me to go see her again, but I was tired, and besides, the program would not be changed till the morrow — on the first night of the fiesta — when there would be some variations.

I went to bed after a supper that we shared with Father’s talkative guests from Manila. The rain stopped, but soon there was a slight insistent patter on the roof again. Occasionally a streak of lightning knifed across the sky. I closed the sash shutters and went to sleep. The patter was still on the roof when I woke up and discerned weighted voices in the hall. They persisted, anxious and harried, not the soft sounds of a dream. I rose and walked to the door. The hall was ablaze, and even the big chandelier, which was used only on special occasions, was lighted. Beyond the balcony, however, the plaza was dark and quiet and the lights of the many vendors and dice tables were out.

I recognized at once the members of the troupe. Hilda’s father paced the floor, still wearing his baggy pants and multicolored coat, but the paint was erased from his face. Hilda’s mother was a forlorn figure near the sofa where most of them were gathered.

Catching a glimpse of Father, I went to him and asked what it was all about. He told me to go back to sleep, but I could see that he was greatly disturbed. “Who is it, Father?” I asked. He said it simply: “Hilda, the girl from the circus, the tightwire artist. She slipped.”

“Isn’t the doctor coming?” one of the women asked. She did not get any reply. The others slouched on the sofas, their faces tense with waiting, and soon they started mumbling. Hilda’s father told them to be quiet. He approached Father and said softly, “I hope you don’t mind the inconvenience we are causing you, but the plaza, with all those people, and the rain …”

Father dismissed him with a nod. Then I saw her. I went to the sofa where the older women were gathered about. Hilda lay there, pale and motionless, and in the corners of her mouth were little streams of red that had dried. As she opened her eyes, her mother bent over her, whispering, “My poor, poor darling …”

She was not listening; she closed her eyes again, and as she stirred, she moaned. “Don’t crowd around her,” Father said when they started hurrying to the sofa again. With the exception of her mother, they went back to their seats.

“Our star is no more,” Hilda’s mother wept bitterly, casting a beseeching look at Father, who turned away. “She always did it right — she could do it even with a blindfold on.”

Hilda opened her eyes again, and briefly our eyes locked. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and I bent low only to hear her say, “I hate you,” almost in a whisper. But her mother heard, and she cried, “You naughty girl!”

I wheeled and ran to my room. Father followed me there. I did not know what to do, what to say. “She came to Carmay with me this morning,” I said. “I did not want to bring her along, but she insisted—”

“I know,” Father said, sitting on my bed. “David told me.”

“I did not do anything,” I said.

Father nodded, then bade me go to sleep. Outside, the rain and the wind grew stronger. The leaves of the balete tree rustled, and there were sounds of people scurrying below the house seeking shelter in the wide sweep of the media agua. They would be drenched if they went under the balete tree; its cover would not be enough. Above the monotonous patter on the roof, the merry music of a brass band somewhere beyond the plaza drifted into the house, and the dusky magic of June clung like a wanton spell to my troubled mind.

CHAPTER 4

In another two days the fiesta was over, but the circus did not wait for the last rocket to be fired. The morning after the accident, it packed up, leaving the plaza looking sullen and desolate. The bamboo arches in the street corners and the paper buntings that were soaked and frayed were not dismantled till after a week, but when the circus left I was miserable. Not even the strong afternoon rains, which brought my friends out — racing in the streets and shrieking and splashing in the solid jets of water from the roofs — could lure me away from the sad, sad thought that bedeviled my mind.

My depression would have lasted much longer, but by the end of the month, another celebration came. After more than ten years in America, Tio Benito finally returned home.

Among our many relatives, only he could claim the distinction of having been to America. He went there in the 1920s at the age of eighteen when many Ilokanos were lured by the promise of high wages on the sugar plantations in Hawaii and in the orange orchards of California. There was also the dubious expectation of being able to go to bed with an Americana. It was the question often asked of Tio Benito when he settled down to talk with old friends and neighbors.

Grandfather had objected to his leaving, for it meant Tio Benito’s denying himself a college education, which his brothers and sisters had. But Tio Benito was bent on his adventure; he pilfered cavans of grain from the bodega over which he kept watch, sold them to the Chinese comprador, then scampered off to Manila and across the Pacific.

Grandfather was very angry, not so much at the minor thievery as at the fact that Tio Benito had gone without bidding him good-bye. But the old man was quick to forgive, particularly after Tio Benito’s letters started coming and with them an occasional dollar bill or a shipment of clothes that, alas, may have been all right for Alaska and Northern California but certainly not for Carmay.

But in his letters Tio Benito asked for money more often than he sent it. He got, of course, what he wanted, plus pleadings from all in the family that he hurry back to the land of his birth because Grandfather was becoming old, and there was need for him to look after his inheritance, for his brothers and sisters were too involved with their own.

Everything about Tio Benito was wonderful and done with style. But Tia Antonia, on the occasions that she visited us, always derided him for having gone wrong; she said he had become a “pagan.” She had an ally in Sepa, our cook, who believed in religion as convert Protestants devoutly do. Almost all of my relatives were a religious lot, though they were very democratic about their beliefs; they went to any church of their liking. It was almost a rule that hardly anyone stayed home Sunday mornings — all must go to church. I found this not too disturbing, for I was serving then as sacristan to Padre Andong, the Catholic priest — a chore I appreciated, as I always managed to swipe a few coins when I passed the collection plate on Sundays.

Tio Benito’s explanation for his “paganism” was pragmatic. “Look,” he would say. “What is the need for one to go to church or pray to God? He is everywhere. God knows that when something miserable has happened to you, you need help. Why go to church and make the preacher or the priest grow rich? God knows you are thankful for the things He has done for you. Besides, He isn’t like a young girl whom you must flatter every day with words so that His love for you won’t diminish. He isn’t like that because He is God. He is good. He knows that you like Him, and there is no need to be repetitive — mumbling prayers over and over, prayers said yesterday or a thousand years previous. He gets tired of that.”

Still Tia Antonia insisted that he did not even know how to make the sign of the cross. It was hard to believe that a man as old as he did not know that.

Father, however, recalled that Tio Benito was quite religious before he left for the United States; consequently, he explained his brother’s sanctimonious behavior as a result of American influence.

To this, Tio Benito retorted, “Don’t you dare say that the Americans have no religion, that they don’t know how to worship. Yes, they do worship — and it is the buck, the dollar, they revere. It is the end and the beginning — an American without money has nothing, not even God. And that is why America is strong — because it worships money. And look at all of you, worshipping something that cannot help you. Is God responsible for the droughts, the typhoons that destroy the crops?”

Tia Antonia looked at his recalcitrance in a slightly different manner: “America is rich and, therefore, licentious and without God. Look at the absence of modesty of its women.” And then she would go into a tirade against the magazines showing American girls in the briefest of bathing suits.

“And that is precisely what I like,” Tio Benito admitted to me one day when he was regaling me again with his stories about the United States.

“But surely, Tio,” I said, “there must be something in America that you did not like.” He was silent for a while, then, in quiet tones, he told me of days of hunger, how difficult it was to get a job because he was brown, how he was treated no different from the Chinese, and how he pitied the Negroes most. “They are not regarded as people,” he told me.

“But America is the land of equality, of the free—”

“Bullshit,” Tio Benito said, raising his voice.

I quoted at length from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which I had already memorized.

“It is the land of opportunity — that is right,” Tio Benito said. “If you are white, if you are Protestant, and you are Anglo-Saxon.”

“Meaning you cannot play the saxophone?”

He laughed and tousled my hair. “You are too young to be discussing religion with me,” he said. Then off again he went, this time to Carmay to be with Grandfather. But after being there for a month, the farm must have bored him, for he moved into the house again, this time sharing Cousin Marcelo’s room on the ground floor. He did not seem to have a care in the world. He had obviously saved some money to fool around with, and he continued his meanderings, holding court in the marketplace and at the town barbershop, and ready with the bottle even for the slightest acquaintance. Spending as he did, his savings soon petered out but not the heckling, particularly from Tia Antonia and from Sepa. His impending bankruptcy and the unrelenting nagging about his profligate ways must have done something, for one Sunday morning he decided to give God a chance.

To please Sepa, he went with her to the Protestant chapel. He played no favorite, for on the following Sundays he tried them all — the Catholic church, the Seventh-Day Adventists, even the Aglipayans. Not one of the denominations, however, appealed to him. After he had tried them all, he did not hide his loathing for “the stuffy crowdedness in the churches — even God would have been uncomfortable there. With all those many converts, they have no need for me. The priests talk in a language I cannot understand,” he said. He complained, too, of people with bad voices singing.

“What did you do in California on Sundays, Tio?” I asked.

“I had a good time,” he said, a grin breaking across his rotund, oily face.

“Did you play games? Cockfights?”

His eyes twinkled. He looked at me expansively. “Cockfights — yes, although the Americans never liked them; they always tried to haul us to jail for it. And games … yes.” He turned to Father and to Sepa, who was hovering by, ready with another helping of his favorite dinardaraan. “I will tell you later … later …”

That afternoon, I cornered him in the bodega, where he was making an inventory of the sacks of grain gnawed by rats. “We followed the crops in California,” he explained. “We would be picking beans, tomatoes, lettuce. Then strawberries and grapes. And apples, yes, apples. I would smell of apples even on Sundays.”

I could picture him munching an apple, although he said apples made him sick. On Sundays, he went on, he had plenty of money. He brushed his teeth, wore his flashiest suit and his black Stetson, then boarded the silver bus that was fast and smooth, and soon he was in town. He went around a corner, and when he came out, he was holding the waist of a tall blonde, who was, all the while, laughing and immensely enjoying herself.

I did not like her laughter. I did not like her looks, even if she was as white as a newly washed radish. She destroyed the picture of baskets and baskets of golden apples that Tio Benito had picked.

A year after Tio Benito had returned, I noticed that the talk about his ways and the questions that were posed to him diminished, then almost disappeared. Everyone began to accept him for what he was — even his profanities, his showing off, and his attachment to his black Stetson when a lighter, airier hat would have sufficed. On Tio Benito’s part, he seemed to have become more morose each day, for he had finally spent all his money and had started to sell some of his things; he even tried to sell his woolens, which no one would buy. Now he often asked for money from Father, but knowing his ways, Father would only give him pin money; after all, Tio Benito was assured a roof over his head and meals every time he was hungry. More than that, he had his share of the harvest, which, alas, was months away. He wandered less and less to the marketplace and to the barbershop on the main street and kept more to the house, talking with Sepa, Tio Baldo, and Old David, for they listened dutifully to his jokes and his stateside stories. Sometimes he also ventured to Carmay to be with Grandfather on weekends.

Then one day he announced pompously at the breakfast table that he would go to the neighboring town to look after a business deal involving the buying and selling of the mongo harvest, and would Father be gracious enough to advance him a small loan of fifty pesos, which he would repay within the month? Father was a bit puzzled but was pleased nonetheless; at last — American commercialism had made its mark in a time of need.

Tio Benito was away for a week, but on the next Sunday he returned at about lunchtime. He looked pleased. His shirt was wet with perspiration, for the sun was bright and the streets were baking in the heat. He did not seem to mind, although I knew him to curse even at the slightest rise in temperature. Now his eyes danced with a light I had never seen before, except when he described his Sundays in America.

Tio Benito had a companion — a woman. She looked at least twenty years older than he. Tio Benito was middle-aged, but he did not have any of the wrinkles that lined the woman’s face. I told myself, of course, that she must be just a business associate and not someone toward whom he had amorous intentions; after all those blondes in America, such a thought was unthinkable.

Not that she was ugly; she was brown — very — and she had classic Ilokano features: a broad forehead, a small nose, and lips that were quite thick. What struck me were her upper teeth, which were all set in gold so that when she smiled it seemed as if her mouth was on fire. From snatches of conversation while they were talking with Father in the sala, I learned that the woman lived three towns away, that she had come to pay my very surprised and very amused father the fifty pesos that Tio Benito owed him plus whatever interest there was. But more than this, she also wanted to talk to all of us about a very urgent matter “concerning salvation and the soul.”

“Yes,” Father said. “This is very good to hear. But let us eat first.”

We stood up and went to the dining room, and when Sepa saw Tio Benito, she told him he was lucky, for she had prepared dinardaraan, his favorite dish. It consisted of pork and the innards of the pig stewed in its own blood and in vinegar. The day before, a neighbor had butchered his pig, and Father gave a cavan of palay for five kilos and the innards.

At the mention of dinardaraan, Tio Benito scowled at the cook, but he did not say anything. We sat before the long narra table, in the middle of which was the glass fruit tray topped with oranges and apples. Like Tio Benito, I also relished dinardaraan, but I could have been knocked down with the paper wand Sepa waved to drive the flies away. There he was, straight as a bamboo, his head bowed, his eyes closed; with his woman companion, he was praying! Father was all smiles; it seemed that we no longer had a pagan in our midst. After this surprise, I pushed toward him the bowl of dinardaraan, reminding him it was my favorite, too.

It happened then; with disdain clouding his greasy face, he pushed the bowl away as if it were poison.

“I prepared it,” Sepa said, surprised and defensive.

But Tio Benito ignored her; he stood up abruptly, and in sudden inspiration, he began the best speech — or sermon — I ever heard on the importance of eating the right food so as not to pollute the body or offend God. He spoke with power and conviction, and we stopped eating; even the maids paused in their chores and crowded in to listen to the words of wisdom that now poured from his lips. He spoke of the growing evil in the world, of the need for brotherhood, community, kindred spirit that would not only allow us to enter the kingdom of God but also banish the usurpers of His word in this land. He railed against the friars who established a church subservient to Rome: look at the money collected in the Catholic churches — it is sent to a foreign land to fatten foreign priests. The Americans were no better; they also sent their own missionaries to perpetuate the subservience of Filipinos to them. The Catholic priests, the Protestant pastors — they talk in a foreign language, they are ashamed of their own, of Ilokano or of Tagalog, which are the languages of the people. And then he spoke of the reasons why he could not eat dinardaraan or anything with blood, for such food was not fit for anyone who believed in the true God, for anyone who could read the Bible and regard it as sacred, for it is right there — and he proceeded to quote from memory the particular chapter and verse. It was my first experience with a convert of the Iglesia Ni Kristo. Sepa was very pleased, although her particular sect was Protestant; what was important was that Tio Benito finally believed.

“I will convert you,” he enthused. Turning to Father and me, and of course to Tia Antonia, then to all the maids and house help gathered around us, he added, “All of you, all of you.”

The woman was silent, but on her face was the most beatific smile I had ever seen — her mouth was aglow. So my Tio Benito became a Christian — of that much I was sure. Although I doubted if his hortatory rhetoric could move as much as an inch any of the people who listened to him, I was sure that the woman with him had some uncanny power of conversion, for it was she who did it and no one else. She married Tio Benito, and though I am not very positive about what Tio Benito said about not eating dinardaraan because it is cooked in blood, of this I am certain: In our town, it used to be fashionable for the very rich to have as many gold teeth as they could afford. Tio Benito’s wife had all her upper teeth in gold, and that, in itself, was enough proof to Christians and pagans alike that she was, indeed, a very wealthy woman.

CHAPTER 5

Nothing pleased Grandfather more than Tio Benito’s wedding; he once said that only a woman could tie my uncle down to Rosales and banish once and for all the itch that had sent him drifting to alien lands. Now that Tio Benito had settled down, the old man was at peace because all his children were where he wanted them: within his reach should the time come for him to die.

The wedding was celebrated in Carmay; in the mud-packed yard of Grandfather’s house, the tenants built a long shed roofed with coconut leaves and fenced with old bamboo fish traps. Here the entire village gathered to feast on three carabaos, two cows, and half a dozen pigs. The wedding ceremony itself, in the absence of a chapel of the new sect in Rosales, was performed in Grandfather’s living room, which was decorated by Cousin Marcelo with sprays of papaya blossoms and palmetto fronds. Many members of the sect arrived in a fleet of caretelas, and while their minister ranted and flung his hands to the roof, the women sang and cried. Grandfather made it clear, however, that he was not now going to stop enjoying dinardaraan or tolerate any attempt of the newly weds to interfere with his bucolic peace and the future of his soul.

Even before the china used at the feast was dry, Grandfather told Tio Benito to pack his overcoat and his thick, dark suits and, like a good husband, follow his wife to her home three towns away. It would have been ideal if Tio Benito and his wife lived with the old man, but Grandfather valued his independence and isolation. “Since your grandmother died,” he once said, “I have lived alone and I like it that way.” Nevertheless, he followed Father’s advice and kept a handyman, not to serve him but to see to it that in his twilight he did no unnecessary work that could cut his days still shorter.

Two days before Christmas, Grandfather came to the house; the helper who kept watch over him had crossed the Agno to spend the holiday with his family, and knowing this, we tried to dissuade Grandfather from returning to Carmay and spending Christmas there alone.

He was too stubborn and set in his ways to accede. He arrived hobbling up the graveled path with his long, ivory-handled cane, a relic of his younger days when he was gobernadorcillo, his feet encased in leather sandals firmly tied to his ankles by thongs. On his head was a crumpled buntal hat. Although he tried to walk as if his bones were those of a frisky youth still, he could not refrain from stooping. It was only when he paused at the foot of the stairs that his fatigue became apparent, though he had walked but a short distance from the bus station. He was panting, and as I tried to help him up, he looked at me, at the young hand that held his arm, and a flash of scorn crossed his face. The expression changed quickly into a wry smile. “I am all right, boy,” he said.

But he did not go up to the house alone, for quickly Father came rushing down, saying he should have sent us word so that Old David could have fetched him in the calesa.

It was one of the old man’s rare visits, usually made three or four times a year. He had chosen to stay on the farm, which he had helped clear out of the wilderness that had once stretched from the Andolan creek to the banks of the Agno. He had also imparted to the farmers around him his knowledge of farming amassed through years of frugal Ilokano existence, which were interrupted only when he held office and participated in the revolution or when he visited town.

If Father did not tell me, I would never have known, for instance, what he did during the revolution, that among other things, he knew Apolinario Mabini and took care of the Sublime Paralytic when he fled to Rosales, that Mabini stayed in our house, where he wrote a lot before he went to Cuyapo, where later on he was captured by the Americans.

The only time I heard Grandfather really raise his voice was when I was perhaps nine or ten years old. I had gotten ill, and he had come to see me on the third day that I had this high fever and hardly noticed the people fleeting about my sickroom. He had made inquiries about what had happened, and Sepa told him I had played at the foot of the balete tree together with some classmates and that we had constructed a playhouse on the veined trunk of the tree.

I remember him roaring at Father, why knowing this, he had not sent an offering so that I would get well, and how Sepa immediately went to the kitchen at Father’s harried command to do what Grandfather wanted although I knew that Father did not really believe in all that superstition.

Father used to threaten me when I misbehaved, saying that he would banish me to Carmay. Though I had always regarded Grandfather with awe, he never terrified me. After all, I loved listening to his stories of the supernatural and the mysterious. He was particularly fond of telling stories about the balete tree, for he believed that the tree was blessed and that it was bound to protect us from the curses and onslaught of evil. When Father realized that packing me off to Carmay would cause me no suffering, he resorted to the whip instead.

For a man over eighty, Grandfather seemed in good health. As far as I could recall, he had been sick only once, and I distinctly remember how, on a stormy September night, Father and the doctor had to rush in the calesa to Carmay and slosh through rice fields to attend to him; he lay in his old rattan bed saying that if death were to strike, no one would be able to thwart the blow, and for that reason he refused absolutely to take any medication.

Grandfather was more than prepared. It was no secret that he had ordered a coffin made of the finest narra when he was just a few years over seventy. Somehow, Father had disposed of the relic when the old man ceased asking about it. Many marveled over his ability to maintain an agile mind, and his memory for faces was superb; he could identify his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, and the host of farmers and their families who lived around him.

What was the secret of his longevity? His tenant neighbors, especially the more superstitious, had an explanation. It could be, they said, that once upon a time, he had heard the bells on Christmas Eve. On that very hour of midnight when Christ was born, a heavenly chime would peal; only the chosen would hear it, and they who are so blessed would live to a ripe old age, their fondest wishes all come true.

I recounted this to Grandfather, but he ignored it; he was not really all that keen about things said of him, for his religiosity pertained mostly to the land, whose yield was greatly influenced by God and the elements. He had not stepped within the portals of the church for ages, though he was not one to deride those who did. During the dark days of the revolution against Spain, he had developed an apathy about the Spanish friars and, eventually, the church.

That December evening as he sat down with us at the head of the table, he seemed exuberant. He relished the mudfish and sipped his chicken broth, as if he thoroughly enjoyed every drop. We waited for him to finish and had expected him to talk, but he was adamant. “I came here for no other reason than to take my grandson with me,” he said. “He can return when Basilio returns from his family.”

It was a time I did not particularly care for Carmay, because on Christmas I would rather be at home. The provincial road sliced through the far end of the barrio, which was really nothing but a few thatched houses huddled together with Grandfather’s — the biggest of them all and the only one with a tin roof — standing closest to the narrow bull-cart path that leads down from the road. There was peace and quiet in Carmay on Christmas Day, and perhaps its only attraction during the holidays was its excellent rice cakes, better than those available in town. It was livelier in Rosales — the early-morning mass, the chill permeating our bones, the jaunty band music rousing all of us. We would then stagger from our warm beds to go to church, where first we would drink scalding ginger tea from the convent kitchen. Afterward there would be the happy sight of flickering candles on the altar, the smell of incense swirling about, and above everything our voices swelling in the choir loft. Later the sun would rise from behind the heavily wooded hills of Balungao, and suddenly it was morning.

The evenings were just as memorable. Tio Baldo, come Christmastime, always fashioned a bamboo cannon for me, and as soon as it was dark we filled one end with heated kerosene, stuck empty milk cans in the mouth, and fired away at the youngsters across the street, who also had the same noisy toy. Or with Angel, Ludovico, and the other boys, we would play from house to house as a bamboo orchestra, all the rest tooting and puffing at a weird assortment of bamboo flutes, clappers, and jingles, while I played the harmonica — the only instrument that somehow managed to give a running tune to the noise that we emitted. The money we made was not much, but for the boys it meant a merrier Christmas. Shortly before midnight, when we returned to the house, we also had something for the help — maybe a cigar for Sepa and a bottle of gin for Old David.

But Grandfather had spoken, and what was Carmay at Christmastime but a wide, dreary field ripe with grain? There was nothing there to dispel the quiet but the booming voice of some farmer calling his children from their river bathing or the martins cawing in the lofty buri palms.

“We are not going to sleep in the house,” Grandfather said. “We are going to sleep in the field to watch the new harvest.”

It was only then that I perked up, for the prospect of sleeping in the open — something I had never done before — was vastly appealing.

“Why should we sleep in the field, Grandfather?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid you might get a cough?”

He tousled my hair, then went on to explain that times had changed. “Years ago,” he said, “during harvest time, the newly cut stalks of palay were piled in the fields, where they were not removed, or brought to the granaries till they were to be husked. Now, with hunger slowly stalking the land, one has to keep watch over the harvest, lest it be stolen.”

I am sure we made a fine sight that afternoon as we walked down the main street to the bus station. Grandfather walked stiffly in his sandals, ivory cane in his hand and his crumpled hat propped straight on his head. I felt proud walking behind the old man who had helped build the town and who was, perhaps, the oldest man for miles and miles around.

When we passed the church I said, “If I were not coming along, Grandfather, I would sing in the choir tonight during the Christmas mass.”

A scowl swept across his face, and knowing I had displeased him with my remark, I did not speak again.

The trip to Carmay was uneventful. We reached it in a few minutes. The sun lay bright on the countryside, and the golden fields were alive with reapers in brightly colored clothes. The boundaries of our land, which Grandfather had cleared, blended with the tall dikes running parallel to the banks of the Agno.

We went up to his house. Ears of corn and fishnets were piled near the door. In the kitchen, chickens were pecking at grains scattered on the floor. The nippy December wind stole in, and Grandfather told me to bundle the blankets and a couple of pillows. We hitched a bull cart, then headed for the open fields where the harvest was stacked high. Soon it had become dark, and stars began to sparkle in the black bowl of sky.

After we had fixed our beds in the bull cart and in the sled with a thin canopy of hay over us, Grandfather sat on the sled quietly. Distant wisps of singing and the ring of laughter from the farmhouses reached us. Rosales was far away — a halo of light on the horizon. No sound from it could reach us, not even the boom of the bamboo cannons or the sharp crackle of firecrackers.

It was peaceful and quiet. After a while, with his head resting on the rump of the sled, Grandfather began to tell stories of the days when this field was a jungle of cogon grass and mounds, and snakes lurked in every hole. He spoke of the Bagos, who trekked down the Cordillera ranges and traded venison for cloth and matches. It was a time when the Agno River was not so wild and the Andolan creek had plenty of fish and, in his own backyard, he hunted the wild pig. He spoke, too, of past Christmases, though he was not keen about them, of the nights he slept in the open during the hunt and harvest evenings, when he kept watch over the grain that could not be carted off to his granary.

“Boy,” Grandfather said, “the silence of a field can give a man beautiful thoughts. Here, more than anyplace, you are nearer God.”

I did not understand then what he meant, for I was Padre Andong’s acolyte in the Catholic church and had quite a different idea about worship. But I listened just the same to his stories of the revolution till the singing and the hoarse shouting of the tenants from across the fields waned and a heaviness stole over my eyes.

Perhaps I dozed, for when I looked up from my seat of hay, Grandfather was no longer near me. Over the land, a moon shone, a cool, silver lamp. The Balungao mountain in the east slumped like a sleeping beast, and all around us was the night, the endless river of night insects and crickets, and the rich, heady smell of new hay. It was cold, and I wrapped the blanket tighter around my quivering body. I looked around apprehensively to where the camachile tree stood, and where the carabao, tied to a saluyot shrub, was chewing its cud. I saw Grandfather then standing in the open behind the cart, his head raised to the sheen of the starlit heavens and his right hand clutching his old ivory cane.

He stood there erect as a spear, for how long I can’t remember. I went to him, but he did not seem to feel my presence. Staring closer at his upturned face, I saw tears trickling down his coarse, wrinkle-furrowed face, to his lips, which were parted in an exultant smile.

I remembered then that he was a little deaf, but he must have known I was near, for he spoke without looking at me: “Listen, boy.”

I held his hand.

“Listen, boy, listen,” he repeated in a soft, tremulous voice.

“What is it, Grandfather?” I asked, hearing nothing.

“Listen,” he repeated severely.

Across the silent fields where the farmers’ homes were huddled a dog howled. The evening wind whimpered in the camachile saplings, a carabao snorted. Somewhere in the shaggy grass that covered the dikes, cicadas were chirping, and farther down, the river gurgled as it meandered in its course.

“I hear only the river, a dog, the wind, and insects,” I said.

It seemed as if his thoughts were far, far away.

“The bells, boy,” he said, a glow on his face bright as happiness, clear as morning. “The bells are ringing.”

I remembered again the legend of the bells, how men like Grandfather had defied time and circumstance, lived through the years crowned with bliss and fortune, because, once on a Christmas night, they heard the bells. And here was this old man, who had always said this was not so, straining his old deaf ears listening, crying.

I looked at his face again, at the drooping eyelids, at the thin lips mumbling a prayer, perhaps, and it occurred to me that he no longer belonged to my time. He had taken on a countenance that struck me with awe. In the next instant, I drew away from him and slowly turned and ran across the new hay, over the irrigation ditches, down the incline, beyond the towering palms standing like hooded sentinels of darkness, all the way to Carmay in the Christmas night. I went breathlessly up to the old man’s house, my heart thundering in my chest, and cuddled among the pillows in his damp room, not wanting to return, cursing myself for not hearing anything and, most of all, for not believing what the old man said he heard.

When Christmas morning broke over Carmay, a neighbor and I went where Grandfather and I camped in the night. I had expected the old man to be angry with me for having left him.

I told no one about what Grandfather said he heard, not even the doctor who declared that Grandfather, whom we found lying serenely on the sled with an angelic smile on his face, had finally died of old age.

CHAPTER 6

After Grandfather’s death, Father asked Tio Benito if he wanted to live in Carmay, but my uncle was too comfortable in his new residence to care for the virtues of the village. Before the elements could claim Grandfather’s house, Father had it torn apart, and all its good planks of wood were brought to Rosales. The other materials — the galvanized-iron sheets, sash windows, and wooden sidings, even the kitchen utensils — were given by Father to his tenants.

The wooden shed, which was full, he gave to a tenant family that had suffered a disaster that year; while the woman of the house was preparing charcoal, some sparks flew and their house burned down. They were so poor that they would have slept on the ground and without a roof had not Father taken pity on them and given them the woodshed.

I remember this family very well, particularly Ludovico, the son. Among the many farmer boys whom I knew, Ludovico alone dared show me his true feelings and speak to me in anger, as if I were no more than a worthless younger brother.

But then, Ludovico’s anger was not the long, smouldering kind. The moment he had given vent to his feelings, he was again his old likeable self. He was a tall, gangling youth with eyes that gave the impression he was sleepy all the time, but those eyes became instantly alive the moment he spoke. He seldom talked, though, and when he did, he seemed always to be groping for the proper words to say.

He was dark like most of the other barrio boys who had no education except the practical kind that one absorbed after knowing hunger quite as well as the endless drudgery that went with being a tenant. He had only a pair of pants — blue denims, well worn, faded at the knees and the buttocks — which he washed himself and ironed with such consuming care, as if it were a de hilo suit.

Ludovico came to the house on a Sunday after the first mass was said. He accompanied his mother, Feliza — a thin little woman who always spoke in a whisper, whose face was as pale as a banana stalk. Her wide bamboo basket was usually filled with vegetables — sweet-potato tops, bamboo shoots, eggplants, greens that she could not have sold for much, because in Rosales vegetables are cheap and could be had for the asking. She would give some of the vegetables to Sepa, for these were raised on Father’s farm, and by some unwritten law, a part of such harvest belonged to us.

Feliza was very industrious — this much could be seen in the way she swept the storehouse or the yard so thoroughly whenever Father asked her.

Ludovico always carried the firewood — dried acacia or dalipawen branches on a pliant pole balanced across his shoulder. One bundle was for us, and the other was for sale in the public market.

They always came barefoot, and their feet were thick and black with mud or dust depending on the season. Like most of the tenants in Carmay, Ludovico would have probably grown to a venerable old age without having known how it was to wear shoes. I would ask them to come up to the house for a while, but like the other tenants, they would refuse with plenty of head-shaking. They would look bashfully at their dirty feet and still decline to come up to the house even after they had gone to the artesian well below the kitchen to wash.

After Ludovico had stacked the firewood in the woodshed and carried the other bundle to market, he would return to the house and wait in the yard while his mother sold the greens and the extra firewood.

Feliza would return at about eleven, her face damp with sweat. With the little money she had made from the vegetables, she would have bought a bottle of kerosene, salted fish wrapped in dried banana leaves, sometimes a bundle of rice cakes, laundry soap, and cheap little items from the Chinese stores that occupied Father’s building along the main street.

They would not depart until Father had acknowledged their presence, not by talking with them as they stood motionless at the bottom of the stairs but by simply waving his hand in their direction and occasionally inquiring how things were in Carmay.

It was while waiting for his mother that Ludovico and I became friends. I would often join him on the stone bench in the shade of the balete tree. He was never voluble; he would shift his position when cramped, or sometimes he would venture into the graveled street and loiter there.

I asked him once if he had gone to school.

He had reached the third grade, he said, his face aglow as if reaching the third grade and being able to write one’s name were an achievement.

During the harvest season, I would get permission to go to Carmay regularly with Old David. The old servant would leave me in Ludovico’s care, and Ludovico would lift me and carry me around on his shoulders while I held on to his short, dry hair.

One day, we went to gather camachile fruits along the provincial road. That was the day Ludovico was scared, for I had messed with some poisonous vine, and the whole day my arms swelled and ached. Father gave him three lashes with the horse whip, and after that Ludovico waited on me as if I were a sultan’s son.

I remember the time we were standing by the half-dried irrigation ditch and my straw hat was blown into the ditch by a strong gust of wind. He crouched low on the embankment to retrieve my hat. On a sudden impulse, I gave him a little shove and into the muddy ditch he fell. He got splashed all over with black mud. He cussed, but I laughed and laughed till I found out that he was really angry. I thought he would give me a thrashing, but when he noticed I was scared, he began laughing, too. He laughed so madly I thought he would never stop.

After the harvest season, the open spaces no longer fascinated me. In a few months the rains came, in driblets at first and then in torrents. Just the same, Ludovico walked three kilometers to our house from the barrio with his two bundles of firewood balanced on a pole.

Once, sitting on the top rung of the kitchen stairs, I watched him drink from the artesian well. I was in a mood for pranks. I went down, splashed water on him and, while at it, I slipped and fell at his feet. We laughed together till Sepa told him to go away, which he did immediately, as if he were a whipped dog.

I cannot now forget the last time Feliza, his mother, came to our house. Balanced on her head was the same old load of greens to sell at the market, but she didn’t put it down. After Ludovico finished drinking, she suddenly started to cough.

Ludovico took the basket off his mother’s head and placed it on the ground, then patted his mother gently on the back.

“I told you not to come,” he said. “Now look — it has started again.”

Feliza stooped and beat her flat chest with her knotted fists. She shook convulsively, then spat out something red, very red.

“What is that?” I asked.

She sat down and gurgled. Seeing that she had nothing to use, I got a glass from the kitchen shelf and handed it to her. She thanked me when her coughing ceased.

Father came out then. He asked what the matter was, and reluctantly, I told him.

Father said, “Don’t carry so heavy a load, Feliza. After all, Ludovico is a big man now and he can do that for you. Or is Ludovico lazy?”

Ludovico reddened. “No, Apo,” he said softly, “I am not lazy.”

After they had gone, Father asked me if it was I who had given the glass to Feliza. He instructed Sepa to immerse the glass in boiling water, then he turned to me: “Don’t give Feliza any of the things we use.”

Once, perched on Ludovico’s shoulders, I asked him: “What would you want to be when you grow up?”

He replied he was already “almost a man” like his father, but I insisted there must be something, someone he would still want to be.

“All right,” he said, laughing. Behind us was Rosales, and in front of us were sprawled the hills of Balungao.

He jabbed a finger at them. “I want to own one of those. You have never been there. You don’t know how it is to own a few trees. Giant trees that can mean a lot of firewood. Sagat and parunapin. These make good house posts, too.”

He went on talking about the trees, how they were felled and later tediously dragged down the slopes. And how he caught the slippery mudfish in the creeks, how his father had a row with an uncle over the irrigation ditches, how his cousin was hurt in a drinking spree. Then, unconsciously, his mother was sucked into the whirlpool of his thoughts, and he told of the work she did at home, which might as well pass for that of a carabao’s — washing clothes, pounding rice, helping in the tilling of the soil.

The harvest season passed. The tenants littered the yard again with their bull carts filled with grain. They tucked the jute sacks in neat piles in Father’s storehouse. And one morning, Chan Hai drove into the yard with his trucks, joked with Father, weighed the palay, then took most of it away. Father counted over and over the money the Chinese had handed him and placed it in the steel safe in his room.

Father always bought a lot of things when he made a sale. Even the servants were provided with new clothes, and a new set of furniture found its way into the house. I wondered what Ludovico’s father did with his share of the crop, for when Ludovico came to town on Sundays, he still wore those faded denims.

Then the rains came. Now the mornings were cool and refreshing, and the world had a sharp, clean aroma that made one glad to have a nose.

Ludovico’s father and the other tenants came to Father’s bodega, talked of the planting season and the harvest. It would be something to be reckoned with, they said. That was immaculately clear in the stars, in the aura of the full moon, in the red-blood sun as it sank beyond the coconut groves of Tomana. When they left, they carted a few sacks for seed.

It was in the first week of October that Ludovico stopped coming to our house and headed for the hills to gather more firewood to make charcoal with. His mother was very sick, and she needed all the money he could earn. His father suffered in his stead with the firewood — small branches of madre de cacao and twigs that were damp and did not kindle so easily.

He apologized when Sepa fumed because the firewood he brought did not give off charcoal for broiling.

He does not know much about firewood, I mused.

He came one Thursday in the hush of twilight with the same two bundles. Since his usual day to come was Sunday, from the dimly lighted kitchen Sepa inquired why he was rather early. He said he was going to the hills the following day.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Sunday, probably,” he said complacently. “I am just going to take Ludovico home. He caught something bad over there. Typhoid, I think.”

That Sunday, as he said he would, Ludovico’s father did return. He came to the house with a black piece of cloth tied around his head. He had freshly ironed, well-starched pants folded at the ankles.

His peasant feet, big and spread, were washed and clean.

Father, whom he sought, emerged from the front door. Father did not ask why he had the black piece of cloth tied around his head. Instead, the first question Father prodded him with was: “Has the rice started to flower already, and has the dike in the west end of the farm been fixed?”

“Everything is all right, Apo.” Ludovico’s father smiled broadly, but almost as precipitately as it came, his grin vanished as he now spoke in low, even tones. He had come to borrow money for a funeral. Ludovico had died.

Father went to the house, shaking his balding head. When he returned, he handed some bills to Ludovico’s father, who in his relief pocketed them at once.

“There will be the usual interest to that,” Father reminded him.

Ludovico’s father nodded and was all smiles. Then his voice faltered. “But Apo, I cannot return this after the harvest this year. Feliza, my wife … Next harvest time, maybe …”

“And why not, may I know?” Father demanded.

Ludovico’s father explained hurriedly. At first, Father was unmoved. Then he said. “All right, next harvest time. But don’t forget, the interest will then be twice.”

I did not quite understand what it was all about, so I tugged at Father’s hand. He did not mind me — he went his way. I did not attend Ludovico’s funeral, but Sepa, who was fond of him, did, and she described how Ludovico was brought to church without the pealing of bells, wrapped in an old buri mat and slung on a pole carried by his father and a farmer neighbor.

And only afterward did I understand why there was not even a wooden coffin for Ludovico, why the next harvest, which might be bountiful, would be meaningless. I remembered Ludovico’s mother — so tiny and thin and overworked, her wracking cough, her pale, tired face, and the ripening grain that she would neither harvest nor see.

CHAPTER 7

All the lures of Carmay and its feeling of space seemed dulled after Grandfather and Ludovico were gone. Even when the irrigation ditches were finally shallow and the fishing there with bamboo traps was good, even when the melons in the delta were ripe and beckoning, I did not go there. The dry season was upon us — a glaze of sun and honeyed air; it touched the green mangoes and made them golden yellow, took the roar and the brownish tint from the Agno and made it placid and green. The dry season and school vacation also brought to Rosales my Cousin Pedring (on Father’s side) and my Cousin Clarissa (on my mother’s side). Pedring had just finished law school in Manila and had come to Rosales ostensibly for some quiet and to review for the coming bar examinations. He was about twenty-four. He must have been miserable, cooped up in the city for so long, and on his first day in Rosales he got me to go with him to Carmay “to fill his lungs with clean air.”

He was handsome and fair, and he recalled how once he had vacationed in Rosales when I was still a baby; he had bathed in the irrigation ditch in Carmay then, and now he wanted to relive that experience. But in the dry season all the irrigation ditches had dried up except in spots where the water was stagnant and green. This did not deter him; he would have immersed himself the whole morning there like a carabao if I did not tell him that we had to return to town before noon. Gathering his clothes, his hair still streaked with bits of moss, his pale skin shiny with a patina of mud, he dressed hurriedly. We boarded the next caretela that passed.

It had been one of my chores to proceed shortly after noon to the post office in the municipio to pick up Father’s mail and newspapers that were brought in by the train connection from Paniqui. It was a chore I enjoyed because it afforded me the first look at the comics section of the papers, and even in the midday sun on the way back I would be reading Tarzan and Mutt & Jeff.

It was lunchtime when Cousin Pedring and I reached the town, and the sun was warm. On the street, dust rose at the gentlest stirring of the breeze. With mud now caked on his hair, he rushed to the artesian well for another bath with Old David working the pump.

When both of us were through, Father called us up. “You go to the station,” he said.

“But the mail, Father.”

“It is all right,” Father said. “For once the mail carrier will do his job.”

“Who is arriving?” Pedring asked.

“Clarissa,” Father said, and dismissed us with a wave of his hand.

Old David was readying the calesa when we got to him at the stable. It was a short ride, and, from the elevated station platform we could see the train rounding the bend at Calanutan, blowing its whistle shrilly. Pedring helped me down the calesa and said, “Tell me about Clarissa.”

“A cousin like you, but on Mother’s side,” I said.

“I know,” he said, passing his hand over his hair, which had dried. Without pomade, it was unruly. “How old is she?”

I made a hasty mental calculation. “About eighteen, I think.”

He stomped his feet on the stone platform to shake off the dust from his shoes. “I have not seen her yet,” he said. “What does she look like?”

I remembered Clarissa very well. Father and I once went to Cebu for a two-week vacation, and she and her parents met us at the pier; I was barely nine then, but everything about that visit was etched clearly in my mind — the pungent smell of copra at the pier, the sloping, narrow streets, their beautiful stone house, its sash windows festooned with butterfly orchids. There was a party in her honor, for she was sixteen and it was her first time to dance in public. She wore a white lace dress, and her hair was knotted with a red ribbon. I remember how flushed and anxious she looked as she kept in step with her father, and when it was over and the small band changed tune, she sought me, literally pulled me to the floor and, amidst much laughter and coaxing, tried to dance with me. I remember her moist, warm hand, her sweet breath upon my face, and my stepping on her feet many times.

“Is she pretty?” Cousin Pedring was insistent. I hardly heard him above the clangor as the train pulled into the station and shot blasts of white steam into the noonday glare.

“Yes,” I said, “very pretty.”

“Will she stay long in Rosales?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I could not miss her when she alighted. One could not but pause and cast a lingering look at her, even if she was in a crowd; she really had bloomed — a regal head, full lips, and eyes filled with laughter. When she saw me, she waved at once, and moved away from the women with their baskets of vegetables.

“You have become so tall,” she said, bussing me on the cheek. I introduced Pedring, and they shook hands, then we walked down the cement platform to the palisaded yard, where Old David waited. We helped her with her rattan suitcase, then boarded.

“How is Tio?” she asked as we cantered off to town. After I replied, she did not speak again all through the drive. Pedring attempted some conversation: “It is good to have you here.” But to his attempts, she merely nodded or smiled, and her smile — if it was one — was as dry as the dust that Old David’s horse raised.

“What are you thinking of, Clarissa?” I asked later as we ate lunch.

She shook her head and looked pensive. I would have pressed for a clearer answer, but I caught Father’s eye; he sat at the other end of the table, and though he did not speak, I knew he did not want me to press the query further.

The following day, though Father did not explain it clearly, I learned why Clarissa was with us. It seemed that a young man in Cebu had taken an interest in her — he was the son of a clerk, had no chance of going to college, and Clarissa’s parents did not approve — after all, they were well-to-do and all their children had studied in convent schools. She was therefore exiled to Rosales, so that in time she would forget.

Before we went to bed that night, I invited Pedring and Clarissa to play dominoes in the azotea; I knew that she did not relish being in Rosales, in this small dusty town away from the delights of home. “We can go to Carmay tomorrow,” I said. “The camachile trees are now bearing fruit, and we can gather them. We can bring a lunch basket, and we can go to the Agno, swim, or stay there and gather pine splinters. There are so many wonderful things one can do in Carmay.” She shook her head and said something listless, that she did not like hiking.

We did not go, and Cousin Pedring, who had wanted very much to stay in Carmay, seemed pleased that Clarissa had elected to be in the old dreary house instead. And there came a time afterward that he lost all interest in Carmay and would rather be cooped up in the house with her.

The following day, before I was to leave for the post office to get the mail, Father called me to his room and said that all the letters addressed to Clarissa should not be given to her. I should give them all to him.

Clarissa must have expected them, for on the day she arrived, she asked what time the postman usually came to deliver the mail, and I told her it was I who was the mail carrier. She met me at the yard when I returned and breathlessly inquired if there was any letter for her.

“Nothing,” I said, and it was true.

But the following day three did arrive. I followed Father’s instruction and gave them all to him. He opened them and read them briefly, then instructed me to burn them in the kitchen. It was a job I did not relish. As I proceeded to burn them, I got curious and started reading one. It was a love letter — mushy words strung together — and having memorized the penmanship, I never bothered reading any of the many that came afterward. Every day Clarissa would ask and I would lie; she had me mail letters, and like the letters she was supposed to receive, they never reached their destination.

“Are you sure I don’t have any mail today?” she asked one particularly trying day when the heat seemed to scorch everything, even my patience. She had been in Rosales for more than three weeks.

“Yes,” I said sourly. “Why should I hide it from you?”

“Well then,” she said with determination. “Tomorrow, I will be at the post office ahead of you so Tio will not know.”

But on that day she did not come because Pedring managed — by some miracle — to take her to Carmay instead; they left shortly after breakfast with a basket that was amply prepared by Sepa. And in the afternoon when they returned, the wind and the sun in her hair, the basket was filled with camachile fruits. She forgot to ask about her letters.

On the days that followed, she no longer seemed to care whether she received a letter or not, and soon the letters from the boy in Cebu stopped coming altogether, and I was glad and relieved, for then I no longer had to lie. I began to see less of Pedring, too. He was not reviewing, nor did he like to go swimming in the Agno. He had time only for Clarissa.

May came quickly, and once more the land turned green; somehow, the life and vivacity came back to Clarissa, too, and she seemed to enjoy my cousin’s company, for many a time I would catch them laughing on the bench in the yard.

When we played dominoes in the azotea, they would often get to talking and it would be difficult for me to catch the thread of what it was all about. More and more, they would clam up when I asked what it was that they were so secretive about.

At the end of the month, before the town fiesta and the opening of the school year, the parents of both Clarissa and Pedring came to Rosales. With Father joining them, they talked far into the night, while on the moon-drenched balcony Pedring, Clarissa, and I played a listless game of dominoes. I won most of the time, for they did not have their minds on the game; they did not speak much, for they seemed all ears, instead, to the talk and the occasional laughter that went on in the living room.

The following day the tenants came, and with isis leaves and wax they cleaned every nook of the house; they also polished the silver that had started to tarnish. All through the week the preparation went on, and, when it finally came, it was the grandest wedding Rosales had seen in years. There was a battery of photographers, and two days after the wedding, I saw our picture in the papers, Pedring looking bewildered, Clarissa radiant and pretty as always, and I in my white suit looking dandy — too dandy and too old to be a ring bearer.

Pedring took his bride to Hong Kong, and from there he wrote to Father and to me saying they would return to Manila, where they would make their home, then visit us before Christmas. He also took the bar examinations and passed.

I did not see them again until I went to Manila to continue my studies, and then and only then did I realize what I had done, what fate I had helped to shape.

CHAPTER 8

Lack of household help was one problem we never had to face. In fact, Father used to have some difficulty turning away many youngsters who wanted to serve in the house, the sons and daughters of tenants who wanted their children to be with us, so that they would be assured of three meals a day, particularly during the lean months of the planting season — June to August — when many a rice bin was empty. Some of those who came to work, of course, knew that their servitude was payment for debts incurred, debts that their fathers had accumulated through the years. They all came to Rosales without much education, barefoot, their brown, emaciated bodies slowly putting on flesh after the first few weeks of eating regularly, their blemished skin becoming clear, their deportment less awkward as in the first few days when, awed by Father’s presence and the proportions of the house, they would walk or go about their chores in reverential silence.

Not Martina; of all the maids who came to serve us it was she I remembered best, for there was a brashness in her ways that was self-confidence rather than arrogance; it was not that she did not respect Father or that she looked with condescension at the timidity of the other help. She was, from the very beginning, herself, untrammeled by convention and uncaring toward those who thought she was without the refinements that any growing girl — barrio-born or from the heart of town — should have. They said that no good would ever come to her — that she would end up in the streets; I cannot believe this conclusion, and though I never saw her again after she left us, I am sure that wherever she is, she can cope with most of the problems life would shower on her.

She was fifteen when she came to the house. She had had some schooling, for she knew how to write her name and many a time, too, did I see her go over the old papers Sepa used to kindle the firewood. She was well on the way to becoming a woman, and I remember the ogling of the boys in the barbershop when they watched her go to market and the guarded language they used when they spoke with her. She never bothered with them. She would flop on the bench in the yard in a most unwomanly manner, exposing her thin thighs. Sometimes, too, I would catch the other boys in the house stealing glances at her low neckline and her small firm breasts, as she bent doing her chores, sweeping the yard or pumping water from the artesian well.

At first she came to the house only on weekends to do odd jobs, and she would do them as fast as she could, sweeping the wide yard cluttered with acacia and guava leaves and the dung of work animals when the tenants brought their bull carts in. She also helped clean the bodega, which was always in disarray, and once her chores were done, she would disappear. She did not seem to bother with her looks, her hair hanging in damp, uncombed locks, her face stained with dirt, although I was sure with some care and with a little bit more to eat, she would be good-looking.

Once, as Old David told me, her father operated Father’s rice mill, but by some accident, his feet got caught in the gears. It was a miracle that he survived, but he was maimed for life. Earning a living with both legs gone was impossible, so Father gave him an annual pension of twenty cavans of palay, more as a result of a court order, I think, than of sympathy.

Martina always took the shortcut from her house, which was a distance, and hurdled the tall barbed-wire fence in the rear of the bodega. Seeing her scrambling over the fence one afternoon, Father shook his head and said, “Knowing that girl’s future is like being sure that tomorrow the sun will rise from behind the Balungao mountain.”

One afternoon I saw her up a guava tree in the yard; I had refrained from climbing it for one week so that by the end of that time the fruits would be ripe. She had tied a piece of string around her waist, then filled her dress with the hard green fruits so that her tummy bulged out front.

“Get down there!” I shouted. “Or I’ll call Father and he will flog you.” She did not mind me, and angered by her insolence, I started to whimper and cry. As she scurried down, the string around her middle snapped; the fruits all came tumbling out.

“Cry — cry all you can,” she said, jumping to the ground. I stopped crying and scrambled after the fruits, grabbing with both hands all that I could and stuffing them into my pockets until they were full. And while I was at it, she never made an attempt to take anything; she just stood there watching me. When I could no longer gather more fruit, I looked up to meet her gaze, contempt, pity, perhaps, in her sullen eyes. She turned and walked to the house.

There seemed to be a gulf between us after that incident, but somehow, in another week we were friends again. She told me little about herself, but she did talk a lot about her father, who was not feeling well, so that she had to go home for about an hour every day to see him. She was not hindered from doing so; after all, she was not needed much in the house, and I think that Father tolerated her presence only because he felt some obligation toward his former employee.

I went with Martina to the river, too, and we bathed there, her clothes sticking to her thin body, her hair wet and dripping. We dove into the cold depths and tried to stay there as long as our breath could hold, and in the murky greenness, I would open my eyes to see her flapping and holding her nose. After the swim, we crossed the fields glinting brown in the sun and took the path that went by the rice mill, climbed the barbed-wire fence, and then we were home, dry and ruddy from the swim.

I had not seen Martina’s father, and once or twice I asked her to take me so that I could see how a man without legs moved about, but she always said, “Some other time.” Her mother died when she was a baby, and she did not remember her; she was more like a shadow in the past, without any importance.

Martina was very clumsy but could be very gentle, particularly with animals. She was cleaning my room one morning when she tipped the china vase — my bank — from my aparador top, and it fell with a resounding crash on the hardwood floor. She had said earlier that her mother brought bad luck to her father, that her father said so, and now that Martina was growing up, she, too, was bringing bad luck to him.

“See?” she said as I looked aghast at what remained of my vase. “I am bad luck, too.”

She was etched against the bright frame of window where the morning sun came in. “I was simply cleaning this …” she said as she picked up the fragments and placed them in the dustpan.

I faced her squarely, my suspicions aroused. “Where is the money?” I asked. “There were two one-peso bills there.”

She glared at me, her hands fingering the frayed hem of her soiled cotton dress. She had raised it so that her dirty bones stuck out. “Am I to know?” she retorted.

I was angry and could not hold back. I took one step forward. “You are a thief!” I hissed at her.

She did not budge; she lowered the hem of her dress, then pointed a finger straight, almost into my face. “Don’t you ever repeat that word to me,” she said coldly, evenly. “The thieves in this town are not us; if I ever hear you call me a thief again …”

I was helpless facing her, knowing how capable she was of doing whatever she threatened to do.

“I will tell Father,” I said finally.

“Go tell him,” she said in the same even voice.

But i did not tell Father, and it was not that I was afraid to do so; rather, I was bothered by what she had said, that the thieves in Rosales were not people like her. Yet, I had heard Father say so often that the tenants could not be trusted, that during the harvest season they should be watched carefully for they were always hiding part of the grain or harvesting the fields in spots where it could not readily be discovered. They never gave our rightful share of the vegetable harvest, the fruits of the orchards — the bananas, the pomelos — and in time of need, they went to no one but him.

I could not ask Martina about these, so we never talked about the money in the vase again. I could have easily forgotten about it, but the next day, after she had gone to visit her father, I found that the coconut-shell bank that I had filled with coins had grown very light, and there had not been a day that I had not put something in it. But who would I blame? There were other servants in the house who went to my room — Old David, Sepa — I had no proof and will never have one, but nonetheless, Martina was always on my mind.

She came to me once while I was in the bodega chasing the rats, which were eating the palay and the corn stored in huge piles. She asked if I wanted to go with her to her father’s. It was an invitation I had waited for, more out of curiosity than anything else. Now I would see a legless man who did nothing but weave fishnets every day.

Again, we went by the backyard, hurdled the barbed-wire fence, and headed for the open fields. It was a long walk to the other end of town. We paused in the shade of a mango tree, which had started to bloom, then followed the path that led to the big ash mound behind the rice mill.

“You have never been on top of that,” she said. “When you are there, on top of that black mound, you stand so high, you can see almost all of the town and the river, too.”

“Let’s climb,” I said.

She took my hand to lead me, and we followed the black path up the huge mound — the ashes spewed by the rice mill for more than two decades. Her palms were rough and her grip was strong. The rice mill came into view, and we heard the faint chug-chug of its engine, saw its smoke, like a careless lock of Martina’s dark, uncombed hair, trailing off from the tall chimney that stabbed black and straight into the afternoon sky.

When we reached the top of the mound, I was breathless and my hands and brow were moist; there was not much to see — the mound was not high enough the way Balungao mountain and its foothills were. Just a stretch of the river, farms baked in the sun, and the shapeless forms of farmer houses. But for Martina this was the pinnacle, the top of the world, and on her face was happiness and triumph. “This — all this,” she said, “my father put this here. How many years did he work to put this here? And now, I am on top of it — and look at what both of us can see.”

I did not want to spoil her pleasure. “Yes,” I said softly. “You can see farther and more from up here.” A sharp wind rose and the ash swirled around us. For some time the view was marred. A speck got into my eye and blinded me, hurt me, and I went down with her, half seeing what was ahead of the soft and powdery path that led to the fields.

We reached the tobacco rows, the green plants taller than we were, their green speckled leaves, their white flowers like plumes glinting in the sun.

It was a stupid question I asked on impulse: “What did he do before?”

She paused and looked sternly at me: “You know that,” she said. “He built that mound where we were. A mountain of ashes — a mountain! How long do you think it took to collect all that ash? Certainly, it was not a week.”

I regretted having asked again when it was so unnecessary. Now we were silent, unusually so. We walked across the tobacco plots, the leaves brushing against our faces, the air around us strong and compounded with the aroma of tobacco and the brilliant sun.

“I am his bad luck,” she finally said. “He says he had plenty of good luck before. Then he married my mother … then I came. Bad luck … bad luck, that is all he says …”

“Why was your mother bad luck?”

“Mother?” she turned quickly to me, anger flashing in her eyes. But the anger quickly fled, and in its place, this ineffable sadness, and she shook her head as we walked on. We had reached the end of the tobacco farm, and before us was a narrow strip of fallow land given to dried brown shrubs and the amorseco weeds. “Wait here,” she commanded.

Across the weed-choked strip was her father’s shack. Its windows of battered buri palm were closed, and it stood alone and desolate, no life pulsating from it. But I wanted to look within, and I objected shrilly. “You asked me to come, to see your father. You asked me!”

Her tone was final. “You stay here and wait.”

I watched her gallop away; her lithe, catlike figure disappeared behind a curtain of grass, then emerged again only to go up the bamboo ladder and into the hut.

Its windows did not open, and no sound seeped from it.

We got home at dusk, and Father was already eating. I was breathless, and when he asked where I had been, I said simply, “I climbed the ash mountain, Father. Martina and I. We went to her house, too.”

“So. Did you see her father?” I turned briefly to Martina and could see the look of displeasure on her face, the anxiety.

“No,” I said.

Father continued with his chicken adobo, and, when Martina returned from the kitchen with the water pitcher, he said, “Don’t go with Martina to that place again.” And to Martina, who was filling the glasses, he said icily, “Don’t take him there again, understand?”

“Yes, Apo,” she said, looking straight at Father, and then she turned to me, the ancient sadness in her eyes.

Martina and I did not talk anymore about that afternoon, though I wished we had. And when I saw her leave, I wanted each time to go with her, but she merely smiled and said there would be a time when the sun would not rise from the east.

She continued to do her work with frenzy, so that Sepa and all the others could not complain when, having nothing more to do, she would be out in the yard, playing marbles with me, or out in the fields chasing the grasshoppers that had come with the rains.

Then on that week before school opened, she asked me if I wanted to go with her. She had a bottle of medicine that she had bought with her savings; it was for her father, who, I now learned, had not been feeling well for weeks but, in spite of this, had sent his daughter to work for us, and this was what Martina had done, knowing that her place was at home. What was it that made him do this? And for her to accept it? I did not know, Father did not know, but it had to be done if that black mound of ash was anything.

I did not want to disobey Father, though, and the thought held me back, but only briefly. He had gone to Carmay that day, and it would be late in the night when he would return. “It will be I who will tell him. Only I will know that you had come along,” Martina assured me.

It was almost dusk; the farmer boys were bringing home their carabaos from the creek where they had been bathed, and the pigs were being called in for their meal.

“We may be late coming back,” I said.

“Are you afraid?”

“Of course not,” I said.

We hastened to the backyard and climbed over the barbed-wire fence, and as we dropped on the other side, she turned apprehensively toward the house, almost hidden from view by a screen of guava trees, to see if Sepa or any of the help had seen us. We were secure; there was no one in the kitchen or in the azotea.

We walked quickly toward the river, passed the clump of thorny camachile trees, and found the path that led to the gully, which the carabaos had widened when they were herded down for their daily bath. We skirted the bank, then went up the path that crossed the tobacco patches. I had begun to tire, for she walked at a fast pace; she did not want the darkness to catch up with us, and now my breath came in heavy gusts. We went over a bamboo bridge that spanned a dry irrigation ditch, and I sat down to rest. She jeered at me. “You are not tired. I sometimes run all the way from your house to ours!” And I recalled those mornings when she came to sweep the yard and she was pale and breathless, sweat trickling down her forehead.

“No, I am not tired,” I said, and rose.

We rounded the curve where the grass was tall, and in the deepening hush of afternoon, the sound of insects was sharper, the smell of the earth stronger. Then we were at the foot of the black mound, and Martina was saying softly, “How long did it take to build? How long did it take the balete tree to grow? Only those who have memories can tell, and I would like nothing better than not to remember … to forget …”

The small hut was ahead of us, somber and alone against the purpling sky. She held my hand, and I could feel the sudden sprint of life coursing through her with the tightening of her grip.

“Do you know what to say if he asks you who you are?”

“Do I have to say anything?” I was disturbed by what her question implied.

“Only if he asks,” was her hurried reply. “Just tell him anything — anything — that you live across the street. Anything. But don’t tell him you live in the big house — that you are your father’s son!”

I nodded dumbly, and her grip on my wrist relaxed. She continued quietly: “We may be little people … but you must understand, we are not beggars.”

“Whoever said you are a beggar?” I objected vehemently.

“Everyone does,” she said. “Why should you be different?”

We were in the yard and had hurdled the low bamboo gate. Martina headed for the short flight of bamboo stairs, and at the top, she beckoned me to follow her. I did. She slowly opened the door of the sipi—the small room where farmers kept their precious things, their rice, their fishnets, their clothes — and stepped in.

“Father?” tentatively, then, “Father, Father!”

Silence.

In a while, she came out slowly, and in that instant, I should have known from the dumb despair on her face. I should have stayed with her and learned to understand her ways, why she came to the house swiftly and disappeared just as fast when she had done her work, how hurriedly she ate her meals — like a hog — especially during those first days she was with us, the hunger in her belly that could not be easily appeased. Most of all, I should have understood how steadfastly, how proudly she took care of that cripple inside, how he, too, had sought to live his way by sending his only child to work for us, making believe that what was given to him by Father was not charity, when all of us — but not the two of them — knew it was theirs by right. Who built the ash mound?

But I did not know. I was only twelve.

Martina did not fumble for words. “Father is dead,” she said quietly.

I remember having peeped briefly into that darkened room at the legless figure there lying still and stiff, its eyes staring blankly in the gathering dusk, the buzz of mosquitoes around us. And this feeling came to me, freeing me of other feelings, all other thoughts, this feeling of dread that I had intruded into a misshapen world that I had somehow helped to shape, and that, if I did not flee it, it would entrap and destroy me. I do not recall what else Martina said, for I had quickly turned, rushed down the stairs and across the barren ground, away from this house and the ash mound beyond it. I ran and ran — away from the macabre shadows that trailed me, away from Martina and her dead father, into the comforting brightness of our home. I remember, too, her voice, her face determined and calm, and that last look of hurt and abandonment, as I ran out of a beautiful friendship into the certitude of ease that awaited me. And much later, I wished that I could see Martina again, that I could reclaim her friendship, but she left Rosales that very night and did not even attend her father’s funeral, which Father had grudgingly arranged.

CHAPTER 9

One of the crude insinuations I often heard from classmates and neighbors when I was young was that I should be tolerated and my tantrums ignored for the simple reason that insanity ran in our family. It was no joke considering that almost everyone is related — no matter how tenuously and distantly — to a person who may not be exactly insane, but whose behavior is often delightfully unbalanced. We had one such individual in our midst, and thinking about him now, I envy Cousin Marcelo for his being able to do what he wanted and not be disturbed by eccentric labels that our relatives and even some of the townspeople had attached to him.

There were, of course, past evidences of why he had gotten his reputation — that night he returned from Carmay drunk from basi and singing all the way in the loudest possible voice. “The bird sings when it is happy. Why shouldn’t a man do the same?” And what about that time he exploded a box of firecrackers during the Rizal Day program in the plaza? “I hate verbose speeches — they never can explain the Noli and the Fili the way firecrackers can.”

I am, of course, on my Cousin Marcelo’s side, and if he was insane, so was I. He was the happiest man I knew, although much, much later he was just as burdened with the prosaic chores of looking after properties that enabled him to indulge in the kind of independence I wanted for myself.

Cousin Marcelo was not really a cousin; he was Father’s youngest brother, the youngest in the family, and I should have called him Tio and in the most deferential tones, but he did not relish that. “Can you see a single white hair on my head?” he had asked. There was none, of course, in the jet-black mane that reached to his nape, and in time, his asking me to search for one became a ritual. “Call me cousin, then,” he concluded.

He had finished with the highest honors in a Jesuit school in Manila — a fact that, perhaps, explained his rambunctious good humor particularly when it came to his schooling and the church. “Be careful when you go with priests,” he said when I became a sacristan. “He who walks with Jesuits never walks with Jesus.”

He knew a bit of Latin, a bit of Greek, and lots of Spanish, which he spoke with Father and Grandfather, liberally spiced with sexual epithets; if you heard him and did not see him, you would conclude he was some Spaniard. In actual fact, Cousin Marcelo looked very much like a peasant and also dressed like one; he was always going around in denim shorts, which were comfortable — but they also showed how atrociously bowlegged he was, and he was also partial to wooden shoes in spite of the racket they caused. But he had a warm, friendly face, a little squint, and long hair when no one wore his hair long. He was past thirty, but his disposition must have done some physiological magic to his face; he looked no older than twenty. When Grandmother died, he lived for a while with Grandfather but had to go to the city to study and had to live alone—“not in a garret because there are no garrets in the Philippines.”

He had majored in philosophy and was easily the most learned man in town, and his favorite high-sounding expression always had “aesthetics” to it — Don Vicente had no “moral aesthetics,” Father had “no aesthetics” in his life, and he worried about my becoming “an aesthete.”

He chose to return home to paint shop signs, calesas and caretelas, and, for the town fiesta, arches to the auditorium and, of course, his annual masterpiece, the stage and throne of the fiesta queen and her princesses. He could not make a living in Manila doing portraits or the still lifes and landscapes he wanted to do, so he lavished some of his talents on the mundane things in our town, and it was our calesa, its tin inlay aside, that was the most colorful, for he had covered it with cloud and floral designs, as he did with jeepneys in a much later period.

He went to Manila perhaps once a month, sometimes twice, to “unburden” himself, and I always looked forward to his return after three or four days, for he always had something for me — books, chocolates. Indeed, he was my favorite relative, and his big room on the ground floor was almost mine. It was airy, with frosted windows that were open most of the time. One side opened to the garden, and in the morning when the sun flooded the green, his room would be ablaze with light, which never seemed enough. He had Aladdin lamps without their shades, and they were almost always on so that, as he said, he should be able to see everything, even the sins that were hiding under every speck of dirt.

This was his domain, and its main difference, I think, from rooms or the sala of most houses I have been to was not its brightness. He had this diploma — a fine document from his college in a gilt frame, with silver lettering in Latin and a pompous seal. All the diplomas I had seen in our town were in living rooms, prominently displayed for everyone to see.

“Diplomas are turds,” he said, and his hung right in front of the toilet bowl in his closet.

His room, as I have said, was always open, and I often wandered in and out, poked among his things, his paints and brushes, his sketches of nudes, and heaps and heaps of old magazines, pieces of string, bits of glass, old bottles, all of which he said he would shape into living and breathing objects.

Of all his paintings, it was his portrait of Don Vicente that intrigued me most, for he had, more than with any other, enjoyed doing it. As the youngest, he always spoke to Father and all those older than him with some diffidence, but he cast aside the familial hierarchy when he spoke about Don Vicente. “It is time you end your servitude to him,” he had said. “What do you want a hacienda as big as his for? You will be getting many problems, and in the end you will not even be able to enjoy the simplest food that the farmers have.”

Father chose to ignore tirades such as these, reminding Cousin Marcelo that he did not know much about the mundane ways of the world, because as an artist he was confined to the ozone regions of the mind. It was, of course, a rebuttal that Cousin Marcelo did not accept, for he felt he was closer than most to reality, to people, and to the tune of living.

“That is what an artist is,” he said, defining himself.

One warm April afternoon, a delegation of the town’s civic leaders had come to the house seeking Father’s approval for a project that would endear them all to Don Vicente. A case of sarsaparilla, a bottle of gin, and cracked ice had enlivened the discussion, which centered on the forthcoming celebration of the town fiesta. It was Mr. Alafriz, the councilor from the market district, who suggested that, aside from crowning the fiesta queen, Don Vicente should also be honored with a statue, so that “he would look toward the town with kindlier eyes.”

In the haze of Alhambra smoke and the torpor of Fundador, Cousin Marcelo barged in and bellowed, “You will do no such thing.”

All eyes turned to him. His face visibly red with embarrassment, Father said, “Explain, Celo.”

“And who would do the statue of Don Vicente? Would you be able to get someone bright enough to chisel out all the secret recesses of his personality? Show all the different layers and folds of his fat and his character? And where will you get the mountain of marble, not just for the shape of his corpulent body but for the immensity of his greed? You will insult the memory of Rizal by building this man a monument. Images of stone can only be for beings like Mabini, Bonifacio, Rizal. For someone like Don Vicente, you need something different, something that is equal to his rapacity.”

“What are you thinking of?” Father asked.

“You don’t have to spend. And he can take it with him if he wants to.”

“Please tell us what it is,” Councilor Alafriz said.

“I will paint his portrait,” Cousin Marcelo said.

The politicians could not afford to insult Cousin Marcelo; he was Father’s brother, he was far more educated than all of them put together. There were hesitant murmurs, but in the end they agreed, convinced by the most practical of reasons — that the portrait would not cost them one centavo.

For one whole week, Cousin Marcelo labored in his room, which, for once, was locked. When Mr. Alafriz checked on him afterward, he always assured the councillor that the portrait would be finished on time. The great day came, but Don Vicente was not able to come to the fiesta; his piles had gotten worse, and he had to go through surgery. The first time I saw the portrait, I wondered why it was done the way it was — the blobs of black, the smouldering face — and to my question, Cousin Marcelo had grinned: “Just picture Don Vicente in your mind, what you feel about him, what you think he is, and there you have it.”

His second chance to be of use to the town as an artist came when Padre Andong rebuilt the church. Cousin Marcelo said he would do murals for it, to depict God as he saw Him — not a just God but a vengeful one. I suppose that if Padre Andong had lived longer, he would have acceded to Cousin Marcelo’s services.

There is something about a new church that attracts people and bids them welcome. They wander in, their eyes go over the newly painted walls, the shiny altar still flavored with the smell of mortar. Then they pray a little and make the wish, which is supposed to come true sooner or later because it was made during their first visit to the church.

I am sure that, since then, many strangers have entered the new church more in the spirit of adventure than to commune with their faith. Built of hollow blocks with a new tin roof, it adjoins a convent with hardwood panels and a brick porch.

We never had an old venerable church such as those moss-covered edifices farther north, because our church — like our town — is new. The old church had been a ramshackle building that, somehow, was not refurbished even at the time when Rosales was at the height of its prosperity as the rice-trading center of eastern Pangasinan. But it had a quiet and simple atmosphere, and any man who wanted peace could enter and never bother asking if it was Protestant, Aglipayan, or Seventh-Day Adventist.

The façade was a triangle mounted by a white cross. The churchyard was plain carabao grass, with a gravel path lined with rosal. The floor of the church was plain cement, rough and uneven in parts. A skeleton of a belfry was attached to one side of the church, and it shook every time we climbed it to toll the Angelus, the elevation of the host, or the arrival of the dead. A mango tree squatted by the belfry, and on the days that we had nothing to do, we often climbed it, roosted on its branches, and told fool stories.

Everything is changed now; the mango tree has been cut. On the days that it was laden with fruit, Padre Andong used to count them like some miser and would rail at us when he saw us eating the sour green mangoes. “Why can you not wait till they ripen?” he lamented.

“Some people cannot wait for heaven,” Cousin Marcelo would have retorted.

Padre Andong came to the house one Sunday afternoon. He was a short, bulky man in his seventies. For the past three decades or so, he had been our parish priest. He used to be quite slim — that was what the old people say — but the town must have agreed with him, for he had put on weight. His bulk was covered by tight, ill-fitting soutanes, which were always frayed in the cuffs and collars and patched in the buttocks. He had a slight squint, which was not noticeable when he wore glasses. Somehow, that strong smell of tobacco and of public places never eluded him.

He could not have chosen a more propitious time to visit Father, although the visit was not necessary, for even if Father no longer went to church, he sometimes went to the convent to play chess with the old priest or with Chan Hai, another chess player, waiting in the wings for his turn. But Padre Andong wanted to be correct; he had come to ask Father a favor.

The harvest that year had been very good, and the wide yard was filled with bull carts laden with grain. Upon seeing the priest approach, Father gave the ledger to Tio Baldo and went to the gate to meet him.

Up in the azotea where they had gone to sit in the shade, Sepa was preparing the merienda table. It was like this during harvest time, this ritual visit, and Father was in a boasting mood: “Is there any man in town, Padre,” he was saying, “who will give you thirty sacks of palay this year? Thirty fat sacks — you cannot eat that in a year!”

“No, Espiridion,” Padre Andong was saying, “but there is a man who will give me forty sacks next year.”

“I don’t believe it!” Father said.

“You will,” Padre Andong said. “Because it is you who will do it. But I did not come here for the palay, Espiridion. I know that you will give it to me, even if I did not come. As you told me, it’s time that you send your boy over to be an acolyte.”

His words jolted me; serving him was not easy, for he had flogged his erring sacristans and worked them hard and long. It did not seem to me an equable arrangement for Father, who did not go to church, to send me there, but it was his wish and I walked to the church that afternoon with Padre Andong, who was silent most of the way except for his quiet assurance that I would be a good acolyte. Old Tomas, the sacristan, immediately took me under his care, and we proceeded to the sacristy, where he showed me the vestments; he could have said mass himself, for he had served there so long, he knew the Latin liturgy backward.

I served in the church for many months without pay, though money did come in, not just in the Sunday collection but from services: the baptisms, for which there were special rates, if celebrated at the main altar or in his residence; for burials, depending on how long the bells were tolled, on whether we met the funeral procession outside the church, halfway from the residence of the deceased, or when we went to the residence itself. The most expensive, of course, was if Padre Andong went with us to the house and accompanied the hearse to the cemetery. Even weddings had to be priced accordingly, and it was Old Tomas who recited the rates as well as the “specials” that went with them.

The larder was never full; Padre Andong’s breakfast often consisted of just plain rice and dried fish, and as if to save on food, he often made the rounds of his parishioners, as we were having lunch or supper, which was good, for he became known to everyone and was involved not just as confessor but as counselor in many of the problems of small-town families.

I was talking once to Sepa about there being no food in the convent, and she said, “That priest — he would boil a stone, add salt to it, and then call it excellent soup!”

And it was not just with his food that he was niggardly; his clothes, as I have said, were a pauper’s. I had to consider, however, the fact that Sepa was not a Catholic and, therefore, had a biased view.

About Padre Andong’s sternness — there was enough evidence of it to go around. I could start with Father, although I was not there when it happened. Father persistently kept away from the mass but not from the chess games that he, Chan Hai, and Padre Andong played in the convent patio. Father ceased attending church in the month of July, I think, when the rains were particularly strong and even the sturdy blooms of the rosal in the churchyard were frayed. That Sunday the rains had lifted briefly, and as usual, Father had gone to hear mass. Padre Andong was a disciplinarian when it came to how the faithful should act during the elevation of the Host. There were instances when he would interrupt this portion of the mass to shout at an erring parishioner and tell him to kneel.

The old roof had long been leaking, and many portions of the church were wet. Father’s special pew near the altar was drenched, and even if Padre Andong knew it, I suppose he did not really feel it enough reason why now Father should stand up during the elevation.

He spotted Father standing thus, and Padre Andong shouted, “Hoy, there, kneel down. Kneel down!”

Father continued standing, straight as a spear, so the story went, and next Padre Andong shouted: “Espiridion, kneel down not for me but for God!” And Father, in his white alpaca suit, head drooping, crumpled to his knees in the puddle before him.

Unlike God, said Cousin Marcelo, Father was not a vengeful man, and came harvest time, he sent the usual sacks of palay to Padre Andong. And Padre Andong came to the house on the occasions that warranted his being there — the thank-you call, Father’s birthday — as if nothing had transpired.

He was more Ilokano than most of us, though he was Tagalog; when he first delivered his sermon in Ilokano, so the story goes, he had the whole congregation buckling in laughter, for some Ilokano words that he mispronounced easily became obscene. But what really labeled him as a native was his practicality around the church; he had planted fruit trees like the mango later, guava, pomelo, and avocado. He kept poultry, too, and even coaxed us to work with him several plots of pechay, eggplant, and tomatoes so that his larder was literally independent of the marketplace.

But while his hens were always fenced in and properly kept away, the garden was not free from the chickens of the neighbors, which often flew over the fence and pecked on our plants. On one such occasion, Padre Andong was so incensed that he chased a white leghorn and felled it with a stick.

He did not know where the chicken came from, and we certainly did not want to bring it home. The problem was solved by him, and that afternoon, in the convent, we sat down to a wonderful meal of arroz caldo con gallina. When given the opportunity, Padre Andong was also a good cook.

Even in his seventies, Padre Andong saw to it that we were strong of build. He built a chinning bar behind the sacristy, which he often tried himself, and during the Eucharistic Congress in Manila he also bought for us a pair of boxing gloves.

He was an indefatigable hiker, and when he was to say mass in the barrios, he was the first to wake up in the deep quiet of dawn. If it was my turn to go with him, he would rouse me in the convent where I slept for the night, and still drowsy, I would go down to the kitchen where Old Tomas would have a cup of chocolate and pan de sal ready; then we would be on our way, his soutane tucked in his waist, so that he would be able to walk faster, and I would keep pace with him with the small canvas bag that held the chalice, the candles, and the bottle of holy water.

It happened on one such trip to the barrio of Calanutan. On the way back that afternoon, instead of taking a calesa, he decided that we would walk the shortcut, via the railroad tracks. We were halfway when we were caught by a pelting shower, and we got back to the convent drenched to the bone. The following morning Padre Andong was flushed with fever and had difficulty saying mass. The doctor came, and only then did we know that the old priest had never been too well — he had heart murmurs and as a matter of fact, we should never have hiked to Calanutan at all.

We cooked liver broth and gave it to him at lunchtime together with his medicine that the doctor had prescribed. He was grateful for the broth, but he did not take the medicine. In his rasping breath, he said, “Prayer is good medicine, particularly if you are as old as I am.”

That evening I offered him a prayer.

The fever left him, but he never regained his strength. He was pale and listless. One afternoon a nun came to the convent, and I learned afterward that she was Padre Andong’s youngest sister. They talked in Tagalog, some of which I understood. The nun was saying that it was time for him to go to the hospital, or to retire in the hospicio in Manila, where he would be taken care of in his old age. He could no longer say mass regularly, listen to confessions, or visit the villages where there were no churches; Rosales needed a younger priest. This was the way not only of the world but of the church itself.

That afternoon, after Padre Andong had made his decision, he told me to go fetch Father.

“He is leaving Rosales for good, Father,” I said, not quite sure that Father would come. “He is a sick man.”

Father tousled my hair. “I am going to see him,” he assured me.

The old priest’s room was airy and light, but it was bare except for his ancient rattan bed and his shabby clothes in the open aparador. He asked Old Tomas to draw from under the bed an old wooden trunk, to which he had a shiny iron key always in his pocket. Bending over, he opened it and removed from the top the same old black soutane that he wore frayed at the cuffs and the hem but pressed and clean.

And beneath this was a heap of coins and paper bills — many of the coins already greenish with mold. I had never seen so much silver in my life, and I looked at it in sheer wonder. Then, Padre Andong’s cracked voice: “All of it I have saved these many years — the new church will not leak … you don’t have to kneel in a puddle anymore, Espiridion. And you will come back … The new church I will leave … and it is what the people shall have built.”

So they came that week, the carpenters and the masons, and they dumped their lumber and their cement in the churchyard. They tore the façade off the old church first, then the tottering belfry, and through the hellish sound of building, Padre Andong seemed pleased with the world. He rose early, staggered to the churchyard, and looked at what was taking shape, and until the last day of his stay in Rosales, he seemed to want to linger a moment longer.

The day Padre Andong finally took the train to Manila and his resting place, I asked Father during the evening meal, “What happens when old priests can no longer say mass? Who will take care of them, since they have no children?”

Father was in a quiet mood. “Then it is time, I suppose,” he said with a wry smile, “that they sprout wings and go up there.”

I am sure Padre Andong would have preferred it down here, in the new church, if he only could have stayed.

CHAPTER 10

A week before Padre Andong left, the new priest arrived in Rosales. He was a young Pangasinense with short-cropped hair and a bounce in his walk. He had just graduated from the seminary near the provincial capital, and Rosales was his first assignment. During his first week in town, he was always up and about, visiting his wealthy parishioners and supervising the completion of the church.

He came to the house, too, and after losing two successive games of chess with Father, he practically got Father to promise that henceforth he would hear mass again.

He must have made some impression not only on Father but with the townspeople as well, for on his first Sunday mass, the church was filled to overflowing and the crowd spilled all over the sacristy and beyond the open doors onto the lawn.

Shortly after his arrival, however, I stopped serving in the church. I no longer relished working for him; for one, he turned down Cousin Marcelo’s plan to paint murals. He wanted the wall plain. But what really angered me was his refusal to give Tio Baldo a Christian burial. I know that the laws of the church are steadfast, but still, I believe that Tio Baldo — because of his goodness — should have been given a church burial, and that he should not have been buried as if he were a swine.

It is easy to forgive a person his faults when he is dead because in death he atones for his sins somewhat before the eyes of people who are still living and who have yet to add more on the parchment where their sins are listed. But even if Tio Baldo had lived to this day, I would not nurse within me the slightest displeasure toward him for his having taunted Father. I would, instead, honor him as I do honor him now, although in the end his courage seemed futile.

It happened that year when the harvest was so good, Old David had to remove the sacks of rice bran from the bodega so that every available space there could be used for storing grain. I thought that Father’s tenants — and also those of Don Vicente — could buy new clothes at last, but they did not; all they saved they gave to Tio Baldo, who, I’m sure, spent it wisely and well.

Tio Baldo was not really an uncle. In fact, he was no relation at all. He had lived in a battered nipa shack near our house with his mother, who had been, like him, in Father’s employ. She took in washing and did odd jobs for as far back as I could remember.

Tio Baldo helped Father with the books. He had gone through grade school and high school with Father’s money and insistence, and when Father was in a gracious mood, he spoke of him in terms that always brought color to Tio Baldo’s dark, oily face.

He would be a teacher someday if he continued enjoying Father’s beneficence. Indeed, Tio Baldo was made for teaching. He used to solve my arithmetic and my spelling problems in such a lucid manner that he never had to do the same trick twice. He also taught me how to fashion a well-balanced kite out of bamboo sticks, so that once it was airborne, it would not swoop down — too heavy in the nose. He taught me how to make the best guava handle for a slingshot, how to ride curves on a bicycle without holding the handlebar, and most important, how to swim.

One hot, raw afternoon he came to the garden and saw Angel, one of the houseboys, squirting the garden hose at me. He asked if I wanted to go with him to the creek. No invitation would have been more welcome.

We stripped at the riverbank. From a rise of ground on the bank, he stood straight and still, his muscles spare and relaxed, then he fell forward in a dive that hardly stirred the cool, green water as he slid into it.

When he bobbed up for air, he looked up at me and shouted: “Come!”

And seeing him there, so strong and ever ready to protect me, it did not matter that I did not know how to swim, that the water was deep. I jumped after him without a second thought.

One June morning, Tio Baldo came to the house with his mother — an aging woman with a crumpled face, whose hair was knotted into a tight ball at her nape. They talked briefly with Father in the hall; then the old woman suddenly scooped up Father’s hand and, with tears in her eyes, covered it with kisses.

The following day Old David hitched his calesa, and we picked up Tio Baldo at his house, loaded his bamboo valise, and took him to the railroad station. He was to stay in Tia Antonia’s house in the city, and while he served her family, he would go to college to be an agrimensor—a surveyor.

For the next two years that he was in the city, Tio Baldo never took a vacation. He returned one April afternoon; he went straight to the house from the station, carrying a wooden trunk on his shoulders all the way. He had grown lighter in complexion. His clothes were old and shabby, but he wore them with a confidence that was not there before.

Father stood up from his chocolate and galletas to meet him. Tio Baldo took Father’s hand, and though Father tried clumsily to shake off his hold, Tio Baldo brought the hand to his lips.

The following day he resumed his old chores, but Father had other ideas. Father took the broom and ledger from him. “I did not send you to college so you can count sacks,” he said in mock anger. “Go train a surveying party. You’ve work to do.”

Tio Baldo was delighted, particularly so when Father bought him a second-hand transit and a complete line of surveyor’s instruments. With these and some of the farm hands trained as linemen and transit men, he straightened out the boundaries of Father’s farms, apart from Don Vicente’s hacienda.

For half a year he worked very hard; he would start for the fields early in the morning with his huge canvas umbrella, chain, and stakes, and he would return to Rosales late in the evening. He did not work for Father alone; he worked, too, for the tenants.

Then, one evening, Father came home in an extremely bad humor. He struck my dog with his cane when it came yelping down the gravel path to meet him.

“See if Baldo is in,” he told me at the top of the stairs in a manner that was enough to send me scampering down from the house to the nipa hut.

Tio Baldo rushed to the house at once, to the dining room where Father had sat down to supper and was slurping a bowl of cold chicken soup. The moment he saw Tio Baldo, Father pushed the soup aside.

“Sit down!” he shouted, pointing to the vacant chair at his side. “I want to talk to you, you ungrateful dog.”

Tio Baldo, his face surprisingly unruffled, took the seat beside Father.

Father did not waste words. “I’ve always considered a little knowledge dangerous. Baldo, the truth. Is it true you are starting trouble against Don Vicente?”

I admired Tio Baldo’s courage. “Forgive me, Manong,” he said softly. “I am grieved, but I’ve already given them — the old people in Carmay — my word. I only want to get their lands back. Don Vicente can still live in luxury even without those lands, Manong. It’s common knowledge he grabbed these lands because the farmers didn’t know anything about cadastral surveys and Torrens titles. You said so yourself.”

The steady glow of the Aladdin lamp above him lighted up Father’s face. It was very red. “You accuse Don Vicente of being a thief? You might as well shout to the world that I’m a robber, too, because I’m his overseer.”

“You are his employee,” Tio Baldo said.

“And that I’m only doing my job?” Father screamed. He flung his spoon to the wall, and Sepa picked it up quietly.

Tio Baldo nodded.

“What are you doing, Baldo?” Father asked, his face distorted with rage. “What has gone into your head?”

“You knew my father,” Tio Baldo said simply. “You said he was not impoverished until Don Vicente took his land. I’m locating the old Spanish markers. The old men are very helpful, Manong. Please don’t be angry with them.”

As if by an unknown alchemy, Father’s anger slowly diminished, and when he spoke again after a long silence, his voice was calm. “Well, then, so that is how it will be. I’ll tell Don Vicente about this, of course. You will have lots to answer for, Baldo. I only hope you know what you are doing.”

Tio Baldo nodded.

Father looked at him with resignation. “I don’t know what to do with you, Baldo,” he said finally. “You have so much to learn. I’m sorry for you.”

That night I could not sleep for a long time. Father stayed up late in his room, writing, pacing. Occasionally, he would curse aloud and slap his writing desk. When morning came, he roused me from sleep and handed me a fat envelope to mail. It was addressed to Don Vicente.

Four days later, a woman came.

It was early November then. The first harvest was being brought in by the tenants, and their bull carts were scattered in the wide, balete-shaded yard.

She arrived in Don Vicente’s black Packard, and from the balcony, I saw her step out with the lightness of a cat. She must have been Father’s old acquaintance, for she shouted his name in greeting when she saw him padding down the stairs to greet her.

They embraced effusively. “Ah, Nimia!” Father sighed. “I didn’t expect you. This is a surprise.”

She grinned and tried to press away the wrinkles on her elegant blue dress. She went up to the house, sat daintily on Father’s rocking chair in the sala, and shucking off her high heels, curled her toes. Her toenails were as brightly painted as her lips. She must have been near forty and used to having her way, to getting what she wanted, and the very way she talked with Father, the coyness of her gestures, the instances when she touched his arm or smiled at him, suggested not just how well she knew how to use her femininity but how well prepared she was to go all the way if that, too, was the ultimate necessity. That she was brought to Rosales in Don Vicente’s own car from Manila indicated just as well the extent to which the rich man would go to protect his interests; he knew the people in the country who mattered, men who made the laws, who rendered justice, but, more than all of these, he knew, too, the primordial weakness of all men, and I suppose that included Father.

Nimia, as Father called her, fascinated me — how she swung her hips when she walked, how she crossed her legs when she sat down, revealing just a bit of thigh, how everything in the world seemed pleasant and beyond cavil, for there was this smile plastered on her face and it never seemed to leave her.

She came to me when she finally saw me, her perfume swirling around her, and kissed me on the cheek — a wet, motherly kiss — then looked at me with those black witch eyes kindling with delight. “How you have grown!” Then to Father, “He was just a baby when I saw him,” and I thought she would talk more with me, but she wheeled around and relegated me to limbo, while she asked Father about the town, about the problems of Don Vicente and his tenants, and finally about this Baldo.

Father lingered around her with his light talk, ignoring her question. He asked what she would have for refreshments — a glass of sarsaparilla or halo-halo? “Nothing,” she said, then in all earnestness she asked, “Tell me, what does Baldo look like?”

“You have handled worse people.” Father patted her arm. “He is not handsome, of course. A little bit on the lean side, with an average peasant’s face, but I’m sure you’ll have a hard time with him.”

“Vicente always says that in the beginning,” she said, waving Father away with a deft motion of her hand.

“I know Baldo better than you,” Father said.

“After I’m through, I’ll know him better. When do I start?” she asked.

“Right now, if you want,” Father said.

But she did not start at once. Like a bat, she waited for the dark. After supper, she peered out the window; light burned in the sala of the small house, and before a big table there, Tio Baldo was poring over maps.

She smiled confidently at Father, then she went down to the house.

I did not notice her return, but after breakfast the following morning, she started packing her things. Her face was sour when she bade Father good-bye at the gate.

“Don Vicente must try something new,” Father said.

“I’ll tell him you can do just that, but you aren’t lifting a finger,” she said angrily.

Father waved as she boarded the Packard that would take her back to Manila. “I have limitations, my dear,” he said lightly.

She did not wave back.

After the woman left, things moved quickly. November tapered off into December, and the harvest came in a steady stream. Shortly after lunch one afternoon, the black Packard with a uniformed chauffeur drove into the yard, its horn blaring.

Father dressed hurriedly. Our visitor was Don Vicente himself. It was the first time I had seen him, although almost every day his name was mentioned in the house. Father tried to talk him into getting up into the house, but he firmly refused. He sat inside his car, gesticulating, his fat white face tightly drawn. Occasionally, he would shake a stubby finger at Father, and though I could not understand much of their conversation, which was in Spanish, I knew that the rich man was very angry.

Don Vicente concluded his tirade by thrusting a cardboard box in Father’s hand, and then, at a wave of his hand, his chauffeur started the car. Father stood stiffly and said good-bye, and the car sped away.

After we had supped, Father bade me follow him to his room. He handed me the box, then we went to Tio Baldo’s house.

I had not been in it for some time, and now I noticed how really small it was. The sala was bare except for the big table and a sorry-looking bookcase made of packing crates. The only costly fixture in the house was the Coleman lamp hanging from a rafter, and below it Tio Baldo was drafting. When he saw us, he stopped and came forward to meet us.

“You know why I’m here?” Father asked.

“Does it matter, Manong?” Tio Baldo said. “It is always good to have you visit.”

Father took the cardboard box from me, and ripping its cover away, he spilled its contents on the large blue map on which Tio Baldo was working.

“It’s all yours. There’s five thousand pesos there. Count it. Not a centavo less.”

“If you say it’s a million, Manong,” Tio Baldo said, “it’s a million.”

“Don Vicente brought it this afternoon.”

“I heard he was here,” Tio Baldo said. “But I didn’t expect this.”

“All the money you got from the old men — you can return it now, and there would still be enough left to tide you through five lifetimes. Is the price all right?”

“Don Vicente hasn’t enough to buy us out,” Tio Baldo said. “We have all the proofs we need now. We will charge him for damages, too, when we get the land back.”

“You are not taking this money, then?” Father asked, moving toward him.

Tio Baldo did not speak.

“What’s wrong with you?” Father asked sternly. “Don’t you know an opportunity when you see it? You’ll never earn this in a thousand years. Think of it!”

Baldo gathered the bills and returned them carefully to the box. “If you were in my place,” he asked, facing Father, “would you take it?”

Father blanched and his lips quivered.

“Tell me,” Tio Baldo pressed. “Would you take it?”

Father picked up the box and, muttering, he stomped to the door.

The next morning, Father left for the city. When he returned the following day, the first thing he did was tell me to call Tio Baldo to the house.

He came obediently. I followed him to Father’s room and stood guard at the door to see to it that no one ventured near.

“Well, Baldo,” Father said, a hint of sadness in his voice, “I’ve done everything I could. That money … if you want it, it’s still available.”

“I have all the maps and papers ready,” Tio Baldo told Father quietly instead. “I’ll leave for the city tomorrow. The old people who have opened their bamboo banks — all of them — they are expecting so much. I think we have enough to present to the officials. They’ll give us justice, I’m sure.”

Father spoke calmly. “So you think you can win. You are at the end of your road, Baldo.”

“I’m not afraid,” he said with conviction. “There are people on our side.”

Father controlled himself; the veins in his temples were bloated, and his fists were balled. “Do you think you’ll matter?”

“You are wrong to think otherwise,” Tio Baldo said.

“You think I am?” Father brought his fist down on the small table beside him and sent paper clips and pencils flying around the room.

Tio Baldo simply looked at him.

“You think I’m afraid, too?”

Tio Baldo turned away from Father and walked to the window. The yard below was littered with bull carts. A cool wind sprang and wafted up to the house the heady scent of harvest.

“Am I afraid?” Father held him by the shoulder.

“I never said that,” Tio Baldo said, without making the slightest move to shake off Father’s hold. “I think you are only acting your age.”

“Now I’m old!” Father said. “Now I’m a fool. But let me tell you this. Need I remind you it’s not only me you are destroying but yourself, and, perhaps, all those dear to you?”

Tio Baldo, still gripped by Father’s hands, smiled wanly. “I owe you for many things,” he said. “An education, but above all, a sense of right. Please don’t take the last away.”

Father’s hands dropped from Tio Baldo’s shoulders.

“Baldo,” he said softly after a bit of silence, “I’m not taking anything back. Education and righteousness, they are good.” He slapped his thigh in languid resignation. “But we have to live. All of us. All right, I have a few hectares to my name, a rice mill, some houses. But still, I’m nothing. And you know that. Don Vicente — he has everything. He can ruin not only you or me but all of us — not because he wants to, but he may be forced to.”

“We have nothing to lose,” Tio Baldo said. Tears began to well in his eyes.

Father took him to the door. “There’s nothing more I can say,” he said.

Tio Baldo’s gait quickened as he crossed the hall. He hurried down the stairs and stepped into the afternoon.

We did not hear from him the whole month that he was in the city. Christmas passed, and we would not have known that he was finally home had not Old David seen him hurry from the railroad station to his house without speaking to anyone.

The news must have reached Carmay, for at dusk Don Vicente’s tenants started coming, some riding their work animals to town straight from the fields and bearing still the strong odor of earth and sun. The young ones came, too, but there were more old men, farmers who had known nothing but the cycle of plowing and planting. They gathered in the yard, talked quietly among themselves, and wondered perhaps why Tio Baldo did not come out at once to speak to them.

At about eight, he finally came down from the hut and walked among his people. From underneath his house, he rolled out a wooden mortar into their midst and perched himself on top of it. His mother took a kerosene lamp from their kitchen and strung it up on a low branch of the balete tree.

It took him some time before he finally spoke, louder now than the mere whispers with which he half acknowledged those who welcomed him. No sound rippled from the crowd; they hung on to each word, and each was like a huge, dull knife plunged into their breasts.

Then, when he paused, someone spoke, loud enough for all to hear: “And our money, have you cheated us?”

Tio Baldo exclaimed, “All my life, I’ve lived in virtue, but now, with you condemning me, I’ll crawl in the dust to beg your forgiveness.” Lifting his palms to a darkened sky, his voice shaking with his grief, he turned around into the silent crowd that flowed beyond the yard of the little house to the street.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me, you who are older than I, upon whose brows wisdom sits. I’ve tried, but we cannot fight money with money, nor force with force because we haven’t enough of these. Where have I failed? Have I not been true to all of you? Tell me, my fathers who are old and wise, tell me what to do. I have no money to pay you back. Even the house where I live is not mine. But my blood — take it. Tell me, my elders, if it’s enough.”

But they did not tell him; they stood like many stolid posts, unable to speak.

“What has happened to the world?” Tio Baldo cried. “Since when could justice be bought, and men have become strangers to honor? And we who have been marked for this kind of life, shall we be slaves forever? I am your son and will always be; why do you fling me now to the dogs? Tell me, oh my elders, who are wise!”

Still they did not speak.

Then, from their ranks a cry broke out — very soft and plaintive — and in the light of the storm lamp, as I stood there in their midst, I could see tears in many eyes. Numbly I looked at the ancient, careworn faces. Someone started to sob aloud, and he was quickly joined by three or four, and I could feel each sob being torn out of chests, for they were only old men, enfeebled and ready for the grave, crying now that their last dream had gone to waste. And as I looked at them, at Tio Baldo alone atop the mortar, as I listened to their grief, I felt a vise tighten in my throat; I knew I did not belong here, that I had to join Father in our comfortable house.

It was to it that I returned. And there, from the balcony, I watched the farmers slowly scatter and head back for their homes. In a while the night was quiet again and the light in the small house was snuffed out. The crickets in the balete tree started whirring, and from the asphalted provincial road came the muffled clatter of bull-cart wheels and carabao hooves carrying the harvest to the storehouse of Chan Hai.

“How did Baldo take it?” Father asked as I passed him on the azotea on my way to my room.

“Bravely, Father,” I said.

I knew how right I was, even when, the following morning, we woke up to shrill cries from outside, in the wide yard, where people had gathered to see Tio Baldo hanging by the neck from one of the lofty branches of the balete tree.

CHAPTER 11

A man’s suicide is the ultimate violence he can fling against the granite circumstance he could not vanquish. It is a lonely and desperate act of supreme courage, not weakness. But it is also an admission of total failure; the destruction of the self is the end of one person’s struggle, an end wherefrom there will be no rebirth or resurrection — nothing but the blackness, the impenetrable muck that hides everything, sometimes even the reason for death itself.

Tio Baldo never left a note, and I can only surmise the depths of that despair that had claimed him. It was not, I think, that Don Vicente had defeated him; that would not have dented his courage so much, for someone like Don Vicente — all-powerful and all-devouring — could have done that and that would be explainable. It was, I think, Tio Baldo’s complete destruction at the hands of his own people that not only humiliated him; their mistrust — though not so widely voiced — simply destroyed his last shred of dignity.

But when a person commits suicide, he does not do violence only to himself; he inflicts his death upon those whom he least considered would be so afflicted. I have thought of Tio Baldo a lot, admired him, the simplicity of his final response; he has taunted me and haunted me in a way no wraith ever will, for I saw in him not just a way out of my own dilemmas but the capacity of man to have in his hands — and in no other — his own destiny. But in thinking this way, I also realized how finite everything is, how vulnerable a human being is as I now know — victim that I am, not just of memory but of that accursed attachment that I have felt for all those who have been good to me.

As for Father, he, too, was not inured to the turmoil of conscience and self-blame. In the days that followed, he became more morose and withdrawn. At the dinner table, he would stare blankly, his face drawn and haggard. He seldom spoke, and when he did, even when he was not really angry at anyone, his words had a cutting edge.

There were nights, too, when sleep eluded him, and once I heard him curse: “Ungrateful wretches! I gave you everything and you give me hell!” He moved about in his room, his slippers scraping the floor, and I slept through, then woke again to listen to him still awake and moving about.

He did not have breakfast with me that morning, and when I saw him again late in the day after school, his eyes were deep-set and glazed, and for the first time I realized that he was drunk; his breath stank.

He had called me to the azotea, where he reclined on his armchair, the ash from his cigar scattered on the front of his white coat.

“Son,” he said, “when you grow up, don’t think of other people. Think only of yourself. Others don’t matter, because they don’t think of you anyway.”

It was comments like these that, more than anything, showed how Tio Baldo’s death had now warped Father’s thinking. There may have been occasions when his spirits were buoyed up, but they were far between. I thought, for instance, that the coming of Miss Santillan to our house would brighten our lives, and it surely did, but only for a while.

Miss Santillan was brought to the house by the high school principal. She was a young, handsome woman, a teacher. They talked with Father for some time in the sala, then the principal left and Miss Santillan stayed to board with us. Father told her to make herself really at home. I’m sure the gesture was but a nicety; Father could not have meant what he said, because he loathed intrusions into his privacy. The only reason, I presume, why he took Miss Santillan as a boarder was that she was the only teacher in the high school who was not a native of our town. The principal had suggested to her that nothing but the best boardinghouse would do for her.

And the “best,” actually, was our house.

Miss Santillan was around twenty-four. Her complexion was clear brown like a baby’s, and she wore her hair short like a movie actress. Her shoes had high heels, and her toenails, like her fingernails, were painted red. She did not, however, wear the slightest smudge of rouge or lipstick. In spite of this, her lips and her cheeks shone with the pale pink of macopa.

During the holidays, when the wooden schoolhouse beyond the plaza looked haunted, she stayed in her room. And if the weather was balmy, she would read, comfortably seated on the bench shaded by the balete tree. She came up only when the sun finally toppled over the foothills and the leaves of the acacias that lined the provincial road had closed.

On this particular evening, a few days before the celebration of our high school concert, we were idling in the sala, having finished supper. Miss Santillan was feeling exuberant the whole day, and though it was Saturday, she did not shut herself up in her room or read in the yard. She had puttered around the house instead, joking with the maids in the kitchen and with the boys in the storehouse. The echo of the Angelus had waned; I had kissed Father’s hand, and he had taken his silver-handled cane and gone down for the stroll that would lead to Chan Hai’s. Sepa had lighted the bronze Aladdin lamp in the sala. The cool blue haze steadied, and Sepa dropped on the sofa and leafed through the Bannawag, which she could not read but whose pictures and Kulafu comics attracted her.

Miss Santillan, who was looking out into the town slowly succumbing to the dark, turned and beckoned me.

“You want to know something?” she asked. She held my hand and pressed her forefinger to her lips as if to warn me to share with no one her beautiful secret. “It is supposed to be a surprise,” she said.

I nodded.

“You won’t believe it, but Mr. Sanchez and I—”

“You are getting married?”

Her face reddened; she drew back and laughed. “No, of course not.” She stopped laughing, but her voice was still rich with happiness. “For the high school program, the principal has asked us to sing. A duet.”

Now it was evident why she felt lighthearted the whole day, and suddenly it struck me as wonderful — her singing on a stage. From bits of talk in the school, I gleaned that she had studied voice once, but never during the past few weeks that she had stayed with us had she raised her voice in a full-bodied song.

As for Mr. Sanchez, our mathematics teacher, he made not the slightest effort to hide his rich baritone as big as himself, and he could best any male teacher in the school, I am sure, not only in hog-calling but in wrestling.

Miss Santillan turned around and looked at the piano in the hall — a relic that had belonged to my mother. It was more of a prop whose presence was a status necessity in all big houses. Its dark mahogany shone dully through the red shawllike cover that ran down the keyboard and almost hid the rectangular stool. It sulked in the west corner, flanked by two wrought-iron pedestals that supported palmetto fronds. Its stage was elevated a step high, and surrounding it, lining the curving wall, were square glass plates that reflected bits of light. Though constantly cleaned by Sepa, its thin casing had started to crack and peel. I could knock out a tune with one finger, but I never heard it played properly; its only complaint against the obscurity to which it had been flung was a disconcerting jangle of the chords when Sepa ran a rag over the keyboard to wipe off the dust.

“I think I will yet play a tune on that,” Miss Santillan suddenly said, moving toward it.

Sepa dropped the magazine.

“Why doesn’t someone play it, anyway?” Miss Santillan asked me. “It’s easy to learn, you know. Was it never intended to be played?”

“It is, ma’am,” I said.

A cryptic smile crossed her face, then she strode toward it. Before she could lift the cover, Sepa ran to her side and clamped a firm hand on the piano cover.

“No, maestra,” the aghast housekeeper said.

“Don’t be foolish,” Miss Santillan reproached her.

“But Apo — he might know. No one has touched it in a long, long time.”

“It’s all right,” Miss Santillan assured her. “I’ll play softly. Besides,” she turned to me, “your father won’t be back till midnight.”

Sepa backed helplessly away. “I’ll explain it to him,” the teacher said. She eased herself onto the stool and cracked her knuckles. “I haven’t touched a piano in ages.”

She played a folk song and occasionally struck a broken string. She did not step on the pedals because they did not respond, and with the piano lid closed, the music was muffled, distant. She did not complete a piece; she just rippled through snatches of melody.

She turned to me afterward to ask what song I wanted to hear. She would play a complete piece. Her question lost urgency, and her face quickly darkened.

“Play a mazurka. Any mazurka,” Father answered for me; he had returned much earlier than we had expected and had perhaps stood by the door, for how long we did not know.

“Sepa told me not to touch it,” Miss Santillan explained. “I thought I might still be able to play … it was such a long time …”

Father did not listen to her blurted explanation. “I should have known that you play well — with fire, with emotion.” He was euphoric. He brushed aside the housekeeper, who had gone to him with a mouthful of excuses.

“We didn’t expect you to come home so soon,” Miss Santillan said, stepping down from the platform.

Father was still grinning. “Chan Hai has had too much cerveza, and his moves weren’t wise. But go on. Play.”

Miss Santillan reluctantly returned to the piano. Her long housedress swished against her legs. “Some of the keys are out of tune,” she said, and struck one to emphasize her point. “And a few strings are broken.” She struck a few keys again.

“I know,” Father said, “but go on. Play.”

He turned and went to his rocking chair in the azotea, wheeled the chair around so he would face us, and digging a pouch from his shirt pocket, filled his pipe and lighted it. In the cool light of the Aladdin lamp Miss Santillan looked very pretty. Her hair was brushed up and tied with a blue ribbon at her nape. Her forehead, her cheeks were smooth. As she played, her lips were half open as if in a smile. Father’s eyes were on her hands.

Mr. Sanchez visited us the following afternoon. It was the first time he or any other teacher came to the house. Only the principal visited us; even Miss Santillan’s female coteachers waited at the gate when they wanted something from her. We walked from the schoolhouse with Miss Santillan. Mr. Sanchez was short and dark, with a fleshy face and wavy hair. He wore a white shirt loudly printed with red and green birds. Though he was seldom jovial in school, all the way to the house he teased Miss Santillan on the prospects of their forthcoming stage appearance. What they did not know was that the entire school already shared their secret. He did not want to come up to the house, but when I told him that Father was not home and would not be in until evening, he went up with us. It was not long before he was at ease and Miss Santillan had him sitting beside her on the piano stool as they played “Chopsticks.” It seemed to be the only tune the mathematics teacher could play.

“I haven’t done that in years,” Mr. Sanchez gushed, and Miss Santillan’s eyes shone. They sang a little, Miss Santillan softly, while most of the time Mr. Sanchez’s baritone boomed. After the Angelus had pealed, he said he was going home. Since our supper was not ready yet, would Miss Santillan care for halo-halo in the refreshment parlor by the bus station, and would I please come along as Miss Santillan’s chaperon?

Father returned early, and we met him at the gate. He rattled the iron bars of the fence with his cane. The two teachers greeted him. Father did not ask where we were headed, but Mr. Sanchez felt he had to explain, his baritone changing into a squeaky stammer.

On our way back, the night was black and the balete tree was crowned with fireflies. Mr. Sanchez walked close to Miss Santillan, and sometimes they talked in whispers punctuated by Miss Santillan’s soft laughter.

Roosters perched on the acacia trees along the street crowed. At our gate, I saw Father smoking in the azotea. He rose when we approached. “Your supper is cold,” Father said as he opened the door for us. Without listening to Miss Santillan’s greeting, he hied back to his seat.

After supper, Miss Santillan took her lesson plan and went to the table in the sala where I also did my homework. There Father joined us, his unlighted pipe in his hand. “Aren’t you going to play tonight?” he asked.

“I am tired,” she said politely, “and, really, I don’t know any other piece except those that you’ve already heard.”

Father struck a match.

“Besides, the piano is …”

Father snuffed the light out without kindling his pipe. “I know.” He sounded sorry. “The piano is no good.”

Before Miss Santillan could speak again, he went back to his rocking chair. When we left the table after some time, he was still there, neither smoking nor rocking, the quiet night all around him.

I was not asleep when the familiar scrape of his slippers came down the hall. He paused before my door, then came in, his pipe still unlighted in his hand.

“You went very far this afternoon,” he said.

“No, Father,” I said, trying to make out his face in the dark. “We just had halo-halo at the bus station.”

“With that teacher?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and left.

The following week, Father spent little time in the fields. He came home early; at five he was already in the house, and he always asked Miss Santillan to play after supper. In spite of the repeated invitations of Chan Hai and the new priest, Father paid little attention to chess. One afternoon, four days before the high school concert, a man from Dagupan arrived. He brought the piano to the azotea, where he dismantled it, and it lay, a heap of strings and pieces of anonymous wood, its many felt-covered hammers scattered on the stone floor.

“The mice gnawed some parts,” he explained, pointing to a mess of shredded paper where pink baby mice, their eyes still shut, were cuddled together and making soft squeaking noises. For the next two days he stayed in our house, working far into the night. When he was through, the piano was returned to its old niche. It had a new coat of varnish, the lid was propped up and polished to a sheen, and the white ivory keys were no longer yellow.

After supper, upon Father’s prodding, Miss Santillan walked over to the piano. We watched her settle primly on the stool, then tentatively run her fingers over the keys. The music that bloomed later was full, magical, and Father rocked quietly in his chair.

Then it was their last rehearsal, and Mr. Sanchez came to the house again. The block-glass window in the corner was flung open, and the last vestiges of sun that came in made the piano shine like burnished gold. Miss Santillan played “One Kiss” several times. On Father’s rocking chair, which had not been returned to the azotea yet, Mr. Sanchez sat and listened. After a while he went to Miss Santillan’s side. He rested his arm on the piano ledge, looked at Miss Santillan’s face, then sang. His voice was tremulous and without much timbre at first, but as the melody held him, it soon filled the house.

After “Oh Promise Me,” a Spanish song, he sang another, whose words I could not understand. They were not able to finish the last, because there was a brisk clapping behind me. I turned and saw Father standing at the top of the stairs. He did not return the greeting of Mr. Sanchez. To Miss Santillan, he said gravely: “I didn’t know you could sing, too,” then he walked briskly to his room and his ledgers.

Miss Santillan played softly after Father had gone, and in a while Mr. Sanchez begged to be excused. He said he had something important to do at home.

“But won’t we sing just once more?” She tried to hold him back. “We might not be able to practice again.”

“Oh, yes, we will,” Mr. Sanchez stammered, then he stepped back to the door, mumbling unintelligibly about his work.

Father appeared at the supper table. He was very quiet, and it was only after the dessert that he spoke. Without looking at Miss Santillan, he dug his spoon into the bits of nanca sweet and said: “I see you sing, too.”

Miss Santillan could not face Father. “I had no formal training,” she said.

“And the other teacher, too?” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “You made a nice duet, indeed!”

“We will sing in the high school program tomorrow.”

“Really?” Father said. “Well, that’s good! I think you’ll make a good show. It’s really all right for you to like singing very much, to like a man even …”

Miss Santillan gripped the table’s edge; a flush of red had crept to her face. “Isn’t this becoming too personal, sir?” she asked.

Father glared at her. “Personal or not, I cannot let any lovemaking take place in this house.”

“Lovemaking!” Miss Santillan slumped, shocked, on her seat. “We were only singing a … a duet!”

Father had not raised his voice, but it was stern. “I don’t care which men you want to meet. But as long as you are staying here, under my care, I want you to know that I am like — like your father here.”

He stopped and, in all dignity, stood up, walked to the sala, and pushed his rocking chair back to the azotea. Miss Santillan, speechless for a long while, finally rose and made for her room.

The next morning she was back in her perch under the balete tree. The day of the high school show had come, and though she was needed at school, she did not go. Father arrived late for supper, and when it was over he got his cane from the rack and went down the darkening streets. A boy came from the high school where the program was about to begin and asked for Miss Santillan, but she told me to tell the messenger that she was not feeling well. After the Angelus, Sepa lighted the bronze Aladdin lamp, and Miss Santillan brought out her sewing box. The quiet in the house was awful.

“Aren’t you going to play tonight?” I asked.

She shook her head and did not even turn to me.

“I am going to the school to watch the program,” I said. “Aren’t you coming along?”

Another vehement shaking of the head.

It was sheer waste, and I loathed it. I went to the piano at the far corner. I wanted to run my fingers over its keys, so I tried to lift the lid, but to my surprise, it would not budge. The man who repaired and tuned it had installed a shiny, silver-plated lock — and it was on.

CHAPTER 12

Three days after our high school day, Miss Santillan packed her things and told Father she was moving to another house with one of her female colleagues because she “needed help and guidance on some of her class projects.”

Father objected a little, but I did try very hard to dissuade her.

Later in the afternoon, Father went down, his white coat crumpled and dirtied, and he stayed out the whole night. He did the same thing many times afterward, and though I suspected where he went, I did not ask.

I was having a snack in the kitchen one late afternoon when Sepa, who was serving me, said: “I hope you don’t think ill of your father when he leaves in the late afternoons.”

“You are speaking in riddles,” I said. “He plays chess in the convent or in Chan Hai’s shop.”

The old woman sighed, and her small, bleary eyes were slits as her cheeks puffed up in a smile. “Maybe he does …”

“You old fool.” I waved her away with my spoon. “You know nothing but make stories.”

She called me to the window, and I reached it in time to see Father hurrying out of the yard, past the screen of bananas in the direction of the rice mill.

“Do you know where he’s going?” she asked. She wiped her fat, oily face with her apron and went back to the stove.

“He is taking a shortcut to the rice mill,” I said. “If you have something to say, say it.”

“You’ll find out yourself,” she said. “You’ll find out.”

“You are a witch!”

“Follow him, then,” she said. She shook the ladle at me and laughed again.

“You old witch,” I said, flinging the spoon at her.

For a woman of her build, she dodged nimbly. As I left, her roiling laughter trailed me.

It was not easy to forget what Sepa had said, but in time I did forget, for there was Carmay and boys like Angel with whom I played. Father started leaving the house more often. He would be out the whole night and return only in the morning. I never bothered asking him, for he worked hard, managing his farm and Don Vicente’s, and if he did play chess even for a whole week, it was his business and I would not interfere.

Angel and I were out in the fields near the rice mill one gusty April afternoon. We were flying a kite I fashioned out of Father’s extra Christmas wrapping papers the year past. Angel let me launch it alone; it was a perfect kite, for I had just run a short distance when a puff of wind picked it up and sent it soaring to the sky. It wavered sideways, then hovered motionless in the air, its string uncoiled to the very handle, taut and tugging at my hand.

With my kite safely up, I sat down in the shade of a banaba and dismissed Angel, for I no longer needed his help. He had barely disappeared beyond the turn of the path when a strong wind swept the sky; the string snapped, and the kite started its slow, swaying descent.

I raced across the field and followed the kite as it was blown farther away. In a while I found myself near the river, beyond the rice mill. I ran up the mountain of black ash, and as I reached the top I looked down and saw Father walking swiftly along the bend of the river to the new nipa house on the lot where Martina and her father had once lived.

For an instant, I wanted to call out to him and tell him of the kite that was now drifting down the river, but it became apparent that he was in a hurry. What Sepa had said rankled in my mind, and I hurried down the ash mound and trailed him.

Father walked quickly, as if he was afraid someone was following him. As he neared the nipa house, a woman I had never seen before came out. She hurried past the bamboo gate to the path, and as Father drew near, her arm went around his waist, and arm in arm they went up to the house.

I crouched behind a sapling, numb in spirit, and forgot all about the kite. I remembered Mother’s whitewashed grave and Father’s angry voice when he saw me wearing her dress. When I finally went home, the sun had sunk and Rosales was empty and dark.

All through the night, I could not sleep. When Father arrived at dawn amidst the howling of the dogs, for the first time I loathed him.

He appeared at the breakfast table in excellent spirits, his face radiating happiness. He must have noticed my glumness, for he asked me what the matter was. I shook my head and did not answer.

The whole day I stayed in the bodega with my air gun idle in my hands. Many rats were out in the open, scampering in the eaves and on the sacks of grain, clear targets all, but somehow they no longer interested me.

And at the supper table after all had left, Sepa came and tried to humor me.

Unable to contain myself anymore, I went to Father, who was smoking in the azotea.

“I was near the rice mill yesterday afternoon,” I said, hedging close to him. The rocking of his chair stopped; he knocked his pipe on the sill and turned to me.

“What were you doing there?”

“I was flying a kite,” I said, looking down at my rubber shoes, unable to meet his gaze. “Its string snapped and I chased it. I went near the new house by the river.”

I looked quickly at him and saw in the cool light of the Aladdin lamp his tired, aging face.

“What else did you do?” he asked, his voice barely rising above a whisper.

“Nothing,” I said. “I saw you.”

He looked away and said quietly, “I don’t have to explain anything.” And with a wave of his hand, he ordered me away.

I waited until I was sure the house was quiet, then I stole into the kitchen and with the meat cleaver, I busted my bamboo bank and filled my pockets with the silver coins. The back door was open, and without a sound I stepped out into the moonlight.

Sepa was at the gate. She sat beneath the pergola, smoking a hand-rolled cigar whose light burned clear like sapphire in the soft dark.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Do not interfere,” I said. “You are a cook and nothing else.”

She held my arm, but I brushed her away. Undaunted, she stood up and followed me to the street. In the moonlight, she peered at me. “Young one,” she said, “it’s a nice night for taking a walk, isn’t it?”

I did not speak.

She said lightly, “It’s a lot better sleeping out in the open than in a room stuffy with curtains and mosquito nets.” Her hand alighted on my shoulder. “But then sometimes it rains, and then there’s the heat of the highway, and the awful dust that spreads and itches and soon pocks your body with sores.”

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“I should, but listen. It is a man who understands, who knows that life isn’t always cozy,” she said with a wisp of sadness in her voice. “We would like to see things as we want them to be. Unfortunately, that can’t always be.”

We reached the town plaza, which was now deserted of promenaders and the children skating in the kiosk. The plaza was lined with rows of banaba trees glistening in the moonlight.

“Take these trees,” she said, “how wonderful it would be if all through the year they were blooming. But the seasons change just like people. There is nothing really that lasts. Even the mountains don’t stand forever. But people, I am sure, can be steadfast if they have faith.”

Her hand on my shoulder was light, and as I walked slowly she kept pace with me. With her wooden shoe, she kicked at a tin can and sent it clattering down the asphalt.

“Who is she, Sepa?” I asked after a while.

“Who?”

“You know whom I mean.”

“She is good-looking. She came from a village in the next town … was a barrio fiesta queen.”

“Did Father build the new house for her?”

“That’s all I know,” she said. After a while, from out of the quiet, she spoke again: “You know how it is with the hilot—the midwives who deliver babies. I’m one, too. Remember? Sometimes they have to use force to hasten birth and lessen the mother’s suffering. It’s always better for the mother and the baby, but it doesn’t always look good with the hilot. She is misunderstood.”

“I understand you perfectly,” I said flatly.

Sepa sighed: “I still believe your mother was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and more than that I believe, too, that she bequeathed much of her graciousness to her only child. And your father — he is a wonderful man.”

Then it was November again, and the rains no longer came in gusts; the sun shone and the grain ripened, and all over the land the rich smell of harvest hung heavy and sweet. There would be smoke in the early evenings and the delicious odor of roasting, half-ripe, gelatinous rice, and there would be pots of bubbling sweets — camotes, bananas, langka. The mornings would be washed with dew, and I would lie longer in bed till the sun roasted my brain.

It was on one such morning that I was roused from sleep. Father had swept into my room, his leather boots creaking; he tapped the iron bedpost with the steel butt of his riding stick, and in the bronze glimmer of day, he stood before me, big and impressive. “A hunter must rise ahead of the sun,” he said.

I stirred, but when Father had gone I slowly sank back into this bog of blissful sleep. It was brief, though, for the dogs started howling in the grounds, and Old David was shouting at the boys not to tarry with the saddles. Above the clangor of everything, I could distinguish the neighing of the black pony that Father had given me. The world was alive; we were going to hunt together for the first time, for I was already old enough to handle a gun. It was a time I had waited for, and looking back, all through those trying times, Father really needed not just the woman I had yet to meet but a diversion from the cares that had begun to nag and depress him.

At this time of the year, Old David said, the delta was dry again; the waters had receded from their pockets, and in the mornings shrouded with mist the quail would gather at the water holes. It was time for Father to mount his chestnut horse, gallop past the iron gate through the still-sleeping town. On mornings like this when I was not yet allowed to go with him, I would rise early, too, and wrapped in bedsheets, I would linger at the balcony and watch Old David help him mount. The face of the old man would always turn up to me in a smile as he and Father passed below. I loved his work, his closeness to the horses to whom he often spoke, and I often idled in the stables, all around me the pungent smell of urine and sawdust, while he tinkered with the leather. And in the stable, he dismantled father’s escopetas—the twelve-gauge double-barreled shotguns — and cleaned them till their bores shone and their hand-carved stocks glistened. With his permission and watchful eye, I had touched them, listening to the double click of the trigger. By the time I was ten, I could handle the guns, though I could barely lift them, and I had learned not just how to shoot but how to treat them with respect and caution.

“Do you think he would take me hunting now?” I had asked so often, it had become a ritual for us. But Old David, chewing his leaf tobacco, merely shrugged: “Next year, perhaps. Your father knows best.” At the end of the day, as the sun toppled over the foothills, I returned to the balcony, knowing they would soon come, and by dusk Father would ride in slowly, Old David cantering behind him. But many a time, however, the saddle pack did not hold even one skinny bird, and many a time, too, Father tramped to the house with thunder in his boots, banged at the doors and did not even look at me when I rushed down the stairs to kiss his hand.

There were times in the years long past, Old David said, when they did not know where to put the quail and the heron that they had shot, but now the birds hid in the fastness, driven there by men who no longer had enough rice to eat. More babies were born, they grew up, and there being no more land to farm in the plain, they moved to the foothills and razed them of their cogon grass. They tried planting in the delta, too, when the rains stopped, but the course of the river had always been erratic, and what could be a fertile field this year could be a sandy bar next year.

I prodded Old David again to go ask Father if I could go with him to hunt; he had said that my voice was changing and, yes, perhaps this time it would be all right. We went up to Father’s room, but only he entered; I tarried at the door, which was ajar, and heard Father say, “But why must he come? There is nothing there but wasteland. Here he has everything, has he not? An air rifle, a bicycle, companions …”

“He wants to hunt, Apo.”

“And if he gets lost? Or if he drowns? No one will replace him …”

“I have forgotten, Apo.”

“Can he take care of himself?”

“Yes, Apo. He knows how to handle a gun now.”

A long pause, then Old David came out, his craggy face bright with a smile. And later that day, from the open window of Father’s room, I aimed at a brown kapok pod buffeted high in the wind. This was the moment I had waited for, to load and aim a gun, and when I fired, my bones rattled, my teeth jarred, and in my ears the roar was deafening. When the acrid smoke cleared, the pod no longer swung in the tall and slender tree across the street.

Father was grinning when I turned to him. “All right, eh, David?” then to me, “But if you come, you must carry something, like the lunch bag. And you keep track behind me so you won’t get lost.”

But doubts persisted. “Tell me, am I not ready yet?” I asked. Old David shook his head. He had often watched me aim a slingshot at Father’s empty beer bottles lined up in the yard, and each brown exploding glass was like the shattered body of a bird. Then, with an air rifle and at a greater distance. Now with the gun.

“You’ll do,” Old David said simply.

So on this November morning when smoke from the kitchen stoves and yard fires of the neighbors curled up to a sky polished with sun, I finally was to see the delta. I had new rubber boots and denim overalls. I went to the dining room, where Sepa and Old David were serving Father coffee and fried rice, and sat at the other end of the long mahogany table. The chocolate the old man placed before me steamed fragrantly, but it was not enough. I motioned to Old David to pass the fried eggs, but Father warned: “A hunter must always eat light before the hunt.”

I waited till Father rose. At the door, without his seeing it, Old David slipped into my hand a white lump of native cheese wrapped in banana leaf.

Down at the stable, the boys ringed me and wished me luck, then they dispersed hurriedly when Father came. After he had mounted, Old David helped me up onto my pony. For the past few days I had studied the animal’s temper, raced it to the meadow beyond the barbed-wire fence, anticipating the time I would ride it to the delta. Now the frisky animal reared, then pawed the ground. I held its reins steadily.

Old David mounted his low-chinned mare. With Father on his castaño before us, we rode down the driveway. Through the town the dogs followed us in howling packs. The early risers, who sat haunched before yard fires warming their hands, stood up and watched us and our horses, whose breath spouted from their nostrils like blasts of steam in the morning chill. We clattered over the new wooden bridge across the creek, then turned to a weedy bull-cart road, and down to the fields where farmers were already harvesting. They paused in their work to watch.

“We will be there soon,” Father said. We were halfway, so Old David said, when Father told us not to follow him, and jabbing his stirrups into the hinds of his mount, he galloped ahead.

I turned to the old man as Father disappeared at the bend of the road. “Tell me, Old David, can I really get lost in the delta?”

Old David maneuvered his mount away from the mud pits and the deep wheel ruts that sliced the road and moved away from me. He did not answer.

“Are there many birds there?”

“You know what the delta is. There isn’t anything about it that I haven’t told you,” he said.

I brought my horse beside the old man’s mare so that as we jogged on, our legs brushed.

“Ay,” the old man sighed. “Long before your father ever went there, when your grandfather and I were still boys, we hunted there. One night we kept vigil at the edge of a brook. With a powerful gun you track just one bird. One skinny bird! We let the pagaw and the heron alone, but you can’t do that now. You know what were there once? Wild pigs and deer that cavorted in the light of the moon and stood unafraid at the edge of the clearings!”

Once, before I knew what a deer was like, in Father’s study I gazed at the mounted heads of boars that adorned the wall, their tusks sticking out of their petrified snouts like Moro daggers. Beside Father’s folding desk I touched the smooth tapering antlers that served as cane-and-hat rack. On Father’s high, carved chair, I perched myself to reach the blades of the spears, the forked arrows, and the double-barreled shotguns on the wall.

“People didn’t crowd the delta then, nor was it planted with crops. Deer and wild pigs roamed it freely, scared not by the sight of men. They nibbled at the corn; like disciplined soldiers they drank at the riverbank without muddying it. The river was very clear then, like a spring, and the land wasn’t dead. But more people came, sapped it dry of its milk. The animals fled to the deeper hills. Then there was no more place to flee to but here. Everything was cleared. The hills. The mountains.” Old David’s ancient face looked wistful.

“You must love going to the delta,” I said. “Year after year, you go there.”

“So does your father,” the old man said. He smiled enigmatically, then whacked the rump of his mare with his rattan whip. The animal doubled into an awkward trot, and sensing the prospects of a race, I whipped my pony, too, and in a burst of speed I passed him.

The wind whipped my face; the road exploded in a blaze of orange and green. Then the dike loomed, a high mound that followed every turn of the river’s bank. At the base of the dike, I stopped and waited.

Old David rode up to me, and we went together, without speaking, our horses straining up the path. Now, atop its narrow crest, I could see the whirling waters of the river and, beyond the tufts of grass and camachile brambles, the vast green spread — the delta sprawled toward the sun.

“Your hunting ground.” Old David nudged me. Then down the patch of land below the dike we saw Father signaling us to hurry.

“The river is not deep,” Old David said as we trotted to where Father waited.

“And what if it be a hundred bamboos deep?” Father glared at the old man. “You said he can take care of himself. Hurry with the pack, and no more talk.”

The old man alighted slowly and helped me down. He unstrapped the pack from the saddle, unholstered the gun, and laid it on the grass. I held the barrel up and asked Father if I could carry it.

Father shook his head. He pointed to the saddle pack that contained our lunch and the water bottle. Leaving the horses tied to knots of grass near the dike, we walked to the riverbank and down a narrow gully; at its bottom, a bamboo raft swayed with the current. A tenant setting fish traps in the shallows told Father that the first cucumber and watermelon seeds in the small clearings were planted the other day.

“So it’s like last year, eh, David?” Father said happily. “Pray that the birds haven’t been frightened away yet. We should have come earlier.”

Old David strained at the raft line that stretched across the river. The raft moved closer and hugged the muddy river edge. Father leaped into the raft, and I followed him with the lunch bag and the water bottle. The raft swayed giddily.

“You come back for us at sunset with the horses, David,” Father told the old man. “This time, since you aren’t coming, we may have better luck.”

Old David pulled the line, and the raft slithered with the current. We balanced ourselves on the dry bamboo floats, safe from the waters that lapped and swished at our perch. With Old David’s every heave at the line, the steel wire above us sang. The land and the mossy reeds jutting up the waterline drew near, and in a while the braced prow of the raft smashed into the delta. The tamarind tree, on whose trunk the steel line gnawed deep, quivered with the impact.

I leaped into the sandy landing, the bag and the bottle narrowly missing the tree. Father followed; he wasn’t much of a jumper. He splashed into the river’s edge, and I turned just in time to grasp the gun, which had slipped from his hand.

“I’ll hold it, Father,” I suggested. I raised the bottle and the lunch bag. “These aren’t heavy.”

Father grabbed the gun from me and did not answer. He started out immediately on one of the paths that forked from the landing, Swinging the lunch bag and the bottle over my shoulders, I followed the measured drift of his steps. He did not speak. We plodded on until the trail we followed vanished into a high, blank wall of grass that fringed a small brook.

“Shall we stay here, Father, and wait?” I asked, wiping the sweat on my forehead. I had begun to tire, and I had not seen a single bird. “Old David said the delta birds usually roost near the mudholes.”

“We rest here,” Father said. He parted the grass and the undergrowth with the muzzle of the gun.

“But won’t we go deeper?” I asked. “Old David said we have more chances of finding something to shoot at … if we go deeper.”

Father scowled at me. My other questions remained unasked. “We stay here,” he said firmly. “Maybe the herons weren’t driven away by the tenants yesterday.”

I sank on the dank black earth. My legs started to numb, and my throat was parched. I opened the bottle and took a hasty gulp.

Father saw me. “And what will happen if you are lost with no drinking water?”

I hastily screwed the bottle cap. This was no hunt at all; we were sitting on the edge of a stagnant brook, just waiting. After a long while, when nothing stirred in the grass, Father stood up and threw the gun over his shoulder. “Let us move,” he said without turning to me.

“Where do they really stay, Father?” I asked, following him.

“Anywhere.”

Were they in the high grass that rustled with every stirring of the wind? Or in the shade of the low camachile trees?

We came upon untidy clearings that were already planted and lingered in the empty watch houses at their fringes. The sun scorched the sky, and on and on we probed into the grass. Once, I listened to a faint, undefined tremolo — perhaps a birdcall — but nothing came out of it, no quarry taunted the sight of Father’s gun. Only tiny rice birds and still smaller mayas twittered and shrieked in the green.

Our shadows became black patches at our feet, and I felt the first twinges of hunger. I did not open the lunch box. As we walked on, I nibbled at the cheese Old David had given me, and its salty tang heightened my thirst. We reached the fire tree at noon. It would be some time before it bloomed. Old David said it was a landmark we could not miss. It rose above the monotony of rushes and thorny saplings.

“You never notice a fire tree that’s young,” Old David had said. “Not until it’s in bloom. You never see it as sapling or seed. You see it just like the way God had planted it and meant it to be, a blazing marker on the land.”

“I know this tree well,” Father said, pointing to his rudely carved initials on its trunk. “I did that years ago.”

I unslung the lunch bag and the water bottle. “Old David and Grandfather spared this tree when it was still small,” I said.

Father did not listen to me. He ripped the lunch bag open and handed me two cheese sandwiches. He ate hastily, and when he drank, small streams trickled down his chin. He smacked his lips contentedly as the water ran down his neck and drenched his shirt front. After eating, Father slumped on the big roots that crawled up the trunk and lowered his wide-brimmed cap over his face to shield off a piece of sun that filtered through.

“I’ll steal a wink,” he said. “Try it, too.”

Father took his hat off and fanned his face. He looked at me quizzically, then laid his head back against the trunk.

I laid the empty bag on a gnarled root beside him and perched my head on it. Above, hemmed in by branches and the grass, in the blue sky, swallows circled slowly. When I turned on my side, I saw that Father’s jaw had dropped. He was snoring, and a small line of saliva ran down the corner of his mouth. Later, when the sun shone through the branches on his face, he stood up. His eyes crinkled. Tightening the cartridge belt around his wide waist, he bade me follow him.

He said, “You will find hunting is luck. Mostly luck.” He straightened the wrinkles on his breeches, then walked again. I kept pace behind him and flayed the grass with a stick, sometimes with my feet. But no matter how vigorously I worked at it, not one heron or quail soared up from the grass. We were finally stopped by a brook, wide and still, and its quiet and opaque blue meant it was also deep.

“Shall we cross it, Father?”

Father contemplated the glazed waters and shook his head. “We can have as much luck here as across it.”

We hiked back to where we came from, where the ledda grass was burned by Father’s tenants the other day and many charred tufts still smoked.

“Are we going home?”

“You ask too many questions,” Father said.

The sun dipped. From the green before us, a pagaw suddenly whirred up and disappeared in the grass. Father raised the rifle too late. He did not fire. “Not even your grandfather or David could hit that,” he said, lowering the gun. “We are heading home.”

But where was the way? I followed him, and then we were once more near the tree in whose shade we had rested.

Was our aimless meandering now one of the cursed tricks of the delta? It is so easy to get lost in it, Old David had warned, especially at this time of the year when the grass was still high and the water holes were deep. And the thought that we were drifting in its fastness without finding our way soon frightened me.

“Aren’t we lost, Father?”

“Lost?” Father laughed. “Lost?” he repeated but did not look at me. He paused, whipped out a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his face. He studied the thin trace of a trail — if it was a trail — that led to the west, then peered at the sun. We followed the trail hurriedly, and when we heard the river finally gurgling in the shallows, Father’s steps quickened. When we reached the bank, however, the raft was not in sight, nor the tamarind tree to which it was moored. We scanned the other bank, but there was no familiar gully there — only the long hump of earth, the dike.

“Can’t we swim, Father?” I asked. “Old David said the river is not deep.”

Father shook his head vehemently. “We are still hunting.”

“I wish Old David were here,” I said. “He knows this place so well.”

“Don’t say that!” Father’s voice was stern. “No one really knows this land. I’ve come to it year after year long before you were born. Each time, the landmarks are lost except for the fire tree. Even the brooks change their course. The river washes everything away. Nothing remains constant here.”

Father closed his eyes and leaned on the gun barrel, his feet wide apart.

“Let me find the way, Father,” I suggested.

When he did not speak, I parted the high grass and walked ahead. After a few paces, I heard the swoosh of his boots and the crackling of dry camachile twigs behind me.

I walked briskly; to the left from the tree, straight to the left, I remembered Old David’s advice. Pushing through the tall grass, I felt my knees start to wobble. But soon the dunes that sloped before me looked familiar, and finally the clear prints of Father’s boots, the water holes where some water buffalo had wallowed — all the places we had passed that morning.

“Old David said no one can really get lost here,” I said. There was a rustle behind me but no answer.

I was heading straight to the right bank, and I broke into a run. I found the big path used by carabaos, and as I rounded the last scraggly growth of low camachile trees, at last — the river, the tamarind tree, the raft.

The rope that held the raft bit my hand as I untied it hastily. After drawing the raft nearer the landing, I turned around: Father was still not behind me. I called aloud but no answer; I called again, and after a while the grass before me rustled. Father emerged from the green, clutching his gun. He looked tired.

I wanted to brag about what I knew of the delta, all that Old David taught me, but then I heard the distinct flapping of wings.

Wings, bird wings — not the lapping of the water on the reeds or the moaning of the afternoon wind against the brambles. I glanced abruptly at the water’s edge by the raft, and there, only a few paces before the unruly growth, a big, white, long-limbed bird alighted. For an instant it seemed as if it was an illusion, but the bird tilted its head and calmly stood on one leg like one of the porcelain figurines in the house. I turned to Father going out of the grass to the landing.

“Look,” I called softly, afraid lest the thing be disturbed.

Father did not heed me. “There,” I repeated, pointing a trembling finger to where the bird stood. He paused, saw the bird at last, and slid a shell into the gun.

The roar thundered across marsh and river, but the bird did not fall; it hopped slowly to the nearest bush before Father could fire again.

I ran to where it vanished and was still cursing as I jumped upon the brambles that scratched my hands and legs, when I felt Father hold my shoulders and shake me. He looked at the scratches on my arms that had begun to redden.

“You couldn’t have missed,” I flung at him. “Old David said the buckshot spreads.” I was shouting. “And it was so close, so close!”

He did not speak. I walked to the raft and jumped into it first. Neither Old David nor any of the tenants were by the gully to pull us to the other bank, and we both strained at the line.

In midstream Father paused and asked, “What did David tell you about the delta?”

I did not answer.

Father sat on the low bamboo platform, and the eddy that breasted the floats slapped at his muddy boots. “I won’t get angry if you tell me.”

“Stories,” I said, “just stories.”

“I never saw you speaking to the old crow.”

“We talk a lot,” I said uncomfortably. “Under the balete tree, in the stable. Usually when you are away.”

Father bit his lower lip and turned away.

“I wanted to know about the delta,” I said.

“Well,” Father said gruffly, “you know it now.” He rose and gave the line a violent tug. The raft lurched forward, and I almost fell into the water. It smashed into the landing, and I jumped off and raced the incline up the river’s bank.

The sun was buried in a fluff of clouds, and the hilly rim of the world burned with the fires of sunset. Beyond the blurred turn of the dike Old David came leading the horses.

I turned and saw Father swaying up the gully, clutching at each strand of grass that sprouted on its sides. He loosened the earth with each step and brought down a small avalanche of pebbles and loam. When he neared the top, he placed his right leg over the rim and extended the gun muzzle to me. I pulled, and with a grunt, he heaved himself on level ground. He sank on the grass, panting, and did not get the gun back.

“I’ll go ahead, Father,” I said. “I’ll tell Old David to hurry with your horse.”

I hooked the water bottle on the gun barrel and swung it on my shoulder. After a few paces, Father followed. His arms were not swinging.

Old David came with the horses, whistling an old Ilokano ballad, and in the hush of afternoon the tune was clear and sad. “A fine hunt?” The old man grinned as he handed me the reins of my horse. He took the gun and gently placed it in its holster in his saddle. “I heard the shot, and I said, this time, the last bird in the delta is done for.”

I stared at him, wordless, then mounted my horse and jabbed my heels into its flanks. The spirited animal reared, and sprang. I brought the horse down with a jerk of the reins, and Old David grabbed the mouth bit, held it firmly, murmured unintelligible words, and patted the animal’s glossy coat. The horse became still.

“There will be other years. Next year, perhaps,” Old David told me gravely, then he led his mare and Father’s mount away.

I was still gazing at the delta darkening swiftly when I heard Father cursing behind me. Turning around, I saw him walk up to Old David; his hand rose, then descended on the old man’s face, but Old David, holding on to the reins of the big chestnut horse and his own bony mare, stood motionless, unappalled before the hand — the bludgeon — that shot up, then cut into his withered face once more.

CHAPTER 13

The day I was to go hunting again never came that year or the next, for that December the war came and Father surrendered his shotguns to the Japanese. They also got all of the riding horses, save one — the old skinny nag that was Old David’s. The delta where our prey was safe became the sanctuary of brave and angry men.

The war changed the delta and Rosales but hardly altered us. Father and our relatives, we retained our leisurely manners, our luxuries, and the primeval quirks of our nature. Only Tio Doro, I am now sure, was profoundly affected by the war, and I am glad he had survived it. Of all my uncles, it was only he who devoted the best years of his life to politics. There has always been some distaste in our family for any activity that was political, but Tio Doro was simply made of a different fiber. He took to its swagger and blather not for personal honor, but because he found in politics an outlet for his nationalistic passions.

He had no delusions or misgivings, however, in his last days when the ideas that once propelled him to great wrath seemed finally jaded. Maybe he was consoled somewhat by the thought that in his time he had lived fully and well.

After the war, when the Philippines was granted independence, I was sure he would be the main speaker in his town during the program that marked that momentous hour. The honor would have been his by right, because he was Balungao’s first citizen and all his life independence was his one consuming obsession.

I had expected him to say so many things, and those who knew how fiery he had been would have been surprised at the change. Not that he had forsaken his old beliefs for new, pragmatic ones; he simply had outgrown them, I suppose, just as I had outgrown my short pants.

If it were not for his daughter, Cousin Emma, I would not have gone often to Tio Doro’s place. Not that his big, blue house was far from Rosales — it was only five kilometers away. He was awesome, and moreover, he seldom talked with me, maybe because he felt I was not ready for his ideas. I had heard Tio Doro deliver speeches in public, and I recall vividly his Rizal Day speech many years ago. At that time I had enough of a grasp of English. Tio Doro had always occupied a prominent niche in his town, and he was the program’s principal speaker.

It was highly fashionable then to speak in English, although only a few understood it, and Tio Doro spoke in that language for the benefit of the high school students and town officials who occupied the first rows of rattan chairs. A platform had been set up on empty gasoline drums, bordered with split coconut fronds and draped with the national tricolor. Everywhere around the stage, people were sprawled on the grass, on the amorseco weeds, on caretelas and bull carts, and on the floats decked with tobacco sheaves and girls in native costumes.

He wore one of those ill-fitting, collarless drill suits that was the uniform of bureaucrats. His stiffly starched pants almost shackled the ankles, but they heightened his patriarchal dignity. When he strode to the stage, there was a discernible clapping from the front seats. After clearing his throat, Tio Doro cast a solemn glance at the newly painted Rizal monument, whose base was covered with amarillo wreaths, and then he broke into a resonant voice that became more vigorous as he progressed.

He spoke of death, declared that dying could not be more glorious than when one gives up his life for the native land. He said this with such intensity that it made me wonder if he remembered it on his deathbed. He relived the days when, at the age of thirteen, he was already with the revolutionary forces. And on he meandered, no longer elaborating on dying but attacking Occidentals, the despicable manner in which they had exploited Filipinos for centuries. He dissected the Monroe Doctrine and its distorted implications, the hypocrisy of the Americans in exercising it, their much touted entry into World War I to make the world safe for their democracy. His voice rose as he lambasted whites for their rapacity and deliberate blindness to the Filipinos’ right to self-government. He gesticulated and swore to high heaven and evoked the wrath of the gods, because on earth nobody would act as Tio Doro wanted.

He finally concluded: “God forbid that I will ever have ties with foreigners who ravaged this beautiful Philippines!”

As if precipitately timed with the end of his speech, the brass band played the hymn “My Country,” and the notes hammered at the already excited audience. The ensuing ovation was ringing and long.

As I said, Tio Doro seldom spoke to me, and when he did, he was aloof and dull. On one visit, however, we finally had a chat. I was browsing in his library, and Cousin Emma was banging on the piano. I had picked out the Noli from his Rizaliana and was giving it a cursory look when he emerged from his room, propped himself comfortably on a sofa, and asked what I would want to be when I grew up.

There was a note of concern in his throaty voice. For a moment I did not know what to say. I was but a sophomore in high school. I finally blurted out that I had not yet given the matter much thought, but Father had insisted on my becoming a doctor. Tio Doro remarked that I might be a writer someday, because I was always reading. But being a doctor, I told him, impressed me more. Whereupon, he tried to dissuade me from becoming one, arguing that there were too many doctors who had M.D.’s only as honorary suffixes to their names. And that was when, for the first time, Tio Doro talked with me as though I were grown-up.

“It is just too bad,” he mused, gazing at the unlighted Aladdin lamp above us. “We don’t have a language that is known throughout the world. Even if we could have a national language someday, it would still be better if our writers wrote in English. Then they will have a wider following. However, if you will ever write, use a pen name. If you use your own, you might be mistaken for a Latin or even an Italian. Now, if you wrote under such a name like Lawag or Waywaya, no one would doubt your being Malayan.”

Though I did not quite know his motives then except for what I gleaned from his impassioned speeches and from textbooks about Bonifacio and Del Pilar, I said I understood.

Tio Doro was an elementary school principal and was among the first batch of graduates of the Philippine Normal School. After his wife passed away, he gave up teaching and focused more attention on his estate, which, after all, was the main source of his income. He plunged into active politics immediately after he quit his teaching job, and that was even before I was born. Several times he ran for the presidency of his town, but every time he lost. His political enemies had a tough time dislodging him from the political platform, though. He was that kind of a man — he could be stopped but not knocked out. And when he finally retired from the political arena because of physical disability, never again were elections in his town thrillingly anticipated. Under the tattered banner of the Democrata-Nacional he waged his fight, and when this party irrevocably split over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Law, he sided eventually with the Democratas.

He should not have suffered defeat as often as he did. It was not because he squandered on campaigns, filling the insatiable stomachs of voters, for his wife’s and his own resources were quite formidable. There was nothing questionable, either, in the way the ballots were counted, for the time when birds and bees could vote was yet to come. It was just that he had a horde of implacable enemies.

In his town the Chinese up to this day carry considerable influence. Tio Doro did not have a single Chinese friend then, and he derided Father for being on affable terms with Chan Hai. He attacked Mon Luk, the rice merchant in his town, whenever he could and at his political meetings accused him of controlling the retail trade. Tio Doro never failed to point out how many people owed money to the Chinese middlemen.

Tio Doro would not have won in the 1934 elections if the Nacionalistas had not split and backed two other candidates for the presidency. As town executive at last, he effected no radical changes during his term. Many had thought he would forcibly padlock all the Chinese stores or do something equally drastic, but he did not. On the routinary side of his term, he sliced a narrow graveled road behind the cockpit and named it after himself, as was the practice of almost all town presidents. He built a new wing for the elementary school building, planted rows of ornamental bougainvillea in the town plaza, erected a water tank, and dug drainage ditches on the sides of the streets.

Anyone would have asserted that Tio Doro truly loved himself, but no one could deny him his charity when in 1934 he gave half of his rice harvest to the poor, as the great storm of that year ravaged the crops. At the close of his term, the Commonwealth was inaugurated. He expressed his usual skepticism about the new arrangement, but he did not run for reelection. Not that he was tired of politics. I used to see him limp often. Now his legs were paralyzed, and that ultimately meant he could not campaign anymore. This did not mean, however, that he left politics completely. His heavy hand was still felt as he welded the Democratas in his district as the last phalanx of the opposition. Though none of his weakling protégés got elevated past the municipal council, he scrupulously supported them to such an extent that he became a local power broker.

Being a true Democrata, Tio Doro would not support President Manuel Quezon, but when Quezon made his now oft-quoted “Better a government run like hell by the Filipinos than a government run like heaven by the Americans,” Tio Doro tersely commented: “Tama!”

After high school, Cousin Emma continued her piano studies at the state university conservatory. Tio Doro might have at times been smothered with loneliness in his big house, and the wheelchair to which he was tied might have depressed him no end. Emma was not around to play his nostalgic kundimans, the nonpopularity of which he lamented. “These songs,” he said, “express the soul of our people.”

I seldom went to see him, but on those occasions that I did, he spoke to me of the conflict between Japan and China as if I were now grown-up. But clearly the flare-ups loomed nearer, darker. Mussolini had attached Ethiopia to his empire. In Spain the civil war raged. Then Germany invaded the Balkans. Developments came quickly: Japan joined the Axis, and he predicted that, with Japan now on one side and America on the other, Filipinos would soon be involved more precariously than ever in the whirlpool of the White Man’s destiny.

Hitler must have slightly piqued Tio Doro’s interest, for he bought a copy of Mein Kampf. He never trusted foreigners, and now he justified the racism of the totalitarians as long as national progress was their goal. When the Atlantic Charter was promulgated, Tio Doro was inclined to be sarcastic about it. It is a very interesting scrap of paper, he averred, but the Americans and the British have common imperialistic designs, as history had proved in Cuba and India. Do you think they will come to the succor of the colonials without considering their private interests first?

War engulfed the Philippines shortly afterward. The Japanese landed on the beaches of my province, and Tio Doro’s town, like ours, was one of the first to be occupied. Father saw no reason for us to leave the province. We were not molested, and we had enough to eat. But the transportation was slow and difficult, and I rarely visited Tio Doro and Emma, although Father did see him frequently.

Cousin Emma wrote to me occasionally. In her letters she could not say much because the mails were censored. For Tio Doro, however, his writing days were over; the dread paralysis had crept to his hands.

Then Emma’s letters ceased. The country was liberated, and we weathered a few scary nights. When the fighting was over, Emma wrote in one long letter everything of importance that had happened. She told of how her father had been humiliated by the Japanese. His frailty had proved to be no shield. He had been asked to serve as town mayor, a figurehead, but he had flatly refused. Yet, before the war, he had appreciated the Japanese love of country and emperor that amounted to fanaticism, and he believed in the validity of the Japanese catchword: Asia for the Asiatics, the Philippines for the Filipinos. Then, inconsistently, he secretly gave most of his harvest to the guerrillas rather than sell it to the Japanese rice agency, the BIBA. Cousin Emma recounted some gory episodes, among which was how the only son of Mon Luk in their town was executed for underground activities, and how the rice mill of the Chinese had been razed to the ground, transforming the Chinese merchant into a pauper. To all these incidents Tio Doro had been an eyewitness. At one time he was a prisoner, too.

But for all that happened, Tio Doro’s absorption in politics had not waned. Although the war had added to his worries, he still managed to dabble in politics. His health was deteriorating, and his resistance was petering away. He was sick most of the time from complications of his paralysis so that the doctor’s visits became more frequent. He was never really physically strong; even when his legs had not yet succumbed, his frame was meager and he was susceptible to colds, so that when he made his nighttime speeches he was always wrapped up. Emma asked if I would like to see the old invalid before he passed away.

I arrived on an Army truck transformed into a bus. The Balungao municipal building was a gaunt remnant of a once imposing edifice, and beyond it, Tio Doro’s blue house still stood above the rubble of the other residences, which had not been as fortunate. At my right loomed the chimney of Mon Luk’s rice mill, a monolith pointing to a sodden sky as a reminder of a once-flourishing business, over which Tio Doro would have pleasantly chuckled years ago if by some occult and terrible power it suddenly collapsed.

I passed through the stirring May streets, felt the cool whiff of the rainy season through the thick afternoon heat, recalled how every house once stood, how edges of gumamela had not yet sprung up in the yard of the demolished schoolhouse, which was now alive with American GI’s. The acacia trees that lined the main road were bigger — they had been but puny saplings once. The asphalted road, which they lined, was rutted and scarred by the tracks of tanks and bulldozers. A couple of makeshift bars were filled with soldiers in olive uniforms, laughing boisterously and singing “You’ll Never Know.”

As I neared the blue house — its paint peeling off, its fence shabby and crooked — jazz welled up from within. I pushed the heavy iron gate that squeaked open with a metallic tinkle from the bronze bell above it. Up the graveled path I hurried, and from the direction of the back-door stairs, Cousin Emma came beaming.

I hurried up the polished stairs, on each side of which stood little statues of discus throwers. Cousin Emma took me to the spacious drawing room and told me that the old man’s days were numbered.

We went to the room where Tio Doro was confined. He was propped up in a wheelchair near the wide-open window. The afternoon sun streamed in. His cheeks were sallow, the crop of distinguished white hair sparse. He was apparently resigned, as would be the earth to the whims of the elements. But now in the room were two middle-aged American officers and Tio Doro’s former archenemy, Mon Luk, who, I later learned, had just borrowed a little capital from him to start business anew.

I held his soft, nerveless hand and kissed it, and almost forgot to answer when he inquired how Father was.

At that time when no explanations were possible, I was hurtling back to those blurred yesteryears, to that conspicuous Rizal Day program long ago, when as the main speaker he discoursed despicably on all foreigners, when on his election platform he damned all Chinese. And now, in the privacy of his home — in his own room — were these strangers laughing with him as if they were his long-lost brothers.

CHAPTER 14

What happened to Tio Doro was one of those profound transformations that the Occupation wrought. Rosales itself underwent irreparable changes — the great fire that burned down the business area and Father’s commercial buildings, the guerrilla war that brought death to more Filipinos, I think, than to Japanese. For me, neither death nor suffering was trivialized. I had seen both and was touched, but not by lesser forms of travail. Father had seen to it that his family and those under his wing were well provided for. He had also played superb politician by keeping away from entanglements either with the guerrillas or with the Japanese puppets. As I heard him say all too often, “The bamboo survives by bending to the storm.”

As for the balete tree, it weathered the war handsomely. The belief of the people in its sacredness, in its being the embodiment of spirits that watched over us, was even reinforced. At one time, the Japanese needed some poles or timber for additional construction in the schoolhouse they had taken over, and they ordered some civilian laborers to cut down a few branches. The laborers — as was to be expected — ran away for fear that they would displease the spirits. Faced with having to do the job themselves, a couple of bald-shaved Japanese proceeded to the tree with their handsaws. No one really saw what happened, but the two soldiers were killed by a grenade that exploded while they were up in the tree. How the grenade got there is one of those riddles that will never be unraveled. Then, when the Americans came, they pitched their tents in the plaza and had a bulldozer level or cover up the bomb shelters with which the Japanese had pocked the plaza. The bulldozer had grazed the balete trunk — much to the shock of the people who were watching the machine work, for they had warned the American sergeant driving it not to go near the tree. He had, perhaps, never heeded the warning. As he turned around, an explosion rent the air, and after the smoke had cleared, the bulldozer was in shambles and the American was seriously injured. He had hit a land mine that had lain there all the time, undisturbed, planted by whom, nobody knew. The American detachment in Rosales left soon after the accident, and the bulldozer lay by the tree in a crumpled heap. It was there for some time, rusting in a pile of scrap, till someone dismantled it, testimony again to the sorcery of the balete tree.

The war was over — we thought there would be no more killing. But we were wrong, for now, all around us in the plain, the men who had fought the Japanese so well as Huk guerrillas now fought their landlords and the Army, which they perceived as instruments of the landlords to perpetuate their ancient, miserable lot.

But even if this was so, Father’s tenants did not seem affected by the dissidence that had broken out in their midst; they went about their duties promptly, and for all the memories of Tio Baldo, they seemed as docile as always. Yet I knew that it was not so — the surface calm was deceptive.

It had been growing — I am conscious of that now — like the yellow, poisonous yam; and though there were mere tendrils above the earth, crawling and withered, underneath was this root, massive and deformed, with appendages of the most grotesque shape, burrowed deep. To bring out the whole would require careful prodding and digging, so that all of the root would be lanced from its mooring, for any remaining shred could well be nurtured again by the rich and loving earth, not just into life, but into something bigger than the original root wherefrom it had sprung.

“It is so clear,” Cousin Marcelo said. “The war showed the farmers, the poor, how they could survive and how the rich and the powerful could not. Look around you — the tenants are no longer the cowed starvelings they used to be. They know that if they are united and if they have guns, they can do almost anything. Anything! We have to be aware of these changes and adjust to them. We cannot live in the past forever.”

Indeed, the war altered many things but again not us, not us. We knew no hunger as did our neighbors, who lived on buri-palm flour; no lack of clothes as did many of our tenants, who learned the feel of sackcloth on their backs.

“We are fortunate,” Cousin Marcelo continued. “But look at the thousands of young people with no future. They either become soldiers or bandits in the hills whom the soldiers seek without pity. Look at Angel, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

I knew what Cousin Marcelo meant. I also know now that the changes that came upon the country were very profound and much more all-embracing than we had the courage to perceive. The farmers, the tenants — we did not realize then how they saw and understood that the power of the rich, of Don Vicente and Father himself, had been eroded, that in those four abject years it was really each man for himself. The old loyalties held insofar as we were concerned, but they were rendered fragile, as only time would soon show. For what the Japanese did was not to destroy the landlords; they were not interested in social change, in the restructuring of classes; they were interested only in the produce of the land, and they got the rice and whatever bounties the land gave and in the process leveled everyone.

But with the Japanese gone, the old arrangements were quickly resumed — or so we thought — little realizing that what had been broken could never be brought together again. And all these now come sharply to mind as I think of Angel and that morning during the dry season, when Father woke me up with his swearing in the garden. I rose and went to the window.

Below, Angel struck the stone bench by the balete tree with his straw hat and stirred the dust and dry leaves that covered it. As if he were a participant in a primal ritual, without looking at Father poised before him, Angel lay flat on his stomach.

I hurried down the flight in time to see Father lash the horse whip across Angel’s buttocks for the last time. The servant’s lips were drawn, his eyes were shut, and he did not rise. Panting and cursing still, Father flung the whip to the caked earth and with his forefinger scraped off the beads of sweat that glistened on his forehead.

Father was a tired shadow of his former self; he forgave the servants their manners, their barging into the sala before the guests, tongue-tied and fumbling for words, when he asked what brought them there; he did not mind their forgetting to polish his boots when he galloped off on his castaño to the fields. But it seemed that the mistake Angel had committed was beyond reprieve.

“And you say you will soon buy a cédula, ha?” Though Father’s wrath was spent, his voice was threatening still. “Not in ten years will a stupid one like you need one!”

Angel finally stood up. He passed a hand over his buttocks and mumbled, “It won’t happen again, Apo.”

Father did not hear him, as he turned away and stomped back to the house.

Since he came to serve us, Angel was to tend Mother’s garden — the roses, dahlias, and sparse rows of azucena that had survived the rainy season. He had failed to water the unpotted roses to which Father was particularly devoted because the rose plots were what Mother had lavished her care on. Father himself padded them with horse dung from the stable, but now the rose plots were whitish patches of dry soil.

Father had found Angel behind the bodega, sitting on a sled and gazing at the faraway hills, unable to explain why he was there on a morning when he should be working and — most of all — why he neglected the rose garden.

After his whipping, Angel returned to the garden and sprinkled water on the wilted plants, shielding each with his palm.

“It won’t do any good,” I said.

He turned to me and smiled sadly. “I shouldn’t have forgotten.” He dropped the tin can back to the water pail. “I just couldn’t forget what happened to Father and Mother. It seemed so impossible …” He drew the can from the pail again and, his palm over the withered plants, sprinkled them. “These are difficult times,” he murmured.

Angel was eighteen, but he looked shriveled and lines of premature age furrowed his brow. He stood up when his pail was empty and returned to the artesian well by the kitchen stairs, where three soldiers stationed in the town plaza were filling canvas buckets. They belonged to a company supposed to patrol the nearby foothills, which were now alive with Huks. Angel was soon conversing with them.

He was back in the garden in the late afternoon.

“Will you teach me now?” he called. I was at my window watching him. I went down to the back of the storehouse where Father had seen him loafing. We sat on a ledge; against the back of an old chair, he balanced the dog-eared primer I gave him and turned to its last pages.

He tackled a few sentences, and after one page he paused and leaned on the warm stone wall. His eyes wandered to the tamarind tan of May that covered the land. From his shirt pocket, he dug out the last frayed letter from Mindanao, which, as one would a Bible, I had read to him many times before. Exasperated at the thought of reading it again, I said, “No, not this time.”

He seemed hurt, and he thrust the letter back into his pocket without unfolding it.

“What can you do now?” I said, feeling badgered. “You should burn it. All the other letters, too.”

He came close to me, smelling of the stable and the dry earth. His voice trailed off: “About this morning, when your father saw me here, I was thinking …” Again his eyes were on the barren land beyond the barbed-wire fence and farther, the mountain half-hidden by coconut trees. He spoke brokenly. “I just cannot believe it. How they both died …”

I looked at the dust where with his finger he had spelled his name wrong. I did not want to remember the stooped, pallid woman, his mother, and the slight balding man, his father. “You never learn!” I said, and stood up to leave.

Angel was to serve us for ten years without pay. In the ledger in Father’s room, on the list of debtors, was the name of his father. As with all the other tenants, Angel’s father had often been in great need.

“Why do you butcher your carabao and feed a throng because your son is getting a wife?” Father always blustered to them who came asking for loans. But always, in the end, the tenants got the money — what they needed for a “decent” funeral, a baptism, a wedding. And as their debts piled up, they promised, “Next harvest will be good …” Sometimes, when their forecast was right, they did pay, but during the planting season — in the lean days of June, July, and August — they would again be before Father with the same old plea.

When Angel came to the house, his flesh was mottled with a skin disease caused by long hours of work in the waterlogged fields. Father bade him sleep in the bodega, by the wall near the west window. It was a shelf, actually, which was used to hold jars of fermenting sugarcane wine, and when the harvests came he was hemmed in by sacks, and there was only enough space for him to crawl onto his board and snuggle there. When the grain was sold and the storehouse was emptied, the cavern was all his again.

In time the coarse board was polished by his back. The seasons changed, the balete tree lost its leaves, then sprouted them again. The fiesta filled the house with loquacious cousins from the city, and before long, Christmas. The boys and Old David received new clothes, they sang carols in the yard. New Year — the boys from across the street dueled Angel and me with bamboo cannons loaded with empty milk cans — and, finally, harvest time, and Chan Hai cluttered the yard again with his trucks.

“This is a harsh year,” Angel said, when his parents came to stay in the bodega with him. May rain fell at its appointed time, and Old David hoped the harvest would really be good, for he had observed the sun sink blood-red behind the foothills and seen the full moon and its indigo halo. Weren’t those the signs that augured beneficence?

But shortly after the seedlings sprouted from the beds, the worms crawled out and devoured them. What the worms spared was transplanted into the irrigated fields, but barely grown, the sprouts were parched by a long August drought. Only those near the waterways survived to be lashed later on by an October storm. For a week the winds whipped the crops and the farmers scurried in the fields. But no matter how fast they cut the ripened grain, they could not pick each seed from the mud where the wind had embedded it. Father’s share did not even reach up to Angel’s pallet, and Chan Hai made but a few trips to the bodega. By February all that was left were a few sacks of seed rice, over which Angel kept watch, because every day some hungry tenant came to town and peeped into the bodega before going up to Father to ask for a loan.

Hunger precipitated despair. But more than despair was the nagging belief that the land they had patiently and lovingly groomed never really belonged to them but to Father or Don Vicente. This rankled in their hearts — Tio Baldo had long been dead, but they remembered. They knew that in the unrecorded past their forebears cleared the land but were cheated when influential men made the Torrens titles. This belief alone united them and gave them strength.

One late February afternoon, Angel’s father rushed to the storeroom and told his son to leave immediately. Angel refused; instead, he convinced his father to go see Father, who was in the azotea, watching a ball game in the plaza.

“They are coming tonight,” Angel’s father said. “They will force the storehouse open. The grain will be divided among them.”

Father listened without stirring, and when Angel’s father was through, he walked briskly to his room. When Father came out, the new Garand that the soldiers had given him was slung on his arm.

He looked at Angel’s father coldly. “By God, I’ll use this if I have to! I’ll call the constabulary. The bastards will not get a single grain.”

They came at dusk, their bolos tied to their waists, their talk a drone of many bees that rose ominously to the house where, from the half-closed windows, the maids tried to make out their brothers and fathers. They spread out in the yard restlessly, then one of them strode to the door and rattled the iron latch and called, “Apo, we want to talk with you!”

Father was waiting for them at the top of the stairs. He went down, brushing aside Old David, who tried to hold him back by saying, “Blood must not be spilled,” for Father was unarmed. I rushed down after him, walked among the strangers whose brown faces were indistinct in the shadows cast by the storm lamp Old David held high in front of Father.

His tenants followed him like steel filings drawn by a magnet. Walking behind him, I expected anytime the shining arc of a bolo to descend on him. He walked on, silent and sure, and when he reached the bench under the balete tree, he mounted it. Old David hung the storm lamp on an overhanging branch, and in its yellow glow Father’s face was livid with rage. He looked at all of them gathered before him, the men whose first names he knew, and when he spoke, his voice trembled.

“I knew you were coming,” Father said. “I know you want to tear down the gate of the storeroom, so you can get what is in there.”

The men shuffled and murmured among themselves.

“And I know, too,” Father went on, his voice now pitched and stern, “that you are saying, ‘Why must we pay a yearly rent when the land we farm is ours?’

“I’ll tell you. I was not born a hundred years ago, but I know that when my father came down from the north, he cleared this land. I bought the rest. You know that. Maybe Don Vicente did steal from you, but not I! I can drive you from your farms, use machines. It is cheaper, easier, less trouble. Maybe I’ll even harvest more.”

Father paused. His hands shook. “You came here to tear down doors. Well, go ahead. You’ll get a few sacks of grain. You’ll have full stomachs for a week. But after that, what? When the planting season comes, where will you get seed rice?”

No answer. Then, slowly, some of them drifted away from where Father harangued at them and sat under the awning of the storeroom, mumbling a babble of solutions.

“But can’t you give us something to eat, Apo?” someone finally asked.

Father stepped down from the bench and went to the bodega. At the door Father called Angel. The massive doors swung open, and in the light of the storm lamp, which Old David raised, Angel stepped forward, the shotgun in his hands. The tenants glared at him, and from their curses I knew that they had disowned him.

“I am not the government, nor is Don Vicente,” Father said. “If I give one, I must give all. Go home, all of you, or I’ll run you out of this yard!”

“Hunger can’t wait, Apo,” one was brave enough to shout.

“You’ll die of starvation tomorrow if you eat your seed rice!” Father shouted back. “Go home, all of you. I’m not the government — nor a philanthropist!”

Then the dry season — the land beyond the fence browned. Heavy clouds formed overhead, but rain did not fall and light passed on to darkness. The boys gathered edible moss from the creeks, the women returned empty-handed from the withered vegetable patches, and the men scanned the blue, burning sky.

Angel’s father, who came to the house every Sunday to give his share of firewood as did Ludovico’s father, stopped coming, and one April morning Angel and I rode a bull cart to Carmay to trim the madre de cacao and acacia trees that lined the barrio road.

On our return, the cart loaded with green twigs, Angel said, “It is hardest this year.” Angel’s parents came with us with all their things, and upon reaching the house, they sought Father.

He was smoking in the azotea.

“We have nothing left to eat in Carmay, Apo,” Angel’s father said. “The sweet potato has been shorn of its green leaves.”

Angel’s mother said, “We have tried everything. Even banana roots.”

Father listened placidly, rocking his chair, his arms limp on his lap. The smoke from his pipe curled above his head. “I have many mouths to feed,” he said finally, “and your debts — you haven’t paid them yet.”

“We won’t stay here long, Apo,” Angel’s father pleaded. “Before the planting season comes we will leave Carmay.”

“For where?” Father asked.

“We are selling our house and our carabao, Apo, for our fare to Mindanao.”

“Like the others, ha?”

Angel’s father did not answer. There being no alternative for Father but to let them stay, they carried their things to the storehouse and swept away from a corner the cobwebs, bat droppings, and bran. They did not mean to be idle. Angel’s father fixed the fence, and his mother helped in the kitchen, until one May morning Father chanced upon her coughing hoarsely there. He told her never to work in the house again.

Father did not send them away as the town sanitary inspector had recommended. It was June at last, and the first showers of the rainy season blanketed Rosales. All the things Angel’s parents owned were packed in two bundles, and Angel drove them in Father’s calesa to the train station. All through the narrow, shrub-lined dirt road, they did not speak. They loaded their bundles into a boxcar.

As the train chugged to start, Angel reminded his father, “Don’t forget to write. Tell me what is happening. And someday”—he stared at his big toe digging into the sodden, coal-sprinkled bed of the ties—“I’ll come, too.”

Angel’s father nudged his wife. “Hear that, woman? Don’t forget what your son said.”

A slight drizzle started as they climbed into the boxcar, and Angel and I ran back to the rig. They lifted their hands in awkward farewell, but Angel did not look back. We drove back slowly, and he held the reins in check so that we reached home in a walk.

A full month passed and the land finally stirred. The rains became fuller and stronger, and the fresh green of June darkened to a dirty hue. The banabas bloomed and amorseco weeds wove violet patterns around the mud holes that pocked the plaza. One afternoon, as was my daily chore, I returned from the post office with a bundle of letters. At the foot of the stairs, I called Angel, who was in the garden weeding the gladiolus bulbs, and threw him the bundle.

“From Mindanao,” I said.

In the storehouse that night, in the light of the storm lamp, I pored over the letters. They told of how his folks barely had enough seed rice to start the planting season in that distant land. They were isolated, and in the evening only the flickering of a faraway neighbor’s lamp in the trackless dark impinged upon them the consoling thought that they were not alone at the edge of the forest.

The succeeding letters arrived regularly, and I answered some for Angel, who now mastered the alphabet but could not yet write legibly. The boys envied him for his parent’s luck. He told them of the wonderful Cotabato fields, how his father caught a wild pig under their house, how one evening his father killed a python in the chicken coop. As to what was in store for them, Angel had no foreboding. In another year Angel’s mother told of how they were plagued by moneylenders who wanted to get all they harvested for the little that they owed.

“Tell me why it is like this,” Angel asked.

I could not explain the tragedy that stalked his folks before the next harvest was in. When he received the fateful letter, he managed to have one of the boys read it. In the afternoon, when I came upon him filling the horse trough with water, his eyes were swollen from crying.

“Father is dead,” he said simply.

“Let me see the letter,” I said.

He washed the bran and black molasses dripping off his hands and gave me a folded sheet from the ruled pad on which his mother always wrote. “Read it, please,” he said.

I started cautiously, feeling out the words: “My dear son:” (The letters always started that way.) “This old and aching heart will overflow with joy if, when this letter reaches you, you are in the best of health.

“There is not much for me to do now [there was an erasure that blotted out two lines] … now that your father is no more.

“Sometimes I think we should have never come here, but in this land the rice grows tall. We thought we would never know hunger again, but hunger will always be with us. Your father could not even fight when they got him …”

Somewhere in the stable, a neighing horse drowned out my words. Angel leaned on the wooden rail that separated the trough from the stall of Father’s castaño.

“Why did they do it?” he asked.

“We came here,” I went on with the letter, “because they said that for us who cannot wait for the three-month rice to bear grain, there is plenty here. The trees — they are in the forests. The cogon grass and bamboo, too. We can build strong houses here, but we shall always be cowering before the big men around us, doomed to die, paying …

“We will always fall prey, chick to the hawk. They said this land is ours and we can own all we plant. But here there is hunger, too, as elsewhere in the world. We fear not only God’s wrath, but the field rats that devour our grain, the animals that trample our fields. We fear men because they have made the world too small for us. There is not enough of it for us to plant, we who have never known what lay beyond the waters we crossed or the high mountains that now surround us …”

“What about Mother?” Angel bent forward, his eyes burning. “What does she say of herself?”

I turned the letter over. “There is nothing more,” I said.

In the days that followed, Angel would rush to meet me every time I appeared at the bend of the road with the mail from the municipal building. He would trail me up the stairs, and without bothering to look at him, I always shook my head. There were no more letters.

I chanced upon him in the bodega one afternoon while hunting house lizards and mice. He was hidden by piles of firewood and corn, poking a rod into the piles to flush out the mice. He did not speak until I saw him. His eyes were hollow, his voice was heavy. “Mother is dead, too,” he finally said.

“You are not sure,” I said, cocking my air rifle as a mouse raced across the eaves.

“She is dead,” he said.

I fired, and the lead pellet whammed into the tin roof with a sharp metallic twang. I lowered the air gun with a curse.

“Two months,” Angel said, breathing hard, “and not a letter. Can’t you see? How was she buried, who dug the grave, was there a cross?”

Silence.

“And if someday I’ll go there, how will I look for them?”

There was nothing I could say. I stood up and left him, his words ringing in my ears. The next day Father found him behind the bodega, seated in the wide drop of the driveway. He did not water the rose plots for a week, and in the heat, the young plants that Father loved were dead.

Hard times, Angel said, for during the last harvest Father did not go to the fields anymore as was his wont. But for a company of soldiers who had their camp — an untidy blotch of olive-colored tents — in the town plaza, who drew their water from the artesian well behind the house, Father and I would have gone to the city to return to Rosales only when he could safely canter on his horse to his fields again.

A few weeks back, the Huks swooped down on the next town and all through the long night the sad boding chatter of machine guns and the scream of speeding trucks on the provincial road kept us awake. Since then it was prohibited to walk in town at night without a light, and Father slept with his shotgun and his new revolver within easy reach.

Shortly after the Angelus, Sepa came to the sala, where, beneath the new Coleman lamp, I was reading. “Angel has something for you,” the old woman said, and gestured that he was waiting for me in the bodega. I went down to the silent yard. Inside the big building I flashed a light on the broad wooden board where Angel sat leaning against the wall.

“Do you want ointment for blisters?” I bantered, playing the light on his face.

He did not answer. I turned the light off, and in the pale haze from the barred window above him, his gaunt, tired face became softer.

He stretched his hand to me. “Here,” he said in a tone that was supplicating. I took from him the battered cardboard box where he kept his mother’s letters. “Keep it for me.”

I climbed to his side and sat on the pallet. I flashed a light on the stone floor, saw that his trunk fashioned out of packing boards was tied. He wore shoes, too, the worn-out pair Father thought he had thrown away.

“Are you leaving because Father whipped you? Why, he whips everyone. Even me!”

Angel shook his head.

“Where are you going, then?” I asked, gripping the box.

“Don’t tell Apo,” he said. “I am leaving tonight. With the soldiers.”

“But where?”

The alien sounds of evening filled the storehouse. In its blackness rats moved. Outside, in the balete tree, cicadas were alive.

“I don’t know where they will send us,” Angel said carelessly. “I am not going to Mindanao, though. Maybe, someday, I’ll go to the United States, like your Tio Benito. But for the next few years …” He turned reflectively to the barred window and pointed to the starlit west where the mountains loomed. “We will go there. Fight there.”

In my mind flashed the vivid sight of the uncovered bodies of soldiers brought to the town plaza after the all-night fighting in the nearby hills — the stiff, half-naked dead, some barefoot, all their faces anonymously stolid in death — dumped by the camp roadside to be identified.

“You are stupid, just as Father said.”

“I am eighteen,” he retorted.

“You don’t know what is waiting there for you. You’ll die.”

His rough hand slid into mine. “It doesn’t make a difference.” His voice quavered. “But what can I do? Will I stay here forever like David, tending the garden, feeding the horses? I would have joined the Huks if they came and asked me. I am sure that with them I’d be in a place other than here. Can’t you see? I have to go. Where I am going I’ll have my own life. The soldiers have that much to offer. And they are here.”

“You are going to die.”

He let go of my hand. In the dark, his teeth gleamed in a quick smile. “That should worry your father,” he said with a trace of sarcasm, “but don’t think I’m running away from my father’s debt. My salary, most of it, will go to Apo. Until we are free.”

“You are going to die.”

His head drooped. He eased himself down the pallet and paced the stone floor. “Yes, but I’ll die decently,” he said, pausing. He leaned on his elbows and faced me. “Isn’t that what we should live for?” His questions had a quality of coldness, of challenge.

I swung down the pallet and beamed a ray across the black void to the open door. His letters were in my hand. I walked away without answering him, Angel, my servant, my friend.

CHAPTER 15

In the morning the household was agog over Angel’s sudden departure, the servants speculating on where and when he would die.

“I can’t understand it,” Father said at the lunch table. He was angry and perplexed. “So I did whip him, but was that enough to make him leave?”

“Maybe he wanted to be free,” said Sepa, who was serving us.

“Free?” Father asked incredulously. “Wasn’t he free here to do his foolishness?” He turned to me. “You were the last one he saw. What did he tell you? Why didn’t you stop him?”

“He said he would send you the money, Father, to pay the debt of his parents.”

“And I’ll believe that? Why didn’t you stop him?”

I could not speak.

“So Angel is gone,” he said aloud for all the servants to hear. “Ingrate! I gave him a roof and three meals a day, and he could at least have come to me and said, ‘Oy, I’m leaving now because my belly is full and my limbs are strong.’ See what I get for my kindness to people. Nothing but insults that claw the mind!”

Father’s anger, however, did not persist, nor did the talk of the servants about Angel. In a week, all attention centered on the forthcoming celebration of Father’s birthday. It was not really for him alone; more than anything, it was an occasion for all of his tenants to come to town to partake of his food, and at the same time bring their children and grandchildren, so that Father would get to know them. It was a time for them to render us service, to fix the fences, clean the yard, and whitewash the walls.

For Father’s close friends, too, it was a time to gather in the house and share his liquor. For our relatives who lived in other parts of the province or in the city, this was a time for remembering old ties.

Among our Manila relatives, it was Tia Antonia and her children who came most often “to have a better whiff of air.” I suspect, however, that she came to Rosales almost every month not only for the country air but to save on groceries, for Tia Antonia was the prototype of the Ilokano housewife — a tightwad as only Ilokanos could be. For the big feast she was the first to arrive.

Old David and I met her at the railroad station. I was peeved at Father’s sending me there, for it interrupted my mouse hunting in the storehouse. Tia Antonia and her children needed no welcoming committee — Rosales was practically their home. As we came within sight of the red brick station, Old David’s horse paused and its bony head dropped. He prodded its skinny rump with his big toe and whacked the reins on its back.

“Thank heavens, this calesa is not for hire,” he sighed as the horse finally lifted its head and plodded on.

The old man turned to me and grinned. His breath stank with nipa wine, but he talked soberly: “If it were, no one would use it. You can’t expect much from horses now. But you should have seen the horses I tended then in your grandfather’s stable. Colts, roans, all spirited, from the provinces of Abra and Batangas. They could race the wind and come out winners by how far the east is to the west!”

The train from Paniqui had long come in and was now leaving the station, the steel bumpers of its three dilapidated coaches whanging as they lurched forward. Calesas filled with passengers were pulling out of the parking lot under the acacias, and the platform was almost empty of people. We could have reached the station earlier, but through the main street, along the shrub-lined road that skirted the creek to the station, though Old David always clacked his tongue, never once did his horse perk up.

“There they are,” I said, nudging the old man as we reached the shade of the acacias where now not a single calesa was parked. Even from a distance it was easy to recognize Cousin Andring, with his paunch and round balding head, and Tia Antonia, who always wore a severe chocolate-colored terno, her gray hair tightly knotted.

Old David tied the reins to one of the posts that palisaded the station yard. I jumped down and ran to Tia Antonia, who was standing by the ticket window, and kissed her bony hand. She was past fifty and looked ascetic but still used perfume liberally, a brand that had a particular scent similar to that of crushed bedbugs. Andring tousled my hair.

“If I didn’t know you were coming,” Tia Antonia said drily, peering down at me through her steel-rimmed eyeglasses, “we would have taken one of the caretelas.”

Cousin Andring beckoned to the old man. “David,” he called pointedly, “don’t tell me you were drunk again and forgot.”

The old man mumbled something about the horse being slow, but Cousin Andring went on: “Hurry with the bags.” Three pieces of baggage lay at his feet. David picked up one — a leather valise, the biggest of the three, and sagged under its weight.

“Careful!” Tia Antonia hissed. “My thermos bottle and medicines are in there.”

Old David smiled as he picked up the bag and walked away. Cousin Andring called him back and told him to take one more bag, but the old man walked on.

“The old lazy drunk!” Cousin Andring swore. “I cannot understand why Tio tolerates him. He is late, and now he is also insolent.”

He picked up the two bags and, overtaking the old man, dumped one on his shoulder. Old David momentarily staggered, but he balanced the bag and carried it to the back of the calesa.

“It is about time Tio bought a car,” Cousin Andring said as we joggled up the dirt road to town. “I don’t see why he doesn’t. He has the money.”

“Whip the horse, David,” Tia Antonia said irritably. “I’m hungry.”

Old David whacked the reins on the back of the animal, but its pace did not change. Cousin Andring grabbed the rattan whip slung on the brace beside the old man. He moved to the front and sat beside me on the front seat, then leaning forward, he lashed at the horse. Our speed did not pick up, so he gave up after a while. “The servants and the horses Tio keeps,” Cousin Andring said in disgust, “they are all impossible.”

Father met us at the gate. After they had alighted, Old David took the calesa to the stable. He carried the bags upstairs and let me take the heavy leather harness off the horse.

I led the animal to its watering trough and watched it take long draughts. Old David came to my side and, breathing heavily, told me to go up to the house, where they were waiting for me at lunch.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

Old David shook his head, then scrubbed the moist, steaming hide of the animal. “All morning you have been bringing rice and vegetables from Carmay,” he spoke softly to the horse’s ear. “Then you are whipped and cursed.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Ay! It’s the life of a horse for you.”

From the kitchen window Sepa called me; Father would be angry if I did not eat my lunch on time. I turned and left Old David.

The kitchen hummed that night; the stove fires burned bright, and the servants moved briskly about. In the wide yard, under the balete tree, Father’s tenants butchered a carabao, several pigs, and a goat. The activity in the house, the boisterous laughter of Cousin Andring in the sala, where he told stories to Father and the other arrivals, made sleep difficult.

A light flickered in the stable — an old squat building with a rusty tin roof at one end of the yard. It was strange that a light should still be on there, so I went down to look. The door was bolted from the inside. I peeped through a crack and saw the horse prostrate on the sawdust, and Old David sitting on an empty can beside it. He let me in.

“He is very sick,” he explained. He watched the beast’s dilated nostrils, its dull, rasping breath. He had covered the animal with jute sacks soaked in warm water.

“Will it die?”

He lifted the storm lamp on the ground and looked at me. “There is a limit even to the strength of a horse,” he said.

I stayed with him for some time and helped drive away the flies that crawled on the horse’s head. He carried pails of boiling water from where the tenants were heating water in big iron vats, and when the water was no longer very warm, he poured it on the jute sacks that covered the animal.

Soon the roosters perched on the guava trees crowed. It was past eleven. “Go to sleep now,” Old David told me. “Tomorrow is a big day, and don’t let a sick horse worry you.” He thanked me and walked with me to the stairs.

Sleep was long in coming. The laughter in the hall, the incessant hammering in the yard, the scurrying feet of servants persisted all through the night. Between brief lapses of sleep I thought I heard the insistent neighing of the horse.

In the morning more of Father’s tenants and their wives and children trooped to town. Under the balete tree a long table made of loose planks and bamboo stands was set. Big chunks of carabao meat and pork with green papayas steamed in cauldrons for them. I passed the drinks — gin and basi—and played no favorites. To each I gave only a cup.

The tenants never went up to the house where Father’s relatives and friends gathered in the sala around a big round table laden with our food, fat rolls of morcon, caldereta, dinardaraan, lechon, and, from La Granja, tinto dulce, sherry, anisado.

Before the food was served to the tenants Old David came to me with a big bottle.

“Fill it up,” he pleaded.

“You’ll get drunk again,” I said, knowing I already had given him three cups of gin.

“It’s for the horse,” he said. “A little alcohol might help it.”

I could not refuse the old man.

Before noon, when the food was about to be served to the tenants, the five demijohns under my care were empty. I went to the stable to see how the horse was. It will be better in the morning, Old David had told me the night before. He was still in the stable. His withered face was red, and the bottle of gin I had given him was on the ground, half empty.

“Old David, you drank the wine,” I said, angered by his lie.

He nodded and grinned foolishly, his black teeth showing. “It’s no use,” he said, pointing to the horse that now lay still on the sawdust, its eyes wide open. Several flies were feasting on its eyes, on the streams of saliva that had dried on its mouth. The jute sacks that had covered its brown hide were scattered around.

“Only a while ago,” Old David explained, shaking his head.

“Father must know,” I said.

“No, not on a day like this. All these people. What will he say?”

“It is his horse,” I said. “Tell him.”

“It’s an old horse, and it was more mine than his,” Old David whined. “He never liked it. He had no need for it.”

“If I tell him myself, it will not be good for you,” I told him.

He stood up and, with wobbly steps, followed me to the house. In the sala Father and his guests were already eating. I went to him and told him Old David had something important to say. He beckoned to the old man, who remained standing at the top of the stairs where I had left him. He walked to the table and whispered the news in Father’s ear.

“No!” Father exclaimed. He turned to the startled assemblage. “Of all things to happen on my birthday!”

Cousin Andring, who sat near him, bent over and asked, “Not bad news, is it?”

“It is,” Father said, but there was no trace of grief in his voice. “My old horse is dead. All the rest the Japanese took. But this. Now it’s dead.” He turned to the old man. “What did it die of?”

“I don’t really know, Apo. Maybe exhaustion.”

“I always knew that horse couldn’t endure it,” Cousin Andring said. “You should have hitched another yesterday, David.”

“There is none other,” Old David said. He turned to Father. “What shall we do now, Apo?”

Father stroked his chin, exaggerating the gesture. “Well, inasmuch as no one wants to eat the meat of a dead horse, there is only one alternative left. David, you bury the horse.”

Father’s guests roared.

“Tell us,” Father went on when the laughter subsided, “when did it die?”

“Just now, Apo.”

“How long have you been tending horses, David?” Cousin Andring asked. “You were not able to cure this one, even with your experience.”

“The Apo knows I’ve been in this household since I was a child. Ever since, I have tended not only horses but also children. One can cure sickness, but death …”

“Tell us, then,” Cousin Andring leaned forward, his eyes bulging with inspiration, “about your experiences tending horses. God, let us saddle up David and have some fun,” he said, turning to our other relatives, all of whom smiled approval.

The old servant moved to the middle of the hall near the table stacked with wine and food. He looked anxiously at Father, but Father was now occupied with the leg of a fried chicken. When he caught Father’s eye, Father merely nodded and said, “Go ahead, David. Speak up.”

Old David blinked, wiped his bloodshot eyes with his shirt-sleeve.

“Here,” Cousin Andring said, rising and offering the old man his unfinished glass of Scotch. “You may have had too much, but this is different. It may even refresh your memory.”

“Thank you,” Old David said. He took the proffered glass and emptied it into the brass flower vase on the table. Again, the bumptious howling.

Cousin Andring relished it. “If you can’t tell us about horses, David,” he went on, “tell us the story of your life. Anyone who has lived as long as you, and has drunk as much, must have an interesting life.”

Old David turned briefly to me, but I could not look at him; I felt dismal and responsible for his predicament. He turned to Father, but again Father nodded.

“My life,” he said finally, softly, without the slightest trace of emotion, his red eyes steady on my Cousin Andring, “is like an insect’s. So small it can be crushed with the fingers like this.” He paused, and with his thumb and forefinger lifted, he made the motions of crushing an imaginary insect.

“Ah, but for an insect — a flea, for instance — you are very durable,” Cousin Andring said. The guests smiled.

“Now tell us,” Cousin Andring said, “your life as a man, not as a butterfly.” More laughter. Cousin Andring beamed. He was apparently enjoying himself.

Old David held the table edge. His voice was calm. “Yes, I’ll tell you all.” His eyes swept the hall.”I was born here. I knew this place when it was a wilderness, when the creek … you’d be surprised — it wasn’t wide then. Why, there were some parts of it that one could cross merely by jumping. And the fish …

“I have watched young people grow so quickly like the shoots of bamboo. Most of you here, Benito, Antonia, Marcelo — all of you. And I said, someday, maybe, among these fine children, there would be one like their father. You must all revere his name, you whose lips still smell of milk …”

“And Carlos Primero!” Cousin Andring roared. Laughter swelled in the hall again.

“There was kindness in the hearts of men,” Old David said, undistracted. “I recall similar parties like this, which your grandfather used to give. His servants — us — we did not eat in the yard. We ate with him at his table, and we drank wine from the same cup he used!”

“More wine!” Cousin Andring howled again.

“There was less greed, less faithlessness. Men were brothers — the rich and the poor. It was a day for living, but now the past is forgotten and it can never be relived again even by those who used to belong to it. It was a good time, a time for loving one another, for forgiving one’s faults and understanding one’s weaknesses. Now the people don’t even know what kindness means to a horse …”

“Let’s drink to the health of the horse,” Cousin Andring said. “By God, we’ll give that horse a decent funeral, eh, Tio?” Cousin Andring winked at Father.

More laughter. The guests raised their glasses of wine and beer and smacked their lips. Then they fell to eating again, nibbling at drumsticks, reaching for the mountains of prawn and crab on the table.

Old David turned to Father and said in a quavering voice, “I have said enough, Apo.”

Father laid the spoon on his plate. “All right, David. We lost all the horses. No, I am not blaming you and your drinking. After all, even horses die. Now, maybe, I’ll buy a pickup truck, a jeep, or a car. You can’t drive — and even if you can, I won’t let you be the driver. What good would you be in the household then?”

“There is still the garden, Apo,” Old David said. He bent forward, his arms twitching. “And I can clean the car, wash it every day, till it shines like the bronze studs of the harness. And I can help in the housekeeping. I’ll sweep the yard twice a day, Apo. Even the streetfront of the house …”

“You are too old for that, David,” Father said, smiling wryly.

“And too slow,” Tia Antonia chimed in, “and too drunk.”

Cousin Andring stood up and faced the old man. “Well,” he said, gesturing with his fat hands. “Since you seem to have no more use for David here, we can bring him with us to the city.” He turned to Father. “What do you say, Tio? You don’t know the trouble with the servants we are having there. You cannot trust anyone except those whom you have known long and well. Tell Tio, Mother, about our last maid who ran off with the houseboy across the street, bringing with her your pearl earrings and some of the silver. David drinks too much, more than he can hold, but …”

Tia Antonia nudged Father. “It is true,” she said gravely.

“I’d rather stay here, Apo,” Old David said, his eyes pleading. “I was born here. I’ll die here.”

Father grumbled. “Don’t worry about dying, David. You’ll live to be a hundred. You’ll still be around long after we are turned to dust.” Father turned to his sister: “I have no objection.” Then to the old man, “You’ll go, David. Maybe just for half a year—”

“My days are numbered, Apo. I feel it in my bones, in the lungs that are dried in my chest,” Old David said.

“Who wants to live forever?” Cousin Andring asked. “Drink, David.” He extended another glass of Scotch. “There’s more of this where you are going. None of the cheap nipa wine and gin you have here.”

But the old man did not even look at my cousin; he turned and shuffled out of the hall.

The next morning the house was quiet again. Several women from Carmay stayed behind, and, after the guests had gone, they swept the yard, then scrubbed the narra floors. The stable was being torn down by the boys. Earlier, the horse had been dragged to the nearby field and buried there.

I lingered in the stable, waiting for Old David to go. He was dressed in his best denim — a little faded on the knees and on the buttocks but still quite new because, unlike his other pair of pants, it was not patched. He watched the planks being torn down. The dirty harnesses cluttered up a corner together with those that he had cleaned, their bronze plates polished to a sheen. His battered bamboo suitcase, lashed tight with abaca twine, was beside him.

“When will you return?” I asked.

His eyes were smoky red as they always were. He gazed at the ground, at the black streaks of molasses, which the boys had carelessly spilled in their hurry to dismantle the stable. Upstairs in the house, Cousin Andring traded parting pleasantries with Father. Then they came noisily down the stairs.

“Must you really go?” I asked the old man again.

Old David’s voice was hollow and distant. “So it must be. This is the time for leaving. Just as there was a time for beginning, planting, growing. I watched them all grow — your uncles, your father — all of them. Your grandfather — he was a spirited young man. I remember how he dared his father’s wrath, how he would flee to the forest with me in search of game. We swam the swollen creek together, even when logs hurtled down with the current. Ay, he was not born to the wilderness, but he defeated me in almost every contest except running. We would race to the edge of the river, but my legs — they were young and agile then, and they always carried me there first. He could shoot straight with the bow or with a gun. But he died, too.” A long pause. “Then your father — I would carry him perched on my shoulders, just like you. I used to drive him around, just the two of us, in the calesa to Calanutan and Carmay. I remember we spilled out once when the wheel fell into a deep rut and broke. I carried him to town on my shoulders, and never once did I put him down. Balungao it was, and that’s five kilometers away.”

“You are drunk again,” I said.

He dug his big toe into the sawdust and shook his head. “Ay — I knew them all. I watched them grow into big men, learned men. But no one lives forever — that’s what your cousin said. I can die here, where I saw them all grow. There is nothing like the land you belong to claiming you back. But everywhere the earth is the same.”

Father, his hands on the shoulders of Tia Antonia and Cousin Andring, walked idly to the gate where the jeep was parked. The servants were loading it with vegetables, two sacks of rice, chicken, and bunches of green bananas.

Cousin Andring turned to us. “And why isn’t David moving yet?” he shouted. “Is he drunk again?”

The old man stood up and tried lifting his valise, but it was cumbersome. I grasped its lashing at one end, and we carried it to the jeep.

“Does he have to bring all that junk to the city?” Cousin Andring asked, looking apprehensively at the jeep that was now overloaded. “I’ll bet anything it’s all bottles of nipa wine. A year’s ration, that’s what.”

Father smiled. “Let him,” he said.

“Hurry, David,” Cousin Andring urged the old man, “we’ll miss the train.”

We raised the suitcase, but the old man’s hold was not firm enough and the trunk fell. I stepped aside lithely just in time to avoid being hit by it. Its lashing broke, and out spilled his things — an old prayer book, his clothes, a leather case in which he kept his betel nuts, and a bottle of nipa wine. The bottle broke when it hit the ground, and its contents were spilled.

Tia Antonia buckled over laughing, but Cousin Andring was angry. “God,” he cursed, “can’t you be more careful, David?”

Pushing the old man aside, he picked up his things and dumped them into the open suitcase, then heaved everything into the jeep.

Old David’s face was pale and expressionless. He was the last to board the vehicle, and as it started, he turned briefly to me. I could not tell whether what glistened on his cheeks was beads of sweat or tears.

CHAPTER 16

Shortly after Old David left to serve in Tia Antonia’s house in the city, I, too, had to pack my bags. I always knew that someday, after I finished high school, I would proceed to Manila and to college. In my younger days I had looked ahead to the event, but when the moment finally came, leaving Rosales filled me with a nameless dread and a great, numbing unhappiness. Maybe it was friendship — huge and granitelike — or just plain sympathy. I could not be too sure anymore. Maybe I fell in love for the first time when I was fifteen.

Her name was Teresita. She was a stubborn girl with many fixed ideas, and she admonished me once: “Just because you have so much to give does not mean it will all be accepted. Just like that. There’s more to giving than just giving.”

She was sixteen then, and looking at her made me think of moments bright and beautiful, of the banaba in bloom.

I did not expect her to be vexed when I brought her a dress, for it was not really expensive. Besides, as the daughter of one of Father’s tenants, she knew me well enough, better perhaps than any of the people who lived in Carmay, the young folks who always greeted me politely, doffed their straw hats, then closed-mouthed went their way.

I always had coins in my pockets, but that March afternoon, after counting all of them and the stray pieces that I had tucked away in my dresser, I knew I needed more.

I approached 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 his head. I stood beside him, watching him scrawl the figures on the ledger, his wide brow and his shirt damp with sweat. When he finally noticed me, I could not tell him what I wanted. He unbuttoned his shirt down to his paunch. “Well, what is it?”

“I’m going to take my classmates this afternoon to the restaurant, Father,” I said.

He turned to the sheaf of papers before him. “Yes,” he said. “You can tell Chan Hai to take off from his rent this month what you and your friends can eat.”

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 some money, Father,” I said. “I have to buy something.”

Father nodded. He groped for his keys in his drawer, then he opened the iron money box beside him, drew out a ten-peso bill, and laid it on the table.

“I’m going to buy—” I tried to explain, but with a wave of his hand he dismissed me and went back to his figures.

It was getting late. After feeding the hogs, Sepa was getting the chickens to the coops. I hurried down the stairs to the main road, which was quiet and deserted now except in the vicinity of the round cement embankment in front of the municipio, where the town loafers were taking in the stale afternoon sun.

The Chinese storekeepers who occupied Father’s building 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, traveling merchants had unhitched their bull carts after a whole day of slow travel from town to town 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 and picked out the white silk cloth with glossy printed flowers. I asked Chan Hai, who was perched on a stool smoking his long pipe, how much he would ask for the material I had picked for a gown.

Chan Hai peered at me in surprise. “Ten pesos,” he said.

With the package, I hurried to Carmay. Dusk was falling very fast, the leaves of the acacias had folded, and the solemn, mellow chime of the Angelus echoed to the flat 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. Their house sat on a sandy lot that belonged to Father, set apart from the cluster of huts of the village. Its roof, as it was with the other farmhouses, was thatched and disheveled, its walls were battered buri leaves. It stood alone near the gully that had been widened to let the bull carts and calesas through when the bridge was washed away. Madre de cacao trees abounded in the vicinity but offered scanty shade. Piles of burnt rubbish rose in little mounds in the yard, and a disrupted line of ornamental San Francisco ringed the house.

Teresita was in the kitchen, sampling the broth of what she was cooking. There was a dampness on her brow and a redness in her eyes.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” she confronted me. In the glow of the crackling stove fire, she looked genuinely surprised.

I could not tell her at once or show her what I brought.

“I wanted to see you,” I said, which was true.

“But it’s already late, and you have to walk quite a long way back.” She laid down the ladle on the table and looked puzzled. She must have noticed then that I was hiding something behind me.

“What do you have there?” she asked, moving toward me.

I laid my package on the wooden table cluttered with battered tin plates and vegetables.

“It’s for you,” I said. My face burned like kindling wood. “I hope you’ll like it.”

Her eyes still on me, she opened the package. When she saw what it was, she gave a tiny, muffled cry. She shook her head, wrapped the package again, then gave it to me. “I can’t,” she said softly. “It does not seem right at all.”

“But you need it, and I’m giving it to you,” I said firmly. The burning in my face had subsided. “Is there anything wrong with giving one a gift?”

And that was when she said, “There are things you just can’t give like what you are doing now …”

I think it all started that evening when we were in the third year and Teresita recited a poem. It was during the graduation exercises, and she was the only junior in the program. I cannot remember distinctly what the piece was about, except that she spoke of faith and love, and how suffering and loss could be borne with fortitude, and as she did, a clamminess gripped me, smothered me with a feeling I’d never felt before. I recall her resonant voice cleaving the hushed evening, and I was silently one with her.

I did not go home immediately after the program, for a dance in honor of the graduates followed. Miss Santillan, who was in charge of the refreshments, had asked me to help Teresita in serving them. I sat on one of the school benches after I got tired, watching the dancers file in and out, giggling. When most of them had eaten, Teresita asked Miss Santillan for permission to leave.

“My father, ma’am,” she said. “He doesn’t want me to stay out very late, because of my cough. Besides, I have work to do early tomorrow.”

“Going home alone?” Miss Santillan asked.

“I’m not afraid,” she said resolutely.

I stood up, strode past the table laden with an assortment of trays and glasses. Beyond the window, a moon dangled over the sprawling school buildings like a huge sieve, and the world was pulsating and young.

“I’ll walk with you,” I said.

She protested at first, but Miss Santillan said it would be best if I went along. After Miss Santillan had wrapped up some cakes for her, we went down the stone steps. The evening was clean and cool like a newly washed sheet, and it engulfed us with an intimacy that seemed unreal and elusive. We did not speak for some time.

“I live very far,” she reminded me, drawing a shabby shawl over her thin shoulders.

“I know,” I told her. “I’ve been there.”

“You’ll be very tired.”

“I’ve walked longer distances. I can take Carmay in a run,” I said, trying to impress her.

“I’m sure of that,” she said. “You are strong. Once I was washing in the river, and you were swimming with Angel, and you outraced him.”

“I did not see you,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, “you never notice the children of your tenants, except those who serve in your house.”

I was so upset that I could not speak at once. “That is not true,” I objected. “I go to Carmay often.”

She must have realized that she had hurt me, for when she spoke again she sounded genuinely sorry. “That was not what I meant, and I didn’t say that to spite you.”

Again, silence.

The moon drifted out of the clouds in a sudden smudge of silver, lighting up the dusty road. It glimmered on the parched fields and on the giant buri palms that stood like hooded sentinels. Most of the houses we passed had long extinguished their kerosene lamps. Once in a while a dog stirred in its bed of dust and growled at us.

“You won’t be afraid going home alone?” she asked after a while.

“There is a giant capre in the balete tree that comes out when the moon is full,” I said. “I’d like to see it. I’ve never seen a ghost.”

“When I die,” she laughed, “I’ll appear before you.”

“You’ll be a good ghost, and I won’t be afraid,” I said.

We walked on. We talked about ourselves, the friends that we ought to have had but did not. We reached the edge of the village where the row of homes receded and finally her house, near the river that murmured as it cut a course through reeds and shallows.

When we went up to the house, her father was already asleep. In fact he was snoring heavily. At the door she bade me good night and thanked me. Then, slowly, she closed the door behind her.

So the eventful year passed, and the rains came on time. The fields became green, and the banabas in the streets blossomed. The land became soggy, and the winds lashed at Rosales severely, bowling over a score of flimsy huts that stood on bamboo stilts. Our house did not tremble in the mightiest typhoon. With us, nothing changed. The harvest with its usual bustle passed, the tenants — among them Teresita’s father — filled our spacious bodega with their crops. The drab, dry season with its choking dust settled oppressively, and then it was March — time for Teresita and me to graduate.

Throughout the hot afternoon, we rehearsed our parts for the graduation program. We would march to the platform to receive our high school diplomas, then return solemnly to our seats. When the sham was over, Teresita and I rested on the crude benches lined before the stage.

She said softly, “I will not attend the graduation exercises. I can feign illness. I can say I had a fever or my cough got worse, which is the truth, anyway.”

“Why?”

“No one would miss me in the march if I don’t come.”

“You are foolish,” I said.

“I can’t have my picture, too, I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can’t come. I just can’t,” she repeated with finality.

She did not have to say anything more. I understood, and that afternoon I asked for money from Father to buy a graduation dress for Teresita.

And that same week Father ordered Teresita’s father, who farmed a lot in the delta in Carmay, to vacate the place, as Father had sold it. Teresita’s father had to settle in the hills of Balungao, where there were small vacant parcels, arable patches on the otherwise rocky mountainside. There he might literally scratch the earth to eke out a living.

April, and a hot glaring sun filtered through the dusty glass shutters and formed dazzling puddles on the floor. The dogs that lolled in the shade of the balete tree stuck out their tongues and panted. The smudges of grass in the plaza were a stubbly brown. The sky was cloudless and azure. Sepa told me to see Father, who had something important to tell me.

He was in the azotea reading the papers and fanning himself vigorously. The question he asked stunned me. “When do you want to leave for the city?”

For some time I could not say a word. The school vacation had just started, and the school opening was still two months away. “It’s only April, Father,” I finally said.

“I know,” he said. “But I want you to get well acquainted with your cousins there.”

Heat waves rose, shimmering in the street, swallowed up by the dust that fluffed high when a jeepney passed. Father’s voice: “You will grow older.” He hammered this notion into me. “You will grow older and realize how important — this thing that I’m doing. You will leave many faces here. You will outgrow boyish whims. In the city you’ll meet new friends.”

I did not speak.

“The time will come when you will return to me — a man.”

“Yes, Father,” I said as he, having spoken, went on with his reading.

The dark came quickly. The sun sank behind the coconut groves of Tomana and disappeared below the jagged horizon. Before darkness fell, I left the house and journeyed to where the houses were decrepit, where children were clad most of the time in unkempt rags and, when a stranger would stumble into their midst, they would gape at him with awe. Beyond the cluster of homes came the barking of dogs stirring in the dust.

I went up the ladder that squeaked, and when Teresita’s father recognized me in the light of the flickering kerosene lamp hanging from a rafter, a shadow of a scowl crept into his leathery face. Even when I said, “Good evening,” his sullen countenance remained. He returned my greeting coldly, then went down and left us alone.

“I’m leaving,” I began. Teresita was washing the dishes and now she wiped the soap suds from her hands. “I’ll go to the city tomorrow to study. Father is sending me there.”

She said nothing — she just looked at me. She turned and walked to the window that opened to the banks of the river and the fields.

“We’ll soon leave, too,” she murmured, her hands on the windowsill. “Your father sold this place, you know,” she said without emotion.

“I’m very sad.”

“There is nothing to be sad about.”

“Yes, there is,” I said. “Many things.”

She remained by the window. Outside, the night was alive with crickets.

“Won’t you go to school anymore?” I asked after a while. She did not reply, and I did not prod her for an answer.

“What course are you going to take?” she asked.

“I’m not very sure,” I said. “Maybe I’ll follow your advice.”

“Please do,” she said. “Please be a doctor.” With conviction, “You can do so much if you are one.”

I did not know what else to say.

“Don’t write to me when you are there,” she said.

“But I will.”

“Nothing will happen,” she insisted. “Besides, it will not be necessary. Thank you very much for coming to see me.”

“I have to,” I said.

She followed me to the door. The bamboo floor creaked under me. She called my name as I stepped down the first rung, and I turned momentarily to catch one last glimpse of her young, fragile face, and on it a smile, half-born, half-free.

“Please don’t write,” she reiterated, raising her hand. “It’s useless, you know.”

“But I will,” I said, and in my heart I cried, “I will, I will!”

“I’d be happier, and so would Father, if you didn’t,” she said. “And besides, I wouldn’t be able to answer your letters. Stamps cost—”

“I’ll send you some,” I said.

The smile fled from her face. “You cannot buy everything,” she said.

I headed for the gate. The children who played nearby stopped and looked at us. And in the other houses, though it was very dark, I knew the farmers and their wives watched me leave, knowing how it was going to be with us, how I would leave Teresita and thus make Father happy, how I would forget everything — the orchids I gave her that now adorned her window and that, I am sure, would someday wither, the books I lent her, which she rapaciously read, the eager laughter that welled from the depths of her. I would forget, too, how we hummed to the music of the town’s brass band and walked one sultry night from the high school to Carmay.

The night was vast and the stars were hidden by clouds. In the blackness I could not see banabas along the path, but I could imagine the purple of their blooms.

CHAPTER 17

On the morning that I left, Sepa came and thrust into my hand pieces of pan de sal with coconut syrup. The syrup had oozed, and the paper bag with which she had wrapped the bread was soiled.

“For the trip,” she said, attempting a smile.

I went down to the yard, where one of the boys had the jeep waiting. The air was heady, compounded with the clean tang of morning. The sun was mild, and one could drink it and never feel that the body was full. It touched the fading grass and gave it a tinge of jade. It glinted, too, in the leaves of the coconut palms and transformed them into a thousand blades gleaming and unsheathed. It was a beautiful day, but not for me.

Father was at the gate. When I kissed his hand, he held my chin up and said: “You’ll be all right in the city. But that’s not important. It’s the learning that counts, and the growing up.”

He dug out his gold watch from his waist pocket. “You have plenty of time,” he said. “Now listen. You are young and you don’t know many things, but do remember this: you are alone on this earth. Alone. You must act for yourself and no other. Kindness is not appreciated anymore, nor friendship. Think of yourself before you think of others. It’s a cruel world, and you have to be hard and cruel, too. They will strangle you if you don’t strangle them first. Trust no one but your judgment — and even then don’t trust too much.”

He laid a hand on my shoulder and smiled wanly. “Son,” he whispered. He had not spoken the word in a long, long time. “Be good.”

I wanted to fling my arms around his neck, tell him that I loved him, but my throat was dry. I only said, “I’ll remember, Father.”

I boarded the jeep, and we drove out into the street. I did not look back.

It was early evening when I reached Tutuban Station. The jostling crowd in the giant, gloomy building baffled me, but I had no difficulty because Cousin Andring was on the platform to greet me. When we emerged into the lobby, Old David came forward from the nameless phalanx of people. He had aged so much. I did not want him to carry my suitcase, but his grip was strong and determined.

We hurried to Cousin Andring’s jeep, which was parked outside the station, then we drove off to the suburbs. The long trip did not tire me, but in the jeep, watching the brilliant neon lights and the depressing huddle of tall buildings, I felt lost and tired.

My first days in the city were restless and uneventful. In the mornings, I’d wander around the shops or see a movie. I’d return to their house in Santa Mesa shortly before lunchtime. Tia Antonia seldom talked with me, and Old David did not have the time, either, for he was always busy in the garage or in the garden. I imagine that he purposely avoided me and busied himself whenever I went near.

Tia Antonia’s children — since most of them were already grown-up — were correct but not friendly, and, if they talked with me at all, they asked the most asinine questions.

I was very glad when, one morning, Cousin Pedring telephoned and said he would come in the afternoon to pick me up, so that I could stay in his house in Cubao until classes started. It had been ages since I saw him last, when he and Clarissa got married, and I was very glad he had not forgotten.

He had changed a lot. His girth was wider and so was his forehead.Clarissa, too, looked different from the young girl I used to know. Her cheeks were plump, and she moved about with a matriarchal dignity rather than the gay sprightliness that was her. She had three children now, the youngest a darling girl about two years old. Clarissa hummed incessantly as she prepared the supper table.

In the early evening Cousin Pedring and I got to talking about the old times, and we would have talked far into the night if he did not have a poker session with friends. He kissed Clarissa at the door, as if he were going on a long journey.

I was alone with her, and as she served me a second helping of ice cream we talked about Rosales and how it was. “That was the most beautiful wedding I have ever seen,” I said, recalling theirs.

“In a short time yours, too, will come,” she said. “And then you’ll be raising your own family. But you men never know the trouble women go through.”

I remembered the secret I had kept and decided that now was the time to get it off my chest.

“It was good you came to Rosales that vacation,” I said. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t come.”

“What do you think would have happened?” Her eyes lighted up.

I remember the letters postmarked Cebu, which I showed Father first, then burned. “Well,” I said, “you might have ended up marrying that fellow from Cebu and not Pedring.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, the laughter drained from her.

“After all, he wrote to you so many times when you were in Rosales. He was very insistent, you know.”

“He did write to me?” She was incredulous.

“Yes,” I said. “But you never knew it, did you? Father told me never to tell you. As a matter of fact, I burned the letters myself.”

Her face became blank. “And I thought all along he had decided to forget. I was all wrong,” she mumbled, a faraway look in her eyes. And then her head drooped, and her body shook with silent sobs.

“Clarissa.” I went to her. “Is there anything wrong?”

She kept sobbing for some time, and I stood before her, not knowing what to do. She looked up at me and hurriedly wiped her tears.

“Tell me,” I said. “Does Pedring beat you?”

A smile bloomed again. “Foolish!” she said, rising from her chair. She tweaked my ear. “Of course, he treats me well. He doesn’t beat me at all. Whoever gave you that idea?”

“Why are you crying, then?”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You are too young.”

“Tell me,” I urged her. “I won’t tell your secret.”

She turned away. A trace of sadness lined her voice. “I was thinking of all those letters … and it seems as if it was only yesterday …”

“You’ve not grown up,” I said, but she did not hear, for the baby had started crying and she rushed to the crib, baby talk gushing from her lips.

Then June, and I was in college at last, engrossed with botany, zoology, chemistry, and a host of other subjects for preparatory medicine. College was an exhilarating experience, and for a time the old nagging aches were soothed and I was immersed in new interests.

Until one October afternoon: I was in the college cafeteria drinking Coke, when one of my classmates rushed to me white-faced and asked if I had seen the evening paper.

I shook my head. He thrust the front page in front of me and asked if the photograph before me was that of Father.

I could not believe what I read, how he was brought out of our house the evening before by men who were armed. The soldiers had gone after his kidnappers, so the paper reported, but they had returned empty-handed.

I rushed to the dormitory, and at the lobby I met the father dean. He must have read the story, too, and had come to tell me about it. He held my shoulders, and his cool blue eyes gazed into mine.

“You have to be brave,” he said.

I went to my room and shut the door. No tears came; a tightness gripped my chest, and I could not breathe. I lay on my cot and could not think.

At dusk Cousin Marcelo and Tia Antonia came mouthing platitudes. “Maybe,” they said, “the men did not harm him.” Cousin Pedring came, too, with Clarissa. He said he would leave for Rosales the following morning.

I did not go down for supper. My roommate came in shortly before lights-out and brought me a glass of warm milk and crackers.

After Three Days, Cousin Pedring came, the grime of travel still on his face. There was no news at all about Father. Then, after a week, a tenant stumbled upon Father in the delta. He had died terribly, said Cousin Marcelo, who came with the news. The body bore more than a dozen bolo wounds. The day they found Father, they buried him beside Mother’s grave.

“You do not have to go home,” Cousin Marcelo said. “There’s nothing you can do now.”

“But I’m going home,” I told him, suddenly aware that it was now my duty to look after his ledgers, the farm. “I’d like to look at the papers.”

“Yes, of course,” Cousin Marcelo said. “Now you have to study a lot of things and make decisions.” He looked ruefully at me. “And you … so young and not even through with school.”

But it would not do for me to stay in Rosales anymore; everywhere I would turn, there would always be something familiar, yet alien.

“You’ll be free now,” Cousin Marcelo said. “You must not be like your father. He was a slave to what he owned. You must begin again — that is most important.”

Words meant not to be heard, a few drops of rain on parched ground.

We arrived at the station at dusk. No one met us but the baggage boys, who recognized me at once. They gathered around, and one got hold of my canvas bag, while another hurried down the platform to hail a calesa. They did not speak much.

Even the calesa driver did not speak until we were close to home. Cousin Marcelo placed a salapi in his palm, and as we got down, he turned to me and said he was sorry about what had happened. Sepa could not contain herself when she saw me coming up the stairs. She waddled down and exclaimed: “You are so tall!” Then she broke down and cried. Cousin Marcelo held her shoulder, then freed me from her. I did not cry; for a long time now I have not tasted the salt of tears. Darkness fell quickly, and since it was too late to go to the cemetery, I hastened to my old room and unpacked.

The supper that Sepa prepared was excellent — roasted eggplant, crab and meat stew — but I had no appetite. I went to the azotea. Sepa followed me; she had lighted her hand-rolled cigar.

“Tell me,” I asked after some silence. “What has become of the people in Carmay? Who did it? Surely you have an idea.”

“I do not know,” she said feebly. She leaned on the azotea ledge and turned away. “I’m just an old, worthless woman imprisoned in the kitchen. All I know is this: death hides now, not only in the delta but in Carmay as well.”

“Will they kill me, too?”

“Drive the thought away,” the old woman said. “You are young and good, and you have no enemies.”

“And Father was old and bad and he had a hundred?”

Sepa flung her cigar away. In the soft dark I could make out her face. Her voice was sharp, “Your father was good. He was not seen clearly, that’s all. Now don’t let such thoughts grow lush in your mind. Drive them away quickly.”

Silence again.

“Tell me, what has happened to the people in Carmay?”

“There are a hundred people there,” she said, “and all of them are still alive.” Then she must have guessed what I wanted to know. “You are asking about Teresita?”

“I wrote to her many times,” I said. “She never answered. Not even once.”

“She died last month,” Sepa said softly. She shifted her weight on the ledge. “The old sickness in her family …”

I could not speak for some time. The old woman prattled on: “It wasn’t much of a funeral. I wanted someone to write a letter to you, but I couldn’t find anyone I could trust.”

“Maybe,” I said after another uneasy silence, “it’s better this way. She won’t suffer anymore.”

Sepa grunted: “Yes, death is a blessing. People who grow old should remember that. How is David?”

“I didn’t see him when I left,” I said. “Tia Antonia must be taking good care of him. He’s well, I suppose. I visited Tia Antonia often. But Old David, he always seemed busy. He avoided me. At first, it was difficult; I couldn’t understand. I do now.”

She grunted again.

“You have no news about Angel? Where is he now?”

“He’s lost,” Sepa said without emotion. “He is a soldier. But he is no problem, really, the way she is.”

“Who?” I asked, leaning over to hear her every word.

“Your father’s woman. It must be very sad, being cooped up in that house by the river, unable to show her face …”

“How did you know?” I asked. Sepa did not answer; she stood up shaking her head and left me to the night.

Morning came to Rosales in a flood of sunlight. I woke up, a stranger to my old room but not to the happy sounds of morning, the barking of dogs in the street and the cackling of hens in the yard. Cousin Marcelo was in the sala, waiting.

“I know my way to the cemetery,” I said.

He pressed my arm. “All right then, if you want to go alone. But be sure to be back as soon as you can. We have many things to talk about. You are an heir, remember.”

Breakfast was waiting. I took a small cup of chocolate, then went down to the street. Day was clear, and the sky was swept clean and blue with but wisps of clouds pressed flat against its rim. The banabas along the road seemed greener maybe because my eyes had so long been dulled by the dirty browns and grays of the city. Housewives were hanging their wash in their yards, and their half-naked children played in the street, their runny noses outlined in dirt. The day smelled good with the witchery of October, the tingling sun. Tomorrow, it would probably rain.

It was a long walk to the cemetery. The morning etched clearly all the white crosses and the gumamela shrubs that the grave watchers tended. I walked through narrow paths between the tombs, past the small chapel in the center of the cemetery, beyond which was Mother’s tomb, and now Father’s, too.

A woman was bent before the white slab of stone, and, as she turned I caught a view of her face. I was not mistaken — it was Father’s woman. When she saw me, she stood up and walked swiftly away. I followed her with my eyes, until she disappeared behind a sprout of cogon that hid the road.

I went to the tomb and picked up the bouquet she had left — a simple bundle of sampaguitas — then placed it back on the slab. It was not yet completely dry, and the gray cement that the masons had left unleavened still cluttered the base.

I remembered my first visit, Father’s quavering voice again: Nena, I’ve brought your son to you now that he is old enough.

I must see her, tell her it’s useless harboring ill will. I hurried from the warren of white crosses and headed for the river, down a gully, and along the riverbed until I came to another gully beyond where she lived.

The footpath was widened by carabaos that went down to the river to bathe, and beyond the bank was her house. It looked shabby from the outside, with its grass roof and buri walls already bleached and battered. A bamboo gate was at the end of the narrow path. I pushed it open.

Within the yard, I called: “Man. There’s a man. Good morning.”

No answer. I went up the bamboo stairs. From the half-open door I could see the narrow living room furnished with three rattan chairs, a coffee table with crocheted doilies, and some magazines. A Coleman lamp dangled from the beam above the room. In a corner was a table clock and a sewing machine. A vase with wilted gumamelas was on a mahogany dresser near the open window.

“Man. There’s a man,” I repeated. Still no answer.

In the room that adjoined the sala, someone stirred.

“Please,” I said, rapping on the bamboo post by the door, “I have to see you. I wanted to talk with you at the cemetery, but you left so quickly.”

A shuffle of feet, then she flung the door open and I saw her — not she who was gay and laughing but a tired and unhappy woman, her eyes swollen from crying. Her hair, which would have looked elegant if it were combed, cascaded down her shoulders. She was dressed in a dark shapeless blouse. From her neck dangled a red bead necklace whose medallion of polished gold rested in the valley of her bosom.

“What do you want?” she asked, glaring at me. Then recognition came, and the annoyance in her face vanished.

“You are his son,” she said simply.

“I want to talk with you,” I said.

She came to me. “Why did you come? You don’t have to. It is not necessary.”

“I have to,” I said. “Maybe, because we both lost someone. Maybe …”

“But you didn’t love him,” she said, looking straight at me.

I was too surprised to answer.

“I suspected it all along,” she said sadly. “Many did not like him, and I wouldn’t blame his only son for feeling the same way. Sometimes blood isn’t really enough.”

“You are wrong,” I said. Coherent speech was mine again. “I respected him.”

“Respected him! What a difference!”

I did not know how to argue with her; she did not give me a chance.

“Let me tell you,” she said hastily. “He was not good and he was not kind, and that is why they killed him. But he had virtues, and he was really good in his own way. Not many understood, but I did, and that’s why—” She brought the handkerchief to her eyes and started sobbing. She slumped on one of the chairs, her body shaking with her sobs.

“Please don’t cry,” I said.

She dropped the handkerchief on her lap and turned to me. “He loved you,” she said. “He used to talk so much about you.”

“That’s not true,” I said, unable to hold it back any longer. “That’s not true at all!”

“Ay!” She sighed. She rose and walked to the window. “If only we know the things that are hidden in the hearts of others, the world wouldn’t be such a sad place.” Outside, the sunshine was a silver flood. The birds on the grass roof twittered.

“He never cared for me,” I said plainly. “He tried to but—”

“But he did! And you call him Father! You didn’t even understand him!” she exclaimed. “You were very close to him, and you didn’t even know how he felt! And here I was, seeing him only once or twice a week, and I knew so many things. But maybe it’s because I’m a woman. I do know! You have to believe it now that he’s dead. We could have gotten married, lived together. He loved you, and he said he failed you because of me and many other things that he had to do, although he didn’t want to. The death of this Baldo, his helplessness before your Don Vicente. All these he told me and blamed himself. How will you ever understand? You have to be a man …”

There was nothing for me to say.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Seventeen.”

“So young,” she said, “so very young!”

I gazed out of the window, at the caved banks of the river. “I’ll be leaving, maybe tomorrow,” I said.

She came to me again and held my arm lightly. We walked to the door. A breeze stirred the tall cogon grass that surrounded the house.

“What will you do now?” I asked.

She bit her lower lip, and when she looked at me, resignation was on her face. “What can I do?”

“You’ll stay here?”

Her voice was dry: “Yes. Where will I go? To the city, like you? I’ve been there. You are thinking perhaps that if I leave I can start anew? I ask you: what for?”

She left me at the door and walked to her dresser. Before the oval mirror she examined her face, her swollen eyes. She was beautiful, even though grief had distorted her face.

“If there is anything you need, you can go to the house, to my Cousin Marcelo. I’ll tell him to give you everything you need.”

She turned quickly to me. “No,” she said sharply. “No, thank you. I don’t think I’ll ever go there. I’ve some pride, you know.”

“I want to help.”

“You can’t,” she said, trying to smile. “Thank you for the thought. I am ashamed, that’s all. But not with him. Only in the beginning. Then I wasn’t ashamed anymore, even when I felt a hundred eyes stab me in the market, in church; one gets used to it. The skin thickens with the years.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “But believe me, with him I was not ashamed. Never. Maybe I loved him deeply, although that didn’t seem possible.”

“Please, don’t cry,” I said.

She daubed her eyes. “Well, you see me crying now, but I will stop. I’ll powder my face and comb my hair, then go out. And should another man come up that path, do you expect me to shut the door?”

I did not answer. I turned and stepped down the stairs into the blinding sunlight.

So it must be; I left Rosales, relegating that town to a sweet oblivion in the mind. I left behind people who should not intrude into the peace that, I thought, I could build and reinforce with a wealth of means that is mine by inheritance.

I have lived in pleasant solitude, breathed God’s pure air, and wallowed in sybaritic comfort, although, occasionally, I do think about those who were around me, and do feel deeply about the travail of my youth. But I see their anguish as something caused by human cussedness itself, that this is man’s certitude and destiny — irrevocable, final — that one cannot make anything different from it any more than I can stir ashes back to life.

Yet, much as I am sure of these, I also know that the present, this now, is yesterday, and anything and everything that I find detestable are outgrowths of something equally detestable in this not-so-distant past.

I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality — it is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere, and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all.

But the past was not permanent, nor is the present — who was it who said you cannot cross the river twice? Motion, change, birth, and death — these are the imperatives (what a horrible, heavy word!) of life.

I sometimes pass by Rosales and see that so little has changed. The people are the same, victims of their own circumstance as Old David, Angel, Ludovico, and even Father had all been. God, should I think and feel, or should I just plod on and forget? I know in the depths of me that I’ll always remember, and I am not as tough as they were. Nor do I have the humor and the zest to cope as Tio Marcelo did, looking at what I see not as an apocalypse but as revelation; as he said once, paraphrasing a Spanish poet, he was born on a day that God was roaring drunk.

I think that I was born on a day God was fast asleep. And whatever happened after my birth was nothing but dreamless ignorance. But there was a waking that traumatized, a waking that also trivialized, because in it, the insolence and the nastiness of human nature became commonplace and I grew up taking all these as inevitable. In the end, the satisfaction that all of us seek, it seems, can come only from our discovering that we really have molded our lives into whatever we want them to be. In my failure to do this, I could have taken the easy way out, but I have always been too much of a coward to covet my illusions rather than dispel them.

I continue, for instance, to hope that there is reward in virtue, that those who pursue it should do so because it pleases them. This then becomes a very personal form of ethics, or belief, premised on pleasure. It would require no high-sounding motivation, no philosophical explanation for the self, and its desires are animal, basic — the desire for food, for fornication. If this be the case, then we could very well do away with the church, with all those institutions that pretend to hammer into the human being attributes that would make him inherit God’s vestments, if not His kingdom.

But what kind of man is he who will suffer for truth, for justice, when all the world knows that it is the evil and the grasping who succeed, who flourish, whose tables are laden, whose houses are palaces? Surely he who sacrifices for what is just is not of the common breed or of an earthly shape. Surely there must be something in him that should make us beware, for since he is dogged and stubborn as compared with the submissive many, he will question not just the pronouncements of leaders but the leaders themselves. He may even opt for the more demanding decision, the more difficult courses of action. In the end, we may see him not just as selfless but as the epitome of that very man whom autocrats would like to have on their side, for this man has no fear of heights, of gross temptations, and of death itself.

Alas, I cannot be this man, although sometimes I aspire to be like him. I am too much a creature of comfort, a victim of my past. Around me the largesse of corruption rises as titles of vaunted power, and I am often in the ranks of princes, smelling the perfume of their office. I glide in the dank, nocturnal caverns that are their mansions and gorge on their sumptuous food, and I love it all, envy them even for the ease with which they live without remorse, without regret even though they know (I suspect they do) that to get to this lofty status, they had to butcher — perhaps not with their own hands — their own hapless countrymen.

Today I see young men packed off to a war that’s neither their making nor their choice, and I recall Angel, who is perhaps long dead, joining the Army not because he was a patriot but because there was no other way. So it has not changed really, how in another war in another time, young men have died believing that it was their duty to defend these blighted islands. It may well be, but the politicians and the generals — they live as weeds always will — accumulating wealth and enjoying the land the young have died to defend. This is how it was, and this is how it will be.

Who was Don Vicente, after all? I should not be angered then, when men in the highest places, sworn to serve this country as public servants, end up as millionaires in Pobres Park, while using the people’s money in the name of beauty, the public good, and all those shallow shibboleths about discipline and nationalism that we have come to hear incessantly. I should not shudder anymore in disgust or contempt when the most powerful people in the land use the public coffers for their foreign shopping trips or build ghastly fascist monuments in the name of culture or of the Filipino spirit. I see artists — even those who cannot draw a hand or a face — pass themselves off as modernists and demand thousands of pesos for their work, which, of course, equally phony art patrons willingly give. And I remember Tio Marcelo — how he did not hesitate to paint calesas and, in his later years, even jeepneys, so that his work would be seen and used, and not be a miser’s gain in some living room to be viewed by people who may not know what art is. I hear politicians belching the same old clichés, and I remember Tio Doro and how he spent his own money for his candidacy and how he had bowed to the demands of change. When I see justice sold to the highest bidder I remember Tio Baldo and how he lost. So honesty, then, and service are rewarded by banishment, and people sell themselves without so much ado because they have no beliefs — only a price.

I would like to see all this as a big joke that is being played upon us, but I have seen what was wrought in the past — the men who were destroyed without being lifted from the dung heap of poverty, without recourse to justice.

But like my father, I have not done anything. I could not, because I am me, because I died long ago.

Who, then, lives? Who, then, triumphs when all others have succumbed? The balete tree — it is there for always, tall and leafy and majestic. In the beginning, it sprang from the earth as vines coiled around a sapling. The vines strangled the young tree they had embraced. They multiplied, fattened, and grew, became the sturdy trunk, the branches spread out to catch the sun. And beneath this tree, nothing grows!

Baguio

October 26, 1977