Children of the City

by Amadis Ma. Guerrero

The father of the boy Victor worked on the waterfront and got
involved in a strike, a long drawnout affair which had taken the following
course: It began with charges that the employees were not being given a
just compensation, that part of their earnings were being withheld from
them, and that their right to form a union was being disregarded. It
escalated with the sudden dismissal, for unstated reasons, of several
workers, giving rise to fears that more layoffs would be carried out in the
near future. This led to organized defiance, and the setting up of picket
lines. Finally, one stifling summer evening, violence broke out on the
piers of the city as the strikers were receiving sandwiches and soft drinks
from sympathetic outsiders.

Victor had been, and still was, too young to understand it all. But
when they were living in one of the shanties that stood in Intramuros, he
would frequently overhear snatches of conversation between his parents
regarding his father’s job. Sobra na, his father would say, we cannot take
it anymore. Naglalagay sila, they are depriving us of our wages, and they
even have this canteen which charges us whether we eat there or not.

Then his mother's voice, shrill and excited, would cut in, urging
him to swallow it all, accept what little was given to him and stay away
from the groups that wanted to fight back. She spoke bitterly of the
newly emerging unions - and that priest with his cohorts and his student
volunteers - who were trying to organize the workers. Victor's father
defended these groups, saying were only protecting the dockhands'
interests. You don't know what it's like out there, he would say, there
have been beatings, and all sorts of accidents. It's a dreadful place really.

1
 Once the boy interrupted them and wanted to know what the
discussion was all about, only to be met with a rebuke from his mother.
But he was insistent, the heat of the argument stirring a vague fear
within him, and he asked what a cabo was. To distract him, his father
playfully laid hold of him and hoisted him over his shoulders (although
Victor was getting a bit heavy for this sort of thing). And thus they
horsed about the house, or what passed for it, to the tune of the boy's
delighted shrieks and the cold stares of his mother.

Occasionally, whenever he would find the time, his father would

take him out at night for a stroll along the Boulevard, to feel the breeze
and to walk gingerly on the narrow embankment. The place at this hour
wove its spell around him, a kind of eerie enchantment, and he would
gaze fascinated at the murky waters gently, rhythmically swirling on the
shore, and at the beckoning lights of Cavite, and thrill to the mournful
blast of a departing ship.

“Tatang, where is the ship going? “

“I don't know, Victor. Maybe to the provinces. Maybe to another

country, a faraway land. “

“When will we be able to travel too?”

“I don't know, when we have a little money, perhaps.”

The whistle of the ship, which seemed to be a big liner, sounded

once more as it steamed out of the harbor and headed in the direction of
the South China Sea. Arm in arm in the darkness punctuated only by a
few insufficient lights, father and son tried to make out the dim outline
steadily moving away from them. Then the ship faded into the shadows,
2
and its whistle sounded no more.

Later they strolled on the promenade and made their way slowly to
the Luneta, where his father bought him some chicharon.

The park was dimly lit and ill-kept, and as they passed by the
Rizal monument they noticed a number of rough-looking men lurking
about in its vicinity. Two women, dressed gaudily and unaware of their
presence, were approaching from another direction. As they neared, the
men unloosed a volley of whistles, yells and taunts. Then stones were
flung, triggering screams and curses from the two. Victor was startled at
hearing their voices, which, though high-pitched, sounded distinctly
masculine.

His father hurriedly led him away from the scene, and to his
puzzled queries replied that it was nothing, just a quarrel, an incident.
As an afterthought, he observed that the park had not always been like
this, that once in the distant past it had been a clean and picturesque
place.

“Maybe it will become beautiful again in the future...”

A week after this the dock strike materialized. It was called against
a shipping firm following the breakdown of negotiations. The picket
dragged on, with the strikers and their families subsisting on funds
raised by student, labor and civic-spirited elements. And the tide
seemingly began to favor the strikers, for soon the case attracted national
attention.

Victor's father would return home late at night from the marathon
picket manned in shifts, exhausted but excited, and brimming over with
3
enthusiasm for the cause. His mother made no comment, her protests
having long subsided into a sullen silence.

Students and unionists drummed up public support for the

workers, organizing drives for them, detailing their plight in pamphlets
and press interviews. They reinforced the picket lines, held rallies to
boost their morale and distributed food and money. And the shipping
management's haughtiness turned to concern and then to desperation...

One evening, four months after the strike began, the silence of the
piers was broken by the rumble of six-by-six trucks. There were three of
them, and they were heading straight for the picket lines. A shot rang
out, reverberating through the night, then another and a third.

Panic spread through the ranks of the strikers, and a few started
to run away. Calls by the activists to stand fast, however, steadied the
majority, who stood rooted on the spot following the initial wave of fear
and shock. “Easy lang, easy lang, they won't dare crash through.” But
the huge vehicles advanced inexorably, and as they neared, a kind of
apocalyptic fit seized three picketers who, propelled by the months and
years of exploitation, charged right into the onrushing trucks.

Amid screams and yells, the barricades were rammed. And the
scores of strikers fell upon the 6-by-6s loaded with goons in a fury,
uncaring now as to what happened to them. They swarmed over the
trucks, forced open the doors and fought back with stones, placards and
bare fists, as more guns sounded.

Then the harbor police moved in, and as suddenly as it began, the
spasm of violence ended. The moans of the injured mingled with the
strident orders of the authorities to replace the noise of combat. In
4
addition to the three who had been ran over, two other men had been
shot to death. One of them was Victor's father, and his picture appeared
on the front page of one newspaper. It showed him spreadeagled on the
ground, eyes staring vacantly, with a stain on his breast.

Later that evening, the news was relayed to Victor's mother, and
she fell into hysterics. Her cries betrayed not only anguish but fury and
frustration as well, and learning of his father's death and seeing and
hearing his mother thus, Victor, eight-year-old Victor, cowered in the
shadows.

Neighbors took care of him that night, but in the morning he

managed to slip out, and he made his way to the Boulevard, once there
walking about aimlessly. He heard the call of newsboys going about their
job, and unknown fears began to tug at him. At a newsstand in the
Ermita district his glance fell on the photo of his father, and he stared at
it long and hard. It was the first time he had paid such close attention to
a newspaper.

Victor's father was laid to rest three days later at the crowded
cemetery to the north. His fellow workers had passed the hat around,
and although the amount collected was meager, contributions from the
union organizers and their supporters had made possible the fairly
decent burial. His mother sobbed all throughout the ceremony, and
broke down noisily when the time came for a final look at her husband.
The boy stood at her side, subdued. As the coffin was being lowered, he
felt like calling out to his father, tatang, tatang, but the impulse died
down, swept aside by the copious tears of his mother. It was a bright,
clear day. On the avenida extension, the early morning traffic was
forming and the sound of car horns intruded into the place where the
mourners were gathered.
5
 Not long after his father's death, Victor, a third-grader dropped out
of school, and plans were made to employ him as a newsboy with the
help of an uncle who was a newspaper agent. His mother, who had
gotten into the habit of disappearing in the afternoons and returning
home early in the evening, pointed out that he was healthy and active,
though lacking somewhat in aggressiveness. Surely this could be easily
acquired once he was thrown out into the field?

One day she brought with her a man, a stranger with a fowl breath
who swayed from side to side, and introduced him to Victor as your new
tatang. The boy did not respond to him, thinking some joke he could not
comprehend was being played on him. And in the days that followed he
avoided as much as possible all contact with the interloper. This man,
unkempt in appearance, seemed to be everything his father wasn't. For
one thing he was always cursing (his father had done so only when
angry, and kept this at a minimum whenever Victor was around.) And in
his friendlier moments he would beckon to the boy' and say “Want this,
sioktong?” in such a falsetto tone that Victor coldly looked away. At night
he heard strange sounds behind the partition, accompanied by his
mother's giggling and the man's coarse laughter, and he felt like taking a
peek, but some instinct held him back. He was disturbed no end.

One morning a week after the man moved in. Victor woke up to
find him gone, along with his mother. In their stead stood his agent
uncle, Tio Pedring, who said his mother had gone on a long vacation, and
amid assurances that she would come back soon, informed the boy that
he was to start to work immediately as a courier for the newspaper he
was connected with. It's easy, Tio Pedring said, and forthwith briefed him
on his duties.

6
 He was to report at the plant every night at 9 o'clock, wait for the
first edition, which came out at 11 p.m., and observe the routine. He was
to sleep right outside the circulation offices, and then awaken before 4
a.m., for that was the time the city edition was made available. A number
of copies, perhaps 15 or 20, would then be turned over to him, and it
was up to him to distribute these in the Blumentritt area. Tio Pedring,
his mother's older brother and a thin man with a nervous tic, gave him
the names and addresses of 10 regular customers, and said that it was
up to him to develop, his own contacts so as to dispose off the rest of the
newspapers allotted. When he was off-duty, Victor could stay in his
uncle's Blumentritt place, and for every newspaper he sold he would get
three centavos. No mention was made of resuming the boy's interrupted
schooling.

Thet evening at the appointed hour he went over to the

newspaper's building located in the downtown section, and was greeted
by the sight of scores of ragged, barefooted newsboys swarming before
the dispatcher's section. A few were stretched out on the pavement,
asleep on kartons that served as their bed, while others were having their
supper, bibingka and soft¬drinks, from the turo-turo that catered to
them. The majority just milled around, grouped together in tight bunches
playing their crude game of checkers, or simply loafing, awaiting the call
to duty. The noise of their conversation, loud and harsh and punctuated
by words like p. . ., filled the newspaper's building.

In reply to his hesitant queries, the guard directed him to the

distributing center, a stifling, enclosed place adjoining the printing
presses. Victor entered, knowing that the notice which said unauthorized
persons keep out was not meant for those like him, and for the first time
he heard the throbbing of the machines which daily poured out
thousands of newspaper copies. He listened for a while, fascinated,
7
before seeking out the chief dispatcher, a harried-looking man who
looked at him sharply and said - so you're the new boy? - ¬then told him
to stick around for the provincial edition and observe how things went.
After that he could sleep if he wanted to, and he would be awakened at 4
a.m., when the city edition came out. Fifteen copies would be given to
him, and if he consistently managed to sell all of these, the number
would be increased and he would make more money.

“Our work here is rush, rush, rush. You've got to be listo.”

Victor nodded, then, dismissed, made his way back outside, where
the chill of the evening had replaced the heat of the plant. A mood of
foreboding descended upon him, like a pall. He was hungry, but had no
money, and so contented himself with watching the other newsboys. He
wanted to mingle with them, but they didn't seem to be very friendly. A
dilapidated ice cream pushcart stood at one end of the corner, and to
this the urchins went for their ice cream sandwiches, consisting of one or
two scoops tucked into hot dog and hamburger-sized bread. Beside it
was a Magnolia cart, patronized by outsiders.

One boy stood out from among the throng. The others called him
Nacio, and like all of them he wore a dirty T-shirt and faded short pants,
and had galis sores on his legs, but cheerfulness emanated from him and
he seemed to enjoy a measure of popularity among his companions.
Upon noticing Victor watching from the side he detached himself from a
group and offered him a cigarette.

Surprised, Victor demurred, and said he did not know how to

smoke. Nacio shrugged his shoulders, as if to say hindi bale, then asked
if Victor was new on the job. Upon receiving a reply in the affirmative, he
nodded in satisfaction and told the other to learn from him, for he would
8
teach him the tricks of the trade, such as how to keep a sharp eye out for
customers, how to swiftly board a bus or jeep and alight from it while
still in motion, and so on...

Nacio invited him to eat, but again Victor declined, saying he had
no money.

“Hindi problema yan!” the irrepressible Nacio said, “ Sige, I'll pay
for you.” He turned to the turo-turo owner: “Hoy, Aling Pacing! Pianono
at Coke nga ho! Will you give me a discount?” Aling Pacing only looked
down coldly at the boy, and grunted “No discount for you. No discount
for any of you.”

Nacio winked at Victor as he paid, took the rolls and drinks, and
handed over to the other his share. Victor wolfed down the pianono,
although it didn't taste too new, and drank with deep satisfaction while
his companion chattered on, regaling him with his experiences as a
carrier and his ability to skillfully dodge in and out of traffic. He
disclosed that once he had been sideswiped by a car, but escaped only
with a few scratches, and boasted: “I'm the fastest newsboy in Manila. “
Victor marveled at his luck in finding such a fine friend.

As the time for the release of the first edition neared, an air of
expectation materialized outside the plant. The newspaper's trucks and
vans stood in readiness. The newsboys grew in number and began to
form a dense mass. Their conversation became louder, more excited, and
their horseplay rougher. Shortly after 11 p.m. a team of dispatchers
emerged with the initial copies, the ink of the presses still warm on them,
and was greeted by yells of anticipation. A stampede followed, and Victor
noted that for every bundle turned over to a newsboy, one distributor
jotted down on a piece of paper the number allotted to him.
9
 The clamor grew as the boys dashed out of the building and
surged into the darkened streets. They were like school children being let
out for recess. The noise continued, then subsided after a few minutes,
with the last urchin scampering away. The nighttime silence returned
once more to the area, broken only by occasional shouts of the men
loading the main bulk of the provincial edition into the trucks, the toot of
passing motorist's horn and the sound of laughter from drunkards in the
sari-sari store in front.

Victor settled himself on the pavement, and despite the hard

ground he felt tired and sleepy. He used his right arm as a pillow, and
thought briefly about his father, his mother and the man she had taken
up with, Tio Pedring and the day's events, before sleep claimed him.

He awakened several hours later, jolted by the noise of the second

wave of newsboys gathering for the city edition. Gingerly he stretched his
cramped arms and legs, peered about him and shivered, for it had grown
much colder. He kept an eye out for Nacio, although he felt sure he
would not come back anymore tonight. He could recognize, though, some
of the faces in the crowd.

The same procedure took place at 4 a.m., it was like a reel being
retaken. The routine was now familiar to Victor, but with a difference.
This time he was a participant in the activities, and he found himself
caught up in the excitement. All weariness gone from him, he sped away
in the company of his colleagues, holding on tightly to his ration of 15
copies. Exhilaration coursed through him, and he ran and ran, stopping
only when he reached the Avenida. The others had scattered in different
directions, and the street stretched away endlessly, virtually devoid of
traffic. Its stores had long closed down for the night, and only a few neon
10
signs glowed.

He began to walk slowly, sober now, his responsibilities heavy on

him. His destination was Blumentritt. As he crossed Azcarraga, a taxi
slowed down, and its passenger called out to him. Tremblingly he handed
over a paper, and received 15 centavos in turn. His very first sale! His
spirits soared anew... perhaps it wasn't so difficult after all to sell a
newspaper. This impression was bolstered when in a matter of minutes
he made two more sales, to customers at a small, all-night restaurant.

It was still dark when he arrived at the district, and the first thing
he heard was the whistle of the train which passed through the place
every evening. He reacted in the same way he had to the foghorn blasts
of the ships along the Boulevard.

He set about reconnoitering the area, to get the feel of it, and took
out the list Tio Pedring had given him. He recalled his uncle's words:

“You're lucky. Not all newcomers have mga suki when they begin,
and they have to return so many copies at first. Tambak sila.” The
customers included a dressmaker, a barber, a small pharmacist, and a
beautician. And to their places Victor eventually made his way, slipping
the newspapers under doors, into mailboxes, and the apertures of
padlocked steel gates.

Soon it grew light, and more jeepneys began to ply their routes, as
buses appeared, bound for Santa Cruz and Grace Park. The signs of
activity in the neighborhood market increased while the small parish
church near it remained closed, silent and deserted. Young scavengers,
worn out from poking all night among trash cans, slept inside their
pushcarts. Piles of garbage stood on several streets and alleyways.
11
 Victor made no other sales that day, and he returned to the plant
with three unsold newspapers. He turned them over apologetically. The
one in charge now shrugged, then noted that he had not done badly for a
first night's work. He added that he expected Victor to improve in the
future and equal the other newsboys, who always complained that their
allotment was not enough. The dispatcher said: “Our newspaper is sikat.
By noon we are all sold out in the newsstands.”

On his second night on the job, Victor was set upon by a group of
street boys his age, who sprang up from out of the shadows and began to
beat him up. He managed to flee from the scene in terror, leaving behind
all his newspapers. For this he was roundly cursed by his uncle, who
promised to take it out on his earnings for the next few days.

He took to haunting his beat even during the daytime and became
friends with the little people, the vendors, the sellers of peanuts,
kalamansi, coconuts and pigs, the grocery employees, the market
denizens, the modistas and shop owners, and even some of' the
patrolmen. Through his constant presence in the area, he was able to
find additional regular customers, and no more did he have to return
unsold copies. At night he went about his tasks with renewed confidence,
and when through he would rest in front of the local bank. Gradually he
lost his fear of thugs.

Though his work improved, his relations with the other newsboys
didn't. Nacio remained his only friend, and whenever he was around the
others let Victor alone. He couldn't make them out at all, with their
rough games and harsh tongues, their smoking and their constant
baiting. At one time he was jolted awake from the dreamless sleep by the
concerted yells of the newsboys, who were hurling missiles, with the
12
drivers reacting by merely stepping on the gas, and the passengers
cowering in alarm. The guards whose job it was to break up these things
did not seem to be around. No one could give an explanation for the
sudden outburst.

Victor was eventually allowed to sell both editions of the paper and
his daily quota was increased to 20. Soon he was making about three
pesos every day, sometimes more. His beat late at night was transferred
to the Boulevard district, where he peddled the provincial edition to night
clubbers and cocktail loungers. In the early hours of the morning he
would distribute the city edition to his Blumentritt customers. Tio
Pedring expressed satisfaction with his development, and granted the boy
more decent accommodations and better food at his residence.

Victor settled down into the routine, which would be livened up

sometime by big events, like an earthquake. During such occasions the
labor force would swell, augmented by now inactive boys who had
graduated to other fields of endeavor, like pickpocketing and the watch-
your-car business. In January the Press Club held its annual party in
honor of newsboys, and Victor and Nacio along with many others,
attended. There were balloons, soft drinks and cookies. Nacio kept
stuffing these into his pockets, to the great amusement of Victor, who
was tempted to do the same, but there didn't seem to be enough around.

That was the last time the two spent together. Within a week Nacio
met his death - violently; he had been run over by a car while recklessly
charging into the street following the release of the first edition. The
following afternoon, this sign stood at the corner leading to the
newspaper building: SLOW DOWN NEWSBOYS COMING OUT.

Victor grieved for his friend, and from that time on he became even
13
more taciturn and withdrawn.

He avoided the Boulevard by night, with its motionless ships, its

necking couples, jagged embankment and swaying trees, and stuck to
the well¬-populated areas. The bar district in the southern part of the
city began to attract him, and fortified by his sheaf of newspapers, which
was like a badge of distinction for him, he would stare expressionlessly at
the painted girls posing before the doorways under the garish neon signs,
at the customers briefly eyeing them before going in, and at the well-
dressed bouncers.

On this particular evening the bars were filled with foreign sailors,
for a military exercise was to be held within a few days. Red-faced and
grinning, the fair-complexioned seamen made the rounds, boisterous,
arm in arm sometimes, and swaying from side to side (they reminded
Victor of the man who had replaced his father). Helmeted men, with MP
arm-bands, stood in front of some of the cocktail lounges.

Victor approached one of the dives and, getting a nod from the
bouncer, who saw he was a newsboy, made his way in. It was almost
pitch-dark inside, and it took a few minutes for his eyes to grow
accustomed to the cavern-like atmosphere. Hostesses and sailors were
grouped around the small tables, drinking, talking and laughing shrilly
while a combo belted out pulsating music and a singer strained to make
herself heard above the din. Some couples were pawing each other.

He approached a group noisily drinking, and tugged at the sleeves

of one sailor.

“You buy newspaper from me, sir. Sige na, Joe.”

14
The other peered at him in surprise, then guffawed loudly, and waved
him away. He said thickly: “Beat it, Flip boy!”

Victor stood rooted on the spot. He didn't understand the words,

but the gesture was unmistakable. Some hostesses started giggling
nervously. He was about to turn away in anger and humiliation when
another seaman, blonde and clean-shaven, gently laid a hand over him
“Wait a minute, sonny.” Then he dipped into his pocket and handed over
something to Victor. “Here, take it, it's yours. Have a grand time with it.”

Victor thanked him automatically, and went out swiftly. He looked

at the paper bills in his hand and saw that they totaled two pesos,
practically a night's work for him... and the pall that had descended over
him for weeks was suddenly lifted, like a veil. He felt liberated, renewed.
He wanted to sing out, to shout and dance about. And he began to run,
joy spurring him on.

Later that night he recounted the incident to his surprised

colleagues, who had never seen him this garrulous before. He elaborated
on the story, enriching it with imaginary details, and transformed it into
a tale of danger, excitement and exotic drama. As a clincher, he proudly
showed off his money, realizing his mistake in the next instant. But it
was too late. The others began to advance toward him, encircling him.
Their words were flung at him like stones:

“Why aren't you like us?”

“Why don't you smoke?”

“Why don't you curse?”

15
“Say p. . .”

Victor drew back, frightened. With a chill he remembered the time

the Blumentritt boys had ganged up on him. “I don't say words like that.”

“Say it!”

“All right, all right, p. . . “But the epithet carried no conviction,

and he repeated it, stronger this time. The boys laughed in derision, and
gave out a mirthless kind of cheer. After uttering the words, Victor could
no longer control himself. He began screaming all kinds of curses, and he
hurled himself bodily upon them, kicking, hitting, screaming, in the grip
of a fury he had not known existed within him.

With a great shout, the others fell upon him. Newsboys sleeping on
the ground woke up in alarm, the night circulation people looked around
in consternation, and the turo-turo owner screamed. The melee
continued until a shouting security guard rushed in and roughly broke it
up. He led Victor away, and was about to interrogate him when the boy,
who had sustained some cuts and bruises, broke free of his grasp and
fled into the night.

He roamed the streets, the byways and darkened alleys of the

teeming district. He passed by children his age scrounging around trash
cans, and dingy motels where couples went in and out. One small
restaurant, a focal point of excitement during the daytime when the
racing results were posted, now stood silent and almost empty, about to
close down. His face and body ached from the blows he had received, and
a trickle of blood streamed down his nostrils. He wiped this on his T-
shirt. He seemed to be in good shape otherwise, and he felt relief that the
fight had been stopped in time. His thoughts flew back and forth. He
16
promised himself that he would never go back to the plant, but his
resolve soon began to weaken. He was at a loss as to what to do.

A rough voice to his right drew his attention, and as he turned into
a narrow sidestreet leading to the Avenida, he saw a policeman bending
over a man sprawled on a heap, and apparently asleep. The officer kept
on shaking the fellow, who failed to respond. Then, cursing, he hit him
with his night stick, as Victor watched...

He reported for work the following evening, prepared for anything.

But nothing untoward happened. Last night's incident seemed to have
been forgotten, and the others made no reference to it. Then one of the
boys, whom Victor recognized as a ring-leader, went over to him and,
apparently as a kind of peace offering, held out a cigarette. Victor
hesitated, then said he didn't smoke.

The others began to form around him anew, but this time their
attitude was one of curiosity rather than of menace.

“Sige na, take it. It is very nice to smoke, and it is easy. All you
have to do is take a deep breath, then exhale slowly.”

And Victor, his last defenses down, leaned forward and wearily
accepted the cigarette, while around them swirled the life of the city: this
city, flushed with triumphant charity campaigns, where workers were
made to sign statements certifying they received the minimum wage,
where millionaire politicians received Holy Communion every Sunday,
where mothers taught their sons and daughters the art of begging, where
orphans and children from broken homes slept on pavements and under
darkened bridges, and where best friends fell out and betrayed one
another.
17
 Lengua Para Diablo
(The Devil Ate My Words)
By Merlinda Bobis

I suspected that my father sold his tongue to the devil. He had

little say in our house. Whenever he felt like disagreeing with my mother,
he murmured, ‘The devil ate my words.’ This meant he forgot what he
was about to say and Mother was often appeased. There was more need
for appeasement after he lost his job.

The devil ate his words, the devil ate his capacity for words, the
devil ate his tongue. But perhaps only after prior negotiation with its
owner, what with Mother always complaining, ‘I’m already taking a peek
at hell!’ when it got too hot and stuffy in our tiny house. She seemed to
sweat more that summer, and miserably. She made it sound like Father’s
fault, so he cajoled her with kisses and promises of an electric fan, bigger
windows, a bigger house, but she pushed him away, saying, ‘Get off me,
I’m hot, ay, this hellish life!’ Again he was ready to pledge relief, but
something in my mother’s eyes made him mutter only the usual excuse,
‘The devil ate my words,’ before he shut his mouth. Then he ran to the
tap to get her more water.

Lengua para diablo: tongue for the devil. Surely he sold his tongue
in exchange for those promises to my mother: comfort, a full stomach,
life without our wretched want . . . But the devil never delivered his side
of the bargain. The devil was alien to want. He lived in a Spanish house
and owned several stores in the city. This Spanish mestizo was my
father’s employer, but only for a very short while. He sacked him and our
18
neighbour Tiyo Anding, also a mason, after he found a cheaper hand for
the extension of his house.

We never knew the devil’s name. Father was incapable of speaking

it, more so after he came home and sat in the darkest corner of the
house, and stared at his hands. It took him two days of silent staring
before he told my mother about his fate.

I wondered how the devil ate my father’s tongue. Perhaps he

cooked it in mushroom sauce, in that special Spanish way that they do
ox tongue. First, it was scrupulously cleaned, rubbed with salt and
vinegar, blanched in boiling water, then scraped of its white coating —
now, imagine words scraped off the tongue, and even taste, our capacity
for pleasure. In all those two days of silent staring, Father hardly ate. He
said he had lost his taste for food, he was not hungry. Junior and Nilo
were more than happy to demolish his share of gruel with fish sauce.

Now after the thorough clean, the tongue was pricked with a fork
to allow the flavours of all the spices and condiments to penetrate the
flesh. Then it was browned in olive oil. How I wished we could prick my
father’s tongue back to speech and even hunger, but of course we
couldn’t, because it had disappeared. It had been served on the devil’s
platter with garlic, onion, tomatoes, bay leaf, clove, peppercorns, soy
sauce, even sherry, butter, and grated edam cheese, with that aroma of
something rich and foreign.

His silent tongue was already luxuriating in a multitude of

essences, pampered into a piquant delight.

Perhaps, next he should sell his oesophagus, then his stomach. I

would if I had the chance to be that pampered. To know for once what I
would never taste. I would be soaked, steamed, sautéed, basted, baked,
boiled, fried and feted with only the perfect seasonings. I would become
an epicure. On a rich man’s plate, I would be initiated to flavours of only

19
the finest quality. In his stomach, I would be inducted to secrets. I would
be ‘the inside girl’, and I could tell you the true nature of sated affluence.

Rice
(Summary)
by Estrella Alfon

The play began when Claro a man who looks older than his age sat
beside Esco who’s fondling a cock in his arm while talking to Rosie as
they seated under the blooming flowers of bougainvillea hanging from the
walls of a modernized sub-division in the suburbs.

One day, Lumen, tried to wake her husband Claro who was
sleeping. Claro asked if what day it was. “It’s Sunday. What do you want
for breakfast?” Lumen replied and Claro said, “We don’t even have a cent
why ask if what I want for breakfast.” “God is always kind. Maybe I can
still borrow something from Aling Bibang.” Lumen proceeds to change
Claro’s change the shirt Claro has slept with a clean one. Lumen
massages Claro’s back as he struggles with phlegm. Then all of a
sudden, Lumen stated, “In fact, Aling Bibang said she would bring a Mrs.
Hasplenty with her from the S.W.A (Social Welfare Administration).” And
that seemed to lift Claro’s mood for a while.

The next moment, while the whole people of barong-barong were at

the commotion of a cock fight, the group Lumen anticipated came. Along
with Aling Bibang, Mrs. Hasplenty and her fleet break the commotion
and brought boxes of goods held by the chauffer under each arm as the
cameraman takes picture of everything. “Good morning, mga people. Mga
kapitbahay, I brought with me my boss from the S.W.A., our beloved
Manang Eniang. Our good Manang Eniang, She wants to see all of you”.

All the while the crowds were cheering for the good news Aling
Bibang brought, Mrs. Tamalamang, the owner land lord of the

20
subdivision took the chance to divert the attention of the crowd to the
main pupose why their group come to the looban. “Naparito si Manang
Eniang para kay Claro. Mrs. Tamalamang spotted Lumen and as fast as
Mrs. Tamalamang saw Lumen she called for her on stage. Mrs. Hasplenty
hugged Lumen and asked how Claro was. “Malapit na ang eleksyon,
kailangan makaboto siya” added Manang Eniang.

“Mga kaibigan, kapatid, mahal ko kayong lahat. But due to the

information given to me by Aling Bibang, I came to help Lumen and
Claro. So today, I must give the goods to Lumen. It is Sunday and S.W.A
is closed.” Mrs. Hasplenty could feel the disappointment on the crowd’s
eyes and so she promised to come back the day later to give them all
what they need. When the crowd shouted for rice she nodded. The crowd
cheered with the news and shouted for the things they need. Then, Mrs.
Tamalamang inserted, “Mrs. Hasplenty would like to help you all, but
she would be able to do so if we would elect her for Senator”. The crowd
shouted with the most riotous answer, “Mabuhay Si Senadora Eniang!”
Mrs. Hasplenty puts her free hand to Lumen’s shoulder and looks up in
the adoration at the beautiful would-be-senator. The photographer took
picture of them.

Mrs. Hasplenty gave the boxes to Lumen and as she received the
goods she was more than happy. She kneels down and thrust her hand
into the sack of rice and clenches her fist on the precious grain. Then
Mrs. Hasplenty placed some bills on Lumen’s hand on the pretext to
make her stand up from kneeling. The crowd once again cheered before
the fleet goes their way.

Lumen went home to break the news to his husband. She was
excited as she narrates the excitements she felt. “Did you see her Claro?
Did you see her dress? And her smell, she smelled so nice” not as excited
as she was, Claro hid pain in his eyes, “If only I’m not sick then maybe I

21
could give my wife some too” he thought a flash of despair curved his
bittersweet smile. “She gave me some money, you know what Claro? We
could finally buy the medicine the doctor prescribed. “I’ll come back as
soon as I bought the medicine” Lumen said as she was about to leave
and told her children, Boy and Ening to not go far for their father is weak
and when he needs something they must oblige.

Claro sat up from his Beddings and divided the goods into days
where they could eat three times a day and just as when he was getting
done, three of his neighbors went to their house and asked for a few
takal of the rice and some canned goods. At first he tried refusing and
asked if they could wait for Lumen to come and then she will decide
whether to give them what they asked for. But the neighbors were so
adamant on having their packs and so they started saying the good
deeds they’ve done to their family and now Claro is refusing to help them
back. He had No choice but to give them his permission and smiles of
winning crawled the neighbors’ faces.

Claro hid the remaining takals of rice and other tin canned goods
under his bed and asked the children to say none to anyone about where
did the gods go. Lumen returned home and the children walked to her
then Ening suddenly notice his father’s ghastly look she grabbed his
brothers arm and shouted, “Itay?!” Lumen enters and immdiately
touched Claro’s forehead and neck and swiftly she look at the medicine
she bought and took a glass filled with water and wordlessly lifted his
husband’s head and made him take the medicine. But his lips were
closed and swallowing was out of the question in HIS STATE.

Lumen then tried once again to open his mouth to swallow but it
was no use. finally she paces the envelope she was holding to one side
and look for the box and find it empty then she realized it was well
hidden in Claro’s head and so she turn to Boy and Ening and told them

22
to build a fire and wash the rice to make a broth for their father. Lumen
tried shaking Claro’s head but his head would loll groggily on the jumpy
pillow. She continued massaging his limbs when one of her neighbor
stood by the way and watched her for a moment and then left. Lumen
checked the fire boy had been doing and then come back at Claro to
continue the massage. The neighbor came back with the other and asked
Lumen if she could borrow a few gatang of bigas to cook their supper but
lumen said that the bigas were supporting claro’s head and pleaded not
to disturb him all the while she cooked the gruel and feeds Claro by then
she could give Aling Etang the gatangs of rice and some tin canned
goods.

Lumen went to the pot of gruel she was cooking and added a little
salt and when she return to Claro she noticed her neighbors and the
crucifix on Claro’s fingers and the people kneeling before him while
chanting prayers. She tried stopping them and shouted Claro to wake up
at his ears meanwhile the children was so hungry they can’t even put
their bowls of gruel down even when lumen shouted at them to call on
their father, the two seemed to be puzzled by what their mother said and
continued eating.

Lumen keeps shaking the prostate man and the neighbors

continued their prayers, lumen’s shaking of the tires sick man has
caused a tear in the old pillow case and the rice trickles down, Lumen
finally stops. She looks at the sick thin frame and sits back on her
haunches as the neighbors keep their praying she tenderly placed her
own thin hands on the hollow cheeks, she smoothes the pillow under his
head, realizes the lumps the tin cans made.

Rice trickled down and she watched it and slowly picked some in
her hand and clutched it tightly on her chest. She leaned unto Claro’s
thin shoulders and wails. She raised her head and see if he will answer.

23
“Claro” she called half-whispering… “May bigas tayo” she continued and
then released wails.

instead, you end up ruminating, or thinking over and over about

what you should have done.
But rumination can make things worse. Researchers have found
that while traumatic experiences are a significant cause of anxiety and
depression, people who ruminate, or dwell on, those negative thoughts
and experiences report more stress and anxiety.2
In a calmer moment, it might be helpful to talk over the ways you
can cope with similar experiences in the future. Try to come up with a
plan for how you might respond or what you could do differently next
time. Once you’ve determined how to respond, try to leave the incident
behind you as you go on.

PULSE OF THE LAND

HERMEL A. NUYDA

Pulse of the Land

by Hermel A. Nuyda

The American was thirsty; very thirsty. The water jug had been
emptied of its contents a mile back and but for the assurance of his
guide that they would find water in one of the huts scattered about the
vicinity, he would have turned back and called in a day.

“You mean to tell me people actually live on this volcano?” he said

wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. Although the
morning was still early, already the sun had reddened his face lean face
and his shirt was wet with sweat.

“Yes,” the guide informed him. “People have been living on it for
years.” The guide was a short fellow and for every step the American took
24
he took two. But there was power in his arms and legs and he could
speak English.

“But I understand this is an active volcano,” the American said. “What

happens to the people when it erupts?”

“That happens very seldom,” the guide said, “and when it does they
seek refuge in safer places. Then they come back after the eruption is
over.”

“Isn’t that something!” the American said. “Well, tell me—how do they
go about making a living?”

“They plant in the daytime,” the guide explained, “and make charcoal
at night. It is their fires you see at the foot of the mountain after dark.”

The American shook his head. “What an odd way to live,” he said.

“Have you stayed long in the country?” the guide asked in turn.

“Three months,” the American answered. “Manila”. This reminded him

of the book he was writing about the country, of Manila and its populace.
He smiled to himself. As he walked he thought of the pictures he had
taken; the biting wit of the captions he had given them. That one about
the market place, for instance: “Native wares of all kinds, and one
hundred odors for every one hundred words,” Or that one about the street
scene: “And we can talk about the gals, and the smells, and the cartellas,
and the smells, and the caribou carts, and the smells.” His was going to be
some travel book! It was going to turn the country inside out, and the
essence of it he would unfold by a few lines on the cover: “If all the
negatives I’ve shot in Manila were laid end to end, they would serve no
lawful purpose. But, printed here, they’ll serve to remind you that East is
East and West is West, and I’ll take North Overshoe, Nebraska.” He would
be denounced: he could not help that. He had decided to tell the truth.

25
“Confused—not a trace of individuality—sadly wanting in sincerity and in
clarity of purpose—a flax seed caught in the meeting of the winds—” Such
was his impression of the twenty-two million. Perhaps they would hate
him for it, but it would not be his fault.

“Are you staying longer in the country?” the guide’s voice broke into
his reverie.

“Stay longer here?” he repeated. “No, no, I’ve stayed long enough. In
fact I should be on my way back to the States, you know, but the fame of
your Mayon Volcano altered my plans, I had to see the cone for myself.”

The barking of dogs meant that they had come upon a dwelling. That
meant water too.

When they reached the clearing where a hut squatted on the dry
earth, two lean dogs bared their fangs at them so that they had to stop
on the trail until small boy (he could not have been more than eight
years old) backed off slowly toward the hut, staring at them as he did,
with timidity and fright.

When the American grinned, the boy smiled back; and his hands
inched their way to cover his front which was uncovered from the waist
down. The boy stood thus for several seconds: shoulders hunched, arms
straight across the belly, and the hands slipped in between the thin dark
legs. Then he ran up the low steps of the hut and almost immediately
came down again, this time followed by a young girl dressed in a red
chemise, a little taller than he was and, by her looks, no doubt his sister.

The girl stared at the American in very much the same manner as did
her brother a moment before: shy, withdrawing. She had long stringy
hair, and her smile was pleasant; she kept biting at her fingers as she
looked at the strangers.

26
 As the two children stood by their squalid hut—the boy awkwardly
shielding his nakedness with his hands, and the girl, giggling, biting her
fingers, the long stringy hair rubbing against her scant red garment—the
American thought they made such splendid subjects for candid shot!
Without their knowing it, he took their picture. The caption flashed in his
mind: “The Slops of Mt. Mayon.”

The American told the guide to see if there was water in the house
and if they could be spared some. The guide talked to the children in the
dialect.

“May we have some water?” he inquired.

The small girl nodded and said: “I will get some.” She hurried up into
the hut.

The two men walked to a bamboo bench. As the American straddled

the bench, the little boy edged near him. The American laughed and said:
“Hello, boy, what’s your name?” The boy shook his head and, covering
his cheeks with his two hands, ran up into the hut. He disappeared for a
brief spell. Then slowly his head stuck out in the doorway, his big black
eyes looking at the American excitedly. “Well, how do you like that!” the
American exclaimed.

“They have not seen an American before,” the guide explained.

“They’re cute,” the American observed as he looked at the little boy’s

face, at the same time peering into the interior of the hut which was
almost bare except for a frail-looking bamboo stool, a crudely-fashioned
weaving loom, a mat rolled up and laid against a corner, and a calendar
with the picture of a saint nailed on the bamboo wall.

The girl came out with a black earthen bowl filled with water.

27
 At first she made signs of giving it to the American, but on second
thought, she turned to the guide and gave him the bowl instead. The
guide handed the bowl to the American who took it, gave it a careful
look, and before raising it to his lips, asked: “Think it’s safe?”

“They drink it,” the guide said.

The American saw the boy and girl watching him with great interest.
They were smiling at him as if they’re not doing so would offend him and
make him decide not to drink the water. “Oh, well,” he said, and raised
the bowl to his lips.

The American gargled with his first gulp. He gargled with the second
and the third. He gargled with half the contents of the bowl, the water he
spat out forming a dark splotch on the dry earth. The next half he drank.
The water was cool, sweetish, with a queer but pleasant smell. He liked
it. He smiled at the girl and asked for more by holding up an index finger
and nodding his head at the same time. The girl understood and
returned his nod gleefully. She went into the hut once more, the boy
running after her. “How white he is,” she said, looking back as if to make
sure the stranger had not decided to leave. “And big. How big!” exclaimed
the boy.

The American drank half of the next bowl of water. The rest he offered
to the guide. When the latter had finished drinking, the small boy
suddenly jumped down the low steps and grabbed the bowl from him.
Then with great excitement the boy faced the American, holding up his
little index finger, his head nodding up and down, trying to ask if the tall
white man wanted one more.

The American grinned and nodded back.

Proudly the boy went up the steps, laughing at his sister and sticking
out the tip of his tongue at her as he passed by. When he came back, he

28
walked very carefully, holding the bowl is if he were carrying the world in
his hands. He pursed his lips, gave his sister a triumphant wink and,
trembling, raised the bowl to the big white man.

For the third time the American took the black earthen bowl. But this
time he did not drink. He stepped out into the yard and poured the water
over his head, his face. After he finished he threw the rest of the water on
the ground. Then he gave the bowl to the boy and sat on the bench once
more.

“How come,” he asked the guide, “these kids are alone in such a wild
place?”

“They are used to it,” the guide answered. “Their folks must be
somewhere near, planting or looking for greens to eat.” And to the girl,
“Where are your parents?”

“In the camote patch, the girl replied. Then she walked straight to a
jackfruit tree by the edge of the clearing, from which an empty bomb
shell was hung. From the foot of the tree she took an iron rod with which
she struck the shell five times. It made a sound clear as a church bell.

“That’s one of our shells,” the American observed. “How on earth did it
ever get here?”

“Many of those were dropped on the towns,” the guide explained,

“before your soldiers came.”

Shortly after the last impact of metal against metal, a woman’s voice
came from way back of the clearing. A little later an old woman rushed
into view. A strip of cloth was tied around her head and in her right hand
was clutched a bolo smudged with fresh soil. When she saw the two men
seated on the bench, she stopped and stared at them, her face tense and
drawn. It was only after the children had talked to her that the tension

29
on her face disappeared. She approached the two men and nodded
politely to them.

“We came to ask for water,” the guide said.

“We have water,” the old woman answered and addressed the girl: “Go
get the men water.”

“They already have given us enough,” the guide said.

“Are you sure? You must excuse these children if they have been
rude. They are young and do not know much. Perhaps they did not even
ask you to come up into the house?”

“That is all right,” the guide assured her. “We are only resting for a
while.”

“I am glad it is all right. They are my grandchildren, you know, and

there is only me to teach them what is right. Their father and mother
died two years ago.”

“The children have been good,” the guide said.

The old woman looked at the American, and when she saw that he
was looking at her, listening to her talk, she tried in the least noticeable
way she could rub the earth off her hands with her faded skirt. Then to
the guide she said: “Where are you bound for?”

“He wants to go up the volcano,” the guide replied looking at the

American.

“Why should he want to do that?” the woman asked. There are no

people living there.”

He is a visitor to our land,” the guide explained. And he wants to take

pictures.”

30
 “Oh,” the woman said. “Well, tell him that we are very sorry it is only
water we can give. But if he can wait, I can fry some camotes in a short
time.”

“What’s she saying?” the American interrupted, conscious that he was

the subject of their conversation.

“She says she is sorry the children did not ask you to come up into
the house, and she is ashamed she can only offer water. But if you care
to wait she could fry sweet potatoes.”

“Oh no,” the American objected, shaking his head. “Tell her not to do
that. And thank her for me.”

The guide conveyed the American’s words.

“Well then,” the woman said “you must take some water with you. It is
hot and you will be thirsty on the way.” Then she picked up the empty
water jug. “Is this for water?” she asked. Te guide nodded. Without
speaking further the woman went into the hut, taking each rung very
slowly and with the same leading foot. She was gone for only a short
time.

“Here,” she said when she came back to the doorway. “It is full.” The
guide took the water jug.

The American stood up and thrust his hand into his pocket for some
loose change, but as he did so, the woman shook her head and frowned.
The American withdrew his hand slowly from the pocket and smiled his
thanks instead, after which he bowed to her, nodded to the children, and
walked out of the clearing. He looked back once and saw the three of
them still looking at him: their lean dogs lapping the dark splotch formed
by the water he had spat on the earth.

31
 How far they had walked the American could not exactly tell. The
guide said they had covered two miles from the hut. To him it seemed
much more. But he did not care. The feeling inside him as he stood on
the huge rock was well worth the cuts on his arms, the long uphill trek,
the descent into the steep ravines and the arduous walk over their beds
of rock and sand, the blistering heat of the noonday sun.

From where he stood, the peak of the volcano, although it had lost the
smoothness of its contours, loomed before him like a tower in the sky;
powerful in its ruggedness, immutable keeping vigil over the brown and
green of the plains, the blue of the distant mountain ranges, and the dull
gray of the sea beyond them.

He breathed deeply of the cool air, feeling as big as the vastness of it

all. Then he took his camera and set to work. He shot as many negatives
from many angles as suited his critical eye. Then he walked to where the
guide was resting and said: “Nature has been most generous to your
country. You should take pride in the beauty of your land.”

“It is high noon,” the guide remarked casually. “It is bad to let hunger
pass.”

They ate in silence.

Half an hour later the American decided it was time to go back.

“If you do not mind walking up a little more,” the guide suggested,
“there is a better way back.”

“Lead on,” the American said. “You’re the guide.”

They walked uphill for several minutes along the edge of a deep ravine
until they came upon a trail that led to its bottom. This they followed.
The trees were bigger and their foliage greener than those at the foot of

32
the mountain. Around them they could hear the soft cooing of wild
doves.

When they got to the bottom of the ravine, the American saw a group
of people huddled on the other side of the ravine where the opposite cliff
cast its shade. He could make out an old man sitting on a stone, some
women squatting on the sand, and several children grouped in a circle
playing with pebbles. Propped against the cliff, some pillowed on stones,
were long bamboo tubes.

“What are all these people doing here?” the American asked the guide,
wondering. “And what are the bamboos for?”

“The people are waiting for their turn,” the guide explained. “The
tubes are for fetching water.”

“Water?” said the American, surprised. “How on earth could they get
water from such a dry place?” I don’t see any sign of it anywhere.”

“This place is called ‘Tagdo’. In English it means ‘drops’. It is the only

place where folks for miles around can find water to drink. “But go
ahead” the guide suggested, “and take a look for yourself.”

The American decided to do that. Curiously he walked toward the

people who stared at him as he passed, smiled past them and take a look
for the source of the water.

What he saw startled him.

In the hard rock which was the base of the cliff was a very small well
about six inches deep and a foot across. It was not spring. Water did not
come from under it but flowed into it over an inch-wide strip of banana
leaf which was so arranged as to receive the weak flow of a very tiny
stream formed by little drops of moisture. They came from the moss
clinging to the rock and to be protruding roots of trees growing alongside

33
the cliff. The American watched the tiny stream trickle over the banana
leaf and flow into the well. He watched for a long time; saw the old man
scoop the water carefully with a coconut shell and pour it into his tube.

The American stood there, just watching, forgetting for the moment
who he was, why he was there. “Twenty minutes,” he said aloud to
himself. “It would take twenty minutes to fill the tube.” Slowly he took
his gaze off the well, and facing about, saw the people were watching
him, smiling politely at him.

As he stared at them, searching into their brown faces for what he did
not know, a small boy naked from the waist down broke out from the
group of children and in a streak was at the well holding the coconut
shell in his hand and twiddling the index finger of the other, his head
nodding up and down, up and down. The American stared at him. He
stared good and hard, and felt the blood creeping up his back, his
shoulders, and his face. Never before had he felt such dryness in his
throat. There was no mistaking that ever-ready smile, those big black
eyes, the eager nodding of the familiar head.

The American’s white hand slowly found its way to the boy’s
hunched shoulder and, forgetting that the boy could not understand his
language, blurted: “You mean you walk all that distance and get your
water here too?”

Surprisingly the boy understood. He gave his biggest smile and

nodded, his eyes gleaming with elation as he glanced about at the
women, at his little friends, for his having been recognized and talk to by
this tall white man. Then he pointed to a long-haired girl in red chemise
hugging a bamboo tube twice her own length and smiling with her
fingertips in her mouth.

34
 As the American silently watched the scene before him, the guide
approached him and softly asked: “Would you like to take a picture?”

The American looked at the guide and did not say anything. He
could not say anything at all, and his look was blank, because in his
mind he was looking at the picture of a big white brute who gargled and
drank and spilled away the difficult labor of a little boy and girl; because
inside him there was great shame; because he knew he had been taking
the wrong pictures and thinking the wrong thoughts...

They Say Filipina Is Another Name For Maid

by Luisa Igloria

Our Overseas Contract Workers are the new heroes of the Philippines
--FIDEL V. RAMOS

In Hong Kong last summer

my office mate and I took
turns, smiling for pictures
in front of “The Court of Final
Appeal,” as a joke, or maybe
in a kind of atonement—because
two women boarding the same
ferry we took that morning said,
in the dialect they were sure
we would recognize, Is it
your day off too?

35
 One of them had a quick, nervous way
of smiling, as if ready to take it back
if we had turned on them with
indignation. The other was clearly
ready to challenge, if the well-
intentioned expression of solidarity
were read otherwise. It was a day
filled with rainclouds, a sky
the color of aluminum, the dull
sheen on the inside of an old
rice cooker.

Yes, we smiled; it’s our day, off

too. Is your amo kind? ventured the younger
of the two, shyly. Yes, we said, thinking of the air-
conditioned offices and computers we had left behind
for two weeks of r & r, as we leant back on the green
railing. The boat punched forward, toward the red
and yellow buildings, the rickshaws lined up
in the shade.

Mine too, she said; now. But the first one…

and her voice trailed like a scarf over the water,
hesitating. We had to force our way in,
said her friend, picking up the thread. I called
the center, you know, the one near the church?
Migrante. She was this close to being raped.
Did you hear about the last one? The one
who threw herself off the hospital roof?
Instead of an autopsy they scraped
36
 her insides clean, stuffed her
with cotton. Now no one can
prove anything.

If the body can keep secrets, what can it tell

of them? The body as a scroll: what calligraphy,
what message, did that woman’s family unwrap
when they received her body aerogrammed
in a bronze casket? For so many dollars,
you can get your name carved
in ideographs on an inked stamp
that is also called a chop.

The shy one asks me to braid her hair.

She calls me ate, older sister. She shows me
the scar on her left leg from shimmying
down a mango tree in their old backyard
at home. She has just turned nineteen,
and her smile can still be
warm as a ripe mango.

I run my fingers through the ink of her hair,

dividing into three sections. What was loose
and rippling in the wind, she has let me gather
in my hand. I braid, picking up the faint scent
of coconut oil; yeasty, warm, like good bread,
rising. She could be my daughter, my niece,
my cousin, my best friend.

Our new friends take us to the Central Station

where they will share a picnic meal
37
with others: garlic pork and rice, sour
broth, rice cakes, meat stewed in blood
gravy. They will talk, exchange
numbers, letters, news of better
openings, the meanings of insults
in a foreign language; pictures of grade
school children proudly stepping up
to receive medals on closing
day at school. Their hands
the size of their sleeping
quarters.

Even on their day off, the army

ponders the different ways
to share strength in the many
lands of the enemy, abroad
where they are known
by only one
name.

38
 Summer Solstice
Nick Joaquin

The Moretas were spending St. John’s Day with the children’s
grandfather, whose feast day it was. Doña Lupeng awoke feeling faint
with the heat, a sound of screaming in her ears. In the dining room the
three boys already attired in their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and
came crowding around her, talking all at once.

“How long you have slept, Mama!”

“We thought you were never getting up!”

“Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?”

“Hush, hush I implore you! Now look: your father has a headache, and so
have I. So be quiet this instant—or no one goes to Grandfather.”

Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a
furnace, the windows dilating with the harsh light and the air already
burning with the immense, intense fever of noon.

She found the children’s nurse working in the kitchen. “And why is
it you who are preparing breakfast? Where is Amada?” But without
waiting for an answer she went to the backdoor and opened it, and the
screaming in her ears became wild screaming in the stables across the
yard. “Oh my God!” she groaned and, grasping her skirts, hurried across
the yard.

In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams,

was hitching the pair of piebald ponies to the coach.

“Not the closed coach, Entoy! The open carriage!” shouted Doña Lupeng
as she came up.

39
“But the dust, señora—”

“I know, but better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your
wife, eh? Have you been beating her again?”

“Oh no, señora: I have not touched her.” “Then why is she screaming? Is
she ill?”

“I do not think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself,
señora. She is up there.”

When Doña Lupeng entered the room, the big half-naked woman
sprawled across the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Doña Lupeng was
shocked.

“What is this Amada? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in such
a posture! Come, get up at once. You should be ashamed!”

But the woman on the bed merely stared. Her sweat-beaded brows
contracted, as if in an effort to understand. Then her face relax her
mouth sagged open humorously and, rolling over on her back and
spreading out her big soft arms and legs, she began noiselessly quaking
with laughter—the mute mirth jerking in her throat; the moist pile of her
flesh quivering like brown jelly. Saliva dribbled from the corners of her
mouth.

Doña Lupeng blushed, looking around helplessly, and seeing that

Entoy had followed and was leaning in the doorway, watching stolidly,
she blushed again. The room reeked hotly of intimate odors. She averted
her eyes from the laughing woman on the bed, in whose nakedness she
seemed so to participate that she was ashamed to look directly at the
man in the doorway.

“Tell me, Entoy: has she had been to the Tadtarin?”

“Yes, señora. Last night.”

40
“But I forbade her to go! And I forbade you to let her go!”

“I could do nothing.”

“Why, you beat her at the least pretext!”

“But now I dare not touch her.”

“Oh, and why not?”

“It is the day of St. John: the spirit is in her.”

“But, man—”

“It is true, señora. The spirit is in her. She is the Tadtarin. She must do
as she pleases. Otherwise, the grain would not grow, the trees would
bear no fruit, the rivers would give no fish, and the animals would die.”

“Naku, I did no know your wife was so powerful, Entoy.”

“At such times she is not my wife: she is the wife of the river, she is the
wife of the crocodile, she is the wife of the moon.”

“BUT HOW CAN they still believe such things?” demanded Doña Lupeng
of her husband as they drove in the open carriage through the pastoral
countryside that was the arrabalof Paco in the 1850’s.

Don Paeng darted a sidelong glance at his wife, by which he

intimated that the subject was not a proper one for the children, who
were sitting opposite, facing their parents.

Don Paeng, drowsily stroking his moustaches, his eyes closed

against the hot light, merely shrugged.

“And you should have seen that Entoy,” continued his wife. “You
know how the brute treats her: she cannot say a word but he thrashes
her. But this morning he stood as meek as a lamb while she screamed
and screamed. He seemed actually in awe of her, do you know—actually
afraid of her!”

41
 “Oh, look, boys—here comes the St. John!” cried Doña Lupeng,
and she sprang up in the swaying carriage, propping one hand on her
husband’s shoulder while the other she held up her silk parasol.

And “Here come the men with their St. John!” cried voices up and
down the countryside. People in wet clothes dripping with well-water,
ditch-water and river-water came running across the hot woods and
fields and meadows, brandishing cans of water, wetting each other
uproariously, and shouting San Juan! San Juan!as they ran to meet the
procession.

Up the road, stirring a cloud of dust, and gaily bedrenched by the

crowds gathered along the wayside, a concourse of young men clad only
in soggy trousers were carrying aloft an image of the Precursor. Their
teeth flashed white in their laughing faces and their hot bodies glowed
crimson as they pranced past, shrouded in fiery dust, singing and
shouting and waving their arms: the St. John riding swiftly above the sea
of dark heads and glittering in the noon sun—a fine, blonde, heroic St.
John: very male, very arrogant: the Lord of Summer indeed; the Lord of
Light and Heat—erect and godly virile above the prone and female
earth—while the worshippers danced and the dust thickened and the
animals reared and roared and the merciless fires came raining down
form the skies—the relentlessly upon field and river and town and
winding road, and upon the joyous throng of young men against whose
uproar a couple of seminarians in muddy cassocks vainly intoned the
hymn of the noon god:

That we, thy servants, in chorus

May praise thee, our tongues restore us…

But Doña Lupeng, standing in the stopped carriage, looking very

young and elegant in her white frock, under the twirling parasol, stared
down on the passing male horde with increasing annoyance. The insolent

42
man-smell of their bodies rose all about her—wave upon wave of it—
enveloping her, assaulting her senses, till she felt faint with it and
pressed a handkerchief to her nose. And as she glanced at her husband
and saw with what a smug smile he was watching the revelers, her
annoyance deepened. When he bade her sit down because all eyes were
turned on her, she pretended not to hear; stood up even straighter, as if
to defy those rude creatures flaunting their manhood in the sun.

And she wondered peevishly what the braggarts were being so

cocky about? For this arrogance, this pride, this bluff male health of
theirs was (she told herself) founded on the impregnable virtue of
generations of good women. The boobies were so sure of themselves
because they had always been sure of their wives. “All the sisters being
virtuous, all the brothers are brave,” thought Doña Lupeng, with a
bitterness that rather surprised her. Women had built it up: this poise of
the male. Ah, and women could destroy it, too! She recalled, vindictively,
this morning’s scene at the stables: Amada naked and screaming in bed
whiled from the doorway her lord and master looked on in meek silence.
And was it not the mystery of a woman in her flowers that had restored
the tongue of that old Hebrew prophet?

“Look, Lupeng, they have all passed now,” Don Paeng was saying, “Do
you mean to stand all the way?”

She looked around in surprise and hastily sat down. The children
tittered, and the carriage started.

“Has the heat gone to your head, woman?” asked Don Paeng, smiling.
The children burst frankly into laughter.

Their mother colored and hung her head. She was beginning to feel
ashamed of the thoughts that had filled her mind. They seemed
improper—almost obscene—and the discovery of such depths of

43
wickedness in herself appalled her. She moved closer to her husband to
share the parasol with him.

“And did you see our young cousin Guido?” he asked.

“Oh, was he in that crowd?”

“A European education does not seem to have spoiled his taste for
country pleasures.” “I did not see him.” “He waved and waved.”

“The poor boy. He will feel hurt. But truly, Paeng. I did not see him.”
“Well, that is always a woman’s privilege.”

BUT WHEN THAT afternoon, at the grandfather’s, the young Guido

presented himself, properly attired and brushed and scented, Doña
Lupeng was so charming and gracious with him that he was enchanted
and gazed after her all afternoon with enamored eyes.

This was the time when our young men were all going to Europe
and bringing back with them, not the Age of Victoria, but the Age of
Byron. The young Guido knew nothing of Darwin and evolution; he knew
everything about Napoleon and the Revolution. When Doña Lupeng
expressed surprise at his presence that morning in the St. John’s crowd,
he laughed in her face.

“But I adore these old fiestas of ours! They are so romantic! Last night,
do you know, we walked all the way through the woods, I and some boys,
to see the procession of the Tadtarin.”

“And was that romantic too?” asked Doña Lupeng.

“It was weird. It made my flesh crawl. All those women in such a mystic
frenzy! And she who was the Tadtarin last night—she was a figure right
out of a flamenco!”

“I fear to disenchant you, Guido—but that woman happens to be our

cook.”

44
“She is beautiful.”

“Our Amada beautiful? But she is old and fat!”

“She is beautiful—as that old tree you are leaning on is beautiful,” calmly
insisted the young man, mocking her with his eyes.

They were out in the buzzing orchard, among the ripe mangoes;
Doña Lupeng seated on the grass, her legs tucked beneath her, and the
young man sprawled flat on his belly, gazing up at her, his face moist
with sweat. The children were chasing dragonflies. The sun stood still in
the west. The long day refused to end. From the house came the sudden
roaring laughter of the men playing cards.

“Beautiful! Romantic! Adorable! Are those the only words you learned in
Europe?” cried Doña Lupeng, feeling very annoyed with this young man
whose eyes adored her one moment and mocked her the next.

“Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over there—to see the holiness and
the mystery of what is vulgar.”

“And what is so holy and mysterious about—about the Tadtarin, for

instance?”

“I do not know. I can only feel it. And it frightens me. Those rituals come
to us from the earliest dawn of the world. And the dominant figure is not
the male but the female.”

“But they are in honor of St. John.”

“What has your St. John to do with them? Those women worship a more
ancient lord. Why, do you know that no man may join those rites unless
he first puts on some article of women’s apparel and—”

“And what did you put on, Guido?”

45
“How sharp you are! Oh, I made such love to a toothless old hag there
that she pulled off her stocking for me. And I pulled it on, over my arm,
like a glove. How your husband would have despised me!”

“But what on earth does it mean?”

“I think it is to remind us men that once upon a time you women were
supreme and we men were the slaves.”

“But surely there have always been kings?”

“Oh, no. The queen came before the king, and the priestess before the
priest, and the moon before the sun.”

“The moon?”

“—who is the Lord of the women.”

“Why?”

“Because the tides of women, like the tides of the sea, are tides of the
moon. Because the first blood -But what is the matter, Lupe? Oh, have I
offended you?”

“Is this how they talk to decent women in Europe?”

“They do not talk to women, they pray to them—as men did in the dawn
of the world.”

“Oh, you are mad! mad!”

“Why are you so afraid, Lupe?”

“I afraid? And of whom? My dear boy, you still have your mother’s milk
in your mouth. I only wish you to remember that I am a married
woman.”

“I remember that you are a woman, yes. A beautiful woman. And why
not? Did you turn into some dreadful monster when you married? Did

46
you stop being a woman? Did you stop being beautiful? Then why should
my eyes not tell you what you are—just because you are married?”

“Ah, this is too much now!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she rose to her feet.

“Do not go, I implore you! Have pity on me!”

“No more of your comedy, Guido! And besides—where have those

children gone to! I must go after them.”

As she lifted her skirts to walk away, the young man, propping up
his elbows, dragged himself forward on the ground and solemnly kissed
the tips of her shoes. She stared down in sudden horror, transfixed—and
he felt her violent shudder. She backed away slowly, still staring; then
turned and fled toward the house.

ON THE WAY home that evening Don Paeng noticed that his wife
was in a mood. They were alone in the carriage: the children were staying
overnight at their grandfather’s. The heat had not subsided. It was heat
without gradations: that knew no twilights and no dawns; that was still
there, after the sun had set; that would be there already, before the sun
had risen.

“Has young Guido been annoying you?” asked Don Paeng.

“Yes! All afternoon.”

“These young men today—what a disgrace they are! I felt embarrassed as

a man to see him following you about with those eyes of a whipped dog.”

She glanced at him coldly. “And was that all you felt, Paeng?
embarrassed—as a man?”

“A good husband has constant confidence in the good sense of his wife,”
he pronounced grandly, and smiled at her.

47
But she drew away; huddled herself in the other corner. “He kissed my
feet,” she told him disdainfully, her eyes on his face.

He frowned and made a gesture of distaste. “Do you see? They

have the instincts, the style of the canalla! To kiss a woman’s feet, to
follow her like a dog, to adore her like a slave -“

“Is it so shameful for a man to adore women?”

“A gentleman loves and respects Woman. The cads and lunatics—they

‘adore’ the women.”

“But maybe we do not want to be loved and respected—but to be adored.”

But when they reached home she did not lie down but wandered
listlessly through the empty house. When Don Paeng, having bathed and
changed, came down from the bedroom, he found her in the dark parlour
seated at the harp and plucking out a tune, still in her white frock and
shoes.

“How can you bear those hot clothes, Lupeng? And why the darkness?
Order someone to bring light in here.”

“There is no one, they have all gone to see the Tadtarin.”

“A pack of loafers we are feeding!”

She had risen and gone to the window. He approached and stood
behind her, grasped her elbows and, stooping, kissed the nape of her
neck. But she stood still, not responding, and he released her sulkily.
She turned around to face him.

“Listen, Paeng. I want to see it, too. The Tadtarin, I mean. I have not seen
it since I was a little girl. And tonight is the last night.”

“You must be crazy! Only low people go there. And I thought you had a
headache?” He was still sulking.

48
“But I want to go! My head aches worse in the house. For a favor, Paeng.”

“I told you: No! go and take those clothes off. But, woman, whatever has
got into you!” he strode off to the table, opened the box of cigars, took
one, banged the lid shut, bit off an end of the cigar, and glared about for
a light.

She was still standing by the window and her chin was up.

“Very well, if you do want to come, do not come—but I am going.”

“I warn you, Lupe; do not provoke me!”

“I will go with Amada. Entoy can take us. You cannot forbid me, Paeng.
There is nothing wrong with it. I am not a child.”

But standing very straight in her white frock, her eyes shining in
the dark and her chin thrust up, she looked so young, so fragile, that his
heart was touched. He sighed, smiled ruefully, and shrugged his
shoulders.

“Yes, the heat ahs touched you in the head, Lupeng. And since you are
so set on it—very well, let us go. Come, have the coach ordered!”

THE CULT OF the Tadtarin is celebrated on three days: the feast of

St. John and the two preceding days. On the first night, a young girl
heads the procession; on the second, a mature woman; and on the third,
a very old woman who dies and comes to life again. In these processions,
as in those of Pakil and Obando, everyone dances.

Around the tiny plaza in front of the barrio chapel, quite a stream
of carriages was flowing leisurely. The Moretas were constantly being
hailed from the other vehicles. The plaza itself and the sidewalks were
filled with chattering, strolling, profusely sweating people. More people
were crowded on the balconies and windows of the houses. The moon
had not yet risen; the black night smoldered; in the windless sky the

49
lightning’s abruptly branching fire seemed the nerves of the tortured air
made visible.

“Here they come now!” cried the people on the balconies.

And “Here come the women with their St. John!” cried the people
on the sidewalks, surging forth on the street. The carriages halted and
their occupants descended. The plaza rang with the shouts of people and
the neighing of horses—and with another keener sound: a sound as of
sea-waves steadily rolling nearer.

The crowd parted, and up the street came the prancing, screaming,
writhing women, their eyes wild, black shawls flying around their
shoulders, and their long hair streaming and covered with leaves and
flowers. But the Tadtarin, a small old woman with white hair, walked
with calm dignity in the midst of the female tumult, a wand in one hand,
a bunch of seedling in the other. Behind her, a group of girls bore aloft a
little black image of the Baptist—a crude, primitive, grotesque image, its
big-eyed head too big for its puny naked torso, bobbing and swaying
above the hysterical female horde and looking at once so comical and so
pathetic that Don Paeng, watching with his wife on the sidewalk, was
outraged. The image seemed to be crying for help, to be struggling to
escape—a St. John indeed in the hands of the Herodias; a doomed
captive these witches were subjecting first to their derision; a gross and
brutal caricature of his sex.

Don Paeng flushed hotly: he felt that all those women had
personally insulted him. He turned to his wife, to take her away—but she
was watching greedily, taut and breathless, her head thrust forward and
her eyes bulging, the teeth bared in the slack mouth, and the sweat
gleaning on her face. Don Paeng was horrified. He grasped her arm—but
just then a flash of lightning blazed and the screaming women fell silent:
the Tadtarin was about to die.

50
 The old woman closed her eyes and bowed her head and sank
slowly to her knees. A pallet was brought and set on the ground and she
was laid in it and her face covered with a shroud. Her hands still
clutched the wand and the seedlings. The women drew away, leaving her
in a cleared space. They covered their heads with their black shawls and
began wailing softly, unhumanly—a hushed, animal keening.

Overhead the sky was brightening, silver light defined the rooftops.
When the moon rose and flooded with hot brilliance the moveless
crowded square, the black-shawled women stopped wailing and a girl
approached and unshrouded the Tadtarin, who opened her eyes and sat
up, her face lifted to the moonlight. She rose to her feet and extended the
wand and the seedlings and the women joined in a mighty shout. They
pulled off and waved their shawls and whirled and began dancing
again—laughing and dancing with such joyous exciting abandon that the
people in the square and on the sidewalk, and even those on the
balconies, were soon laughing and dancing, too. Girls broke away from
their parents and wives from their husbands to join in the orgy.

“Come, let us go now,” said Don Paeng to his wife. She was
shaking with fascination; tears trembled on her lashes; but she nodded
meekly and allowed herself to be led away. But suddenly she pulled free
from his grasp, darted off, and ran into the crowd of dancing women.

She flung her hands to her hair and whirled and her hair came
undone. Then, planting her arms akimbo, she began to trip a nimble
measure, an indistinctive folk-movement. She tossed her head back and
her arched throat bloomed whitely. Her eyes brimmed with moonlight,
and her mouth with laughter.

Don Paeng ran after her, shouting her name, but she laughed and
shook her head and darted deeper into the dense maze of procession,
which was moving again, towards the chapel. He followed her, shouting;

51
she eluded him, laughing—and through the thick of the female horde
they lost and found and lost each other again—she, dancing and he
pursuing—till, carried along by the tide, they were both swallowed up
into the hot, packed, turbulent darkness of the chapel. Inside poured the
entire procession, and Don Paeng, finding himself trapped tight among
milling female bodies, struggled with sudden panic to fight his way out.
Angry voices rose all about him in the stifling darkness.

“Hoy you are crushing my feet!”

“And let go of my shawl, my shawl!”

“Stop pushing, shameless one, or I kick you!”

“Let me pass, let me pass, you harlots!” cried Don Paeng.

“Abah, it is a man!”

“How dare he come in here?”

“Break his head!”

“Throw the animal out!”

“Throw him out! Throw him out!” shrieked the voices, and Don Paeng
found himself surrounded by a swarm of gleaming eyes.

Terror possessed him and he struck out savagely with both fists,
with all his strength—but they closed in as savagely: solid walls of flesh
that crushed upon him and pinned his arms helpless, while unseen
hands struck and struck his face, and ravaged his hair and clothes, and
clawed at his flesh, as—kicked and buffeted, his eyes blind and his torn
mouth salty with blood—he was pushed down, down to his knees, and
half-shoved, half-dragged to the doorway and rolled out to the street. He
picked himself up at once and walked away with a dignity that forbade
the crowd gathered outside to laugh or to pity. Entoy came running to
meet him.

52
“But what has happened to you, Don Paeng?”

“Nothing. Where is the coach?”

“Just over there, sir. But you are wounded in the face!”

“No, these are only scratches. Go and get the sehora. We are going
home.”

When she entered the coach and saw his bruised face and torn clothing,
she smiled coolly.

“What a sight you are, man! What have you done with yourself?”

And when he did not answer: “Why, have they pulled out his tongue
too?” she wondered aloud.

AND WHEN THEY are home and stood facing each other in the bedroom,
she was still as light-hearted.

“What are you going to do, Rafael?”

“I am going to give you a whipping.”

“But why?”

“Because you have behaved tonight like a lewd woman.”

“How I behaved tonight is what I am. If you call that lewd, then I was
always a lewd woman and a whipping will not change me—though you
whipped me till I died.”

“I want this madness to die in you.”

“No, you want me to pay for your bruises.”

He flushed darkly. “How can you say that, Lupe?”

“Because it is true. You have been whipped by the women and now you
think to avenge yourself by whipping me.”

53
His shoulders sagged and his face dulled. “If you can think that of me -“

“You could think me a lewd woman!”

“Oh, how do I know what to think of you? I was sure I knew you as I
knew myself. But now you are as distant and strange to me as a female
Turk in Africa.”

“Yet you would dare whip me -“

“Because I love you, because I respect you.”

“And because if you ceased to respect me you would cease to respect

yourself?”

“Ah, I did not say that!”

“Then why not say it? It is true. And you want to say it, you want to say
it!”

But he struggled against her power. “Why should I want to?” he

demanded peevishly.

“Because, either you must say it—or you must whip me,” she taunted.

Her eyes were upon him and the shameful fear that had unmanned him
in the dark chapel possessed him again. His legs had turned to water; it
was a monstrous agony to remain standing.

But she was waiting for him to speak, forcing him to speak.

“No, I cannot whip you!” he confessed miserably.

“Then say it! Say it!” she cried, pounding her clenched fists together.
“Why suffer and suffer? And in the end you would only submit.”

But he still struggled stubbornly. “Is it not enough that you have me
helpless? Is it not enough that I feel what you want me feel?”

54
But she shook her head furiously. “Until you have said to me, there can
be no peace between us.”

He was exhausted at last; he sank heavily to his knees, breathing

hard and streaming with sweat, his fine body curiously diminished now
in its ravaged apparel.

“I adore you, Lupe,” he said tonelessly.

She strained forward avidly, “What? What did you say?” she screamed.

And he, in his dead voice: “That I adore you. That I adore you. That
I worship you. That the air you breathe and the ground you tread is so
holy to me. That I am your dog, your slave… “

But it was still not enough. Her fists were still clenched, and she
cried: “Then come, crawl on the floor, and kiss my feet!”

Without moment’s hesitation, he sprawled down flat and, working

his arms and legs, gaspingly clawed his way across the floor, like a great
agonized lizard, the woman steadily backing away as he approached, her
eyes watching him avidly, her nostrils dilating, till behind her loomed the
open window, the huge glittering moon, the rapid flashes of lightning.
she stopped, panting, and leaned against the sill. He lay exhausted at
her feet, his face flat on the floor.

She raised her skirts and contemptuously thrust out a naked foot.
He lifted his dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted
his hands and grasped the white foot and kiss it savagely – kissed the
step, the sole, the frail ankle – while she bit her lips and clutched in pain
at the whole windowsill her body and her loose hair streaming out the
window – streaming fluid and black in the white night where the huge
moon glowed like a sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and the
pure heat burned with the immense intense fever of noon.

55
56
 MAGNIFICENCE
Estrella D. Alfon

There was nothing to fear, for the man was always so gentle, so
kind. At night when the little girl and her brother were bathed in the light
of the big shaded bulb that hung over the big study table in the
downstairs hall, the man would knock gently on the door, and come in.
he would stand for a while just beyond the pool of light, his feet in the
circle of illumination, the rest of him in shadow. The little girl and her
brother would look up at him where they sat at the big table, their eyes
bright in the bright light, and watch him come fully into the light, but his
voice soft, his manner slow. He would smell very faintly of sweat and
pomade, but the children didn’t mind although they did notice, for they
waited for him every evening as they sat at their lessons like this. He’d
throw his visored cap on the table, and it would fall down with a soft
plop, then he’d nod his head to say one was right, or shake it to say one
was wrong.

It was not always that he came. They could remember perhaps two
weeks when he remarked to their mother that he had never seen two
children looking so smart. The praise had made their mother look over
them as they stood around listening to the goings-on at the meeting of
the neighborhood association, of which their mother was president. Two
children, one a girl of seven, and a boy of eight. They were both very tall
for their age, and their legs were the long gangly legs of fine spirited colts.
Their mother saw them with eyes that held pride, and then to partly
gloss over the maternal gloating she exhibited, she said to the man, in
answer to his praise, “But their homework. They’re so lazy with them.”
And the man said, “I have nothing to do in the evenings, let me help
them.” Mother nodded her head and said, “If you want to bother
yourself.” And the thing rested there, and the man came in the evenings
57
therefore, and he helped solve fractions for the boy, and write correct
phrases in language for the little girl.

In those days, the rage was for pencils. School children always
have rages going at one time or another. Sometimes for paper butterflies
that are held on sticks, and whirr in the wind.

The Japanese bazaars promoted a rage for those. Sometimes it is

for little lead toys found in the folded waffles that Japanese confection-
makers had such light hands with. At this particular time, it was for
pencils. Pencils big but light in circumference not smaller than a man’s
thumb. They were unwieldy in a child’s hands, but in all schools then,
where Japanese bazaars clustered there were all colors of these pencils
selling for very low, but unattainable to a child budgeted at a baon of a
centavo a day. They were all of five centavos each, and one pencil was
not at all what one had ambitions for. In rages, one kept a collection.
Four or five pencils, of different colors, to tie with strings near the eraser
end, to dangle from one’s book-basket, to arouse the envy of the other
children who probably possessed less.

Add to the man’s gentleness and his kindness in knowing a child’s

desires, his promise that he would give each of them not one pencil but
two. And for the little girl who he said was very bright and deserved
more, he would get the biggest pencil he could find.

One evening he did bring them. The evenings of waiting had made
them look forward to this final giving, and when they got the pencils they
whooped with joy. The little boy had two pencils, one green, one blue.
And the little girl had three pencils, two of the same circumference as the
little boy’s but colored red and yellow. And the third pencil, a jumbo size
pencil really, was white, and had been sharpened, and the little girl
58
jumped up and down, and shouted with glee. Until their mother called
from down the stairs. “What are you shouting about?” And they told her,
shouting gladly, Vicente, for that was his name. Vicente had brought the
pencils he had promised them.
“Thank him,” their mother called. The little boy smiled and said,
“Thank you.” And the little girl smiled, and said, “Thank you, too.” But
the man said, “Are you not going to kiss me for those pencils?” They both
came forward, the little girl and the little boy, and they both made to kiss
him but Vicente slapped the boy smartly on his lean hips, and said,
“Boys do not kiss boys.” And the little boy laughed and scampered away,
and then ran back and kissed him anyway.

The little girl went up to the man shyly, put her arms about his
neck as he crouched to receive her embrace, and kissed him on the
cheeks.

The man’s arms tightened suddenly about the little girl until the
little girl squirmed out of his arms, and laughed a little breathlessly,
disturbed but innocent, looking at the man with a smiling little question
of puzzlement.

The next evening, he came around again. All through that day,
they had been very proud in school showing off their brand new pencils.
All the little girls and boys had been envying them. And their mother had
finally to tell them to stop talking about the pencils, pencils, for now that
they had, the boy two, and the girl three, they were asking their mother
to buy more, so they could each have five, and three at least in the
jumbo size that the little girl’s third pencil was. Their mother said, “Oh
stop it, what will you do with so many pencils, you can only write with
one at a time.”

59
 And the little girl muttered under her breath, “I’ll ask Vicente for
some more.”

Their mother replied, “He’s only a bus conductor, don’t ask him for
too many things. It’s a pity.” And this observation their mother said to
their father, who was eating his evening meal between paragraphs of the
book on masonry rites that he was reading. “It is a pity, said their
mother, People like those, they make friends with people like us, and
they feel it is nice to give us gifts, or the children toys and things. You’d
think they wouldn’t be able to afford it.”

The father grunted, and said, “the man probably needed a new job,
and was softening his way through to him by going at the children like
that.” And the mother said, “No, I don’t think so, he’s a rather queer
young man, I think he doesn’t have many friends, but I have watched
him with the children, and he seems to dote on them.”

The father grunted again, and did not pay any further attention.

Vicente was earlier than usual that evening. The children

immediately put their lessons down, telling him of the envy of their
schoolmates, and would he buy them more please?

Vicente said to the little boy, “Go and ask if you can let me have a
glass of water.” And the little boy ran away to comply, saying behind him,
“But buy us some more pencils, huh, buy us more pencils,” and then
went up to stairs to their mother.

Vicente held the little girl by the arm, and said gently, “Of course I
will buy you more pencils, as many as you want.”

60
 And the little girl giggled and said, “Oh, then I will tell my friends,
and they will envy me, for they don’t have as many or as pretty.”

Vicente took the girl up lightly in his arms, holding her under the
armpits, and held her to sit down on his lap and he said, still gently,
“What are your lessons for tomorrow?” And the little girl turned to the
paper on the table where she had been writing with the jumbo pencil,
and she told him that that was her lesson but it was easy.
“Then go ahead and write, and I will watch you.”

“Don’t hold me on your lap,” said the little girl, “I am very heavy,
you will get very tired.”

The man shook his head, and said nothing, but held her on his lap
just the same.

The little girl kept squirming, for somehow she felt uncomfortable
to be held thus, her mother and father always treated her like a big girl,
she was always told never to act like a baby. She looked around at
Vicente, interrupting her careful writing to twist around.

His face was all in sweat, and his eyes looked very strange, and he
indicated to her that she must turn around, attend to the homework she
was writing.

But the little girl felt very queer, she didn’t know why, all of a
sudden she was immensely frightened, and she jumped up away from
Vicente’s lap.

61
 She stood looking at him, feeling that queer frightened feeling, not
knowing what to do. By and by, in a very short while her mother came
down the stairs, holding in her hand a glass of sarsaparilla, “Vicente.”

But Vicente had jumped up too soon as the little girl had jumped
from his lap. He snatched at the papers that lay on the table and held
them to his stomach, turning away from the mother’s coming.

The mother looked at him, stopped in her tracks, and advanced

into the light. She had been in the shadow. Her voice had been like a bell
of safety to the little girl. But now she advanced into glare of the light
that held like a tableau the figures of Vicente holding the little girl’s
papers to him, and the little girl looking up at him frightenedly, in her
eyes dark pools of wonder and fear and question.

The little girl looked at her mother, and saw the beloved face
transfigured by some sort of glow. The mother kept coming into the light,
and when Vicente made as if to move away into the shadow, she said,
very low, but very heavily, “Do not move.”

She put the glass of soft drink down on the table, where in the
light one could watch the little bubbles go up and down in the dark
liquid. The mother said to the boy, “Oscar, finish your lessons.” And
turning to the little girl, she said, “Come here.” The little girl went to her,
and the mother knelt down, for she was a tall woman and she said, Turn
around. Obediently the little girl turned around, and her mother passed
her hands over the little girl’s back.
“Go upstairs,” she said.

The mother’s voice was of such a heavy quality and of such awful
timbre that the girl could only nod her head, and without looking at
62
Vicente again, she raced up the stairs. The mother went to the cowering
man, and marched him with a glance out of the circle of light that held
the little boy. Once in the shadow, she extended her hand, and without
any opposition took away the papers that Vicente was holding to himself.
She stood there saying nothing as the man fumbled with his hands and
with his fingers, and she waited until he had finished. She was going to
open her mouth but she glanced at the boy and closed it, and with a look
and an inclination of the head, she bade Vicente go up the stairs.

The man said nothing, for she said nothing either. Up the stairs
went the man, and the mother followed behind. When they had reached
the upper landing, the woman called down to her son, “Son, come up
and go to your room.”

The little boy did as he was told, asking no questions, for indeed he
was feeling sleepy already.

As soon as the boy was gone, the mother turned on Vicente. There
was a pause.

Finally, the woman raised her hand and slapped him full hard in
the face. Her retreated down one tread of the stairs with the force of the
blow, but the mother followed him. With her other hand she slapped him
on the other side of the face again. And so down the stairs they went, the
man backwards, his face continually open to the force of the woman’s
slapping. Alternately she lifted her right hand and made him retreat
before her until they reached the bottom landing.

He made no resistance, offered no defense. Before the silence and

the grimness of her attack he cowered, retreating, until out of his mouth
issued something like a whimper.
63
 The mother thus shut his mouth, and with those hard forceful
slaps she escorted him right to the other door. As soon as the cool air of
the free night touched him, he recovered enough to turn away and run,
into the shadows that ate him up. The woman looked after him, and
closed the door. She turned off the blazing light over the study table, and
went slowly up the stairs and out into the dark night.

When her mother reached her, the woman, held her hand out to
the child. Always also, with the terrible indelibility that one associated
with terror, the girl was to remember the touch of that hand on her
shoulder, heavy, kneading at her flesh, the woman herself stricken
almost dumb, but her eyes eloquent with that angered fire. She knelt,
She felt the little girl’s dress and took it off with haste that was almost
frantic, tearing at the buttons and imparting a terror to the little girl that
almost made her sob. “Hush,” the mother said. “Take a bath quickly.”

Her mother presided over the bath the little girl took, scrubbed
her, and soaped her, and then wiped her gently all over and changed her
into new clothes that smelt of the clean fresh smell of clothes that had
hung in the light of the sun. The clothes that she had taken off the little
girl, she bundled into a tight wrenched bunch, which she threw into the
kitchen range.

“Take also the pencils,” said the mother to the watching newly
bathed, newly changed child. “Take them and throw them into the fire.”
But when the girl turned to comply, the mother said, “No, tomorrow will
do.” And taking the little girl by the hand, she led her to her little girl’s
bed, made her lie down and tucked the covers gently about her as the
girl dropped off into quick slumber.

64
 What I Love or Will Remember Most about High School
Vicente Garcia Groyon

Dressed identically in fatigues, the boys milled about the

converted court, waiting for their weekly Citizen’s Army Training to begin.
Letty Jayme hovered at the edge of the court and craned her neck,
looking for her son.

The boys recognized her immediately, calling out her name or

polite “Miss!” in greeting, but she didn’t ask them for help. All she could
manage was a quick smile or a slight nod of head. Teaching high school
students in such a small city meant a loss of privacy to her. Three days,
anywhere she went there was always the inevitable familiar face asking
“Miss, do you remember me?”

Letty began to move through olive-drabbled crowd. She

disapproved of military training for civilian students, but the boys, her
son included, appeared to enjoy it, and there was no way around the
government ruling.

She came upon a cluster of uniforms engaged in loud

conversation. She didn’t see him right away, but he knew she had found
him when they looked her way and nudged a companion. A capless head,
half-shorn hair, swiveled on a slender neck to reveal the features of the
youth she had married in 1986. The head turned away, and with small
smiles his friends studied the face hidden from her.

“Jambee”

He came to her and grasped her elbow. She allowed him to walk
her away from his friends when she felt they were a safe distance from
them.

“What’s your commandant’s name again?”

65
 “Gacuma”

“Right. Please give this to him.”

“Why?”

“It’s a note from me. Just give it to him.”

“About what?”

She felt it starting. He was being difficult again, for no other

apparent reason than because she wanted something done. If they had
been at home, this conversation would have gone on for the rest of the
day, but she was running out of time.

“I want to excuse someone for a few minutes.”

“Who?”

“Jambee----”

“Mom, he’s not in his office. I can’t go there.”

“So just drop it off. Or ask one of your officer classmates to do it

for you. Say it’s for me.”

“His office is just there. See?”

“I’d rather not give it myself.”

“Why not?”

“Basta. Just hand it to him.” She held out the envelope. “Please?”

Without answering, he plucked the note from her fingers and

walked towards where he said the office was. She wanted to get angry,
but doing so now, in full view of his friends, would be a big mistake. She
sighed and began walking back to the Faculty Room.

66
 From behind her deep voice shouted, “Fall in!” She turned to see a
shapeless green mass break into a several pieces, each one moving in the
same direction, but separately, like a school of fish. The angry trilling of
police whistles pierced the rumbling of more than a hundred pairs of
boots running towards the athletic field. She watched until ragged rows
of green-clad bodies began to form before going on her way.

She sat at the conference table in the Faculty Room without

moving, her body forming a lazy C against the rigid angle of the chair.
The room and the halls outside were unnervingly quiet. The exams had
ended at noon that day, since it was the last day of the school year, and
the rest of the faculty had gone home early. She was alone in the high
school section of the campus.

An early breeze came through the open door and stirred the
papers in the folder that lay open on the table front of her. She had been
rereading them for the fifth or sixth time that afternoon before stopping,
defeated.

Just three hours ago, Father Bernardo Luz, vice principal of St.
Martin’s institute for boys, had held the same folder in his hands.

They were large, she noticed for the first time, with thick knobby
fingers and long squared-off nails almost as pale as the starched habit he
wore. He licked his thumb to turn the pages of the essay. Lust patches of
coarse black hair sprouted in the backs of his hands. Cradled by them,
the sturdy cardboard folder appeared suddenly fragile. She looked down
at her own hands, noting that the veins there were not as large or as
pronounced as his were, but that a few more years of keeping a home
clean and livable for two sons would soon produce the same effect.

She looked up at the sound of the folder being closed. He was

holding it up to his chin with both hands, staring up at the ceiling with a
thoughtful air.

67
 “These things do happen, Mrs. Jayme. Oh, yes, they do. ” He tossed
the folder on his desk and laced his fingers over his belly.

“It was the last thing I expected, Father. I’ve used this topic as a
final composition assignment for the Seniors ever since I started teaching
here, but I’ve never received anything as---delicate as this. I really
thought the topic was quiet harmless. ”

“It is harmless, Mrs. Jayme. It’s not your fault at all.”

“I know that, but----”

“I think you are wondering what should be done.” He straightened

up and placed his hands on the folder.

“Yes.”

“What actions, if any, should be taken.”

“Yes.”

His sudden shifts to down-to-business mode often caught her off-

guard. Now was going to do the talking, it told her.

“There appears no doubt that something has happened, but what

do we actually have here?”

He picked up the folder and leafed through the pages. To Letty,

his every movement was calculated to cause a specific effect in people----
whether he was saying mass or chatting with the students in a hallway.

“There are suggestions, innuendoes, to be sure, but there is

actually nothing here that would indicate definitely that something
indecent has really happened. Based on what the boy---who is it, Luis?---
based on what he has written, it could have been anything---- ” He
trailed off, looking past her shoulder, up the wall, to the ceiling.

68
 “You have to read between the lines. I could show you his other
essays. He has never been sentimental or emotional before. He’s very
quiet--- reserved. He does the work correctly, but he never puts himself
into it. This is the first time he’s been this---open.”

“I see. So it’s as if his conscience is bothering him.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly why he is emotional.”

“No, it’s more than that. I can’t explain----”

“A boy’s conscience can be overpowering sometimes, Mrs. Jayme.”

He was beginning to use his pulpit voice now. Letty hated that.

“I’ve listened to countless boys overpowered by conscience.

Sometimes seems like their very souls are being burned in hell already,
even as they speak. When I tell them that they can still be forgiven,
provided they perform the penance sincerely and with conviction, the
relief in their voices is almost laughable.”

“It---doesn’t seem that----in this case.”

“Well, all right. Supposing what you say is---supposing your

suspicious on well-founded, what do you propose to do?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked to see you. Perhaps you could
speak to---”

“I think that thus is a simple case of a boy’s imagination working

in class alliance with his conscience, blowing things up beyond their
actual proportions. He chuckled. “Perhaps even with our imaginations.”

“But you were saying a while a ago that things like this do
happen. Have happened.”

69
 “Yes, they have. I’ve heard things in the confessional that I cannot
repeat----you understand. But they do not apply in this case, I believe.”

“What makes you say so?”

“It is high unlikely.”

“But it happens.”

“I simply would not want to act rashly on this matter, Mrs.

Jayme.”

“Which is why I brought it to you first.”

“I am simply concerned because Max---Mr. Gacuma---is simply

not my type of man who would---” He waved his hand over the table. “He
came to the institution right after he graduated from college, when I was
just the discipline officer. I have known him ever since.”

He shrugged, held his hand up in mock helplessness.

“The idea is ridiculous. I’ve known him for a long time.”

“But it’s clear that something wrong is going on.”

“Clear? He grimaced and shook his head, staring down at the

folder. As I’ve said, all we have here is, at best, a hazy innuendo that has
been most likely colored by an emotional fit brought about by an attack
of conscience. It won’t do.”

She realized that she had leaned forward in her chair without
meaning to, and drew back.

“The institution has just rewarded Max for twenty-five years of

service. Do you seriously think?”

He looked at her with an almost-smile playing on his lips.

“I suppose not.”

70
 “He’s married.”

“Yes, he is.”

“When did you join us, Mrs. Jayme?”

“1973. No, ’72.”

“Twenty-two. Three more years to go for you, eh? How has it been
for you?”

“Oh---wonderful, Father.”

“Well, that’s good. I’ve been here for almost 40 years, myself.
When Father Clarence dies I’ll be the oldest Father around here. ”

“Really, Father?”

“Sometimes I myself am surprised by how much the school has

progressed. Just compare what you see now to what it lost like when you
first joined us. ”

“Yes, Father.”

“Well, I’ll see you during the summer term, then, eh?”

He had risen from behind his desk and was moving to the door,
where he hand out the folder to her. She stood up and took it from him.

“What about this, then, Father?”

“I will keep in mind what you have told me. We simply cannot act
on it until we have more proof that something has actually happened.”

By this time they were outside his private room, moving through
an administrative office, and his voice grown louder.

“I’m very glad about your dedication, eh? Keep up the good work.”

They shook hands. The large hand swallowed hers.

71
 “Thank you, Father.”

With a wide grin he turned and reentered his office the venetian
blinds back the glass clattered as he closed his door.

She got up and stepped out into the corridor, looking up and
down the hallway. It was getting darker, and Luis was nowhere in sight.
She wonders Jambee had delivered her note at all. It was likely he had
not; out of reservation perhaps, or just to annoy her. She felt the anger
rising in her again, and went in to sit down.

Lately the tone of voice that, Jambee had begun to use with her
had to bother her. She couldn’t tell, however, what it was. Sometimes it
sounded politeness with an undercurrent of irritation, sometimes like
impatience, sometimes like the tired disgust that came right before giving
up. Whatever it was it sounds the same. Whether he was telling her to
get out of the bathroom because taking a bath, or taking the time to
inform her about what he was watching on TV, or whatever, it was the
same tone, and she thought she was more or less familiar with it.

She first recognized it in Icky-boy; her eldest, now attending a

college in the city. She had taken offense when he first spoke to her that
way, but she decided to be patient with it. Then she decided to ignore it.
She knew now that it would go away in time, as it did with Icky-boy. But
she feared that it only seemed to go away, evolving instead into another
uniform tone---more adult, more restrained, more patronizing---one that
allowed its user to avoid confrontation. She was already familiar with this
higher form of tone when Icky-boy---Ricky, he insisted now---first tried it
on her. But she didn’t feel ready for the moment when Jambee would
start using it.

Watching Jambee’s features mature into those of his father

comforted her, even if it meant that was slipping away. Once, she took
the boys to their father’s restaurant---a dimly lit, pseudo-Italian bistro

72
where Julio Iglesias sang from the huge black speakers that use to sit in
the corners of their den. It was Icky-boy’s high school graduation, so she
had been nice to Mike. Mike had been nice to the boys too, and decent
enough not to introduce the girl who sat smoking at the table nearest the
cashier. Letty thought that the girl had been quiet civilized, even if she
should have done the more civilized thing and stayed in their love nest
for the evening. She never even looked up as Mike herded Letty and the
boys out of the restaurant and stood by as they as they climbed into the
car and drove away. Letty drove that night, even Icky-boy wanted to show
off his dad.

She heard two soft knocks, and turned to see the boy’s head
hovering sideways next to the doorjamb.

“Luis. Come in.”

The rest of Luis appeared in the doorway. He was among the

shorter boys in his class. Letty found the randomness with which the
puberty pounced on the boys touching. Poignant, even. Her students
were often a motley bunch, ranging from fully formed men gangly,
awkward types, to boys who looked like they would be more comfortable
in the sixth or seventh grade. This boy’s build was compact but already
muscular, with limbs that too short for the rest of him. His face, though,
still had the androgynous beauty of a child: a rounded square with full
cheeks, long lashes, and a soft, tender mouth. He was attractive to girls,
she could tell. His upper lip was paler than the rest of his face, indicating
that he had begun scraping with a razor at the uncertain black shadow
there, but nowhere else.

“You wanted to see me, Miss?”

“Have a seat.”

73
 He sat in the chair opposite her, snatching the marine cap off his
head just a shade too late and thrusting it into his lap. His movements
were sudden but restrained---the body language peculiar to young men
that seemed to communicate politeness and deference to superiors. All
the boys, she noticed, move in this year whenever they were in an office.

His haircut was generic military style that left him with an absurd
shook of hair around the top of the head, and a while stripe around the
lower half. Letty suddenly remembered a time two or three years ago
when Luis’s mother has his hair curled. Pre-perm, it had fallen from his
crown in even, straight-lines, usually in the 90’s version of the bowl-cut,
which to Letty resembled a biker’s helmet. On morning, he arrived in
school with his hair swept up and back, undulating in fibrous waves all
the way from his forehead to the nape of his neck. In the Faculty Room
the afternoon, his homeroom teacher confided in her that Luis had
glanced at his once with an imploring look on his face---just once---and
then looked back down his notebook. But he wore the haircut with a
straight face, Letty remembered, was it until grew out and returned to
normal.

His hands were under the table where Letty assumed they were
fidgeting with the cap.

“I called you because I wanted to discuss this with you----your

composition.”

He said nothing, but his gaze dropped to the folder on the table.
Letty’s hand jumped to it and at once she felt foolish---her first thought
had been that he would snatch it off the table and run away.

“You don’t have to worry about anything---it’s very well-written,

as usual.”

He shifted position just the slightest bit.

74
 “You still express yourself very well. More so in this essay,
because it seems you allowed yourself to become more personal.”

He nodded.

“Your past essays all felt like you were just doing the assignment,
without feeling anything, but here you seem more open, more honest,
and that really improves one’s writing.”

“Yes, Miss.” The wet snap of his mouth opening was loud in the
quiet of the room.

“But I am very concerned with some of the things that you said in
your essay.”

He had begun to nod before she had even finished. She paused,
waiting to see if he say something. His gaze remained fixed on the folder,
so she went on.

“Well, some parts of the essay are a little bit vague, so I just
wanted to clarify with you what exactly you meant in certain parts.”

“Mm.”

She waited for more, and he looked up at her with wide eyes, as if
wondering why she had stopped talking.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes, Miss.”

She opened her mouth, and shut it again. Now it was her turn to
look down at the folder, and with a small frown she opened it and began
to leaf through its contents.

“Well, first of all you decided to omit ‘Remember’ from the title. So
it became ‘What I Love Most About High School.’” She stole a glance at
him; he was watching her.

75
 He was right; his intelligence was of a correct, bookish sort. Letty
discouraged this in her students, but St. Martin’s nurture such types.
Luis was a likely candidate for valedictorian, or at least one of the top
honors. They would all know by next week.

She looked at him without raising her head. “That’s true. But
isn’t also true that sometimes you don’t love what you remember? Or
remember what you love?”

She wasn’t making much sense, and he seemed skeptical, but he

averred anyway.

“You said that you loved being CAT officer the most.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“And you made it very clear here why you loved it, I think.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Is your father in the military? Or anyone in your family?”

“No, Miss.”

“My father was Colonel in the army.” There was only a slight
reaction to this but she plowed on. “There was a time when our family
actually lived in the Camp in the houses provided for the officers. Life
there was very routine, very ordered. But I think my father loved it.” He
was looking at her, his forehead only the slightest bit wrinkled. “And my
mother grew to love it,” she added in a rush, hoping that meant
something.

“Discipline, Miss.”

“Yes, exactly. Anyway. As I said, it’s very clear why you love being
an officer agrees with you, apparently.”

“Yes, Miss.”

76
 “Now, this is what I was concerned about. You said that you love it,
even sometimes things are ‘not always right’ in the organization. And
then you mentioned some things, lie for instance when the officers have
arguments among themselves or when your classmates come to hate you
for imposing rules on them. These all quiet clear, I think. ”

He was staring at the folder again.

“And then you start talking about the higher officials in the corps.
About how sometimes they---do not behave in very admirable ways. I
mean, how sometimes they can be petty and vindictive and childish.” She
waited for a reply. “Yes?”

“Yes, Miss.”

She inhaled quietly, and went on. “That’s normal, you know. I
mean, adult don’t always grow out of some kinds of behavior right away.
Right?”

“Yes.”

“And then you mentioned Mr. Gacuma.” She had planned to say it
quickly, but had to stop as she forced herself to look at him.

“Yes, Miss.”

His voice was suddenly hoarse, and the words were almost
inaudible.

“Is there something else about him that you didn’t mention in
your essay?”

“No, Miss.” He cleared his throat.

“Because I ----couldn’t quiet understand what you meant when

you said that he was ‘not proper’ in some of his behavior.”

He was staring past her, at the cabinets perhaps.

77
 “In what way Mr. Gacuma ‘not proper’?”

Now he was staring at his lap.

“Luis.”

He shook his head, and shrugged.

“Luis, if there is anything that you want to say, you can tell me.
You wanted to say something in your essay, but I think you decided not
to. Please tell me.”

His gaze flicked towards her, and for a moment he seemed to

waver. But Letty thought that she was leaning too far forward again, or
her face looked too concerned, because he looked away and made little
stretching movements with his shoulders and neck.

“It’s just that I used to admire him so much, and I thought that
he couldn’t be reached by us, us cadets. But I realized that he was also
human, and that he could also have faults like the rest of us.”

“What faults?”

“Nothing, really. Like he also has moody days, he also forgets

things. You know.” He looked at her. “Things like that.”

It was too late. He had closed himself off. He was giving her the
safe rubber stamp replies---the sort of unthreatening, neutral, yet
realistic responses that were expected to him.

“What else?”

“Nothing else, Miss.”

“Luis, are you sure?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“Because you can tell me, you know.”

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 “Yes, Miss.”

She waited for him to say more, but he just stared at her. His
mouth had hardened into a cold line.

“Luis, if there is anything going on among the officers, if one of

the officers is doing something to you that you don’t like, you should say
something about it.” Her voice had taken on a pleading tone, but she no
longer cared. “Even if it involves Mr. Gacuma.”

“There’s nothing at all, Miss.”

“You don’t have to be afraid if you know that what is happening is

wrong. You can’t get into trouble if what you’re doing is the right thing.”

“There’s nothing at all, Miss.”

His voice had turned insistent, defensive. She knew that for some
reason she had become the enemy again.

“Luis, don’t you want it to stop?”

His lips began to tremble, but she knew that it was no use. She
had not approached him in the right way, and now he would never tell
her. She sensed in the way Jambee would give up on explaining how to
use the computer to her or when Icky-boy would refuse to tell her who he
was dating at the moment. She leaned back in her chair.

“You don’t understand.”

His eyes dared her to refute the words. She said nothing, because
she knew he was right. In the end, he was right.

He stood up and left the office. She didn’t follow him.

When she got to athletic field the ceremonies were still in progress.
She saw Gacuma behind the podium on the grandstand, reading out
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cadets’ names from a list. Uniformed boys mounted the stage as they
were called, received a piece of rolled parchment tied with a ribbon, and
turned to their ranks. Not wanting to draw attention to herself, she
decided to wait in Gacuma’s office behind the grandstand.

As she approached the door, it opened and a student in fatigues

stepped out. He was Junior with a white armband that had ‘SP’
appliquéd to it in red plastic. He stopped for a moment and mumbled a
“Good Afternoon” before brushing past her.

She entered the office, which was empty and quite except for the
distant booming of Gacuma’s amplified voice, and looked around. The
office was all angles and hard edge – every fixture, every piece of
furniture was functional in a recognizably military way. The color of the
walls was the sort of toothpaste green seen in public hospitals, and the
tables, chairs, and cabinets were the familiar generic shade of diluted
burnt umber enamel paint. The entire room looked like it had been
painted only a month ago. A tiny dustpan made of quartered cooking oil
can and a piece of wood for a handle stood in the corner. It cradled a
walis tambo whose handle had been shortened to match the dustpan’s
proportions, and whose fan had been worn down almost to the tip of the
broomstick.

She sat on the chair nearest the door, which swung shut with a
gentle click as soon as she let go of it. the seat was made of inch –thick
wooden slats, and there had been some ineffectual attempt to match its
curve to the human anatomy. Each of the officers had a space on the
long desk that ran along the length of two walls. Textbooks were plied
according to size in each place, telling Letty what year each officer was
in.

The sternness that pervaded the room was relieved only by the
presence of photographs. They seemed to be everywhere –taped on

80
cabinet doors , tacked to little corkboards above each desk, or, as in the
case of the table she was sitting beside, protected under glass.

She learned over to get a better look. This was obviously Gacuma’s
place, for the word ‘MAX’ had been cut out of green felt paper in large
block, letters, covered with a camouflage pattern drawn in brown marker,
and arrange in a straight line under glass. Arrayed all around the name
were snapshots of the students in military uniform and graduation
photos. She could tell how old the photos were by the degree to which
they had faded or adhered to the glass. She recognized them and they
had all been in her Senior English classes at one time or another.
Remember Luis’ essay, she shattered and looked away. Their smiling
faces reminded her butterflies impaled on long pins.

Her eyes were met by another photo---- larger, older, framed on the
wall. It was Gacuma, but much, younger, in a cadet’s dress uniform. She
did not have to look at the date to know that photo had been taken in the
early 60’s----she had a photo herself taken in the same style, for the
same purpose there was the same soft focus, the artfully angled body,
the three quarter twist of the torso, and the smile. The smile, she
remembered, was the most important element in a studio portrait. Her
own photographer had fretted over her smile, and satisfy with everyone
she proferred, until, he lost his composure and mad a face. As she
suppressed a giggle, he declared the expression “Right!” and snapped
and stuttered. Gacuma smile, on the other hand, looked fabricated----
just the right amount of curved to bring out his cheekbones without
showing too many teeth. He looked young and fresh and far cry from the
sour, taciturn man he had become.

She stood up and steppedforward to peer at the photo and saw

that she had been deceived. His eyes did not belong with the rest of his
face. They stared at the viewer, not out of frame as was the fashion then.

81
They seemed confident challenging the viewer to pass judgment on the
sitter. At the same time, the shielded the man by showing nothing more.
Their coldness jarred with the portrait intended effect.

The uniform made her think of her own father. In her wallet she
kept an old photo of him in his cadet dress grays. Unsmiling he stood at
attention: he puffed out, his chin tucked in, and his back arched to its
limit. He was a quiet man given to displays of affection. She could not
remember him ever having touches her, except to take her hand when
they crossed the street. Even this happened infrequently. In her memory
he was a dark bulky shape with his back to her, sitting on a chair on the
veranda, emitting languid streams of white smoke touches with twilight
blue at the edges. She wept more than was necessary at his funeral, only
someone who bore no more connection to her than the amiable corporal
assigned to escort her family to military functions when her father was
away on a mission. Still, she wept. Later, when she went away to her
college, she read the people funerals weep not for the dead, but
themselves. Then his histrionics made sense to her.

The severity of the office pressed in on her. She began to ask

herself what she was doing here, but was out the door before an answer
could come. She rushed back along the cement pathway, staring down at
it without blinking. She knew she would go back home and tuck the
folder away in one of the cartons that contained her college notes. She
would forget about the entire incident and the boy would be relieved.
Father Bernie would be relieved too.

She squinted and looked up she was back at the edge of the
covered court. The distribution of certificates was over, and now the
troops were in the middle of an inspection. Or it could have been a
marching demonstration; she couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

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 She squinted and looked for Jambee. She scanned the platoons for
classmates that would lead her to him, but recognized no one. She tried
looking for Luis, as well, but gave up.

The cadets and the officers had turned motionless, and even the
spectators sat on stiff rows. From where she stood no one appeared to be
breathing.

Then her throat jerked in a sudden spasm and she swallowed hard
to suppress the nausea. Her strangled cry was the only sound in the
covered court. She had locked back at the cadets and seen instead a
solid green wall topped by rows and rows of identical stony faces. Their
mouths were all set in the same hard line, their chins set at just the
same angle. Their backs were all arched, and their chests were all puffed
out.

A deep wailing rose from the far end of the field. It began strong
and firm, sustaining the last syllable of a word she didn’t catch at first.
Then she realized that it was the Battalion Commander informing the
Commandant that all the lines and all the rows in all the companies were
straight, perfectly straight. She saw Gacuma stand up and acknowledge
the report with a crisp salute.

She walked to bench and sat down, fighting an ure to burst into
tears. She felt tired, and wanted Jambee to accompany her home, but
she knew that after this there would still be the marching demonstration
before the cadets were released.

She sat through the PasaMasid, reassembly, the last roll call, and
the final dismissal. She stood up as they came towards her in waves. She
realized in relief that she could now pick out individual students in the
crowd as they came nearer or took off their caps. She heard them call out
greetings to her, but managed to respond to only a few.

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 “Mom?”

Jambee was beside her. She fought back an urge to burst into
tears.

“Jambee. I was waiting for you.”

“Mom, I’m going to come home late tonight. I’m going to Emil’s
place to play basketball.”

She wondered if her disappointment had registered on her face.

She caught herself leaning forward too much again, and straightened up
just a little bit.

“I see.”

“Mom, it’s the last day of school.”

“Thanks.”

“Do you have your keys?”

“Yes, mom.”

With a different nod he ran to where his friends were waiting. She
watched them lope off together until they turned a corner and
disappeared from view.

She turned back to the field and saw Luis with the other junior
officers carrying various pieces of equipment back to the office. She
wondered if he had seen her Gacuma walked among them,
distinguishable only by his erect bearing and his more careful, measure
gait. They were talking about something, probably the graduation, and
they all looked very pleased. Even Luis.

They disappeared into the office, probably they put the equipment
away in the proper places. She waited until she could no longer hear

84
their voices before walking back to the Faculty Room. By that time, the
covered court was deserted.

Menstruating in the Month of June

By Dr. Elynia Ruth S. Mabanglo
Translated by Bienvenido Lumbera

Give way to this force -

Power clambering out of the womb
Heat bubbling up at boiling point, flowing, springing out
Freeing itself and enjoying its leisure
Against suppression,
It surges forth, leaving its mark
Even with anxiety standing in the way.

Give way to this force -

This is
The sum of my entire being,
The sum of what makes me myself and makes me
Like other people,
The sum of past memories saved up,
And the present being spent,
The sum of the future I have hocked
To the calendar

Give way to this force -

Let it bleed into the list
Of what I owe and what I have loaned out
Let it leave the imprint of my obligations
And my responsibilities:

85
 To myself, to my clan and to society:
Let it voice out

The plaints and needs

Flow
When many women are poisoning
Ovum and sperm
And others let rot
In rubber sacs
The fruit of loving and love-making.
Ay, what is this movement, this march and litany
To kill off the infant
Without compunction?

In what covert clinics, garbage dump and toilets

Will lust and sin be stored?
Even the orphanage as storehouse
Of responsibilities denied
Carries nature's accusing blame
That cannot be turned aside,
Give way to this force -
Meet with a smirk pain snaking out,
Suffer the whiplash
While acknowledging, acknowledging
The meaning
That sears as it soaks

This is the month of June pouring a toast

86
 Into my glass -
Lover
Spouse
Mistress,
Or paid dispenser of carnal pleasure:
This is testimonial, contract and curse:

This is the base,

The meaning and the hollowness
Of living and surviving.
Give way
To this,
The current of all progress -
There is a breath of hope
Teetering on the levees of this force.

Scent of Apples
Bienvenido N. Santos

When I arrived in Kalamazoo, it was October and the war was still
on. Gold and silver stars hung on pennants above silent windows of
white and brick-red cottages. In a backyard, an old man burned leaves
and twigs while a grey-haired woman sat on the porch, her red hands
quiet on her lap, watching the smoke rising above the elms, both of them
thinking the same thought perhaps, about a tall, grinning boy with his
blue eyes and flying hair, who went out to war: where could he be now
this month when leaves were turning into gold and the fragrance of
gathered apples was in the wind?

87
 It was a cold night when I left my room at the hotel for a usual
speaking engagement. I walked but a little way. A heavy wind coming up
from Lake Michigan was icy on the face. If felt like winter straying early
in the northern woodlands. Under the lampposts, the leaves shone like
bronze. And they rolled on the pavements like the ghost feet of a
thousand autumns long dead, long before the boys left for faraway lands
without great icy winds and promise of winter early in the air, lands
without apple trees, the singing and the gold!

It was the same night I met Celestino Fabia, "just a Filipino farmer"
as he called himself, who had a farm about thirty miles east of
Kalamazoo.

"You came all that way on a night like this just to hear me talk?"

"I've seen no Filipino for so many years now," he answered quickly.

"So when I saw your name in the papers where it says you come from the
Islands and that you're going to talk, I come right away."

Earlier that night, I had addressed a college crowd, mostly women.

It appeared they wanted me to talk about my country, they wanted me to
tell them things about it because my country had become a lost country.
Everywhere in the land the enemy stalked. Over it, a great silence hung,
and their boys were there, unheard from, or they were on their way to
some little known island on the Pacific, young boys all, hardly men,
thinking of harvest moons and the smell of forest fire.

It was not hard talking about our own people. I knew them well
and I loved them. And they seemed so far away during those terrible
years that I must have spoken of them with a little fervour, a little
nostalgia.

In the open forum that followed, the audience wanted to know

whether there was much difference between our women and the

88
American women. I tried to answer the question as best I could, saying,
among other things, that I did not know that much about American
women, except that they looked friendly, but differences or similarities in
inner qualities such as naturally belonged to the heart or to the mind, I
could only speak about with vagueness.

While I was trying to explain away the fact that it was not easy to
make comparisons, a man rose from the rear of the hall, wanting to say
something. In the distance, he looked slight and old and very brown.
Even before he spoke, I knew that he was, like me, a Filipino.

"I'm a Filipino," he began, loud and clear, in a voice that seemed

used to wide open spaces, "I'm just a Filipino farmer out in the country."
He waved his hand toward the door. "I left the Philippines more than
twenty years ago and have never been back. Never will perhaps. I want to
find out, sir, are our Filipino women the same like they were twenty
years ago?"

As he sat down, the hall filled with voices, hushed and intrigued. I
weighed my answer carefully. I did not want to tell a lie yet I did not want
to say anything that would seem platitudinous, insincere. But more
important than these considerations, it seemed to me that moment as I
looked towards my countryman, I must give him an answer that would
not make him so unhappy. Surely, all these years, he must have held on
to certain ideals, certain beliefs, even illusions peculiar to the exile.

"First," I said as the voices gradually died down and every eye
seemed upon me, "First, tell me what our women were like twenty years
ago."

The man stood to answer. "Yes," he said, "you're too young . . .

Twenty years ago our women were nice, they were modest, they wore
their hair long, they dressed proper and went for no monkey business.
They were natural, they went to church regular, and they were faithful."

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He had spoken slowly, and now in what seemed like an afterthought,
added, "It's the men who ain't."

Now I knew what I was going to say.

"Well," I began, "it will interest you to know that our women have
changed--but definitely! The change, however, has been on the outside
only. Inside, here," pointing to the heart, "they are the same as they were
twenty years ago. God-fearing, faithful, modest, and nice."

The man was visibly moved. "I'm very happy, sir," he said, in the
manner of one who, having stakes on the land, had found no cause to
regret one's sentimental investment.

After this, everything that was said and done in that hall that night
seemed like an anti-climax, and later, as we walked outside, he gave me
his name and told me of his farm thirty miles east of the city.

We had stopped at the main entrance to the hotel lobby. We had

not talked very much on the way. As a matter of fact, we were never
alone. Kindly American friends talked to us, asked us questions, said
goodnight. So now I asked him whether he cared to step into the lobby
with me and talk.

"No, thank you," he said, "you are tired. And I don't want to stay
out too late."

"Yes, you live very far."

"I got a car," he said, "besides . . . "

Now he smiled, he truly smiled. All night I had been watching his
face and I wondered when he was going to smile.

"Will you do me a favor, please," he continued smiling almost

sweetly. "I want you to have dinner with my family out in the country. I'd

90
call for you tomorrow afternoon, then drive you back. Will that be
alright?"

"Of course," I said. "I'd love to meet your family." I was leaving
Kalamazoo for Muncie, Indiana, in two days. There was plenty of time.

"You will make my wife very happy," he said.

"You flatter me."

"Honest. She'll be very happy. Ruth is a country girl and hasn't

met many Filipinos. I mean Filipinos younger than I, cleaner looking.
We're just poor farmer folk, you know, and we don't get to town very
often. Roger, that's my boy, he goes to school in town. A bus takes him
early in the morning and he's back in the afternoon. He's nice boy."

"I bet he is," I agreed. "I've seen the children of some of the boys by
their American wives and the boys are tall, taller than their father, and
very good looking."

"Roger, he'd be tall. You'll like him."

Then he said goodbye and I waved to him as he disappeared in the

darkness.

The next day he came, at about three in the afternoon. There was a
mild, ineffectual sun shining, and it was not too cold. He was wearing an
old brown tweed jacket and worsted trousers to match. His shoes were
polished, and although the green of his tie seemed faded, a colored shirt
hardly accentuated it. He looked younger than he appeared the night
before now that he was clean shaven and seemed ready to go to a party.
He was grinning as we met.

"Oh, Ruth can't believe it," he kept repeating as he led me to his

car--a nondescript thing in faded black that had known better days and
many hands. "I says to her, I'm bringing you a first class Filipino, and

91
she says, aw, go away, quit kidding, there's no such thing as first class
Filipino. But Roger, that's my boy, he believed me immediately. “What he
is like, daddy,” he asks. Oh, you will see, I says, he's first class. Like you
daddy? No, no, I laugh at him, your daddy isn’t first class. Aw, but you
are, daddy, he says. So you can see what a nice boy he is, so innocent.
Then Ruth starts griping about the house, but the house is a mess, she
says. True it's a mess, it's always a mess, but you don't mind, do you?
We're poor folks, you know.

The trip seemed interminable. We passed through narrow lanes

and disappeared into thickets, and came out on barren land overgrown
with weeds in places. All around were dead leaves and dry earth. In the
distance were apple trees.

"Aren't those apple trees?" I asked wanting to be sure.

"Yes, those are apple trees," he replied. "Do you like apples? I got
lots of 'em. I got an apple orchard, I'll show you."

All the beauty of the afternoon seemed in the distance, on the hills,
in the dull soft sky.

"Those trees are beautiful on the hills," I said.

"Autumn's a lovely season. The trees are getting ready to die, and
they show their colors, proud-like."

"No such thing in our own country," I said.

That remark seemed unkind, I realized later. It touched him off on

a long deserted tangent, but ever there perhaps. How many times did
lonely mind take unpleasant detours away from the familiar winding
lanes towards home for fear of this, the remembered hurt, the long lost
youth, the grim shadows of the years; how many times indeed, only the
exile knows.

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 It was a rugged road we were traveling and the car made so much
noise that I could not hear everything he said, but I understood him. He
was telling his story for the first time in many years. He was
remembering his own youth. He was thinking of home. In these odd
moments there seemed no cause for fear no cause at all, no pain. That
would come later. In the night perhaps. Or lonely on the farm under the
apple trees.

In this old Visayan town, the streets are narrow and dirty and
strewn with coral shells. You have been there? You could not have
missed our house, it was the biggest in town, one of the oldest, ours was
a big family. The house stood right on the edge of the street. A door
opened heavily and you enter a dark hall leading to the stairs. There is
the smell of chickens roosting on the low-topped walls, there is the
familiar sound they make and you grope your way up a massive
staircase, the bannisters smooth upon the trembling hand. Such nights,
they are no better than the days, windows are closed against the sun;
they close heavily.

Mother sits in her corner looking very white and sick. This was her
world, her domain. In all these years, I cannot remember the sound of
her voice. Father was different. He moved about. He shouted. He ranted.
He lived in the past and talked of honor as though it were the only thing.

I was born in that house. I grew up there into a pampered brat. I

was mean. One day I broke their hearts. I saw mother cry wordlessly as
father heaped his curses upon me and drove me out of the house, the
gate closing heavily after me. And my brothers and sisters took up my
father's hate for me and multiplied it numberless times in their own
broken hearts. I was no good.

But sometimes, you know, I miss that house, the roosting chickens
on the low-topped walls. I miss my brothers and sisters, Mother sitting in

93
her chair, looking like a pale ghost in a corner of the room. I would
remember the great live posts, massive tree trunks from the forests.
Leafy plants grew on the sides, buds pointing downwards, wilted and
died before they could become flowers. As they fell on the floor, father
bent to pick them and throw them out into the coral streets. His hands
were strong. I have kissed these hands . . . many times, many times.

Finally we rounded a deep curve and suddenly came upon a

shanty, all but ready to crumble in a heap on the ground, its plastered
walls were rotting away, the floor was hardly a foot from the ground. I
thought of the cottages of the poor colored folk in the south, the hovels of
the poor everywhere in the land. This one stood all by itself as though by
common consent all the folk that used to live here had decided to say
away, despising it, ashamed of it. Even the lovely season could not color
it with beauty.

A dog barked loudly as we approached. A fat blonde woman stood

at the door with a little boy by her side. Roger seemed newly scrubbed.
He hardly took his eyes off me. Ruth had a clean apron around her
shapeless waist. Now as she shook my hands in sincere delight I noticed
shamefacedly (that I should notice) how rough her hands were, how
coarse and red with labor, how ugly! She was no longer young and her
smile was pathetic.

As we stepped inside and the door closed behind us, immediately I

was aware of the familiar scent of apples. The room was bare except for a
few ancient pieces of second-hand furniture. In the middle of the room
stood a stove to keep the family warm in winter. The walls were bare.
Over the dining table hung a lamp yet unlighted.

Ruth got busy with the drinks. She kept coming in and out of a
rear room that must have been the kitchen and soon the table was heavy
with food, fried chicken legs and rice, and green peas and corn on the

94
ear. Even as we ate, Ruth kept standing, and going to the kitchen for
more food. Roger ate like a little gentleman.

"Isn't he nice looking?" his father asked.

"You are a handsome boy, Roger," I said.

The boy smiled at me. You look like Daddy," he said.

Afterwards I noticed an old picture leaning on the top of a dresser

and stood to pick it up. It was yellow and soiled with many fingerings.
The faded figure of a woman in Philippine dress could yet be
distinguished although the face had become a blur.

"Your . . . " I began.

"I don't know who she is," Fabia hastened to say. "I picked that
picture many years ago in a room on La Salle Street in Chicago. I have
often wondered who she is."

"The face wasn't a blur in the beginning?"

"Oh, no. It was a young face and good."

Ruth came with a plate full of apples.

"Ah," I cried, picking out a ripe one. "I've been thinking where all
the scent of apples came from. The room is full of it."

"I'll show you," said Fabia.

He showed me a backroom, not very big. It was half-full of apples.

"Every day," he explained, "I take some of them to town to sell to

the groceries. Prices have been low. I've been losing on the trips."

"These apples will spoil," I said.

"We'll feed them to the pigs."

95
 Then he showed me around the farm. It was twilight now and the
apple trees stood bare against a glowing western sky. In apple blossom
time it must be lovely here. But what about wintertime?

One day, according to Fabia, a few years ago, before Roger was
born, he had an attack of acute appendicitis. It was deep winter. The
snow lay heavy everywhere. Ruth was pregnant and none too well
herself. At first she did not know what to do. She bundled him in warm
clothing and put him on a cot near the stove. She shovelled the snow
from their front door and practically carried the suffering man on her
shoulders, dragging him through the newly made path towards the road
where they waited for the U.S. Mail car to pass. Meanwhile snowflakes
poured all over them and she kept rubbing the man's arms and legs as
she herself nearly froze to death.

"Go back to the house, Ruth!" her husband cried, "you'll freeze to
death."

But she clung to him wordlessly. Even as she massaged his arms
and legs, her tears rolled down her cheeks. "I won't leave you," she
repeated.

Finally the U.S. Mail car arrived. The mailman, who knew them
well, helped them board the car, and, without stopping on his usual
route, took the sick man and his wife direct to the nearest hospital.

Ruth stayed in the hospital with Fabia. She slept in a corridor

outside the patients' ward and in the day time helped in scrubbing the
floor and washing the dishes and cleaning the men's things. They didn't
have enough money and Ruth was willing to work like a slave.

"Ruth's a nice girl," said Fabia, "like our own Filipino women."

Before nightfall, he took me back to the hotel. Ruth and Roger

stood at the door holding hands and smiling at me. From inside the room

96
of the shanty, a low light flickered. I had a last glimpse of the apple trees
in the orchard under the darkened sky as Fabia backed up the car. And
soon we were on our way back to town. The dog had started barking. We
could hear it for some time, until finally, we could not hear it anymore,
and all was darkness around us, except where the headlamps revealed a
stretch of road leading somewhere.

Fabia did not talk this time. I didn't seem to have anything to say
myself. But when finally we came to the hotel and I got down, Fabia said,
"Well, I guess I won't be seeing you again."

It was dimly lighted in front of the hotel and I could hardly see
Fabia's face. Without getting off the car, he moved to where I had sat,
and I saw him extend his hand. I gripped it.

"Tell Ruth and Roger," I said, "I love them."

He dropped my hand quickly. "They'll be waiting for me now," he

said.

"Look," I said, not knowing why I said it, "one of these days, very
soon, I hope, I'll be going home. I could go to your town."

"No," he said softly, sounding very much defeated but brave,

"Thanks a lot. But, you see, nobody would remember me now."

Then he started the car, and as it moved away, he waved his hand.

"Goodbye," I said, waving back into the darkness. And suddenly

the night was cold like winter straying early in these northern
woodlands.

I hurried inside. There was a train the next morning that left for
Muncie, Indiana, at a quarter after eight.

97
 A Borderless World

Patricia Evangelista

WHEN I was little, I wanted what many Filipino children all over
the country wanted. I wanted to be blond, blue-eyed and white.

I thought -- if I just wished hard enough and was good enough, I'd
wake up on Christmas morning with snow outside my window and
freckles across my nose!

More than four centuries under western domination can do that to

you. I have 16 cousins. In a couple of years, there will just be five of us
left in the Philippines, the rest will have gone abroad in search of
"greener pastures." It's not an anomaly; it's a trend; the Filipino diaspora.
Today, about eight million Filipinos are scattered around the world.

There are those who disapprove of Filipinos who choose to leave. I

used to. Maybe this is a natural reaction of someone who was left
behind, smiling for family pictures that get emptier with each succeeding
year. Desertion, I called it. My country is a land that has perpetually
fought for the freedom to be itself. Our heroes offered their lives in the
struggle against the Spanish, the Japanese, and the Americans. To pack
up and deny that identity is tantamount to spitting on that sacrifice.

Or is it? I don't think so. Not anymore.

True, there is no denying this phenomenon, aided by the fact that

what was once the other side of the world is now a 12-hour plane ride
away. But this is a borderless world, where no individual can claim to be
purely from where he is now. My mother is of Chinese descent, my father
is a quarter Spanish, and I call myself a pure Filipino -- a hybrid of sorts
resulting from a combination of cultures.

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 Each square mile anywhere in the world is made up of people of
different ethnicities, with national identities and individual personalities.
Because of this, each square mile is already a microcosm of the world. In
as much as this blessed spot that is England is the world, so is my
neighborhood back home.

Filipino Diaspora

Seen this way, the Filipino Diaspora, or any sort of dispersal of

populations, is not as ominous as so many claim. It must be understood.
I come from a Third World country, one that is still trying mightily to get
back on its feet after many years of dictatorship. But we shall make it,
given more time. Especially now, when we have thousands of eager
young minds who graduate from college every year. They have skills.
They need jobs. We cannot absorb them all.

A borderless world presents a bigger opportunity, yet one that is

not so much abandonment but an extension of identity. Even as we take,
we give back. We are the 40,000 skilled nurses who support the United
Kingdom's National Health Service. We are the quarter-of-a- million
seafarers manning most of the world's commercial ships. We are your
software engineers in Ireland, your construction workers in the Middle
East, your doctors and caregivers in North America, and, your musical
artists in London's West End.

Nationalism isn't bound by time or place. People from other

nations migrate to create new nations, yet still remain essentially who
they are. British society is itself an example of a multi-cultural nation, a
melting pot of races, religions, arts and cultures. We are, indeed, in a
borderless world!

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 Leaving sometimes isn't a matter of choice. It's coming back that
is. The Hobbits of the shire travelled all over Middle-Earth, but they
chose to come home, richer in every sense of the word. We call people
like these balikbayans or the "returnees" -- those who followed their
dream, yet choose to return and share their mature talents and good
fortune.

In a few years, I may take advantage of whatever opportunities that

come my way. But I will come home. A borderless world doesn't preclude
the idea of a home. I'm a Filipino, and I'll always be one. It isn't
geography; it isn't about boundaries. It's about giving back to the country
that shaped me.

And that's going to be more important to me than seeing snow

outside my window on a bright Christmas morning.

“Mabuhay and thank you.”

Pinay's Letter from Brunei

"Liham ni Pinay mula sa Brunei"
By: Elynia Ruth S.Mabanglo (1987)

I am a teacher, wife and mother

A women, kissed by perfume, powder and silk
Intimate with the wash rub, pots and bed.
Seemingly weary and bored
I seek to go abroad

Always the same man sits at the head of the table

He reads the newspaper each morning
He waits for his coffee
And smokers,
While I am restrained by the crib and books,

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 I apply my lipstick and let the faucet drip
He does not stir
Even if the pots burn or the children whimper.
In the bathroom I hand him his underwear and towel,
I comfort him when he is edgy.
He has no explanation for
Why he stays out all night,
But his forehead is furrowed
When I leave on Sunday.
He does not like galunggong and saluyot
Even though the pay envelope is flat
He seems to still want me to perform miracles
Even if the rent money is always short.

I am a teacher, wife and mother.

A woman weary of being a women.
Designated by my genitalia
Assigned to the broom the wash and lullaby
Even with a profession and salary.
Always the same daily routine
The drudgery spread out in the length
Of the house and school,
Of the kitchen and bed.

Do I have the right to sulk?

Where will run when I am sad?
He has a beerhouse and massage parlor hangout
My partner who craves,
I wait by the window.
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 My body blazes with my ambitions,
My tongue has a cross and is barred to speak.
My children are asking for bread,
I turn up the volume of the radio,
It seems I am weary and bored,
I seek to go abroad.

It was then I dreamt I was wearing pants.

I sent dollars and pasalubong
I can now breathe freely,
My lips are without keys, my mind is open
I confess that I am lonely
Even if now I make my own coffee,
I wait for letters at the gate and door,
On the phone my heart is replenished.
I cried in the beginning,
It appears that everything can be cured by reading.
This is the only answer,
Leave the man to wash the sheets.

The Woman in the Box

By: Jose Dalisay, Jr.

On a cloud-curtained evening, one Saturday in August, a corpse

zinc casket in a wooden crate at Ninoy Aquino International Airport. 237
kilometers west of Paez. The Cargo manifest put the dead woman’s name
down as “Cabahug, Aurora V.” At 1834 hours, just as the city’s driver
began switching their headlights on and a million gas stoves roared to

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life, Aurora V. Cabahug’s flight rejoined the earth, although the woman
herself did not, just yet; She lay deep in the Gulf Air 747’s cargo bay
where it was coldest, a bulkhead away from the tiger orchids and the
apricots. She had left Jeddah earlier that day – much earlier than the
time itself suggested, because the plane flew ahead of the clock – 4,053
miles from Jeddah to Bangkok, pausing there for an hour and 25
minutes to take on the orchids and other precious perishables before
hauling them another 1,368 miles to Manila. She was offered within an
hour, and the 747 returned to Jeddah, again via Bangkok, on schedule
at 10:20 the next morning, but it took three more days in a refrigerated
customs warehouse before Aurora v. Cabahug’s body re-emerged into her
country’s microbe-friendly warmth.

It was a journey that took over 5,000 miles and stretched the
daylight with it for most of the way across the Indian Ocean. The plane
was filled to capacity when it left Bangkok, where another Manila-bound
Thai Airways jet, passing through from Frankfurt, had found a problem
with its hydraulics and moved 23 of its 86 Filipino passengers onto the
Gulf Air flight. The newcomers settled into whatever seats were available,
dislodging duty-free stereos and other carry-on presents, and conjoining
dentist with mechanic, pianist with manicurist, professor with pipefitter.
As they were wont to do, the Filipino workers clapped and cheered in
their seats as the plan’s wheels touched the runaway; a few made the
Sign of the Cross and shut their eyes in mumbled prayer. The flight
attendants and the Saudi businessmen were inured to these outbursts,
but some Filipinos who had transited in Bangkok from their seminars in
Louvain and pilgrimages to Rome felt unnerved and embarrassed by the
applause that swept the cabin, and studiously looked straight ahead or
at their watches and magazines. Their rowdier countrymen pressed their

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noses to the window as if there was a chance of the airport lights
expiring the plane veering back into binding desert.

At Ninoy Aquino, a total of three pilots, eight flight attendants, and

267 passengers walked off the plane into the funnel at the arrivals area.
The crew fled through an express lane past immigration and customs
into a van that whisked them off to their hotel on the edge of the bay.
The rest of the living , prized possessions in hand, marched into the
steamy welcome of passport control, baggage claim, customs, the
grinning mob across the arrivals fence, the purring taxicabs and
jeepneys and a tumultuous downpour that blurred glasses and windows
and drove people to quick and convenient and sometimes disastrous
decisions. The next day’s noontime news would carry a story about two
masons and an electrician losing a year’s wages earned at Al-Khobar to
gang that offered them a cheap lift to Novaliches in their Tamaraw FX;
unreported, a beautician from Dammam, falling to spot her boyfriend in
the rain, spent the night in a Pasay motel with helpful cop whose jeep
she rode; even the flight crew’s Nissan Vanette lost whatever time they
had made at the airport when its driver took what he thought was a
shortcut through the mounting traffic, and wound up stuck in an alley
behind a truck bearing a load of bicycles and mattresses. The shower
made taunted drums of galvanized iron roofs and bounced off hastily
summoned tarpaulins, seeking the quickest route back home to open
water but foiled at every turn.

The dead woman faced no such complications, was finally beyond

all schedules and sudden changes in the weather. There was a problem
with her body – no one who should have known had been told that it was
there – but it was nothing she could do anything about; for now and
forever. And there seemed a little more that anyone could do for her and
to her, beyond this grudging gesture of a free ride home, the enactment
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of a clause in an article in a section of a law governing citizens in her
situation: dead but not quite buried.

The death certificate taped in a pouch onto her casket would

simply say that she had died by drowning: “Drowned per forensic
Jeddah.” In the last moments of its breathing life – either shortly before,
or shortly after – this body met water, and then consumed and was
consumed by it. No other papers came with it – no police report, no
autopsy, just that certificate stamped by airport security at Jeddah’s
Abdul Aziz. The consulate and the local police in Jeddah could not locate
her passport – which was customarily confiscated from foreign workers
by their employers in lieu of an iqama, or a temporary identity card, but
even this iqama was absent from the body they had recovered. And thus
it had taken the authorities some time to establish her identity; certainly
they could not have done this from her bloated face. Once her
waterlogged abaya had dried, it yielded some clues from the poor quality
and cut off the fabric, which suggested a woman of low station. No Saudi
woman from Jeddah had been reported missing for the past three days,
which seemed about the time the body had spent in the water, and so
inquiries were made about missing or escaped foreign maids and
workers—a search that came up with no less than 163 names, just over
the past six months, involving everything from Sudanese and Russian
prostitutes to Indonesian cooks—but one report sounded particularly
persuasive, and it had to do with the sudden disappearance from her
place of employment of one Aurora V. Cabahug, 26 from the Philippines.
She had been reported missing in the company of another maid from
India named Meenakshi, presumably another runaway. Upon polite
interrogation, Cabahug’s employer, no less than a Saudi prince speaking
through a subordinate named Yusuf, claimed that the two had vanished
many days earlier, taking stolen goods with them, including a gold
Montblanc fountain pen Prince Khaled had left on his night table: despite
105
his master’s paternal trust and care, said Yusuf, they proved thieves and
ingrates, both and the lot of them.

And so the woman’s body was remanded to the care of the

embassy authorities and, through them, to “OWWO Manila”—the
Overseas Workers Welfare Office. If no one came forward to claim Aurora
V. Cabuhug from the NAIA cargo section, it would fall on an OWWO clerk
to march down several flights of stairs to a basement where the plumbing
touched knees and elbows with row upon row of steel filing the cabinets,
and paw through damp, smelly folders to recover the bare details of her
life: date of birth, place of birth, civil status, height, weight, permanent
address.

Nobody had come to meet her; nobody had known she was there,
because a Filipino vice-consul in Riyadh had mixed up his homebound
corpses—there were three of them that week in various stages of
paperwork: one in Jeddah, one in Riyadh, and another in Yanbu—and
had sent this one ahead of a headless man a convict punished for
stabbing his Saudi employer’s wife in an argument over missing jewelry
(and, the court established, unsavory glances cast at the eldest
daughter).

This vice-consul surnamed Quirante had had a very rough week,

even rougher than the usual, because another knot of distressed maids
had sought refuge at the embassy, and it was one of his many jobs to
apportion the sleeping-space and provide for their beddings in the
temporary quarters they had set up for these runaways. His only
consolation was that, now and then, one of these frightened faces would
106
be uncommonly pretty, and with much ceremoniousness he would
somehow manage to secure the best spot and sweet desserts for her,
then seek what he felt was his just gratuity for the extra service. A few
nights before the woman’s body flew home, his intended victim—a
seamstress from Muntinlupa—had bitten him on the nose like a cornered
dog, and in his pain and anger, lasting well into the next morning, he
had switched the woman’s papers with the beheaded man’s, causing her
immediate release from the embassy’s purview, and her departure soon
after.

And so it happened that a family of seven had come all the way in
a jeepney from Lingayen to meet and to claim the two segments of
Filemon Catabay, who had been executed three months earlier. They had
learned of his death the way many others did—after it happened, from a
routine news report on DZXL, between an involved discussion of a movie
star’s rumored abortion and a commercial for a new and more potent
livestock dewormer. The man’s mother was gutting fish when her
grandson ran in the news: the fish she was holding trembled in her hand
and then leapt out altogether in a final spasm, as though it had come
back to life.

THERE WAS nothing funny, nothing at all, about this woman’s

body and how it mouldered away in that box, awaiting its anguished
claimants. The only one to find humor in the situation was a security
guard named Al Viduya, who thought he had seen everything that could
happen between two people in that airport, including a fast and furious
bout of lovemaking between a departing congressman and his chief of
staff—who answered to the name of Marvin—in the lavatory.

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 When the crate arrived, Al had just finished his supper of fish in
black bean sauce, two cups of rice, a glass of watery coffee, and a
banana, taken in the outdoor stall just beyond the airport fence. One of
the new helpers a girl from Ozamis, and had blushed when he mentioned
a Sunday walk at the Luneta, and how relaxing and cheap it was to
spend the night on the grass, like many couples did. I’ll give her a week,
he thought, picking the fish out of his teeth—or was it the young gummy
banana—as he strode through the gate toward the cargo warehouse. The
downpour had spent itself while he was eating and there were oil-
streaked pools of water all over asphalt. Al had to skip and hop between
the puddles to keep his newly polished shoes clean and dry. He felt badly
like a smoke but his shift was starting an hour earlier than usual
because the other fellow was in a hurry to meet his date in Sta. Cruz. It
was an easy favor to grant; “You reap what you sow,” Brother Mike liked
to preach in the park, and Al had no doubt that he would make his
kindness back in spades. But maybe not tonight. A sniveling knot had
already formed at the door, clutching dirty little handkerchiefs and one
another’s hand. They huddled close to the wall, taking advantage of a
small overhang in the root to keep out of the rain, though not too
successfully. Their clothes and their feet were soaked, although none of
them seemed to mind.

Their presence could only mean the arrival of a new body in cold
storage. Whoever it was, it drew the usual gaggle of squashed brown
faces that didn’t know quite where to look or what expression to put on,
urging each other to be brave while going to pieces at the same time, like
the young woman, probably a sister, who kept punching her male
companion’s arm; the man paid her no heed and seemed to be more
interested in the goings-on at the arrivals area, where a crowd of
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autograph-seekers had formed around a big black man in shades and a
shiny green suit. And then there were the kids, all four of them from a
quiet boy of about 14 to a little girl who clung to an old woman’s hand;
the other boy and girl in between were arguing over something the girl
was holding on to--- a picture or a card, Al couldn’t tell, but it was
getting out of hand and their kuya shushed them; he seemed to be the
only one whose eyed bored through the concrete wall and who had
already seen what lay there. He was the wettest of them all, and his spiky
hair glistened like a crown.

The woman in the dark brown dress had to be their grandmother;

the old ones always looked stunned and out of place, like they had a
mistake in letting themselves be dragged here when there were mosquito
nets to be mended or rice cakes to be shaped at home. Al wondered
where the wife or the husband was; usually they stood or sat in a corner,
the husband punch-drunk, the wife puffing away at cigarettes chain-lit
by her best friend. No one stood out in this configuration. The
grandmother faced the door that said CARGO but it was shut and there
was nothing to see, and even if it opened they still would see nothing if
he didn’t let them. Only Al could open the door from this side of the
building. They could still wheel cargo in from incoming flights and
another guard minded the larger doors in the rear. It was past office
hours and all the clerks had gone home at midday. From the public and
the visible end, only Al had the key, the real key to everything that
everyone waited for from the far ends of the earth.
“We want to see him,” said the whimpering woman as Al
approached the door.

“See who?”

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 “My brother.”

“My father! My father!” said the girl holding the picture.

“My son…. Filemon, oh my son Filemon….” said the old woman, a

great cry welling up in her chest.

Al could hear it coming; the keening spiral of emotions that sucked

some people into a family and spat others out. It was strange how;
outside of the movies, grief could be so particular. You walked into a
funeral parlor and in every room was a family weeping like mad over the
loss of one of its own, but who couldn’t have cared less if the corpse next
door was that of the President, or of a girl who sold sampaguitas to feed
her siblings and who’d been run over by a truck. You grieved for your
own. And, Al was convinced, you could grieve only so much. He had lost
his only brother. He had lost his only brother to tuberculosis five years
earlier; he shed tears at the hospital for three minutes, then took a
jeepney back to work. Sometimes, at the Luneta, he found himself
weeping at Brother’s Mike sermons, but it wasn’t for grief or anything
like that; in fact it felt good, so good that everyone else around him was
crying, too. It was almost like a family, a very big and happy family.
These people before him would get over it and find better things to do
and to pray for.

“Can I see my son?” the mother asked.

“He arrived tonight, on the Jeddah flight,” said the sister.

“Where’s Papa?” the young boy asked.

110
 “What’s his name?” Al said despite himself, fumbling with the lock.

“Filemon Catabay,” said the elder son. “Filemon Catabay, Senior.”

The mother and sister rushed behind Al as he stepped behind Al

as he stepped inside but he was expecting it and turned with one foot
still out the door. You can’t come in, I’m sorry, this arca’s restricted.”

“We’ve waited month to see him,” the sister pleaded, and Al wanted
to tell her that there couldn’t be much left of the man to see after all that
time, and that poor Filemon wasn’t going to mind it if they saw him
another day. But Al thought the letter of his remark. Just a year earlier
he would have gruffly driven them away, but he was learning that
patience and forbearance were the most Christian of virtue, and led to
commensurately generous rewards.

"You'll have to wait until the office opens tomorrow. There'll be

manifests to check, papers to sign. It isn't as simple as you think-"

"I'm getting wet!" the little boy shouted.

"They cut off his head," the little girl said to Al bravely, as though
she was telling him about how she had lost a shaky tooth.

"Catabay," Al said, repeating the man's name for his own benefit. "I
can't let you in. But I can check if the body's here. Wait and I'll have a
look."

They usually whined when he said "the body" but he believed that
it did them good to come to terms with the terrible facts, the better to
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prompt their faith in another life. Al went inside and locked the door
behind him. He could have gone to sleep that very minute and be certain
that they would still be there, poised to rush forward, when he opened
the door the next morning. But there was no question of Al himself
peeking into the casket, so soon after his supper. It was boarded up to
begin with, and he had neither the authority nor the inclination to pry it
open. The best he could do was to verify the name. Often that was all
these people needed, to get on with their lives--and, in many cases, the
new mates they had found to keep them company in the long meanwhile.

He turned up his jacket collar and went through another door to

the refrigerated section. The fluorescent light threw a greenish pallor on
the crates and boxes piled high on pallets on the floor. Some special
items--life-and-death serums and such, imported from places like the US
or Switzerland-went into freezer chests and upright cabinets with
thermostats. If the building lost power, a standby generator was
supposed to kick in automatically, but Al knew from experience that that
didn't happen; he and whoever else was on duty would have had to start
up the generator manually, because something was wrong with those
gauges and dials that no one seemed to know or to worry about. Once,
during a brownout, they discovered that the generator was out of gas.
Eventually they brought the cooling back, losing an hour to the welling
heat, and refroze everything with no one the wiser, but a batch of drugs
went bad in the meantime and later killed a retired constabulary major
somewhere in the Visayas. At least that's what the lawyers said in the
inquiry that followed; people got paid out of the insurance money, and
the guards on duty, who didn't include Al, were sacked. This was why Al
felt doubly responsible for any incidents on his watch. It was his job in
all those boxes, his life, his sardines and Philip Morrises.

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 The telephone rang somewhere behind him, breaking the tinny
thrum of the air-conditioning. Al knew better than to mind it; almost
certainly it was some excitable importer wanting to know if his shipment
had come in, so he could spend the weekend jet-skiing with his girlfriend
in Subic while figuring his profits. Let him wait, Al thought, or let him do
like tha Catabays did, and plead his case in person at the door. After six
or seven rings the phone fell quiet, and then resumed its clamor. Al went
deeper into the room and farther away from the ringing, until he reached
the corner where the crated coffins were usually kept. There was only
one of them now-a fresh arrival, he could tell, yesterday's two bodies
having lain on the left and have been forwarded that morning to their
ultimate destinations. At least one of them turned up on the tarmac and
in his warehouse every day, sometimes two, sometimes more, like the
random victims of a fire or a car crash happening very far away, too far
to be seen or heard. He'd read a story in People's Tonight about how, the
year just past, more than 600 of these bodies had gone through the
airport, and even he, who'd signed most of them out, felt surprised by the
figure, which sounded like another media exaggeration designed to
embarrass the government he'd voted for. From where he stood they all
looked the same, and it was easy to lose track of the big figures. Al had
asked a cabin steward once how many people a 747 carried. Six hundred
bodies: it was as if two fully loaded jumbo jets had collided in mid-air,
killing everyone on board from the captain down to the tiniest tot-and
you had to face the certainty of one of these disasters happening every
year. It wasn't the numbers that upset Al so much as the silliness of
people; he'd never been abroad hinself yet-that was high in his list of
prayers, next to winning the lottery and meeting the right girl-but acts of
God aside, he couldn't believe how his countrymen could blow their
lifetime's chance at happiness so badly. He remembered the tabloid story
about two Filipino sailors who died on a Norwegian ship on its way to
South Korea. Well, sailors died at sea all the time, but these two Pinoys
113
had implanted bits of reindeer horn-Rudolph was the only reindeer Al
knew anything about-into their penises, bringing on severe tetanus, viral
infection, and an excruciating death in mid-ocean. Their widows claimed
death benefits and received something like $13,000 each plus back
wages, so it wasn't all a waste as sailors' lives went, but-frothed the
wags, over their beer-what a waste of penis, not to speak of reindeer
horn.

Al dropped to one knee beside the crate to look for some

identification; sometimes an agent or a handler scrawled the name
across the pinewood crate in chalk or with a sign pen, especially if they
came in groups. He wondered at the same time
if it was better for all those people to die at once and have it done with, or
for this steady trickle of Catabays, Pamintuans, and del Rosarios to
continue. Before he could make up his mind, he found the plastic pouch-
a kind of airwaybill - taped onto the crate , in which he could make out
(rubbing the beaded moisture off the surface of the pouch , and squinting
mightily in the unhelpful light) the typewritten name of the
deceased:CABAHUG,AURORA V. He looked again, to make sure that
there was no mistake, chuckled at his discovery, and then got up to
comfort the bereaved, who had all been crying for the wrong person.

"HES NOT here. There’s a coffin in there but it's someone else's." Al
kept the door half-open but stayed inside, wanting to keep the exchange
as brief as necessary, so he could go to the toilet and light up a cigarette.

For a few seconds no one could speak. Were they supposed to feel
joy, relief, anger, indignation? Were they supposed to take his words, this
gate keeper who knew nothing about the kind of man Filemon was like,
and even how he had looked in life?

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 Finally the brother-in-law, who had driven his jeepney all the way
from Lingayen to bring the body back, came to his senses." What do you
mean 'He's not there'?" he demanded." Look again. The office told us to
expect him today. There must be some mistake. You must be mistaken."

Al stopped himself from grinning at what the man was saying.

"You're right, there's been a mistake- but I didn't make it. Aurora - you
know a woman named Aurora? She's the woman in the box."

"What woman?" The mother sounded even more lost than ever."
Where's my son?"

Maybe back in Dubai or Kuwait or wherever he was supposed to

come from.Im sorry, but there's only one body in there. It came on the
Jeddah flight, and it's not your son's."

"Please let us have a look-"

"You can't do that. Those boxes are sealed .This area's restricted."

"Where's Papa?" Said the older girl.

"They cut off his head," said her small cousin.

"What can we do?" said her uncle.

"Call the office again.But call them or come back on Monday, no

one will be in tomorrow."

"We live in Lingayen. We came on my jeepney."

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 "Then sleep in it, people do it all time. You can use the public
toilets- not for bathing, of course, or you'll use up all the water in
drums."

Filemon's sister and her husband looked at each other and at the
children. The eldest boy was sobbing, his face turned away from the rest
of them, although what he was crying for was no longer so clear. Al
remained at the half-open door, desperately wanting to go back in and
relieve himself. He knew that he- or whoever took the morning shift on
Monday- would see these people again.

"Damn," the man was saying. "We came all the way here for
nothing. I drove sex hours. All for nothing!"

"We can wait here till Monday, I have some money, we can buy
food," his wife proposed.

"I promised to help Dodong with those GI sheets he needs to pick

up from Calasiao tomorrow-"

"Dodong can wait, someone else can drive for him. Please, Mar, it
will only be a day, I'm sure the children won't mind." The littlest girl was
theirs, and she was wrapped around her grandmother's knees, sucking
on her thumb.

"Let's go to the park!" The young boy said." I want to ride a bicycle
in the park!" Two years earlier, just before leaving, Filemon himself had
taken the children to the big city and its bayside greens.

"Shut up," his kuya said, remembering their father even more
sharply.
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 "Are you sure we can get him on Monday?" The brother - in - law
asked Al, who was becoming exasperated.

"I can't tell you, I don’t run the airlines, I don’t make the rules.
Maybe he'll be here by then, maybe not-"

"Maybe my son's alive," the mother said ." Maybe it was someone
else's head they took .That woman- that woman in there - what did you
say her name was?"

"Aurora. Aurora, uh, Sulpicio" Al said, making up the surname,

which he had already forgotten. Anything but "Catabay" would make the
same point. "Look, there's nothing for you to do here. Take my advice: go
around and get some fresh air. It's a nice place, in the best parts. Just
watch where you keep your money."

"Oh, we don't have much---only what the village managed to put

together, to give him a proper funeral---and a donation from the
congressman---"

Her husband seemed surprised and instantly alert. "Did you bring
all that money with you?"

"Can you trust anyone back him?" Her bag was slung over her
shoulder and she tucked it in even more tightly. Deep in the bag, in little
rubber-banded wands, was almost twenty thousand pesos. It should
have been more, but unknown to anyone else, she had already deducted
the eight thousand that Filemon--or actually his ex-wife Rosalie, before
she left him to join a millenarian cult,--had borrowed from her from the
117
poultry farm that failed. There was nothing wrong with what she'd done
the sister decided; Filemon would have given her the money himself if he
had the chance, and now he did. Otherwise, it was chargeable as an
overhead expense, it was no joke and certainly no fun managing a highly
emotional and complicated operation like this, which also cut into her
working hours as department-store cashier in Lingayen. If her brother
had just kept his thieving hands to himself, none of this would have had
to happen. Indeed, the more she thought about it, the longer grew the
catalogue of Filemon's faults and transgressions, from the time he stole
the money for her graduation dress so he could buy a Sony Walkman for
the ___ dancer he was besotted with, to the time he lied about lending
their father's jeep to a friend who lost it to a hooded gang. It was almost
as if justice had tapped her brother on the shoulder.

"No," her husband said after some deliberation. He was actually

thinking of the tires his jeepney needed. They were on their second
retreads, and this weekend's expedition wasn't going to help them any.

"I want to see my son. I have so many things to tell him." The
daughter hugged her mother and pulled her away. "We'll be back on
Monday," she said to Al, who nodded tiredly and shut the door, praising
the Lord.

"We're going to the park, we're going to the park!" the little boy
began to chant and this time no one shushed him, wishing secretly for
untimely pleasure like cotton candy and dancing fountains.

"Tomorrow," his aunt sighed. "We might as wrll make the most of
our time. We can ever go to the Megamall--"

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 "I'm staying here," said her nephew, suddenly.

"Don't be silly and don't be difficult. You heard what the man said.
We're waiting for nothing here. Come on, be nice. I'll get you something
at the mall tomorrow."

The boy stood his ground. The woman took his brother's and
sister's hands and led them away. Her hus and picked up their daughter
and carried her piggybank.

"We'll be in the jeep," said the woman to the dead man's son. "You
know where we parked. Don't stray too far. I'll be getting us dinner soon."

"That poor woman," the mother said as they sloshed their way back to
the parking lot, where the crowd was beginning to stir anew over the
impending arrival of the Northwest flight from San Francisco via Tokyo
Narita. Cars and jeeps were ganged up at the entranceway, eager to grab
a slot. The mother paused on the sidewalk's edge, taking her daughter's
arm. "What kind of family do you think she had?"

EXCEPT THE TRUTH

(Excerpt from Chapter XIV of MY BROTHER, MY EXECUTIONER)
Francisco Sionil Jose

In the first five days that Luis did not go to work there had piled up on
his desk letters, telegrams, and other messages , most of which he would
have enjoyed, for many of them were congratulatory. Seeing them now ,
he felt no sense of fulfillment, no affirmation of the righteousness. They
were reminders of a turmod that had uncoiled. He went over them
perfunctorily, then dumped them all in a side drawer.

119
The phone rang and Eddie answered it. “It’s the Old Man,” he said. “He
wants to see you.”

The publisher’s voice sounded relieved. “Ah- so you have finally come
,”he said as soon as Luis was on.

“I wasn’t well, sir. I hope I didn’t inconvenience you…”

“I understand,” the publisher said. “If it was a blow to you, Luis, just
remember- it was to much, much more to us Have you written to your
wife- or called her up and told her?They were such good friends, you
know.”

Perhaps Marta and Simeon had mentioned the tragedy to her, but the
fact that she had not called him up was indication that she still did not
know.

“I hope you are all right now,” Dantes said, “Can you come to my office
immediately? There are officers who will be here in an hour and they
want to clarify a few things about your special issue.”

When he hung up, Eddie was looking at him expectantly. “It’s the
Constabulary,” Luis said simply.

“Patience,” Eddie told him as he opened the door. A few of the men on
the desks turned to him. Perhaps they knew what was in store for him in
the publisher’s office, perhaps they envied his courage which they, in
their conformity, in their middle age, no longer had, but he walked on,
not wanting to talk even to those who knew him well. This was his
problem and he must handle it alone.

Miss Vale, Dantes spinsterish secretary, was waiting for him and he
smiled perfunctorily as he paused before her desk. She was efficient, not
given to office gossip, and she was one of Dantes’ most trusted workers.
It was rumored she was an illegitimate sister of Dantes but Miss Vale

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was dark and Ilocano while Dantes was fair skinned and Negrense. “Go
right in,”she said smiling at Luis. He was pleased to find that with that
single smile she could still look like a young girl.

The publisher was opening his morning mail with a gold letter and on his
large circular desk, were copies of his morning papers including Luis
magazine. “Sit down, Luis,”he said without turning to his editor. “If you
want a drink, the bar is over there.”

Dantes thrust his chin across the expanse of blue carpet, the conference

Dantes stood up elegant on his cream linen suit, alligator shoes and
green silk tie. He cracked his knuckles- a sign that he was nervous- and
started pacing the floor, his head bowed, as if in thought, “I have often
wondered about you,” he finally said, the smoky eyes focused on Luis for
a brief moment. “Why should you feel uncomfortable with your money
Luis? It is not a crime to be rich, you know.”

“No, sir,” Luis said. I have never considered myself a criminal.” He found
himself speaking with confidence. “I like my comforts, they are, after all,
mine by inheritance and I am sure my father wants me to enjoy them.”

Dantes walked on the narra conference table, a huge, glass, topped,

rectangular single piece of wood surrounded by a dozen gilt edged hand-
carved chairs. “Anyone reading you would conclude that you hate the
rich and think that all of us are scoundrels who make money exploiting
the working class. Even if we do please do not forget that the poor will
always be with us and it is not our fault. They will be there because they
are lazy, they have no capital, no incentives, no imagination, and no will
to work. In any society, however, there are those among these wretched
poor who will rise. History is full of them. Your own Manila elite- and you
know how despise the new takes- many of the started with nothing but
glibb tongue and nimble fingers...

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But do they need to be always with us ? Luis asked diffidently as he were
addressing the question himself. "If so, I would then admit society is
always exploitative. We go the nature of man his perpetual.

Dantes glanced at Luis and small laugh preceded Luis-- just like
Philosophy 24 ages. Ah, my undergraduate years....." he sighed. "Soon
we will be going in theology, then escapism, then nirway and all that sort
of thing. I continue read Luis, though not much,-- "he thrust his chin
again at the books that ____ the huge office. Indeed Dantes was very
erudite and every historian in a country knew of his extensive collection
of rare books on the Philippines including one of the editions of the
Doctrins which was the first printed book in the country.

"I know, sir," Luis said humbly, and that is why I consider it a privilege
that you should even seek my views talk like this with me.

" Enough of the flatter," Dantes said, but he was obvious pleased. " I love
the Buddhists-- they seem to have all the answers. I particularly amused
by Tantric Buddhists. You should see collection on Tantric art one of this
days-- mostly from India and Nepal. Ah, but I am straying now. What I
want to say is that the poor need to be what us always. That is why we
have resolutions-- all through history.

“Don’t you believe that the communists, the Marxists, invented

resolution? They had it in ancient Egypt, in Rome, Spartans. All through
history, blood has been spilled and it is not pretty sight, Luis. I don’t
really think you want resolution. You are just like me, living with
emotions, too comfortable to go after most of them – but mind you – he
passed and pointed a finger at the young man, I am not accusing you of
insincerity.”

“Thank you, sir,” Luis said, feeling relieved. The sir had begun to
get stuffy and he could feel the blood rising to his temples.

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 “I think I understand your motivation,” Dantes said, “I think you
are a bit muddled and not clear, even to yourself. The quest for justice is
in every man, even in me. I have vision, too, I like to think. I would like to
see this country grow, I would like to see it faced with prosperous towns,
with people who have money to enjoy life, to buy the good things in the
market, the products we make. . .”

“Just like America,” Luis said evenly, but the sarcasm made it
mark.

“Do not talk like that,” Dantes said. “You must see progress in
economic terms and its social aspects will follow, since this is a society of
other people’s feelings have always been a part of tradition. Can you not
see, Luis, what I am trying to do? I want my hands not only on industry
but also on communications. Radio and television – we have them now –
and power, electricity, and shipping and transport – the whole complex
that would make this country surge forward.”

With the Danterers in the land, Luis repeated to himself.

"I know you have been upset to how you joined my organizations, but I
cannot stand persons who do not see it my way, which, by God, I know is
not wrong. Besides, in the end, you must judge me not according to what
I say but what I have done. And what are these? Think of the thousands
gainfully employed, enjoying some of the best privileges anywhere in the
country. Of course, this is not just what I want nationalists on my staff.
We must modernize and this starts in the mind, not in the mouth. We
must stop being bewers of wood, drawers of water- to use your awful
cliche."

Luis turned the thought in his mind. This is what the Meijis did, this was
the siren call that is being trumpeted in all the new countries-- how to
stop being slaves not only to tradition but to the mother country.

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"For whom are we going to modernize, sir?" he could not resist asking. "
For whom shall we break our backs, miss our meals, and even kill our
brothers in order to be modern?

"You are cynical and you mistrust me," Dantes said, a hint of sadness in
his voice. "How I wish you did not ask that, for it implies that I am
working only for myself. Yes, that is true, I love wealth and the power
that goes with it, but I know that I will not live forever-- like you. I once
had youth, but look at me now, I am not as healthy as I am supposed to
be. . . "

Luis remembered how Dantes was said to have gone to those Swiss
rejuvenation clinics, so that he could have more vitality – monkey glands,
all those things which the rich could afford – and as the rich man droned
on, almost like a hypochondriac, about his impending death, Luis not
only got a glimpse of Dantes’ weakness but also began to think of all
those like dantes who had everything, but were aware that everything
was ephemeral.

“Sic transit,” Dantes was saying. In my case it could be cancer or

heart cations – one expects in old age . . .” He shook his head slowly and
his gaze wandered to the city spread before his picture window –
splotches of tin and cement, the sickly green trees and a smoky sky
mottled with clouds. His voice sounded remote and suddenly cold. “I
have thought a lot about justice, but let me make this clear – it should be
my kind. I make the rules, for I am what I am – the patron, the
hacendero, the feudal lord – all those sociological clichés that you use. I
like the role. It gives me a feeling of deep satisfaction, almost orgiastic –
to use again one of your fashionable words – of superiority, of
achievement, and of doing well. The justice I dispense with is mine, for I
am the Lord, and this justice will go to the workers, for whom you
profess love and affection, not as a flood but as a trickle. If you will

124
pardon the sarcasm, how much do you pay your driver and your maids?
What are the terms of tenancy in your father’s hacienda?”
Luis bristled and raised his hand in protest, but Dantes waved
Luis’ protest away impetuously and continued, his voice now raised
almost in a rant: “The poor do not know what abundance means. They
will not appreciate it, since they are not conditioned to it. We are Western
**** - our wants, our ambitions, are unlimited. They are Asians –
primitives with limited wants and equally limited vision. They will always
be workers, do not forget that. It is the fate of men to be born unequal.
Those with brains will rise in any society, democratic or totalitarian.
Ideology is meaningless to those who do not know the difference between
cavist and bagoong”. Margarine – not Danish butter.”
Dantes paused and his eyes blazed – but only for an instant. Now
they were warm again. “You must forgive my enthusiasm, “he said with a
quiet laugh. “Sometimes I really sound like a soap boxer or a school
teacher and I forget that you are not only an editor but one of the most
distinguished young writers in the country today.”
Luis carefully brushed aside the compliment. “Thank you for
regarding me highly, sir,” he said, “but I cannot help feeling that you
seem to think the lower classes are aspiring for utopia. I can assure you
– most if the time all they want is three meals a day, education for their
children, medicine when they get sick…” He paused, for he suddenly
realized that he was merely repeating what his brother had said. “These
they do not have. Have you ever been to the Philippine General Hospital,
sir?” He knew the question was impertinent, for every year it was to the
Mayo Clinic that Dantes went for a check up. Have you seen the ****
patients there, sleeping in the halls, dying because they have no
medicines?”
“That’s the government’s responsibility, Luis – not mine. There is
no employee in our companies who do not enjoy the best medical care
and pension benefits – much those than what all those crooked union
125
leaders are demanding. I gave all these benefits to the employees without
their asking for them. No one can **** me about the rights or needs of the
poor.”
The intercom buzzed. Miss Vales’ voice came ****. “The two officers
are here, sir!”
Dantes’ voice changed quickly. “Serve them something and tell
them we will be ready in a few moments.”
Dantes turned to Luis and his voice was grim. “You realize that I
have been making a speech. . .” The grimness quickly disappeared and
he smiled wanly, “I do get incoherent sometimes, but out there are two
officers and before they come in I want you to know that there is only one
side – my side. I am not interested in what is right or wrong – or what is
true or false. My main interest is that nothing happens to this
organization. Let me make this clear – I will back you all the way but
only if you subordinate whatever ideas you have to what I have
mentioned.”
Luis nodded. There was not a single doubt in his mind now that
the old man had really drawn the line, yet he could not but appreciate
Dantes and his frankness, his simple illustration of what he wanted and
what he was. Luis should have had no illusion from the very beginning –
as Ester had said, this should have **** **** the depths of his
subconscious. If she were here now -
“In a way,” Dantes was saying softly, “we have been lucky – the
Army is not so corrupt or power hungry as it is in Latin America and it is
easy to work out things because the officers are just after promotions. . .”
“But, someday, it will be corrupt, sir,” Luis said, “It is already
starting. As with all our institutions, it will decay for the Army will no
longer have a vision and its highest castes will be only after comforts.
This will start at the top, not with the privates and the corporals. But it
will spread down and there will be no stopping it for the leaders shall
have been infected; the colonels will not believe their generals, the
126
lieutenants will not believe their colonels, and the privates will not
believe their lieutenants. Patriotism becomes a sham, a means toward
getting rewards. A dictator will go masquerading as the man on a white
horse. And he will do it easily – for as long as we have an Army which
does not side with the poor. . .”
Dantes has listened but his was the last word nonetheless. “And
what Army in the world, ever, has been an instrument of the poor? It has
always been, and always be, the instrument of the State – and, therefore,
of the powerful!”
The dialogue was over, Dantes stood to his desk and reached for the
intercom.
Two officers, a fat holding colonel and an recetic faced major, came in.
They did not extend their hands when Dantes introduced them to Luis. "
Colonel Cruz, Major Gutierrez." They look at the old man's beady eyes,
which did not soften even when everybody was seated.
" These gentlemen have gone in your town, Luis," the publisher said, and
they want to disabuse your mind about the massacre."
"There us nothing to talk about. Everything was in the magazine, Mr.
Dantes," Luis said. "There is no point in discussing it- unless they have
something new to add to it. If they have a reply we will, of course, as a
matter of policy, print it."
The colonel took the bluster from Luis. "Yes, there are still many things
we can discuss," he said, his voice perceptibly hostile. "Inaccuracies,
ommissions-- all of which have put us in a very bad light. You should
have checked all your facts before you wrote that trash."
Dantes acted awiftly,"Please," he addressed the two officers, "let us go
into this dispassionately."
The old hate pulsed in Luis. "There was nothing to check," he said. " I
saw the grave where the victims were buried--without decent burial. I've
talked with some of the villagers who escaped from your men and my

127
father's guards. I saw the place where the houses stood-- a whole barrio,
mind you, leveled. I need no further proof."
The colonel was unimpressed. He lighted a cigarette, inhaled carefully
and turned to Luis with consumptiness self confidence. Since you are
sure, I hope you will consent to hear our side. These you didn't mention-
that the villagers were active Huk supporters, that one of the leading
Huk Commanders in Central Luzon is from the village-- and I think you
know him well. You did not mention that there was an encounter-- the
villagers fired first.
" And twenty villagers were killed and not one casualty among the civilian
guards or the troops."
" Not only because they were trained well," the major laughed, although
the ascetic face remained expressionless. He opened his portfolio and
handed Luis a sheaf of papers. "Read it," he said. Luis took the papers
and skimmed through it. The report was obviously prepared by the staff
and now an arid bureaucratic piece.
"This is your side," Luis said, " but you are big-- and who will explain the
side of the people-- the same people-- whose interests, since the
government should serve the people should be your concern?"
The colonel grinned. "You tell as if you were there anoinment spokesman.
Why don't you be yourself, Mr. Asperri?
Luis could sense the scorn in "Mr. Asperri"
" You know very well you are not small. You are very big, sit." The colonel
got a fat envelope from his portfolio. Turning to the publisher, he said.
"Perhaps this will prove our papers. Read it, sir. This is the handwriting
of our editor’s father, who is the biggest landlord in the province. It
seems hardly possible that he has sired someone like his son. If father
does not believe in his son, who will?”
Dantes read the first page carefully, then the second. He stopped
reading, “Your father, Luis,” he said bleakly “ feel ou were prejudiced no
massacre just an encounter. So many of them taking place in Central L
128
uzon, you know. Even in the Visayas, in Negros they have started.
Furthermore, your father says that these two gentleman know why you
are prejudiced. Would you care to tell me why? Here, read it yourself.”

The two officers turned to Luis. “ I don’t personally want to talk

about your past or yur personal life,” the major said. The ribbon on his
chest showed that he was a Bataan veteran. “ I can very well understand
why you are bitter, but we have to break our silence…”

Everyone knows, everyone! It was the time when he should not

have cared, when neither contempt or praise should have affected him,
when nothing should have eroded his belief, but in this moment of
truth he felt clammy and small.

“… and expose you ,” the major continued, “ tell the world the
reason for your bias, your prejudice. Maybe you do not think that this is
fair, but what then is the reason for your inability to see it our way? We
should ask you, as an editor, to be impersonal, but this you have not
been. Well everything is now in your hands. That future…”

The future did it really mean anything now? His lies, his denials of
Sipnget and his mother had caught up with him.

“What do you say, Luis?” Dantes asked, pointing to the document

which Don Vicente was written . “Your own father refused you..”

“We had the whole barrio site examined.” The colonel laughed
casually. “ There was no graved at all. Yes, the village was burned. You
know this things happen when houses roofed with thatch are close
together. That the whole village was plowed , that is not our doing . It
was his father’s. we do not deny that the two villagers were killed – just
two – and I think our editors knows who they are. They were taken away
by the villagers themselves when they left. They were buried decently,

129
according to them. I dare anyone to go there and dig the land inch by
inch and show me the mass grave!”

All is done, Luis gritted his teeth; my own father, he has gouged
out my brain and squeezed the air out of my lungs. “ Call it what you
want,” Luis said. “ How do we know from here how you may have
exhumed the bodies and reburied them ? How can I now go back and
gather the refugees when I am sure that by now you may have dispersed
them ? How can I gather testimony from the people who are afraid? The
dead will bear me out if the living won’t.”

The major laughed again in his humourless manner, “I see that

you are even superstitious. I do not think that is good for journalism.”

The officers stood up, ramrod-straight, and made ready to leave,

their Pershing caps in their hands. “ You have a very interesting story.”
The colonel said. “ I hope that someday you can have a really long talk.”

“ In the stockade?” Luis asked contemptuously.

“You misunderstand us” the colonel said, “but perhaps you will be
able to explain to me why Filipinos would kill their own brethren. This, in
principle, seems to be what you insinuate. We are not wealthy like you,
Mr. Asperri. Without the government in which you father has a very
strong say, we are really nothing, and who made this government, Mr.
Asperri? It’s the people of Rosales and Sipnget—and your father and you
yourself and Mr. Dantes.”

E was beyond the reach of anger and his voice was clear as he
echoed his father. “it is the strong who make the laws and the laws are
not foe the weak.”

“Your political beliefs,” the colonel said. “ seems out of medieval

times. I am sorry, but we did not come here to talk politics. We ,erely
came here to give you a chance to retract before we start any action. It is

130
but proper that you should know where we stand. You are being given
the choice and, in your own language, you have a deadline. Mr. Dantes
knows…”

They tipped their Pershing caps in mock politeness, shook the

publishers hand, then marched to the door. Luis sat back and stared at
the papers on Dantes’ desk, the affidavit that his father had signed,
which the officers had left for him to read. Everyday the phrasing was
unmistakably father’s, so was the uneven signature,

“I hope that you listened carefully to what was said,” Dantes

scowling “We are in a mess. They were here yesterday, and told me what
would do. Eddie said you hadn’t coming to the office and
understood. Now, this.”

“ It is part of the job, sir. The risks go with it,” Luis said.

Dantes walked to his side and place an arm on his shoulder. “

let us not make it difficult. I don’t want my back against the wall I don’t
want ro be forced to select the kind of executioner will use.”

“Isn’t that what they have already done?”

The publisher’s brows and his thin lips compressed into a line
across his tired, aging face. “What you hold against your father ?
After one reads in the papers everyday encounters like
this and one must to take them in stride . It is not the of the world
if one village is down and twenty people like said are dead.
You get more in traffic accidents in one day country.”

“We have learned to murder as an everyday occurrence Luis

said. “ When we do this we just as well stop worrying
whether or not we will ever and order. We die when we
stop angry.”

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 “But that’s not the point, Dantes said, moving away and the
young man. There is a limit capacity . we cannot fight all the
battles as if they were of the same magnitude. That is the way things
run. In some we high stakes. Others we just ignore or file away
while we wait for a more propitious time . Now, this is what those officers
want us to do --- print a retraction and declare that there was no
massacre, unless we are willing to conduct an investigation ourselves.”
He walked slowly to the wide glass window through which the sun
streamed in. “You have to make the decision ,” he said softly.

“It is all up to you, sir,” Luis said after a while, “but there will be
no retraction from me. It is not a question of me and my father involving
your publication. That is between my father and me and we will settle it
our way. I will have no resign and they can sue me as an individual if
they want to.” He said not really given the idea much thought, but it
came as natural as breathing.

“You have made a most difficult choice, Luis,” Dantes said, still
looking out of the window , a touch of sadness in his voice. “I knew it
would be this way, but I hoped that you would see it my way. We really
don’t have much choice. We can do what they want us to do or they can
come at us in a big way. I will pull strings to save the magazine, but
among my priorities and I am speaking frankly to you—the magazine is
not the first. You know very well that I have other interests. I had bought
that it would be just some sort of hobby. Perhaps I am speaking much
too candidly, making a hobby out of your life, your career—but there it
is. Never underestimate the power of the government, not the
bureaucracy as such. I have enimies, too. Perhaps you don’t know , but
more than fifty percent of your ads have already been withdrawn from
your next issue. The advertising department will inform you this
afternoon on this when they give you the listing . You know that the

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government control newsprint through the release of foreign exchange.
That is just the beginning.”

“All these simplify matters then, Mr. Dantes,” Luis said calmly .

“But we can back up a bit, Luis,” Dantes turned to him . “ The

world is not really as cold blooded as you picture it. Look at you, aren’t
you yourself a paradox? In between is a broad meeting ground, so wide
we can both rest on it and give no damn to anyone ….” Dantes’ eyes were
expectant.

“I am very sorry I have caused you a lot of trouble, sir, but you
know, if Ester were alive…” he choked on the words, “… if she were here
now and I could discuss this with her—she—she would agree with me.”
He stood up, but Dantes held him back.

“ We cannot end this way,” he said. “ I think we understand each

other better now. You spoke of Ester she was an only daughter and I was
very fond of her. I want you to stay, Luis.”

He walked to the door. “It has to be resolved, sir – and I see no

other way.”

Dantes went to him and they shook hands. The publishers grip
was tight and cold. “ You can print retraction, sir,” Luis said. “Eddie is a
very good man and if you decide to close the magazine I hope you can
keep him.”

“You want a final statement or something?’

“No, sir,” Luis said. The publishers grip relaxed and Luis walked
out

Eddie was pacing the office when Luis went in and sat wearily on
the sofa beside the his desk. “Well,” Eddie asked, “what happened?”

133
 “I put in a good word for you,” he said simply. “ It’s the most I
could do.” He stood up and starting clearing his desk, sorting out the
articles that he should have attended to. “ I don’t know if the old man
will keep the magazine . If he does you will most certainly be running it.
If he decided to let it go you will be absorbed on his other ventures.”

“How did it come to this? I didn’t’ think it would come to this. Isn’t
it too much for an expose?”

Luis went back to his desk. “ That’s the army for you,” he said. “ As for
Dantes, we are not tops in his system of priorities, that’s all.”

“Well,” Eddie said grimly, “I cannot see what is important and what
is not. If he doesn’t think twenty dead people important, I cannot work
for him. I’m used to the gutter, Luis.” He stretched himself on the sofa,
flipped off his brown slip on sang wiggled his toes.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Luis said, emptying his drawers of letters,

manuscripts. It was like combing into the past only, the past could not
be dredged from his drawers and dumped like clips or knick knacks on
his glass-top, where he could pick them out one by one and say. This
fragment of my life is important.

Eddie watched him wordlessly “But in a sense, Dantes is right,

Luis. You are bitter, you know” Luis threw a fistful of junk into the waste
basket and glared. “I knew the village. I could name everyone in it . They
were not just casually figures they were people.”

Eddie sat up. “I do not deny that,” he said. “They must mean very
much to you.

Look at what you are doing to yourself. Let us not go into that
cliché about obligation and righteousness and justice, but you have
obligations to yourself, too, and your relatives your father , most of all.
Why should he disagree with you?”

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 The trash from Luis’ drawers was now reduced to a small pile and
mementoes. It hardly mattered now. Eddie had given him loyalty, respect
and that kind of relationship that could arise only from mutual trust.
“There are things you do not know about me,” he said quietly. “It is not
the massacre is not true. God knows it is, but I did not tell you why I
have been shaken by it to the very core. My Grandfather, he was one of
those killed. And my mother, she was betrayed and lost. You may have
heard from me that my mother died long ago, that was convenient lie.”

“Luis, it cannot be,” Eddie said. “If it is true, then it is not enough
that you write about the massacre .”

Luis smiled wryly, “How I that I could really do something

what; Eddie? As my father said , not the truth that gives
us strengths and not even half the man that I should. I am a God—
forsaken bastard. Go to my hometown and ask anyone you meet in the
street. He will tell how my mother was a maid in my father’s house . I
had to live that lie in this city and I tried to belong. Everything is a sham
and I wish I’d never been born.”

Eddie stood up and embraced him, but Luis pushed him brusquely
away. “I don’t need your sympathy,” Luis said.

“ It is not sympathy,” Eddie said. It is gratitude , for me trusting

me.”

“I don’t have to be a hypocrite any more. I can now live the way I
like. If I must I will tell the story all over again. Let us say that I am a
mourner ad that no one can comfort me except the truth and the
damnation that goes with it.”

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 Night of a Construction Worker
Lamberto Antonio

Unable to sleep.
Yes, hands have let go of shovel,
Hammer, pipe, wire and other tools,
But dismissal at five had failed to signal
Gravel, cement and filling earth
To let go of your breath.
When the light bulb flickers out,
There’s only the dark to ask to nurse the flaring up
And the throbbing of the littlest muscle:
blister, bruise and cut
On arm and finger, and the stab at the heart
and brain,
For dreaming up more construction jobs
to come,
For prayers made musty by sweat and
magic spell.
Moments like these when neon lights shred
the dark,
When contractor and greedy
Right-hand man have gone home,
Dark shapes crouch and stick accusing
fingers in the mind:
Sunken cheeks of the sickly newborn
Or wife whose eyes blur
At the unappealing meal of congee and
grains of salt …
And, too, cold night spread by the late hour

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 A prescribed balm on bare torso
That resists convincing it’s turning into skin
and bones.
How can you fall asleep
When each time you stretch on your back it seems the stars
Are slowly swallowed up by the towering roof above?
Only the dark in the corner to ply with queries:
Why gravel, filling earth and sand
Refuse to let go, weighing on your breath

Each time the thought looms in your mind you're part

Of the scaffloding you yourself, one of these days, will take apart

(1971, 1980)
Translation: Bienvenido Lumbera
THE CHILDREN OF TOIL MUST NOW BE HEARD

Kailangan nang Marinig ang Tinig ng Anakpawis

(An excerpt from Una't Huling Pasyon ni Rio Alma)

Virgilio Almario

The Children of toil must now be heard.

From the cradle and lullabys and boat songs,

Battle-songs and love-songs of the south and north;

From the soft wingbeat of ricebird and egret,

In the dream of west wind and halting breath;

From the chiaroscuro of dawnlight and approaching rain,

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And the soiled bones of cogon and turned earth.

The Children of Toil must now be heard.

From dimming dreams that doom the cry of

the newborn

And the hope in the tears of the lovelorn;

From the bowed souls of the brown race,

Weighed down by time and fate;

From the brown lips parched for love,

For the blessings of the sun and the universe.

The Children of Toil must now be heard.

From the ancient peasant calling to

the breezes

While winnowing grains of famine;

From the bent shadows soaking in

the drizzle,

In the furrowed paddies at planting

time at harvest time

Reaping chaff, and at threshing cut by

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 haystalk and anguish;

From the memory that sprouts together

with the May rain,

Urged by the slingshot and cavorting of children,

Prodded by levee, lovegrass and blade of cogon,

Enticed by the west wind bringing smells

of rice cakes,

Only to die with the summer, to be interred

Among the cracks, the dry tracks and firewood.

The Children of Toil must now be heard.

From the huddled shanties and squalid

thatch-huts;

From the gutters and canals, alleys and

barrios and fields;

From sweaty, tuberculous breasts;

From the toothless grins around the

peasant table

Laid with a bottle of gin, jug of cane

wine and fried anchovies;

From hands used to foraging among

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 fly-infested garbage– in the music

Of the urchin's dream to dig up

At least bones and other leavings.

The Children of Toil must now be heard.

From the breathing choked by the effluvia

of street canaland factory;

From the thick brew

Of asphalt-sweat-body odor-carbons-grease-

dust-blood-vomit,

Inside tunnels, trucks,trains,jeepneys,

buses, elevators, machines,

In stockrooms,kitchens,sewers,toilets

and streets;

From hands destitute and outstretched

on the sidewalk

At the corner of Rizal Avenue, Sta. Cruz,

Quiapo and Divisoria;

From the children of darkness who plunge

into the blaze

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 Only to be consumed without ever

glimpsing hope.

The Children of toil must now be heard.

From those who carry on their shoulders

the Pentagon

And Wall Street, San Lorenzo and Forbe

Park; from the hope withered

In the splendor of Escolta, Makati and

glittering mansions,

By the tourists and peacocks od Ermita,

Bayside, Alba and Hilton;

From the victims of armalite, stingray whip,

truncheon, goon

Of cacique, landlord, politico, usurer and

powerbroker;

From the desperados of skid row, charity

ward, islet and outback;

From the victims of drunks, private armies

and extortionists,

The Blackshirts, Barracudas, Saka-saka,

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 Ilaga, Suzuki Boys.

The Children of Toil must now be heard.

It is time the raging voice of the slave

and weak be heard.

It is time to break the age-old shackles

of mind and heart.

Lumberjack, butcher, stevedore, driver, clerk,

Canefield laborer, fisherman, peasant, worker,

And all the Children of Toil,

Together now must lash ouf and strike with

raging fists.

And on the ashes of the greedy, the frauds

and oppressors,

On the ashes of the vilest, sordid Past, build

The resplendent New World.

(May 1,1971)
Translation:
Ramon Villegas and Marne L. Kilates

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 STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: THE
MARGINALIZATION OF THE PHILIPPINE INDIGENE
RICARDO PAGULAYAN

Author's Background

Ricardo Daniel Pagulayan graduated magna cum laude from the

College of Arts and Letters and earned a B.A in both anthropology and
Arabic. As an undergraduate student, Ricardo was inspired by the
cultural turmoil of his own childhood experiences as a member of the
Itawis community in the Philippines to explore the intersections of
culture, history, and politics in community and identity formation. At
present, Ricardo is looking forward to law school where he hopes to
study human rights law and investigate how the law interacts with
normative cultural practices both in encouraging and inhibiting people’s
ability to flourish.

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 Strangers in their Own Land: The Marginalization of
the Philippine Indigene
Ricardo Pagulayan

The Philippines is a nation with exceeding linguistic and cultural

diversity, having origins from the Neolithic expansion of Austronesian-
speaking peoples into the archipelago, and enduring in the face of
Spanish and American colonization in the modern era. The region is
home to 169 distinct, ethnolinguistic communities – the Cordillera
Administrative Region alone contains the Tinggian, Kalinga, Gaddang,
Ifugao, Kankana-i, Isneg, Bontoc, Ibaloi, and Ilocano (Hirtz, 2003). Yet,
in spite of their diversity, these various groups can tenably be
divided into two halves, that of a “mainstream,” Westernized
Filipino identity that accounts for the demographic majority, and a
minority made up of “indigenous,” non-Westernized groups. It can also
be debated that this mainstream majority and indigenous minority
are split in more ways than the scope of demographics alone, with the
latter enjoying cultural, economic, and political primacy in Philippine
society.

The question thus arises as to why and how this cultural

stratification of Philippine society came to be. In considering all of this,
the colonial experience of the archipelago’s native population
undoubtedly played a large role in the construction of the current
Philippine social order, with the divide between “mainstream” and
“indigenous” made most evident through the processes of racial
othering and hypersexualization ushered in by Western colonization, and
the continued economic repression of indigenous groups in modern
Philippine society.

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 It is undeniable that the linguistic diversity of the Philippines already
existed prior to the arrival of Western colonial powers to the region.
At the arrival of the Spanish to the islands in the 16th century,
colonial officials were already reporting making contact with groups such
as the Tagalog, Ibanag, or Ilocano (Bellwood, 1995). Regardless, it
can be argued that it was the Spanish presence in the islands
that deepened if not created all together the notion of the
indigenous “other.” If anything, the Spanish reified ethnic lines where
there may have been none.

In his work, “It Takes Modern Means to be Traditional,” Frank Hirtz

explains that the Spanish colonial regime had an interest to qualify
and quantify their new, Philippine subjects, and thus individuals
were assigned to groups based on their linguistic affiliations (Hirtz,
2003). The encapsulation of large populations within discrete and
explicitly laid down categories undoubtedly made colonial
administration easier.

However, the demarcation of ethnic boundaries alone was not

responsible for the birth of the indigenous other, as the superimposition
of European whiteness on native society played an even greater role. To
begin, the idea of whiteness as an aesthetic is drawn from John
Dewey’s experiential ideologies. To Dewey, aesthetics, as internalized
by the individual, dictate the individual’s conceptualization of
humanhood, beauty, the meaning of life, and so on (Alexander, 2002). In
terms of the Philippines, the Spanish brought with them the idea
of their superiority over native Philippine populations who they saw as
barbaric, uncivilized, and even sub-human. The mere essence of
civilized humanity was therefore trapped and closely guarded within
the Spaniards’ European aesthetic – their whiteness. The culturality
and physicality of being European thus came to represent in the
native mind the definition of being human itself, which they thought best

145
to adopt and emulate given the socio-politically Spanish-dominated
society.

It would thus be plausible to argue that it was through the aesthetic of

whiteness that the divide between mainstream and indigenous came
to be. The pressure to conform to European ways, to become more
human, more civilized, allowed for the creation of a Westernized,
pan-Filipino culture that became more and more disapproving of groups
who resisted westernization. Though this mainstream culture itself
was born from the welding together of disparate ethnolinguistic
groups by way of a common Catholic religion and Hispanicized culture,
this pan-ethnicity of sorts was cemented as it elevated and
segregated itself from neighboring, non-Westernized ethnolinguistic
communities which came to be seen as backwards, uncivilized, and
stuck in time.

The rift between the mainstream culture and indigenous groups would
seem to only grow wider come the American occupation. The United
States took possession of the Philippine Islands in the early 1900s
following the defeat and subsequent expulsion of Spain from the
archipelago after the Spanish-American War (Bacdayan, 2009). To justify
its political and armed presence in the Philippines, the United States
pledged to pacify, Christianize, and civilize the region and its
disparate peoples (Bacdayan, 2009). Through this, the American public
developed a fascination for the Philippines’ indigenous peoples, and
mock tribal highland villages, complete with infrastructure and
inhabitants, were publicly showcased in American fairs and
carnivals throughout the early 1900s (Cardova, 2009). Notably, American
media at the time had a special fondness for advertising Filipinos,
mainstream and indigenous, as primitive and half naked, with a
particular focus on the bare-breasted highland belle (Cardova, 2009).
This, in turn, did not ring well with the Westernized Philippine

146
population, which saw the bare-breasted, half naked media
representations of Filipinos as deceptive and scandalous, and
misrepresentative of the “civilized,” Westernized peoples of the
archipelago (Cardova, 2009).

Painting the bare-chested Philippine indigene as a hypersexualized

being was in no doubt American propaganda in maintaining its
claims over the Philippines as a wild and rapacious country in
need of taming. This is reminiscent of the wider feminization and
sexual objectification of the so-called “Orient” by the West in
reimagining the East as virgin land awaiting the civilized guidance
of European virility (Kang, 1993). Indeed, the nudity of the Filipino
was, as bluntly stated by Allan Punzalan Isaac, a “visual metaphor for
the definition of

Pinoys [Filipinos] as racial and historical others, exploitable and

stripped of the habiliments of dignity” (Isaac, 2006). Yet, it must be
noted that the United States came to occupy a Philippines that was
indignant of further Western colonization, and the hypersexualized
image of the Philippine indigene was repudiated by the mainstream
Filipino population that wanted to remind the United States of its
Westernized lifestyle, and therefore its civility and readiness for self-rule

(Isaac, 2006). Thus, there was greater incentive for the

mainstream Filipino pan-ethnicity to disassociate itself from the
seemingly immoral and backwards, bare-chested indigenous
Filipino, creating for an even wider cultural and political divide
between the two groups. In essence, the
rejection of the hypersexual indigene served to perpetuate the
image of indigenous peoples as historical and cultural others in
the psyche of the mainstream Filipino culture.

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 Left: A Lubuagan Kalinga woman showing her tattooed arms Right: A young
Tinggian woman in mourning; it is a custom among Tinggian women to shed
their top garments when in mourning. Both photographs originate from the
early 1900s. (Worcester, 1913)

In hindsight, the American occupation, and to a much larger extent,

the Spanish colonial period sparked the cultural and social tensions
that engendered the division between a Westernized, mainstream
identity at odds with an aboriginal, indigenous minority. Debatably,
this is a rift that continues to be maintained in the Philippine
social order of today, one that is most apparent through the scope
of economy, particularly in terms of the neoliberal ideals that have
penetrated the policies of the national Philippine government.

As the Philippines in recent years has pushed for more

liberalized trade and investment policies in promoting the expansion
of both domestic and private sectors, it has also diverted significant
efforts towards cultivating a more robust cultural tourism industry
(Bello, 2009). The neoliberal understanding of people being a “social

148
capital” of sorts has encouraged the intensification in the visiting of
cultural sites, both by domestic and international visitors, cultural
sites that are often part of the cultural patrimonies of indigenous
Philippines groups, such as the Banaue Rice Terraces of the Ifugao
people (Bello, 2009). With this, in terms of the Philippines as a neoliberal
actress, it can be argued that indigenous minorities and their cultures
have come to be envisioned as marketable assets. After all, cultural
artifacts such as folk art, music, and fashion are all viable commodities
in domestic and global markets.

Regardless, with the neoliberal belief in the individual’s dignity and in

the equal access to entrepreneurial and economic opportunities for all
(Bello, 2009), it would seem that the Philippine indigene has a
substantial amount of agency in the increasingly neoliberal Philippine
state. In response, though the growing cultural tourism industry
may be encouraging the movement of capital into indigenous areas
and providing sources of income for indigenous families, the
commodification of indigenous culture is nonetheless reflective of
how marginalized and other Philippine aboriginal communities are.
Their popularity in Philippine cultural tourism accentuates the fact
that mainstream Philippine culture perceives the indigene through a
lens of exoticism, as if indigenous societies were foreign nations
wedged into the territorial patrimony of a Westernized Filipino
nation. Moreover, cultural tourism has emphasized the indigene’s
markedly different cultural practices, religion, and ethnic dress, thus
helping to solidify the image of the non-Westernized indigenous person
as an unrelatedly ethnic and cultural other. Lastly, the neoliberal belief
in the equal opportunities for economic success for all undermines
the fact that indigenous areas in the Philippines, such as the
Cordillera 6 Administrative Region, account for the greatest
rates of poverty in the nation (Rovillos & Morales, 2002), where the

149
distribution of capital, and thus entrepreneurial opportunity, is far
from being leveled and equalized.

Ultimately, it is the consequences and implications of the

mainstream-indigenous divide on contemporary Philippine society that
must be taken into greater consideration. The neoliberal leanings of the
Philippine government and the cultivation of cultural tourism have
shown that the idea of the indigenous other has been conflated with the
notions of social capital and the market, thus leading to the
commodification of their cultural patrimonies. The poverty found in
indigenous areas also hints at the political, cultural, and economic
primacy of the Westernized, mainstream Philippine pan-ethnicity over
the historically marginalized indigene. The question of how and why
this mainstream-indigenous dichotomy came to be may thus not be
the most important question to pose. Perhaps, it is more
worthwhile to recognize the cultural dynamics that allow this divide
and the marginalization of indigenous people to continue. The
answer, however, may ultimately be rooted, again, in whiteness.

Introduced during the Spanish colonial period, the aesthetic of

whiteness, it can be argued, defines the mainstream Filipino identity.
Through conversion to Roman Catholicism and Hispanicizing their native
cultures to conform to Western ideologies of beauty, modesty, civility,
and human hood, the mainstream Philippine culture has, in
essence, assumed the role of the Westerner that the Spanish left
behind. The mainstream Filipino has thus become the Westerner, the
holder of power over the natives, viewing Philippine society through
the framework of imported whiteness as opposed to native Philippine
culture. As a consequence, the Westernized Filipino finds the indigene,
one who has historically resisted Western influence and colonization, to
be unrelatable in experience, point of view, and cultural history.
Perhaps, this is the reason why the Philippine government can promote

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cultural tourism, putting its indigenous peoples on 7display, much like
how indigenous Philippine highland groups were put on display in
American carnivals and fairs in the early 1900s. Here, the indigene has
become the observer, if not the victim of the Westernized culture’s socio-
political power.

The marginalization of indigenous peoples in the Philippines can

thus be understood in the scope of the mainstream society’s
possession of power and its endeavor to maintain this power.
According to Michel Foucault, power is “that which represses. Power
represses nature, the instincts, class, and individuals” (Foucault, 1980).
It can be said then, that the mainstream culture’s castigation of
indigenous peoples as backwards and stuck in time is a reflection of the
former’s cutting off of whiteness – power – from the latter.
Repressing social and economic mobility among the indigenous
population therefore perpetuates a society wherein the Westernized
enjoy a cultural framework of social and cultural preeminence. As
holders of power, the mainstream society thus has the additional
interest of maintaining the status quo, done through outward
demonstrations of this power, such as in furthering the
exotification of indigenous groups under the guise of cultural tourism, or
the outright repudiating of the indigene for being a hypersexualized,
immoral being. It is as Foucault asserts, the “basis of power lies in the
hostile engagement of forces” (Foucault, 1980).

In the end, the mainstream-indigenous divide in Philippine

society puts the region in a complex and precarious situation,
especially in terms of governing a nation that is as linguistically
and culturally diverse as the Philippines. It can be said that Philippines
is presented with the feat of managing a pluralistic nation-state, one that
respects the humanity, dignity, and rights of all its citizens, all the
while being haunted by the socio-cultural scars of its colonial past.

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Could such a diverse, multiethnic nation ever truly exist without a
dynamic of power divided along ethnic lines? Perhaps that is a question
for another time.

152