philippine short stories and selected poems

Compiled by:

Patricia S. Lorica

Table of Contents

Summer Solstice (Nick Joaquin) ………….……………………………………………………

Mill of the Gods (Estrella Alfon) .……………………………………………………………..

The Harvest (Loreto Paras Sulit) ...……………………………………………………….

The God Stealer (F. Sionil Jose) ……………………………………………………………….

Sunset (Paz M. Latorena) ………………………………………………………..……

Desire (Paz M. Latorena) ………………………………………………………….…..

The Virgin (Kerima Polotan Tuvera) ………………………………………………………..

Zita (Arturo B. Rotor) …………………………………………………………….…..

The Visitation of the Gods (Gilda Cordero-Fernando) ……………………………..….

The Day The Dancers Came (Bienvenido N. Santos) ……………………………..…..

Dead Stars (Paz Marquez Benitez) ………………………………………………………….

May Day Eve (Nick Joaquin) …………………………………………………………….…….

My Father Goes To Court (Carlos Bulosan) ………………………………………….……..

My Last Duchess (Robert Browning) …………………………………………………………..

When I Was No Bigger Than Huge (Jose Garcia Villa) ………………………….…….

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (Dylan Thomas) .………………………….

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P h i l i p p i n e S h o r t S t o r i e s a n d S e l e c t e d P o e m s | 1

Summer Solstice by Nick Joaquin

The Moretas were spending St. John’s Day with the children’s grandfather, whose feast 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 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 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 a 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.

“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, Amanda? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in such 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 relaxed, 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 recked hotly of intimate odors. She averted her eyes

from the laughing woan on the bed, in whose nakedness she seemed to participate that she was ashamed to

look directly at the man in the doorway.

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

“Yes, senora. Last night.”

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

“I could do nothing.”

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

“But now I dare not touch her.”

“Oh, and why not?”

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

“But man—“

“It is true, senora. The spirit 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 animals would die.”

“Naku, I did not 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 arrabal of Paco in the 1850’s.

Don Paeng, drowsily stroking his mustaches, his eyes closed against the hot light,merely shrugged.


“And you should have seen the Entoy,” continued his wife. “You know how the brute treats her: she cannot say

a word but he trashes her. But this morning he stood as meek as lamb while she screamed and screamed. He

seemed actually in awe of her, do you know─actually afraid of her!”

Don Paeng darted a sidelong glance at his wife, by which he intimated that he subject was not a proper one for

the children,who were sitting opposite,facing their parents.

“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 with 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 goldly 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

from the skies─the vast outpouring of light that marks this climax of the solar year ─raining 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 her white frock, under the

twirling parasol, stared down on the passing male horde with increasing annoyance. The insolent 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 while 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 coloured 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 wickedness in herself

appalled her. She moved closer to her husband, to share the parasol with him.

“And did you see our 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 enamoured 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 the 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.”

“She is beautiful.”

“Our Amada is 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 at 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 in those rites unless he first puts on some article of women’s apparel and—“

“And what did you put on, Guido?”

“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 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.


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 gentlemen 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.”

“Ah, he has converted you then?”

“Who knows? But must we talk about it? My head is bursting with the heat.”

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 a 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.

“But I want to go! My head aches worse in the house. For a favour, 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 not 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 has 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: th 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 sidewalk 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 lightning’s abruptly

branching fire seemed the nerves of the tortures 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 f 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 seedlings 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 his wife n 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 Herodiads; a doomed captive these witches were subjecting first

to their derision; a gross and brutal caricature of his sex.

Don Paeng flashed 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 gleaming on her face. Don Paeng was horrified. He grasped

her arm— but then just a flash of lightning blazed and the screaming women fell silent: the Tadtarin was about

to die.

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 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 shaws and whirled and began dancing again—laughing and dancing with such joyous exciting

abandon that the people in the square and on the sidewalks, 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, ad 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 instinctive 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 and into

the dense maze of the procession, which was moving again, towards the chapel. He followed her, shouting; 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, turbalent 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 roses

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.

“Ahah, 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.

“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 señora. 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 were home and stood facing each other in the bedroom, she was as 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 whipping will

not changed 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.”

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 ceased 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 speak, forcing him to speak.

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

“Then say it! Say it!” she cried, pounding her clenched her 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 to feel?”

But she shook her head furiously. “Until you have said it 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 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 a 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 kissed it savagely— kissed the step, the

sole, the frail ankle— while she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the windowsill, her body distended and

wracked by horrible shivers, her head flung back 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.


Mill of the Gods by Estrella Alfon

Among us who lived in Espeleta – that street that I love, about whose people I keep telling tales – among us, I

say, there was one named Martha, and she was the daughter of Pio and Engracia.

To all of us, life must seem like a road given us to travel, and it is up to Fate, that convenient blunderer, whether,

that road be broad and unwinding, or whether it shall be a tortuous lane, its path a hard and twisted mat of dust

and stones. And each road, whether lane or avenue, shall have its own landmarks, that only the traveller soul

shall recognize and remember, and remembering, continue the journey again. To Martha, the gods gave this for

a first memory: a first scar.

She was a girl of twelve, and in every way she was but a child. A rather dull child, who always lagged behind the

others of her age, whether in study or in play. Life had been so far a question of staying more years in a grade

than the others, of being told she would have to apply herself a little harder if she didn’t want the infants

catching up with her. But that was so dismal thing. She had gotten a little bit used to being always behind. To

always being the biggest girl in her class. Even in play there was some part of her that never managed to take

too great a part – she was so content if they always made her “it” in a game of tag, if only they would let her

play. And when she had dolls, she was eager to lend them to other girls, if they would only include her in the

fascinating games she could not play alone.

This was she, then. Her hair hung in pigtails each side of her face, and already it irked a little to have her dresses

too short. She could not help in her mother’s kitchen, and could be trusted to keep her room clean, but she was

not ready for the thing her mother told her one night when she was awakened from sleep.

It was a sleep untroubled by dreams, then all of a sudden there was an uproar in the house, and she could hear

her mother’s frenzied sobbing, and it was not sobbing that held as much of sorrow as it did of anger. She lay still

for a while, thinking perhaps she was dreaming, until she could hear her father’s grunted answers to the half –

understood things her mother was mouthing at him. Then there were sounds that were clearly the sound of two

bodies struggling in terrible fury with each other. She stood up, and like a child, cried into the night. Mother?

She wailed the word, in her panic finding a little relief in her own wailing, Mother? And she heard her mother’s

voice call her, panting out, saying, Martha, come quickly, come into this room!


Martha got up and stood at the door of the room, hesitating about opening it, until her mother, the part of a

terrible grasp, said Martha! So Martha pushed in the door, and found her mother and her father locked in an

embrace in which both of them struggled and panted and had almost no breath left for words. Martha stood

wide – eyed and frightened, not knowing what to do, just standing there, even though she had seen what it was

they struggled for. A kitchen knife, blade held upwards in her mother’s hand. Her arms were pinioned to her

sides by her husband, but her wild eyes, the frenzy with which she stamped her feet on his feet, and kicked him

in the shins, and tried to bite him with her teeth, these were more terrible than the glint of that shining blade. It

was her fathers who spoke to her saying urgently, Martha, reach for her knife, take it away. Yet Martha stood

there and did not comprehend until her mother spoke, saying No, no; Martha, your father deserves to be killed.

Then it was Martha who realized what she was to do, and slowly, hesitantly, she went near them, her fear of

both of them in this terrible anger they now presented making her almost too afraid to reach up for the knife.

But reach up she did, and with her child’s fingers, put her mother’s away from the weapon. And when she had it

in her hands she did not know what to do with it, except look at it. It wasn’t a very sharp knife, but its blade was

clean, and its hilt firm. And so she looked at it, until her father said. Throw it out of the window, Martha and

without thinking, she went to a window, opened a casement and threw it away.

Then her father released her mother, and once her mother had gotten her arms free, she swung back her hand,

and wordlessly, slapped him; slapped him once, twice, three times, alternating with her hands, on alternate

cheeks, until her father said. That’s enough, Engracia. And saying so, he took her hands in his, led her resisting to

the bed, and made her sit down.

And Martha was too young to wonder that her father, who was a big man, should have surrendered to the

repeated slapping from her mother who was a very small frail woman.

Her father said, “Aren’t you ashamed now Martha has seen?”

And immediately her mother screamed to him, “Ashamed? Me, ashamed? I’ll tell Martha about you!”

Her father looked at Martha still standing dumbly by the window out of which she had thrown the knife, and

said, “No, Aciang, she is just a child.” And to her: “Martha, go back to bed.”

But now her mother jumped up from the bed, and clutched at Martha, and brought her to bed with her. And

deliberately without looking at Martha’s father, she said, Martha you are not too young to know. And so, the

words falling from her lips with a terrible quiet, she told Martha. The words that were strange to her ears,

Martha heard them, and listened to them, and looked from her mother to her father, and without knowing it,

wetting her cheeks with her tears that fell. And then her mother stopped talking, and looking at her husband,

she spat on him, and Martha saw the saliva spatter on the front of the dark shirt he wore. She watched while

her father strode over them, and slowly, also deliberately, slapped her mother on the cheek. Martha watched


his open palm as he did it, and felt the blow as though it had been she who had been hit. Then her father strode

out of the room, saying nothing, leaving them alone.

When her father had gone, Martha’s mother began to cry, saying brokenly to Martha, “It is that woman, that

woman!” And making excuses to Martha for her father, saying it was never completely the man’s fault. And

Martha listened bewildered, because this was so different from the venomous words her mother had told her

while her father was in the room. And then her mother, still weeping, directed her to look for her father and

Martha went out of the room.

Her father was not in the house. The night was very dark as she peered out of the windows to see is she could

find him outside, but he was nowhere. So she went back to her mother, and told her she could not find her

father. Her mother cried silently, the tears coursing down her cheeks, and her sobs tearing through her throat.

Martha cried with her, and caressed her mother’s back with her hands, but she had no words to offer, nothing

to say. When her mother at last was able to talk again, she told Martha to go back to bed. But it wasn’t the child

that entered who went out of that room.

And yet the terror of that night was not so great because it was only a terror half – understood. It wasn’t until

she was eighteen, that the hurt of that night was invested with its full measure. For when she was eighteen, she

fell in love. She was a girl of placid appearance, in her eyes the dreaming stolid night of the unawakened. She

still was slow to learn, still not prone to brilliance. And when she fell in love she chose the brightest boy of her

limited acquaintance to fall in love with. He was slightly older than herself, a little too handsome, a trifle too

given to laughter. Espeleta did not like him; he was too different from the other young me n on the street. But

Martha loved him. You could see that in the way she looked at him, the way she listened to him.

Martha’s pigtails had lengthened. She now wore her braids coiled on the top of her head like a coronet, and it

went well with the placid features, the rather full figure. She was easily one of our prettier maidens. It was well

that she was not too brilliant. That she did not have any too modern ideas. The air of shyness, the awkward lack

of sparkling conversation suited her Madonna – like face and calm. And her seriousness with love was also part

of the calm waiting nature. It did not enter her head that there are such things as play, and a game. And a man’s

eagerness for sport. And so when she noticed that his attentions seemed to be wandering, even after he had

admitted to a lot of people that they were engaged, she asked him, with the eager desperation of the

inexperienced, about their marriage.

He laughed at her. Laughed gently, teasingly, saying they could not get married for a long time yet; he must

repay his parents first for all that they had done for him. He must first be sure to be able to afford the things she

deserved. Well-turned phrases he said his excuses with. Charming little evasions. And if she did not see through

them while he spoke them, his frequent absences, where his visits had been as a habit; his excuses to stay away

when once no amount of sending him off could make him stay away; these but made her see. And understand.


And then the way neighbours will, they tried to be kind to her. For they could see her heart was breaking and

they tried to say sweet things to her, things like her being far too good for him. And then they heard that he had

married. Another girl. And they saw her grief, and thought it strange that a girl should grieve over an

undeserving lover or so. She lost a little of the plumpness that was one of her charms. And into her eyes crept a

hurt look to replace the dreaming. And Espeleta, with all the good people, strove to be even kinder to her.

Watched her grief and pitied her. And told her that whatever mistakes she had committed to make her grieve so,

to make her suffer so, they understood and forgave. And they did not blame her. But now that she had learned

her lesson, she must beware. She knew her own father as much as they knew about him. And it was in the Fates

that his sins must be paid for. If not by himself, then by whom but she who was begotten by him? So, didn’t she

see? How careful she should be? Because you could, they said it to her gently, kindly, cruelly, because she could

if she were careful, turn aside the vengeance of the implacable fates. And she believed them kind although she

hated their suspicions. She believed them kind, and so she started, then, to hate her father. And that night long

ago came back to her, and she wished she had not thrown that knife away.

Espeleta saw Martha turn religious. More religious than Iya Andia and Iya Nesia, who were old and saw death

coming close, and wanted to be assured of the easing of the gates of heaven. Espeleta approved. Because

Espeleta did not know what she prayed for. Because they saw only the downcast eyes under the light veil, the

coil of shining hair as it bowed over the communion rail.

Yet Martha’s mother and father still lived together. They never had separated. Even after that night, when she

was twelve years old and frightened, and she had called for him and looked for him and not found him. The next

day he had come back, and between her mother and him there was a silence. They slept in the same bed, and

spent the nights in the same room, and yet Martha and Espeleta knew he had another bed, another chamber.

Espeleta praised Martha’s mother for being so patient. After Martha had fallen in love, when she began hating

her father truly then also she began despising her mother.

You did not know it to look at Martha. For her coil of braided hair was still there, and the shy way of speaking,

and the charming awkwardness at conversation. And Martha made up her earlier lack of lustre by shining in her

class now. She was eighteen and not through high school yet. But she made up for it by graduating with high

honours. Espeleta clapped its hands when she graduated. Gave her flowers. Her mother and father were there,

too. And they were proud. And to look at Martha, you would think she was proud too, if a little too shy still.

Martha studied nursing. And started having visitors in her mother’s house again. Doctors this time. Older men,

to whom her gravity of manner appealed, and the innate good sense that seemed so patient in her quiet

demeanour. Espeleta was now rather proud of Martha. She seemed everything a girl should be, and they cited

her as an example of what religion could do. Lift you out of the shadow of your inheritance. For look at Martha.

See how different she is from what should be her father’s daughter.


But what they did not know was that all of these doctors Martha had to choose someone slightly older than the

rest. And where the girl of eighteen that she had been almost a child unschooled, now she was a woman wise

and wary. Where the other nurses knew this doctor only as someone who did not like their dances as much as

the younger ones, who did not speak as lightly, as flippantly of love as the younger ones, Martha knew why he

didn’t.

Between the two of them there had been, form the very start, a quick lifting of the pulse, an immediate

quickening of the breath. From the very start. And where he could have concealed the secrets of life, he chose

the very first time they were able to talk to each other, to tell her that he was not free. He had a wife, and

whether he loved her or not, whether she was unfaithful to him or not, which she was, there had been the

irrevocable ceremony to bind them, to always make his love for any other woman, if he ever fell in love again,

something that must be hidden, something that might not see light.

She was a woman now, Martha was. Wise and wary. But there is no wisdom, no weariness against love. Not the

kind of deep love she knew she bore him. And as even she him, she found within herself the old deep – abiding

secret hate. Against her father. Against the laws of man and church. Against the very fates that seemed rejoiced

in making her pay for a sin she had not committed. She now learned of bitterness. Because she could not help

thinking of that night, long ago, when her mother had sat on the bed, and in deliberate words told her just what

kind of a father she had. It had been as though her mother had shifted on to her unwilling, unready shoulders

the burden of the sorrows, the goad of the grief.

Espeleta, that was so quick to censure, and to condemn; even Espeleta had taken the situation in Martha’s

house as something that could not be helped. And as long as there was no open strife, Espeleta made excuses

for a thing that, they said, had been designed by Fate. Martha’s father came home. Acted, on the surface, the

good husband. And since he was married to Martha’s mother, so must Martha’s mother bear it, and welcome

him home again. Because she would rather he came home, then went to the other one, wouldn’t she? Espeleta

cited heavenly rewards. For Martha’s mother. And Martha went to church regularly, and was a good nurse. And

still called her father, Father.

You have heard that one of course, about the mill of the gods, how they “grind exceedingly fine, and grind

exceedingly slow.” Espeleta hadn’t heard that one, nor had Martha. But Espeleta of course would have a more

winded version of it. Anyhow, one day at the hospital, Martha was attendant nurse at an emergency case. A

man had been shot. There were three bullets through his chest, but he was still alive. Martha laughed queerly to

herself, saying I must be dreaming, I am imagining that man has my father’s face.

It was the doctor she loved who was in charge. With a queer dreaming feeling, she raised her eyes to meet his,

and was shocked to see him drop his gaze, and over his face steal a twist as of pain, as of pity. They were

instantly their efficient selves again, cloaking themselves in the impersonal masks of physician and nurse. It was


as if he who lay there beneath their instruments and their probing fingers was any man, the way it could be any

man. Not her father. But all while, training and discipline unavailing. Martha said to herself, but it is my father.

He died on the table. He never gained consciousness. Martha drew the sheet over his face and form. And

watched as they wheeled him out of the room. She still had the instruments to put away and the room to put in

order. But this did not take long and when she went out into the corridor, she found her mother weeping beside

the shrouded form on the wheeled table. There was a policeman beside her awkwardly trying with gruff words

to console the little woman over her loss. Beside the policeman stood also the doctor, who passed an arm

around the shoulder of Martha’s mother, saying simply, we tried to save him.

Martha joined them, knowing that she should be in tears, yet finding that she had none to shed. It would ease

the tightness within her, would loosen the hard knot in her heart to cry. But you cannot summon tears when

you feel no grief, and the pain you feel is not of sorrow but of the cruel justness of things. She could not even

put her arms around her weeping mother. When the doctor told her that she would be excused from duty the

rest of the day, that he would arrange it for her, she did not thank him. She did not say anything for indeed she

no longer had any words, nor any emotions that required speech. Or should be given speech. For one cannot say,

how right! How just! When one’s father has just died.

Her mother and she took a taxi together to accompany the hearse that took her father home. There was a

crowd awaiting them. Espeleta in tears. Espeleta crying condolence and opprobrium in the same breath. It was

from them – their good neighbours, their kind neighbours – that Martha learned how “God’s justice had

overtaken the sinner.”

Colon is not as intimate as Espeleta. For it is a long street and broad street. But where the railroad crosses it, the

houses group together in intimate warmth and neighbourly closeness and its families live each other’s lives

almost as meddlingly as Espeleta does. And is as avid for scandals as Espeleta is. Among the people in Martha’s

house were some from Colon. And it was they who supplied the grimmer details, the more lucid picture.

In that other woman’s house – and Martha did not even know the other woman’s name there had existed the

stalemate state of affairs that had existed in Martha’s house. Only where in Martha’s house it had been a wife

who was patient, in that other woman’s house it had been the husband who had bided his time. And yet the

neighbours had thought he had not cared. For indeed he had seemed like a man blind and deaf, and if he raised

his voice against his wife, it was not so they could hear it. Yet today, he had come home, after he had said he

was going away somewhere. And had come upon Martha’s father in the house, and had, without saying

anything, taken out his revolver, and shot at him.

Martha heard all these. And thought you know often life seems like an old – fashioned melodrama, guns and all.

And yet the gun had not gone off. It had jammed, and Martha’s father had been able to run. And running, even


as he seemed far enough from the house to be safe, the gun in the husband’s hand had come right again. The

man had gone out in the street, aimed at the fleeing figure. That explained why the bullets had gone in through

his back and out through his chest. They said that the street was spattered with blood and where he fell, there

was a pool of gory red. The killer had surrendered himself at once. But everyone knew he would not pay with his

life he had taken. For the woman was his wife and he had come upon them in his own home.

Martha stayed with the kind condolers only a while. She left her mother for them to comfort as best as they

could. They would have praises like “The good God knows best;” they would have words like, “Your grief is

ended, let your other grief commence.” She went to look at her father lying well-arranged now in his bier.

Already in spite of the manner of his death, there were flowers for him. Death had left no glare in the eyes that

the doctor at the hospital had mercifully closed, over the features lingered no evidence of pain. And Martha said,

Death was kind to you.

In Martha’s room there hung a crucifix. Upon the crossed wood was the agonized Christ, His eyes soft and deep

and tender, even in his agony. But as Martha knelt, and lighted her candles, and prayed, in her eyes was no

softness, and on her lips no words appealing for pity for him who had died. There was only the glitter of a justice

meted out at last, and the thankfulness for a punishment fulfilled. So she gave thanks, very fervent thanks. For

now, she hoped, she would cease to pay.

Aguila, Augusto Antonio A., Joyce L. Arriola and John Jack Wigley. Philippine Literatures: Texts, Themes,

Approaches. Espana, Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. Print.


The Harvest by Loreto Paras Sulit

HE first saw her in his brother’s eyes. The palay stalks were taking on gold in the late afternoon sun, were losing

their trampled, wind-swept look and stirring into little, almost inaudible whispers.

The rhythm of Fabian’s strokes was smooth and unbroken. So many palay stalks had to be harvested before

sundown and there was no time to be lost in idle dallying. But when he stopped to heap up the fallen palay

stalks he glanced at his brother as if to fathom the other’s state of mind in that one, side-long glance.

The swing of Vidal’s figure was as graceful as the downward curve of the crescent-shaped scythe. How stubborn,

this younger brother of his, how hard-headed, fumed Fabian as he felled stalk after stalk. It is because he knows

how very good-looking he is, how he is so much run-after by all the women in town. The obstinate, young fool!

With his queer dreams, his strange adorations, his wistfulness for a life not of these fields, not of their quiet,

colorless women and the dullness of long nights of unbroken silence and sleep. But he would bend… he must

bend… one of these days.

Vidal stopped in his work to wipe off the heavy sweat from his brow. He wondered how his brother could work

that fast all day without pausing to rest, without slowing in the rapidity of his strokes. But that was the reason

the master would not let him go; he could harvest a field in a morning that would require three men to finish in

a day. He had always been afraid of this older brother of his; there was something terrible in the way he

determined things, how he always brought them to pass, how he disregarded the soft and the beautiful in his

life and sometimes how he crushed, trampled people, things he wanted destroyed. There were flowers, insects,

birds of boyhood memories, what Fabian had done to them. There was Tinay… she did not truly like him, but her

widowed mother had some lands… he won and married Tinay.

I wonder what can touch him. Vidal thought of miracles, perhaps a vision, a woman… But no… he would

overpower them…he was so strong with those arms of steel, those huge arms of his that could throttle a spirited

horse into obedience.

“Harvest time is almost ended, Vidal.” (I must be strong also, the other prayed). “Soon the planting season will

be on us and we shall have need of many carabaos. Milia’s father has five. You have but to ask her and Milia will

accept you any time. Why do you delay…”


He stopped in surprise for his brother had sprung up so suddenly and from the look on his face it was as if a

shining glory was smiling shyly, tremulously in that adoring way of his that called forth all the boyishness of his

nature—There was the slow crunch, crunch of footsteps on dried soil and Fabian sensed the presence of people

behind him. Vidal had taken off his wide, buri hat and was twisting and untwisting it nervously.

“Ah, it is my model! How are you, Vidal?” It was a voice too deep and throaty for a woman but beneath it one

could detect a gentle, smooth nuance, soft as silk. It affected Fabian very queerly, he could feel his muscles

tensing as he waited for her to speak again. But he did not stop in work nor turn to look at her.

She was talking to Vidal about things he had no idea of. He could not understand why the sound of her voice

filled him with this resentment that was increasing with every passing minute. She was so near him that when

she gestured, perhaps as she spoke, the silken folds of her dress brushed against him slightly, and her perfume,

a very subtle fragrance, was cool and scented in the air about him.

“From now on he must work for me every morning, possibly all day.”

“Very well. Everything as you please.” So it was the master who was with her.

“He is your brother, you say, Vidal? Oh, your elder brother.” The curiosity in her voice must be in her eyes. “He

has very splendid arms.”

Then Fabian turned to look at her.

He had never seen anyone like her. She was tall, with a regal unconscious assurance in her figure that she

carried so well, and pale as though she had just recovered from a recent illness. She was not exactly very young

nor very beautiful. But there was something disquieting and haunting in the unsymmetry of her features, in the

queer reflection of the dark blue-blackness of her hair, in her eyes, in that mole just above her nether lips, that

tinged her whole face with a strange loveliness. For, yes, she was indeed beautiful. One discovered it after a

second, careful glance. Then the whole plan of the brow and lip and eye was revealed; one realized that her

pallor was the ivory-white of rice grain just husked, that the sinuous folds of silken lines were but the

undertones of the grace that flowed from her as she walked away from you.

The blood rushed hot to his very eyes and ears as he met her grave, searching look that swept him from head to

foot. She approached him and examined his hot, moist arms critically.


“How splendid! How splendid!” she kept on murmuring.

Then “Thank you,” and taking and leaning on the arm of the master she walked slowly away.

The two brothers returned to their work but to the very end of the day did not exchange a word. Once Vidal

attempted to whistle but gave it up after a few bars. When sundown came they stopped harvesting and started

on their way home. They walked with difficulty on the dried rice paddies till they reached the end of the rice

fields.

The stiffness, the peace of the twilit landscape was maddening to Fabian. It augmented the spell of that woman

that was still over him. It was queer how he kept on thinking about her, on remembering the scent of her

perfume, the brush of her dress against him and the look of her eyes on his arms. If he had been in bed he would

be tossing painfully, feverishly. Why was her face always before him as though it were always focused

somewhere in the distance and he was forever walking up to it?

A large moth with mottled, highly colored wings fluttered blindly against the bough, its long, feathery antennae

quivering sensitively in the air. Vidal paused to pick it up, but before he could do so his brother had hit it with

the bundle of palay stalks he carried. The moth fell to the ground, a mass of broken wings, of fluttering wing-

dust.

After they had walked a distance, Vidal asked, “Why are you that way?”

“What is my way?”

“That—that way of destroying things that are beautiful like moths… like…”

“If the dust from the wings of a moth should get into your eyes, you would be blind.”

“That is not the reason.”

“Things that are beautiful have a way of hurting. I destroy it when I feel a hurt.”


To avoid the painful silence that would surely ensue Vidal talked on whatever subject entered his mind. But

gradually, slowly the topics converged into one. He found himself talking about the woman who came to them

this afternoon in the fields. She was a relative of the master. A cousin, I think. They call her Miss Francia. But I

know she has a lovely, hidden name… like her beauty. She is convalescing from a very serious illness she has

had and to pass the time she makes men out of clay, of stone. Sometimes she uses her fingers, sometimes a

chisel.

One day Vidal came into the house with a message for the master. She saw him. He was just the model for a

figure she was working on; she had asked him to pose for her.

“Brother, her loveliness is one I cannot understand. When one talks to her forever so long in the patio, many

dreams, many desires come to me. I am lost… I am glad to be lost.”

It was merciful the darkness was up on the fields. Fabian could not see his brother’s face. But it was cruel that

the darkness was heavy and without end except where it reached the little, faint star. For in the deep darkness,

he saw her face clearly and understood his brother.

On the batalan of his home, two tall clay jars were full of water. He emptied one on his feet, he cooled his warm

face and bathed his arms in the other. The light from the kerosene lamp within came in wisps into the batalan.

In the meager light he looked at his arms to discover where their splendor lay. He rubbed them with a large,

smooth pebble till they glowed warm and rich brown. Gently he felt his own muscles, the strength, the power

beneath. His wife was crooning to the baby inside. He started guiltily and entered the house.

Supper was already set on the table. Tinay would not eat; she could not leave the baby, she said. She was a small,

nervous woman still with the lingering prettiness of her youth. She was rocking a baby in a swing made of a

blanket tied at both ends to ropes hanging from the ceiling. Trining, his other child, a girl of four, was in a corner

playing siklot solemnly all by herself.

Everything seemed a dream, a large spreading dream. This little room with all the people inside, faces, faces in a

dream. That woman in the fields, this afternoon, a colored, past dream by now. But the unrest, the fever she

had left behind… was still on him. He turned almost savagely on his brother and spoke to break these two

grotesque, dream bubbles of his life. “When I was your age, Vidal, I was already married. It is high time you

should be settling down. There is Milia.”

“I have no desire to marry her nor anybody else. Just—just—for five carabaos.” There! He had spoken out at last.

What a relief it was. But he did not like the way his brother pursed his lips tightly That boded not defeat. Vidal


rose, stretching himself luxuriously. On the door of the silid where he slept he paused to watch his little niece.

As she threw a pebble into the air he caught it and would not give it up. She pinched, bit, shook his pants

furiously while he laughed in great amusement.

“What a very pretty woman Trining is going to be. Look at her skin; white as rice grains just husked; and her nose,

what a high bridge. Ah, she is going to be a proud lady… and what deep, dark eyes. Let me see, let me see. Why,

you have a little mole on your lips. That means you are very talkative.”

“You will wake up the baby. Vidal! Vidal!” Tinay rocked the child almost despairingly. But the young man would

not have stopped his teasing if Fabian had not called Trining to his side.

“Why does she not braid her hair?” he asked his wife.

“Oh, but she is so pretty with her curls free that way about her head.”

“We shall have to trim her head. I will do it before going out to work tomorrow.”

Vidal bit his lips in anger. Sometimes… well, it was not his child anyway. He retired to his room and fell in a deep

sleep unbroken till after dawn when the sobs of a child awakened him. Peering between the bamboo slats of

the floor he could see dark curls falling from a child’s head to the ground.

He avoided his brother from that morning. For one thing he did not want repetitions of the carabao question

with Milia to boot. For another there was the glorious world and new life opened to him by his work in the

master’s house. The glamour, the enchantment of hour after hour spent on the shadow-flecked ylang-ylang

scented patio where she molded, shaped, reshaped many kinds of men, who all had his face from the clay she

worked on.

In the evening after supper he stood by the window and told the tale of that day to a very quiet group. And he

brought that look, that was more than a gleam of a voice made weak by strong, deep emotions.

His brother saw and understood. Fury was a high flame in his heart… If that look, that quiver of voice had been a

moth, a curl on the dark head of his daughter… Now more than ever he was determined to have Milia in his

home as his brother’s wife… that would come to pass. Someday, that look, that quiver would become a moth in

his hands, a frail, helpless moth.


When Vidal, one night, broke out the news Fabian knew he had to act at once. Miss Francia would leave within

two days; she wanted Vidal to go to the city with her, where she would finish the figures she was working on.

“She will pay me more than I can earn here, and help me get a position there. And shall always be near her. Oh, I

am going! I am going!”

“And live the life of a—a servant?”

“What of that? I shall be near her always.”

“Why do you wish to be near her?”

“Why? Why? Oh, my God! Why?”

That sentence rang and resounded and vibrated in Fabian’s ears during the days that followed. He had seen her

closely only once and only glimpses thereafter. But the song of loveliness had haunted his life thereafter. If by a

magic transfusing he, Fabian, could be Vidal and… and… how one’s thoughts can make one forget of the world.

There she was at work on a figure that represented a reaper who had paused to wipe off the heavy sweat from

his brow. It was Vidal in stone.

Again—as it ever would be—the disquieting nature of her loveliness was on him so that all his body tensed and

flexed as he gathered in at a glance all the marvel of her beauty.

She smiled graciously at him while he made known himself; he did not expect she would remember him.

“Ah, the man with the splendid arms.”

“I am the brother of Vidal.” He had not forgotten to roll up his sleeves.


He did not know how he worded his thoughts, but he succeeded in making her understand that Vidal could not

possibly go with her, that he had to stay behind in the fields.

There was an amusement rippling beneath her tones. “To marry the girl whose father has five carabaos. You see,

Vidal told me about it.”

He flushed again a painful brick-red; even to his eyes he felt the hot blood flow.

“That is the only reason to cover up something that would not be known. My brother has wronged this girl.

There will be a child.”

She said nothing, but the look in her face protested against what she had heard. It said, it was not so.

But she merely answered, “I understand. He shall not go with me.” She called a servant, gave him a twenty-

peso bill and some instruction. “Vidal, is he at your house?” The brother on the patio nodded.

Now they were alone again. After this afternoon he would never see her, she would never know. But what had

she to know? A pang without a voice, a dream without a plan… how could they be understood in words.

“Your brother should never know you have told me the real reason why he should not go with me. It would hurt

him, I know.

“I have to finish this statue before I leave. The arms are still incomplete—would it be too much to ask you to

pose for just a little while?”

While she smoothed the clay, patted it and molded the vein, muscle, arm, stole the firmness, the strength, of his

arms to give to this lifeless statue, it seemed as if life left him, left his arms that were being copied. She was lost

in her work and noticed neither the twilight stealing into the patio nor the silence brooding over them.

Wrapped in that silver-grey dusk of early night and silence she appeared in her true light to the man who

watched her every movement. She was one he had glimpsed and crushed all his life, the shining glory in moth

and flower and eyes he had never understood because it hurt with its unearthly radiance.


If he could have the whole of her in the cup of his hands, drink of her strange loveliness, forgetful of this unrest

he called life, if… but his arms had already found their duplicate in the white clay beyond…

When Fabian returned Vidal was at the batalan brooding over a crumpled twenty-peso bill in his hands. The

haggard tired look in his young eyes was as grey as the skies above.

He was speaking to Tinay jokingly. “Soon all your sampaguitas and camias will be gone, my dear sister-in-law

because I shall be seeing Milia every night… and her father.” He watched Fabian cleansing his face and arms and

later wondered why it took his brother that long to wash his arms, why he was rubbing them as hard as that…


The God Stealer by Francisco Sionil Jose

They were the best of friends and that was possible because they worked in the same office and both were

young and imbued with a freshness in outlook. Sam Christie was twenty – eight and his Filipino assistant, Philip

Latak, was twenty – six and was – just as Sam had been at the Agency before he assumed his post – intelligent

and industrious.

“That is to be expected,” the official whom Sam replaced explained “because Philip is Ifugao and you don’t know

patience until you have seen the rice terraces his ancestors built.”

“You will find,” Sam Christie was also told, “that the Igorots, like the Ilocanos, no matter how urbanized they

already are, entertain a sense of inferiority. Not Philip. He is proud of his being Ifugao. He talks about it the first

chance he gets.”

Now, on this December dawn, Sam Christie was on his way to Ifugao with his native assistant. It was last month

in the Philippines and in a matter of days he would return to Boston for that leave which he had not had in years.

The bus station was actually a narrow sidestreet which sloped down to a deserted plaza, one of the many in the

summer capital. Sam could make out the shapes of the stone buildings huddled, it seemed, in the cold, their

narrow windows shuttered and the frames advertising Coca – Cola above their doorways indistinct in the dark.

Philip Latak seemed listless. They had been in the station for over half an hour and still there was no bus. He

zipped his old suede jacket up to his neck. It had been four years that he had lived in Manila and during all these

years he had never gone home. Now, the cold of the pine – clad mountains seemed to bother him. He turned to

Sam and, with a hint of urgency – “One favour, Sam. Let me take a swig.”

Sam and Christie said, “Sure, you are welcome to it. Just make sure we have some left when we get Ifugao.” He

stopped, brought out a bottle of White Label – one of the four – in the bag which also contained bars of candy

and cartons of cigarettes and matches for the natives. He removed the tinfoil and handed the bottle to his

companion.


Phil raised it to his lips and made happy gurgling sounds. “Rice wine – I hope there’s still a jar around when we

get to my grandfather’s. He couldn’t be as seriously sick as my brother wrote. As long as he has wine he will live.

Hell, it’s not as potent as this, but it can knock out a man, too.”

Sam Christie kidded his companion about the weather. They had arrived in the summer capital the previous day

and the bracing air and the scent of pine had invigorated him. “It’s like New England in the spring,” he said. “In

winter, when it really gets cold, I can still go around quite naked by your standards. I sent home a clipping this

week, something in the Manila papers about it being chilly. And it was only 68! My old man will get a kick out of

that.”

“But it’s really cold!” Philip Latak said ruefully. He handed the bottle back to Sam Christie, who took a swig, too.

“You don’t know how good it is to have that along. Do you know how much it costs nowadays? Twenty – four

bucks.”

“It’s cheaper at the commissary,” Sam Christie said simply. He threw his chest out, flexed his lean arms and

inhaled. He wore a white, dacron shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

“I’m glad you didn’t fall for those carvings in Manila,” Phil said after a while.

A Grecian urn, a Japanese sword, a Siamese mask – and now, an Ifugao God. The Siamese mask,” Sam spoke in a

monotone, “it was really a bargain. A student was going to Boston. He needed the dollars, so I told him he could

get the money from my father. Forty dollars – and the mask was worth more than that.”

Now, the gray buildings around them emerged from the dark with white, definite shapes. The east was starting

to glow and more people had arrived with crates and battered rattan suitcases. In the chill most of them were

quiet. A coffee shop opened along the street with a great deal of clatter and in its warm, golden light Sam

Christie could see the heavy, peasant faces, their happy anticipation as the steaming cups were pushed before

them.

The bus finally came and Sam Christie, because he was a foreigner, was given the seat of honour, next to the

driver. It was an old bus, with woven rattan seats and side entrances that admitted not only people, but cargo,

fowl, and pigs. They did not wait long, for the bats filled up quickly with government clerks going to their posts

and hefty Igorots, in their bare feet or with canvas shoes who sat in the rear, talking and smelling of earth and

strong tobacco.


After the bus had started, for the first time during their stay in Baguio, Sam Christie felt sleepy. He dozed, his

head knocking intermittently against the hard edge of his seat and in that limbo between wakefulness and sleep

he hurtled briefly to his home in Boston, to that basement study his father had tidied up, in it the mementoes of

his years with the Agency. Sam had not actually intended to serve in the Agency, but he had always wanted to

travel and, after college, a career with the Agency offered him the best chance of seeing the world.

Soon it was light. The bus hugged the thin line of a road that was carved on the mountainside. Pine trees

studded both sides of the road and beyond their green, across the ravines and the gray socks, was shimmery sky

and endless ranges also draped with this mist that swirled, pervasive and alive, to their very faces. And Sam

Christie, in the midst of all this whiteness and life, was quiet.

Someone in the bus recognized Philip and he called out in the native tongue, “Ip – pig!” the name did not jell at

once and the man shouted again. Philip turned to the man and acknowledged the greeting and to Sam he

explained: “That’s my name up here – and that’s why I was baptized Philip.”

Sam Christie realized there were many things he did not know about Phil. “Tell me more about your

grandfather,” he said.

“There isn’t much worth knowing about him,” Philip said.

“How old is he?”

“Eighty or more.”

“He must be a character,” Sam Christie said.

“And the village doctor,” Philip said. “Mumbo – jumbo stuff, you know. I was taken ill when I was young –

something I ate, perhaps. I had to go to the Mission Hospital – and that evening he came and right there in the

ward he danced to drive away the evil spirit that had gotten hold of me.”

“And the doctor?”

“He was broad – minded,” Philip said, still laughing. “They withstood it, the gongs and stamping.”


“It must be have been quite a night.”

“Hell, I was never so embarrassed in my life,” Philip Latak said, shaking his head, “Much later, thinking of it,” his

voice became soft and a smile lingered in his thick – lidded eyes, “I realized that the old man never did that thing

again for anyone, not even when his own son – my father – lay dying.”

Now they were in the heart of the highlands. The pine trees were bigger, loftier than those in Baguio, and most

were wreathing with hoary moss. Sunflowers burst on the slopes, bright yellow against the grass. The sun rode

over the mountains and the rocks shone – and over everything the mist, as fine as powder, danced.

The bus swung around the curves and it paused, twice or thrice to allow them to take coffee. It was past noon

when they reached the feral fringes of the Ifugao country. The trip had not been exhausting, for there was much

to see. Sam Christie, gazing down at the ravines, at the geometric patterns of the sweet – potato patches there

and the crystal waters that cascaded down the mountainsides and the streams below, remembered the Alpine

roads of Europe and those of his own New England – and about these he talked effusively. “See how vegetation

changes. The people, too. The mountains,” Sam Christie said, “breed independence. Mountain people are

always self – reliant.”

Then, at turn of a hill, they came, without warning upon the water – filled rice terraces stretched out in the sun

and laid out tier upon shining tier to the very summit of the mountains. And in the face of that achievement,

Sam Christie did not speak.

After a while he nudged Philip. “Yeah, the terraces are colossal.” And he wished he had expressed his admiration

better, for he had sounded so empty and trite.

The first view of the terraces left in Sam’s mind a kind of stupefaction which, when it had cleared, was replaced

by a sense of wastefulness. He mused on whether or not these terraces were necessary, since he knew that

beyond these hand – carved genealogical monuments were plains that could be had for the asking. “And you say

that these terraces do not produce enough food for the people?”

Philip Latak turned quizzically to him. “Hell, if I can live here, would I go to Manila?”


Their destination was no more than a cluster of houses beyond the gleaming tiers. A creek ran through the town,

white with froth among the rocks, and across the creek, beyond the town, was a hill, on top of which stood the

Mission – four red – roofed buildings – the chapel, the school, the hospital, and residence.

“That’s where I first learned about Jesus Christ and scotch,” Philip Latak said. “They marked me for success.”

Another peal of laughter.

The bus shuddered into first gear as it dipped down the gravel road and in a while they were in the town, along

its main street lined with wooden frame houses. It conformed with the usual small – town arrangement and was

properly palisaded with stores, whose fronts were plastered with impieties of soft – drink and patent – medicine

signs. And in the stores were crowds of people, heavy – jowled Ifugaos in G – string and tattered Western coats

that must have reached them in relief packages from the United States. The women wore the native gay blouses

and skirts.

The two travellers got down from the bus and walked to one of the bigger houses, a shapeless wooden building

with rusting tin proof and cheap, printed curtains. It was a boarding house and a small curio store was on the

ground floor, together with the usual merchandise of country shops: canned sardines and squid, milk, soap,

matches, kerosene, a few bolts and twine.

The landlady, an acquaintance of Philip Latak, assigned them a bare room, which overlooked the creek and the

mountain terraced to the very summit.

“We could stay in my brother’s place,” Philip Latak reiterated apologetically as they brought their things up, “but

there is no plumbing there.”

Past noon, after a plentiful lunch of fried highland rice and venison, they headed for the footpath that broke

from the street and disappeared behind a turn of hillside. The walk to Philip Latak’s village itself was not far from

the town and wherever they turned the terraces were sheets of mirror that dogged them.

The village was no more than ten houses in a valley, which were no different from the other Ifugao homes. They

stood on stilts and all their four posts were crowned with circular rat guards. A lone house roofed with tin stood

at one end of the village. “My brother’s,” Philip said.

“Shall I bring the candies out now?” Sam asked. He had, at Phil’s suggestion, brought them along, together with

matches and cheap cigarettes, for his “private assistance program.”


Sadek, Philip’s brother, was home. “You have decided to visit us after all” he greeted Philip in English and with a

tinge of sarcasm. He was older and spoke with authority. “I thought the city had won you so completely that you

have forgotten this humble place and its humble people.”

Then, turning to Sam, Sadek said, “I must apologize, sir, for my brother, for his bringing you to this poor house.

His deed embarrasses us...”

“We work in the same office,” Sam said simply, feeling uneasy at hearing the speech.

“I know, sir,” Sadek said.

Philip Latak held his brother by the shoulder. “You see, Sam,” he said, “my brother dislikes me. Like my

grandfather, he feels that I shouldn’t have left this place, that I should rot here. Hell, everyone knows the

terraces are good for the eye, but they can’t produce enough for the stomach.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say,” Sam said warily, not wanting to be drawn into a family quarrel.

“But it’s true,” Philip Latak said with a nervous laugh. “My brother dislikes me. All of them here dislike me. They

think that by living in Manila for a few years I have forgotten what is to be an Ifugao. I can’t help it, Sam. I like it

down there. Hell, they will never understand. My grandfather – do you know that on the day I left he followed

me to the town, to the bus, pleading with me and at the same time scolding me? He said I’d get all his terraces.

But I like it down there, Sam,” he threw his chest and yawned.

Unmindful of his younger brother’s ribbing Sadek dragged in some battered chairs from within the house and

set them in the living room. He was a farmer and the weariness of working the terraces showed in his massive

arms, in his sunburned and stolid face. His wife, who was an Ifugao like him, with high cheekbones and firm,

dumpy legs, came out and served them Coca – Cola. Sam Christie accepted the drink, washed it down his throat

politely, excruciatingly, for it was the first time that he took warm Coke and it curdled his tongue.

Sadek said, “Grandfather had a high fever and we all thought the end was near. I didn’t want to bother you, but

the old man said you should come. He is no longer angry with you for leaving, Ip – pig. He has forgiven you...”


“There’s nothing to forgive, my brother,” Philip Latak said, “but if he wants to he can show his forgiveness by

opening his wine jar. Is he drinking still?”

“He has abandoned the jar for some time now,” Sadek said, “but now that you are here, he will drink again.”

Then the children started stealing in, five of them with grime on their faces, their feet caked with mud, their

bellies shiny and disproportionately rounded and big. They stood, wide – eyed, near the sagging wall. The tallest

and the oldest, a boy of thirteen or twelve, Sadek pointed out as Philip’s namesake.

Philip bent down and thrust a fistful of candy at his nephews and nieces. They did not move. They hedged closer

to one another, their brows, their simple faces empty of recognition, of that simple spark that would tell him, Ip

– Pig, that he belonged here. He spoke in the native tongue, but that did not help either. The children held their

scrawny hands behind them and stepped back until their backs were pressed against the wall.

“Hell, you are all my relatives, aren’t you?” he asked. Turning to Sam, “Give it to them. Maybe, they like you

better.”

His open palm brimming with the tinsel – wrapped sweets, Sam strode to the oldest, to Philip’s namesake, and

tousled the youngster’s black, matted hair. He knelt, pinched the cheeks of the dirty child next to the oldest and

placed a candy in his small hand. In another moment it was all noise, the children scrambling over the young

American and about the floor, where the candy had spilled.

Philip Latak watched them, and above the happy sounds, the squeals of children, Sadek said, “You see now that

even your relatives do not know you, Ip – pig. You speak our tongue, you have our blood – but you are a

stranger nevertheless.”

“See what I mean, Sam?” Philip Latak said. He strode to the door. Beyond the betel – nut plams in the yard, up a

sharp incline, was his grandfather’s house. It stood on four stilts like all the rest and below its roof were the

bleached skulls of goats, dogs, pigs, and carabaos which the old man had butchered in past feats. He had the

most number of skulls in the village to show his social position. Now new skulls would be added to this collection.

“Well, he will recognize and I won’t be a stranger to him. Come,” Philip Latak turned to his friend, “let us see the

old man.”


They toiled up the hill, which was greasy although steps had been gouged out on it for easier climbing. Before

going up the slender rungs of the old house Philip Latak called his grandfather twice. Sam Christie waited under

the grass marquee that extended above the doorway. He couldn’t see what transpired inside and there was no

invitation for him to come up. However, some could hear, Philip speaking in his native tongue and there was

also a crackled, old voice, high pitched with excitement and pleasure. And, listening to the pleasant sounds of

the homecoming, he smiled and called to mind the homecomings, he, too, had known, and he thought how the

next vacation would be, his father and his mother at the Back Bay station, the luggage in the back seat, and on

his lap this wooden idol which he now sought. But after a while, the visions he conjured were dispelled. The

effusion within the hut had subsided into some sort of spirited talking and Philip was saying “Americano –

Americano.” Sam heard the old man raise his voice, this time in anger and not in pleasure. Then silence, a

rustling within the house, the door stirring and Philip easing himself down the ladder, on his face a numbed,

crestfallen look. And, without another word, he hurried down the hill, the American behind him.

Philip Latak explained later on the way back to the town: “I had asked him where we could get a god and he said

he didn’t know. And when I told him it was for an American friend he got mad. He never liked strangers, Sam. He

said they took everything away from him – tranquillity, me. Hell, you can’t do anything to an old man, Sam. We

shouldn’t have bothered with him at all. Now, tell me, have I spoiled your first day here?”

Sam objected vehemently.

“The old man wants a feast tomorrow night. My bienvenida of course.”

“You will be a damned fool if you don’t go,” Sam said.

“I’m thinking about you. You shouldn’t come,” Philip said. “It will be a bore and a ghastly sight.”

But Sam Christie’s interest had been piqued and even when he realized that Philip Latak really did not want him

to come he decided that this was one party he would not miss.

They visited the Mission the following day after having hiked to the villages. As Philip Latak had warned, their

search was fruitless. They struggled up terraces and were met by howling dogs and barebottomed children and

old Ifugaos, who offered them sweet potatoes and rice wine. To all of them Sam Christie was impeccably polite

and charitable with his matches and his candies. And after this initial amenity, Philip would start talking and

always sullen silence would answer him, and he would turn to Sam, a foolish, optimistic grin on his face.


Reverend Doone, who managed the Mission, invited them for lunch. He was quite pleased to have a fellow

American as guest. He was a San Fransiscan, and one consolation of his assignment was its meagre similarity to

San Francisco.

“In the afternoons,” he said with nostalgia, “when the mist drifts in and starts to wrap the terraces and the hills,

I’m reminded of the ocean fog which steals over the white hills of San Francisco – and then I feel like I’m home.”

They had finished lunch and were in the living room of the Mission, sipping coffee, while Philip Latak was in the

kitchen, where he had gone to joke with old friends. Sam’s knowledge of San Francisco was limited to a drizzly

afternoon at the airport, an iron – cold rain and a nasty wind that crept under the top coat, clammy and gripping,

and he kept quiet while Reverend Doone reminisced. The missionary was a short man with a bulbous nose and

heavy brows and homesickness written all over his pallid face.

Then it was Sam’s turn and he rambled about the places he had seen – Greece ans the marble ruins glinting in

the sun, the urn; Japan, the small green country, and the samurai sword. And now, an Ifugao God.

Reverend Doone reiterated what Philip had said. “You must understand their religion,” he said, “and if you

understand it, then you’ll know why it’s difficult to get this god. Then you’ll know why the Ifugaos are so

attached to it. It’s a religion based on fear, retribution. Every calamity or every luck which happens to them is

based on this relief. A good harvest means the gods are pleased. A bad one means they are angered.”

“It’s not different from Christianity then,” Sam said. “Christianity is based on fear, too – fear of hell and final

judgment.”

Reverend Doone drew back, laid his cup of coffee on the well – worn table and spoke sternly. “Christianity is

based on love. That’s the difference. You are in the Agency and you should know the significance of this

distinction.” Reverend Doone became thoughtful again. “Besides,” he said, “Christianity is based on the belief

that man has a soul and that soul is eternal.”

“What happens when a man loses his soul?” Sam asked.

“I wish I could answer that,” Reverend Doone said humbly. “All I can say is that a man without a soul is nothing.

A pig in the sty that lives only for food. Without a soul...”


“Does the Ifugao believe in a soul?”

Reverend Doone smiled gravely, “His god – he believes in them.”

“Can a man lose his soul?” Sam insisted.

“You have seen examples,” Reverend Doone smiled wanly. “In the city – people are corrupted by easy living, the

pleasures of senses and the flesh, the mass corruption that is seeping into the government and everything. A

generation of soulless men is growing up and dictating the future...”

“How can one who loses his soul regain it?” Sam came back with sudden life.

“It takes cataclysm, something tragic to knock a man back to his wits, to make him realize his loss...”

“They are all human beings. But look what is in this mountain – locked country. It is poor – let there be no doubt

about it. They don’t make enough to eat. But there is less greed here and pettiness here. There are no land –

grabbers, no scandals.”

Going down the hill, Sam decided to bare his mind to Philip who was below him, teetering on the sleepy trail, he

said with finality. “Phil, I must not leave Ifugao without that god. It’s more than just a souvenir. It will remind me

of you, of this place. The samurai sword – you should have seen the place where I got it and the people I had to

deal with to get it. It’s not just some souvenir, mind you. It belonged to a soldier who had fought in the South

Pacific and had managed somehow to save the thing when he was made prisoner. But his daughter – it’s a sad

story – she had to go to college, she was majoring English and she didn’t have tuition money.”

In the comfort of their little room back in the town, Sam brought out his liquor. “Well,” he said as he poured a

glass for Philip. “At least the hike did me good. All that walking and all these people – how nice they were, how

they offered us wine and sweet potatoes.”

“You get a lot better in cocktail parties,” Philip Latak said. “How many people in Manila would feel honoured to

attend the parties you go to?”


“They are a bore,” Sam said. “And I have to be there – that’s the difference. I have to be there to spread

sweetness and light. Sometimes, it makes me sick, but I have to be there.”

Phil was silent. He emptied the glass and raised his muddy shoes to the woollen sheet on his cot. Toying with his

empty glass, he asks the question Sam loathed most: “Why are you with the Agency, Sam?”

He did not hesitate. “Because I have to be somewhere, just as you have to be somewhere. It’s that simple.”

“I’m glad you are in the Agency, Sam. We need people like you.”

Sam emptied his glass, too, and sank into his cot. Dust had gathered outside. Fireflies ignited the grove of pine

on the ledge below the house and farther, across the creek, above the brooding terraces, the stars shone.

After a while Philip Latak spoke again: “We will be luckier tomorrow, I know. You’ll have your god, Sam. There’s

a way. I can steal one for you.”

Sam stood up and waved his lean hands. “You can’t do that,” he said with great solemnity. “That’s not fair. And

what will happen to you or to the man whose god you will steal?”

“Lots – if you believe all that trash,” Philip said lightly “I’ll be afflicted with pain, same with the owner. But he

can always make another. It’s not so difficult to carve a new one. I tried it when I was young, before I went to

the Mission.”

“You cannot steal a god, not even for me,” Sam said.

Philip laughed. “Let’s not be bull – headed about this. It’s the least I can do for you. You made this vacation

possible and that raise. Do you know that I have been with the Agency for four years and I never got a raise until

you came?”

“You had it coming. It’s that simple.”


“You’ll have your god.” Philip Latak said gravely.

They did not have supper at the boarding house because in a while Sadek arrived to fetch them. He wore an old

straw hat, a faded flannel coat and old denim pants. “The butchers are ready and the guests are waiting and

Grandfather has opened his wine jar.”

The hike to the village was not difficult as it had been the previous day. Sam had become an expert in scaling the

dikes, in balancing himself on the strips of slippery earth that formed the terrace embankment, in jumping

across the conduits of spring water that continuously gushed from springs higher up in the mountain to the

terraces. When they reached the village many people had already gathered and on the crest of the hill, on which

the old man’s house stood, a huge fire bloomed and the flames crackled and threw quivering shadows upon the

betel palms. In the orange light Sam, could discern the unsmiling faces of men carrying spears, the women and

the children, and beyond the scattered groups, near the slope, inside a bamboo corral, were about a dozen

squealing pigs, dogs, and goats, all ready for the sacrificial knife.

Philip Latak acknowledged the greetings, then breaking away from the tenuous groups, he went to his

grandfather’s hut. Waiting outside, Sam heard the same words of endearment. A pause, then the wooden door

opened and Philip peeped out. “It’s okay, Sam. Come up.”

And Sam, pleased with the prospect of being inside an Ifugao house for the first time, dashed up the ladder.

The old man really looked ancient and, in the light of the stove fire that lived and died at one end of the one –

room house, Sam could see the careworn face, stoic and unsmiling. Sam took in everything; the hollow cheeks,

the white, scraggly hair, the horn hands and the big – boned knees. The patriarch was half – naked like the other

Ifugaos, but his loin cloth had a belt with circular bone embellishments and around his neck dangled a necklace

of bronze. To Sam the old man extended a bowl of rice wine and Sam took it and lifted it to his lips, savoured the

gentle tang and acridness of it.

He then sat down on the mud – splattered floor. Beyond the open door, in the blaze of the bonfire, the pigs

were already being butchered and someone had started beating the gongs and their deep, sonorous whang rang

sharp and clear above the grunts of the dying animals.

The light in the hut became alive again and showed the artefacts within: an old, gray pillow, dirty with use, a few

rusty – tipped spears, fish traps and a small wooden trunk. The whole house smelled of filth, of chicken

droppings, and dank earth, but Sam Christie ignored these smells and attended only to the old man, who had


now risen, his bony frame shaking, and from a compartment in the roof, brought out his black and ghastly –

looking god, no taller than two feet, and set it before the fire before his grandson.

Someone called at the door and thrust to them a wooden bowl of blood. Philip Latak picked it up and gave it to

the old man, who was kneeling. Slowly, piously, the old man poured the living, frothy blood on the idol’s head

and the blood washed down the ugly head to its arms and legs, to its very feet and as he poured the blood, in his

crackled voice, he recited a prayer.

Philip turned to his American friend and, with usual levity said: “My grandfather is thanking his god that I’m here.

He says he can die now because he has seen me again.”

Outside, the rhythm of the gongs quickened and fierce chanting started, filled the air, the hut, crept under the

very skin and into the subconscious. The old man picked up the idol again and, standing, he returned to its niche.

“Let’s go down,” Philip said. They made their way to the iron cauldrons, where rice was cooking, and to the

butcher’s table where big chunks of pork and dog meat were being distributed to the guests. For some time,

Sam Christie watched the dancers and the singers, but the steps and the tune did not have any variation and

soon he was bored – completely so. The hiking that had preoccupied them during the day began to weigh on his

spirits and he told Philip Latak who was with the old man before newly opened wine jar, that he would like to

return to the boarding house. No, he did not need any guide. He knew the way, having gone through the route

thrice. But Sadek would not let him go alone and, after more senseless palaver, Sam finally broke away from the

party and headed for the town with Sadek behind him.

The night was cool, as all nights in the Ifugao country are and that evening, as he lay on his cot, he mused. In his

ears the din of gongs still rang, in his mind’s eye loomed the shrunken, unsmiling face of the Ifugao. He saw

again the dancers, their brown, sweating bodies whirling before the fire, their guttural voices rising as one, and

finally, the wooden god, dirty and black and drenched with blood. And recalling all this in vivid sharpness, he

thought he smelled, too, that peculiar odour of blood and the dirt of many years that had gathered in the old

man’s house. Sam Christie went to sleep with the wind soughing the pines, the cicadas whirring in the grass.

He had no idea what time it was, but it must have been past midnight. The clatter woke him up and, without

risking, he groped for the flashlight under his pillow. He lifted the mosquito net and beamed the light at the dark

from which had paused at the door. It was Philip Latak, swaying and holding on to a black, bloody mass. Sam let

the ray play on Phil’s face, at the splotch on his breast – the sacrificial blood – and finally, on the thing.


“I told you I’d get it,” Philip Latak said with drunken triumph. “I told you I’d steal a god,” and staggering forward,

he shoved his grandfather’s idol at his friend.

Sam Christie, too surprised to speak, pushed the idol away and it fell with a thud on the floor.

“You shouldn’t have done it!” was all he could say.

Philip Latak stumbled, the flashlight beam still on his shiny, porcine face. He fumbled with the stub of candle on

the table and in a while the room was bright. “What a night,” he crowed, heaving himself in his cot. “No, you

don’t have to worry. No one saw me. I did it when all were busy dancing and drinking. I danced a little, too, you

know – with the old man. He is going to give me everything, his terraces, his spears, his wine jars. We danced

and my legs – they are not rusty at all.”

Philip Latak stood up and started prancing.

Sam bolted up, too, and held him by the shoulder. “You’ll be waking up everyone up. Go to bed now and we will

talk in the morning.”

Philip Latak sank back on his cot. The air around him was heavy with the smell of sweat, rice wine, and earth.

“He will be surprised,” he repeated. “He will be surprised – and when he does he will perhaps get drunk and

make a new one. Then there will be another feast to celebrate the new god – and another god to steal...”

“You are lucky to have someone who loves you so much. And you did him wrong,” Sam said sullenly. He sat on

the edge of his cot and looked down at the dirty thing that lay his feet.

“He did himself wrong,” Philip said. “He was wrong in being so attached to me who no longer believes in these

idols. Sadek – you have seen his house. It’s different. And not because he has the money to build a different

house. It’s because he doesn’t believe in the old things any more. He cannot say that aloud.” Phil whacked his

stomach. “Not while he lives with a hundred ignorant natives.”

“It’s a miserable thing to do,” Sam said. “Take it back tomorrow.”

“Take it back?” Phil turned to him with a mocking leer. “Now, that’s good of you. Hell, after my trouble...”


“Yes,” Sam said. “Take it back.” But there was no conviction in him, because in the back of his mind he was

grateful that Philip Latak had brought him this dirty god, because it was real, because it had significance and

meaning and was no cheap tourist bait, such as those that were displayed in the hotel lobbies in Manila.

“I won’t,” Philip said resolutely. “If I do, I’ll look bad. That would be the death of my grandfather.”

“I’ll take it back if you won’t,” Sam said almost inaudibly.

“He will kill you.”

“Don’t frighten me.”

“Hell, I’m just stating a fact,” Phil said. “Do you think he would be happy to know that his god had been fondled

by a stranger?”

“It’s no time for jokes,” Sam said, lying down. “That isn’t funny at all.” And in his mind’s resolute eye, there

crowded again one irrefrangible darkness and in it, like a light, was the old man’s wrinkled face, dirtied with the

mud of the terraces, the eyes narrow and gleaming with wisdom, with hate. He wished he knew more about him,

for to know him would be to discover this miserly land and the hardiness (or was it foolhardiness?) which it

nourished. And it was these thoughts that were rankling his mind when he heard Philip Latak snore, heard his

slow, pleasant breathing and with his hand, Sam picked up the taper and quashed its flame.

At the same time Sam Christie woke up it was already daylight and the sun lay pure and dazzling on the rough

pine sidings of the room. It was Philip Latak who had stirred him, his voice shrill and grating. Sam blinked, then

sat up and walked to the door, where Philip was talking with a boy.

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” he said, turning momentarily to him, “My nephew,” a pause. “It’s grandfather.” His

voice was no longer drunken. “I have to leave you here.”

“Anything the matter?”


Philip had already packed his things and the boy held them, the canvas bag and the old suede jacket. “My

grandfather is dying, Sam. He collapsed – an attack.”

When Sam found words again, all he could ask was, “Why... how...”

“Hell, that should be no riddle,” Philip said. “The feast last night. The dancing and the drinking. It must have

been too much for his heart. And at his age...”

“I’m sorry...”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can, but don’t wait, whatever your plans are.”

After the two had gone, Sam returned to the room and picked up the idol. In the light he saw that the blood had

dried and had lost its colour. The idol was heavy, so Sam quickly deduced that it must be made of good

hardwood. It was crudely shaped and its proportions were almost grotesque. The arms were too long and the

legs were mere stumps. The feet, on other hand, were huge. It was not very different, Sam concluded lightly,

from the creations of sculptors who called themselves modernists. And wrapping it up in an old newspaper, he

pushed it under his cot near his mud – caked shoes.

The next day, Sam Christie idled in the town and developed the acquaintance of the Chief of Police, a small man

with a pinched, anonymous face that gained character only when he smiled, for then he bared a set of

buckteeth reddened from chewing betel – nut. He was extremely hospitable and had volunteered to guide him

to wherever he wanted to hike. They had tried the villages farther up the mountains. It was early afternoon

when they returned and the mist, white as starch in the sum, had started to crawl again down into town. The

Chief of Police had been very helpful almost to the point of obsequiousness and Sam asked him to come up for a

drink. After the Chief had savoured every drop in his glass, he declaimed. “Indeed, I am honoured to taste this

most wonderful hospitality, which should be reserved only for important people...”

The party could have gone further, but it was at this moment that Sadek arrived.

Philip’s brother did not waste words. “It’s about my brother,” he said. He looked down self – consciously at his

shoes – they were a trifle big and Sam saw immediately that the pair was not Sadek’s but Philip’s. He saw, too,

that the jacket which Sadek wore was Philip’s old suede. And as if Sam’s unspoken scrutiny bothered him, Sadek

took the jacket off and held it behind him.


“How is he?” Sam asked. He did not wait for an answer. “Come, let’s have a drink.” He held the Ifugao by the

arm, but Sadek squirmed free from his grasp.

“I still have a half bottle of scotch,” Sam said brightly.

“It’s the best in the world,” Sadek said humbly, but he did not move. “Nothing but the best for Americans.”

Sam did not press. “When is Phil coming back?” he asked.

“There was nothing we could do,” Sadek said. He did not face the young American and a faraway gaze was in his

eyes. “Our grandfather...”

“He is dead?”

Sadek nodded.

Sam took the news calmly. He did not find it, its finality, depressing and he was surprised even that the death of

someone who was dear to a friend had not affected him at all. In the back of his mind, he even found himself

thinking that, perhaps, it was best that the old man had died, so that his passing would seal, forever, as far as

Philip Latak was concerned, the family’s concern with the idol’s dubious grace.

“And Phil?” Sam asked.

“He isn’t going back to Manila,” Sadek said simply, smiling again that meaningless grin of peasants.

“And why not?”

Sadek did not speak.


“Tell me more,” Sam insisted. “Does his decision have something to do with burial customs and all that sort of

thing?”

“It’s not matter of custom, sir!”

“I must see him.”

Sadek faced the American squarely now. “Mr. Christie, you cannot do anything now. You must go back to

Manila.” And wheeling round, the Ifugao walked out in the street.

Sam followed him, rifled by the unexpected show of rudeness. “I cannot leave like this, Sadek. I’m sorry about

what happened to your grandfather. In a time of grief I should at least be able to express my... my condolence.”

“You have already done that, sir.”

Sadek paused again. “All right then,” he said sharply. “Do come,” then softly, supplicatingly, “Please, please

don’t think we are being unreasonable – and don’t make me responsible for what will happen.”

Sam Christie was now troubled. “How did the old man die?” That was the question he wanted to ask and when

he did it seemed as if the words were strangled from his throat.

Walking slowly, Sadek glanced at the stranger keeping step behind him. “It happened in the morning after the

feast. He had a lot of wine.”

“Of course, of course,” Sam said. “I saw him gulp it like water. A man his age shouldn’t have indulged in drinking

like he did.”

“But it wasn’t the drink that did it, sir,” Sadek said emphatically. “It was the loss of the god. It was stolen.”


“It was not the god,” Sam said aloud and the words were not for Sadek alone, but for himself that he was not

involved, that his hands were unsoiled. And a pang of regret, of sadness, touched him. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t

the god. It couldn’t be as simple as that. The liquor, the dancing, the exertion – these did it.”

Sadek did not answer. They went down the incline and at the base of the terraces the path was wide and level

again. Then, softly, “My grandfather always love Ip – pig – Philip – more than anyone of us. He wanted to see Ip

– pig before he died. He died in Ip – pig’s arms.”

Near the hill on which stood the old man’s house Sadek paused again. “We buried him there,” he pointed to a

new digging on the side of the hill, “and we held another feast this morning. Two feasts in so short a time. One

was a welcome to a youth gone astray, the other a farewell to him who gave us blood in us...”

At the edge of the hilltop the open pits which had served as stoves still smoked and the dried blood of the

butchered animals stained the earth. Sadek faced Sam. “My brother... he will not starve here, but he will no

longer have the pleasures that he knew. Will that be good to him, Mr. Christie?” He did not wait for an answer

and he droned, “As long as he works... but he is no longer a farmer of course. We are not learned like him and

we have never been to Manila. But my brother...” and, shaking his head as if a great weight had fallen on his

shoulders, Sadek left the young American.

Now there was nothing to do but go up the Ifugao hut, this flimsy thing of straw hat had survived all of time’s

ravages, this house that was also granary and altar, which had retained its shape through hungry years and was,

as it stood on this patch of earth, everything that endured.

And as he approached it, Sam Christie found himself asking why he was here, among these primitive

monuments, when he could very well be in his apartment in Manila, enjoying his liquor and his books and,

maybe, a mestiza thrown in, too.

“Phil?” Sam Christie stood in the sun, crinkling his brow and wondering if he had spoken a bit too harshly or too

loudly to disturb the silence within. “Phil, are you there?”

No answer.

“Phil,” he repeated, raising his voice.

“I heard you,” Philip Latak’s reply from within the hut was abrupt and gruff.


“I thought you would forget. Remember, tomorrow morning, we are leaving. I’ve already packed and I was

waiting. You didn’t even send word. We will still shop, Phil. And that woven stuff and the utensils – do you know

if we can get them before we leave tomorrow?”

“You can’t mean what you say,” Sam said. “Come on, we still have many things to do. But if it’s against the

custom – that is, if you have to stay here for more weeks after the burial –“

The words exploded from the hut with a viciousness that jolted Sam: “Damn it. I’m not coming!” It was no longer

voice. It was something elemental and distressing. “I’m not going back, do you hear? You can bring the whole

mountain with you if you care. The god, my grandfather’s god – isn’t it enough payment for your kindness?”

The words, their keenness, their meaning, bit deep. “Let us be reasonable,” Sam said, his voice starting to quiver.

“I didn’t want you to steal the idol, Phil.”

“You would have gotten it anyway,” the voice quieted down, “because you are always curious and determined. I

could forgive myself for having stolen it, but the old man – he had always been wise, Sam. I killed him because I

wanted to be free from these... these terraces, because I wanted to be grateful. I killed him who loved me

most...” a faltering and a stifled sob.

“Don’t blame me Phil.” Sam choked on the words. “I didn’t want to steal it. Remember, I even wanted to return

it? Besides, I could have gone on searching until I found one I could buy...”

“That’s it!” the voice within the hut had become a shriek. “That’s it! You’ll always find a way because you have

all the money. You can buy everything, even gods.”

His face burning with bewilderment and shame, Sam Christie moved towards the ladder. “Phil, let’s talk this over.

We are friends, Phil,” he said in a low, anguished voice.

“You are not a friend,” the voice within the grass hut had become a wail. “If you are, you wouldn’t have come

here searching for gods to buy.”

“We are friends,” Sam insisted, toiling up the ladder and at the top rung, he pushed aside the flimsy bamboo

door.


In the semi – darkness, amid the poverty and the soot of many years, Sam Christie saw Philip Latak squatting

before the same earthen stove aglow with embers. And in this glow Sam Christie saw his friend – not the Philip

Latak with a suede jacket, but a well – built Ifugao attired in the simple costume of the highlands, his broad

flanks uncovered, and around his waist was the black – and – red breech cloth with yellow tassels. From his neck

dangled the bronze necklace of an Ifugao warrior.

Philip Latak did not, even face Sam. He seemed completely absorbed in his work and, with the sharp blade in his

hands, he started scraping again the block of wood which he held tightly between his knees.

“Leave me alone, Sam,” Philip Latak said softly, as if all grief had been squeezed from him. “I have to finish this

and it will take time.”

Sam Christie’s ever – observant eyes lingered on the face. Where he had seen it before? Was it Greece – or in

Japan – or in Siam? The recognition came swiftly, savagely; with waterly legs and trembling hands, he stepped

down and let the door slide quietly back into place. He knew then that Philip Latak really had work to do and it

would take some time before he could finish a new god to replace the old one, the stolen idol which he was

bringing home to America to take its place among his souvenirs of benighted and faraway places.


Approaches. Espana, Manila: Univesity of Santo Tomas Publishing House. Print.


Sunset by Paz M. Latorena

The Man

She came to him out of the rain like a rabbit of flotsam washed from the distant seas to the shore by uncertain

tides. The wind blew from the east that night and as the door of the rustly shop opened westward, it slammed

shut behind her with a sort of vicious cheated force when she hurried in. The whole place rocked with the

impact and startled him as he sat on a stool mending a pair of brown shoes in the dim light of a small, red lamp

that hung from the blackened sawali ceiling.

Outside the shop, the rain lashed down the narrow street with the fury of an aroused maniac, a steady flood

from a sky of impenetrable darkness. The water streamed along the gutters, foaming at the heaps of filth

congested there, rejected scraps of food, bits of yellow paper, pieces of rags, and untidy dirt. In what weather,

no light shone along Barranco, the heart of the slums of the northern district, early as the hour still was.

He stood up and eyed her uncertainly as she leaned heavily against the threshold, a slender, half drowned wisp

of a woman clutching a faded violet scarf tightly around her narrow chest.

"Yes?" he said with rising infection.

She looked around the small shop―it was shabby but it was clean―and then at him as he stood under the red

lamp, tall in his sleeveless undershirt and dark blue trousers with white stripes.

"I was caught by the rain," she exclaimed in a voice hardly above a whisper, "this was the only place with a

light."

She coughed a dry, unnatural sound that shook her small body from head to foot.

"So I came in," she gasped on, "but now I shall go."

She turned to the door and opened it. The rain darted in and awoke him from his trance-like immobility and

silence.

"Don't," he protested, striding to the door and closing it with finality. "Sit down and wait for the rain to stop."

She looked up and a tired smile of gratitude lighted up her face for a moment.

There was his stool in the middle of the small shop, directly under the red lamp, and there was a smallpapag in a

corner by the small tightly closed window. He led her to that. The only chair in the shop had been borrowed that

afternoon by a neighbor and had not yet been returned he apologized with an embarrassed laugh.

The papag creaked unpleasantly as she sat down without a word. She cast off the wet scarf from her shoulders

with a quick movement, as if its dampness had suddenly become oppressive and intolerable.

He sat on the stool once more and resumed his work.


Did she live far? Was his tentative query.

She nodded.

Was she looking for someone living in the neighborhood?

Again the mute answer.

There were other things he wanted to know but the question that surged to his lips were stilled by her reticence.

He glanced at her furtively. There was something vaguely disturbing in her stillness her feet barely touched the

floor, her hands were quietly folded on her lap, her eyes were turned down, seemingly intent on the pattern of

her red chinelas.

The silence deepened, lengthened into minutes. A musty odor of damp earth and humid air hung heavily in the

room. Dark wetness crept in through the slits in the nipa wall. The wind continued the havoc without, and in all

the world there seemed to be no other sound but the drip, drip on the roof.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the rain stopped. From somewhere in the distance a church bell made itself

heard and tolled the hour.

He looked up. The woman had fallen asleep. She had dropped on one side, and one of her arms pillowed her

head while the other was carelessly thrown across her breast.

He put his work down and lighted a stumpy candlestick.

He stood up and made his way to the corner to wake her up.

Drops of water still glistened on the mass of black hair that was knotted loosely at the black of her head. A stray

tendril threw its shadow across her sleeping face. The large mouth with its full but colorless lips was slightly

parted by her irregular breathing.

He gazed at her for long while-the mass of black hair, the closed eyes with their long lashes the tips of which

touched the soft brown of her cheeks. And a sudden desire to touch her face overwhelmed him as he stood

above her. She was so small, so soft, so still in the flickering candle light.

He remembered that she had looked at him from the door with eyes made enormous by dark circles under them.

In the dim light of the lamp he had not discerned the color of those eyes. Were they black? Or brown?

They were dark-brown in the clear morning when Barranco woke up to find a strange woman in the cobbler's

shop. And they were sad as they met his in the cold and cruel light.

But could anything else have happened, he asked himself hopelessly. He closed his eyes and saw her again in the

frail and haunting loveliness that had been hers in the flickering candlelight.

A long silence bridged the charm of speech. When the spoke it was almost as if her words were so many pebbles

flung into that chasm for themer purpose of sound, as full of hopeless regret was her voice.

"I suppose, I should…" the words halted there.

It was many days later when he learned how she came to him that night of wind and rain. She had been working

in the house of a vaudeville star. She had been happy, she assured him, because the señorita was kind. But the


younger brother, coming home only that night, had been nasty in his drunkenness. She had fled from the house,

from evil eyes and evil lips and evil hands that had seared her flesh with their touch. She had wandered through

unfamiliar streets-from the boat she had gone straight to the senorita's house, upon her arrival from the

province only a few months before―until the sudden rain had driven her to his door.

From mud to mud, he thought as he listened to her story and watched her trembling hands. A sense of the

enormous wrong he had done her troubled him, also an intangible responsibility and a vague to atone.

He would marry her. He said that aloud, feeling he not only should but wanted to.

"But we have to wait," he told one evening across their frugal meal; "marriage cost money. The license… other

fees…"

"The senorita…" she ventured timidly.

"I do not want you to go to that house," he reminded her, "and I shall pay for the license," he added in cold

voice.

She was silent.

The Woman

Barranco was horrified―even the slums had a code of morals loose―but not for long. The poor people had too

many other things and personal affairs to worry about―for example, how to feed seven children everyday on

twenty centavos.

In time the neighbors forgot, for they rarely saw her. It was the cobbler who went to the market, it was the

cobbler who hung the wet clothes in the backyard every morning. And something in her voice, something gay

and undaunted made them stop their work for a while to listen to her and to notice how lovely the day was.

For beautiful mornings came after that night of rain-soft sunshine, blue skies, tender breezes―kind days during

which she learned to love her tall cobbler who made barely enough money to keep them both in rice and fish

everyday.

Often she would sit quietly on the papag and watch him as he sat on his stool mending a pair of shoes that

would bring them a day's meal or standing by the door talking to a neighbor across the narrow street while

waiting for a customer to come in and the night.

So they were not only lovely but happy days as well. Yet she counted them, for if work became steady, they

might save the money to marry on.

Somehow nothing had been said about marriage since the night he had forbidden her to go back to the house of

her former senorita. But how she could talk about it, she argued with herself impatiently whenever the question

furtively intruded into her thoughts, when there were times when they did not have enough money for the

market?

Once or twice she was tempted to go to the señorita without his knowledge, but she could not think of a good

excuse to leave the house for a long time. And she had learned his anger which was swift and silent and

somehow terrible. She had incurred it once by making a friend of the wife of a neighbor and chatting for hours


across the back fence for the sheer pleasure of hearing another woman's voice. He had said anything but she

had cried because he had eaten his meal without her.

She was sweeping the shop one morning―the cobbler had left to deliver a pair of shoes to its owner―when a

small gray car made its way through the narrow street and a girl in a gaudy sweater came down, staring with

bewildered eyes at the small protection.

"Senorita," she exclaimed joyfully as a shadow darkened the threshold.

"Yes," the girl in the gaudy sweater hastened inside. "What are you doing in this shop?"

"I live here, señorita," she said, dusting the only chair with a sleeve of her camisa and offering it to the

unexpected visitor.

"I had come to take you back," crossing her silk-clad legs, "because Pepe is now living with Mother. He told me

what happened the night you left. But the detective I hired took a long time to locate you."

The voice of the señorita was very kind, so were the eyes, and before she realized what she was doing, she had

sobbed the whole story.

"But he is going to marry me, señorita," she smiled through her tears, "as soon as we have enough money with

which to pay the license and other fees."

The girl's face softened, became almost beautiful.

"Well. Here is the salary you forgot to ask for in your hurry to leave," opening a beaded handbag and drawing

out two ten-peso bills and a small card." And here is my new address, in case you should change your mind.

"But señorita…" she stared at the bills in her hand.

"The other bill is my gift to the bride," she said, smiling. "And now is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Yes, there is, señorita," she clutched the girl's arm in her excitement. "Wait for him. And do not tell him you

have seen me. Say that you have heard about us from the detective you hired to locate me, that you are giving

him this gift of money so he can marry me."

"But why?" the girl was puzzled.

"Because I love him, señorita, and I want him to think he is paying for the license, not I." she explained as she

snatched a scarf―the same faded violet scarf with which she had come to her cobbler out of the night and the

rain and hurried out.

The small gray car no longer blocked the narrow street when she returned about an hour later. Inside the shop

the cobbler was regarding a dirty pair of black shoes perched on his low table with evident dislike.

"Where have you been?" he asked casually as she came in.

"Looking for isis with which polish our table," she answered in a happy voice, waving a branch of rough leaves

before his eyes.

"You should not leave the when I am out." He remarked thoughtfully. "People might come in," he added.


"Did any?" she challenged gayly. She stood before him expectantly, her eyes starry bright.

"Well …no," he spoke slowly as he resumed the scrutiny of the black shoes.

A bit of the radiance left her eyes. Rather puzzled, she picked up the isis that had fallen to the ground and went

inside the kitchen to prepare the midday meal.

Throughout the rest of the morning she resolutely kept calm and refrained from thinking. She would not let

anything, not even curiosity, master her into unnecessary doubt, until he himself should, consciously or

unconsciously, give the clue to his rather strange behavior.

"I have a surprise for you," he told her drowsily as he curled up for his usual afternoon nap.

The relief was so sudden and so sharp that it almost brought tears to her eyes. She did not speak because she

knew her voice would betray her.

He was keeping the news as a surprise. He would tell her about it tonight and she hoped there would be rain to

remind him of the night she had come to him. And in a rush of patience for the ugly and furtive thoughts that

had troubled her in spite of herself, she ran her fingers through his hair. He was fast sleep.

With renewed buoyancy, she moved about the shop the rest of the afternoon, excited, humming a tune as she

worked. She made fun of the dirty black shoes the cobbler began mending after his brief nap. She laughed over

the very long needle and the very thick thread he chose for his work.

But even the night brought nothing. Close to him in the dark she waited in vain for the words that would make

of their life together a beautiful symphony, not the sordid interlude it was threatening to be.

Seen through the little window, the sky of night, so smooth, so bestarred, looked wrinkled through her screen of

unshed tears. Her thoughts release at last, kept her company through the long night like so many shadow

specters. And something she could only feel but no name assumed definite proportions with the dawn.

The new day brought his surprise―it was carefully wrapped in fine white paper, and he had in his pocket when

he arrived home from the market. At first she did not want to unwrap the small package. Truth hung by a hair

and as long as it hung, she could swear it was a lie. When she finally did, she was conscious of a sharp and

indignant agony.

She did not ask questions about it. And she noticed that he was relieved as he was surprised by her strange lack

of curiosity.

It was a pretty although inexpensive little thing―a square violet scarf of thin silk with a small tassels all around.

But she wore the old faded one when, three days later, she told him she had found another job.

"But why?" he wanted to know. "I am not earning much but…"

"We cannot go on like this," she spoke low to keep the bitterness out of her voice, "it is not right."

"You mean…"

"Yes. Let us both work and save money. Then perhaps…"

She watched his face keenly. There was not even the flicker of an eyelash to betray him.


"Where will you work this time?" he asked for a long silence. She had only to show the card the señoritahad

given her. But her knowledge of the whole torturing incident prevented her from doing so.

"Somewhere not very far from here," she told him lightly.

A gift was a gift, she reminded herself fiercely. She had given him that money through the señoritawithout his

asking for it, freely, to do with it as he liked. And she chose to let her go.

She left late the next afternoon. He wanted to go with her but she asked him not to, promising to send him word

and her address later.

"The fish is under the basin, near the stove," she reminded him as he helped her into the carretela that was

waiting for her.

He gave her a bundle, the clothes of his dead mother which he had insisted on her taking with her. His face was

pale in the late afternoon light, his hands were none too steady. She smiled compassionate divinity looking

down on the puny sins of man.

She was still smiling as the horse started. At the end of the street she turned her head and waved her hand to

him as he stood by the gate in the failing darkness.


Desire by Paz M. Latorena

She was homely. A very broad forehead gave her face an unpleasant, masculine look. Her eyes, which were

small, slanted at the corners and made many of her acquaintances wonder if perchance she had a few drops of

celestial blood in her veins. Her nose was broad and flat, and its nostrils were always dilated, as if breathing

were an effort. Her mouth, with its thick lips, was a long, straight gash across her face made angular by her

unusually big jaws.

But nature, as if ashamed of her meanness in fashioning the face, moulded a body of unusual beauty. From her

neck to her small feet, she was perfect. Her bust was full, her breast rose up like twin roses in full bloom. Her

waist was slim as a young girl's, her hips seemed to have stolen the curve of the crescent moon. Her arms were

shapely, ending in small hands with fine, tapering fingers that were the envy of her friends. Her legs with their

trim ankles reminded one of those lifeless things seen in shop windows displaying the latest silk stockings.

Hers was a body a sculptor, in a thirst for glory, might have dreamed of and moulded in a feverish frenzy of

creation, with hands atremble with vision of the fame in store for him. Hers was a body that might have been

the delight and despair of a painter whose faltering brush tried in vain to depict on the canvas such a beautiful

harmony of curves and lines. Hers was a body a poet might have raved over and immortalized in musical,

fanciful verses. Hers was a body men would gladly have gone to hell for.

And they did. Men looked at her face and turned their eyes away; they looked at her body and were enslaved.

They forgot the broad masculine forehead, the unpleasant mouth, the aggressive jaws. All they had eyes for was

that body, those hips that had stolen the curve of the crescent moon.

But she hated her body--hated that gift which Nature, in a fit or remorse for the wrong done to her face, had

given her. She hated her body because it made men look at her with an unbeautiful light in their eyes--married

eyes, single eyes.

She wanted love, was starved for it. But she did not want the love that her body inspired in men. She wanted

something purer…cleaner.

She was disgusted. And hurt. For men told other women that they loved them, looking into their eyes to the

souls beneath, their voices low and soft, their hands quivering with the weight of their tenderness. But men told

her that they loved her body with eyes that made her feels as if she were naked, stripped bare for their sinful

eyes to gaze upon. They told her with voices made thick by desire, touched her with hands afire, that seared her

flesh, filled her with scorn and loathing. She wanted to be loved as other women were loved. She was as good,

as pure as they. And some of them were as homely as she was. But they did not have beautiful bodies. And so

they were loved for themselves.


Deliberately she set out to hide from the eyes of men the beautiful body that to her was a curse rather than a

blessing. She started wearing long, wide dresses that completely disfigured her. She gave up wearing Filipino

costume which outlined her body with startling accuracy.

It took quite a while to make men forget that body that had once been their delight. But after a time they

became accustomed to the disfiguring dresses and concluded that she had become fat and shapeless. She

accomplished the desired result.

And more. For there came a time when men looked at her and turned their eyes away, not with the unbeautiful

light of former day but with something akin to pity mirrored there--pity for a homely face and a shapeless mass

of flesh.

At first she was glad. Glad that she had succeeded in extinguishing that unbeautiful light in the eyes of men

when they looked at her.

After some time, she became rebellious. For she was a woman and she wanted to be loved and to love. But it

seemed that men would not have anything to do with a woman with a homely face and an apparently shapeless

mass of flesh.

But she became reconciled to her fate. And rather than bring back that unbeautiful light in men's eyes, she

chose to go on…with the farce.

She turned to writing to while away the long nights spent brooding all alone.

Little things. Little lyrics. Little sketches. Sometimes they were the heart-throbs of a woman who wanted love

and sweet things whispered to her in the dark. Sometimes they were the ironies of one who sees all the

weaknesses and stupidities of men and the world through eyes made bitter by loneliness.

She sent them to papers which found the little things acceptable and published them. "To fill space," she told

herself. But she continued to write because it made her forget once in a while how drab her life was.

And then he came into her life--a man with white blood in his veins. He was one of those who believed in the

inferiority of colored races. But he found something unusual in the light, ironic, tirades from the pen of the

unknown writer. Not in the little lyrics. No, he thought those were superfluous effusions of a woman belonging

to a race of people who could not think of writing about anything except love. But he liked the light airy sketches.

They were like those of the people of his race.

One day, when he had nothing to do, he sent her, to encourage her, a note of appreciation. It was brief. But the

first glance showed her that it came from a cultured man.

She answered it, a light, nonsensical answer that touched the sense of humor of the white man. That started a

correspondence. In the course of time, she came to watch for the mail carrier, for the grey tinted stationery that

was his.

He asked to see her--to know her personally. Letters were so tantalizing. Her first impulse was to say no. A bitter

smile hovered about her lips as she surveyed her face before the mirror. He would be so disappointed, she told

herself.


But she consented. They would have to meet sooner of later. The first meeting would surely be a trial and the

sooner it was over, the better.

He, the white man, coming from a land of fair, blue-eyed women, was shocked. Perhaps, he found it a bit

difficult to associate this homely woman with the one who could write such delightful sketches, such delightful

letters.

But she could talk rather well. There was a light vein of humor, faintly ironical at times, in everything she said.

And that delighted him.

He asked her to come out with him again. By the shore of Manila Bay one early evening, when her homely face

was softened by the darkness around them, he forgot that he was a white man, that she was a brown maiden

homely and to all appearance, shapeless creature at that. Her silence, as with half-closed eyes she gazed at the

distance, was very soothing and under the spell of her understanding sympathy, he found himself telling her of

his home away over the seas, how he loved the blue of the sea on early mornings because it reminded of the

blue of the waves that dashed against the rocks in impotent fury, how he could spend his life on the water,

sailing on and on, to unknown and uncharted seas.

She listened to him silently. Then he woke up from the spell and, as if ashamed of the outburst of confidence,

added irrelevantly: "But you are different from the other women of your race," looking deep into her small eyes

that slanted at the corners.

She smiled. Of course she was, the homely and shapeless mass of flesh that he saw her to be.

"No, I do not mean that," he protested, divining her thoughts, "you do not seem to care much for conventions.

No Filipino girl would come out unchaperoned with a man, a white man at that."

"A homely woman can very well afford to break conventions. Nobody minds her if she does. That is one

consolation of being homely," was her calm reply.

He laughed.

"You have some very queer ideas," he observed.

"I should have," she retorted. "If I didn't, nobody would noticed my face and my…my…figure," she hated herself

for stammering the last words.

He looked at her impersonally, as if trying to find some beauty in her.

"But I like you," was his verdict, uttered with the almost brutal frankness of his race. "I have not come across a

more interesting girl for a long time."

They met again. And again. Thoughts, pleasant thoughts, began to fill her mind. Had she at last found one who

liked her sincerely? For he liked her, that she was ready to believe. As a friend, a pal who understood him. And

the thought gave her happiness--a friend, a pal who understood him--such as he had never experienced before.

One day, an idea took hold of her--simply obsessed her. He was such a lover of beautiful things--of beauty in any

form. She noticed that in all his conversations, in every look, every gesture of his. A desire to show him that she

was not entirely devoid of beauty which he so worshipped came over her.


It would not do any harm, she told herself. He had learned to like her for herself. He had learned to value their

friendship, homely as she was and shapeless as he thought her to be. Her body would matter not at all now. It

would please the aesthete in him perhaps, but it certainly would not matter much to the man.

From the bottom of a very old trunk she unearthed one of those flimsy, shapely things that had lain there

unused for many years. She looked at herself in the mirror before the appointment, she grudgingly admitted

that her body had lost nothing of its hated beauty.

He was surprised. Pleasantly so.

Accustomed as he was to the beautiful bodies of the women of his race, he had to confess that here was

something of unusual beauty.

"Why have you been hiding such a beautiful figure all this time," he demanded in mock anger.

"I did not know it was beautiful," she lied.

"Pouf! I know it is not polite to tell a young lady she is a liar so I won't do it."

"But…but…"

"But…" fear was beginning to creep into her voice. "Well…let us talk of something else."

She heaved a deep sigh. She was right. She had found a man to whom her body mattered little, if anything at all.

She need not take warning.

He had learned to like her for herself.

At their next meeting she wore a pale rose of Filipino dress that softened the brown of her skin. His eyes lighted

up when they rested on her, but whether it was the unbeautiful light that she dreaded so much, she could not

determine for it quickly disappeared. No, it could not be the unbeautiful light. He liked her for herself. This belief

she treasured fondly.

The had a nice long ride out in the country, where the winds were soft and faintly scented and the bamboo trees

sighted love to the breeze.

They visited a little out of the way nipa chapel by the roadside where naked man, nailed to the Cross, looked at

them with eyes which held at the tragedy and the sorrow of the world--for the sins of sinning men.

She gazed at the figure feeling something vague and incomprehensible stirring within her. She turned to him for

sympathy and found him staring at her…at her body.

He turned slightly red. In silence they left the little chapel. He helped her inside the car but did not start it at

once.

"I …I…love…" he stammered after some moments, as if impelled by an irresistible force. Then he stopped.


The small eyes that slanted at the corners were almost beautiful with a tender, soft light as she turned them on

him. So he loved her. Had he learned not only to like her but to love her? For herself? And the half-finished

confession found an echo in the heart of the woman who was starved for love.

"Yes…" there was a pleading note in her voice.

He swallowed hard. "I love…your body," he finished with a thick voice.

And the blue eyes flared with the dreaded, hateful light.

She uttered an involuntary cry of protest, of pain, of disillusion. And then a sob escaped her. And dimly the man

from the West realized that he had wronged this little brown maiden with the homely face and beautiful body as

she never had been wronged before. And he felt sorry, infinitely so.

When they stopped before the door of her house, he got out to open the door for her.

"I am sorry," was all he said.

There was a world of regret in the eyes she turned on him. "For what?" she asked in a tired voice. "You have just

been yourself…like other men." He winced.

And with a weary smile she passed within.


The Virgin by Kerima Polotan Tuvera

He went to where Miss Mijares sat, a tall, big man, walking with an economy of movement, graceful and light, a

man who knew his body and used it well. He sat in the low chair worn decrepit by countless other interviewers

and laid all ten fingerprints carefully on the edge of her desk. She pushed a sheet towards him, rolling a pencil

along with it. While he read the question and wrote down his answers, she glanced at her watch and saw that it

was ten. "I shall be coming back quickly," she said, speaking distinctly in the dialect (you were never sure about

these people on their first visit, if they could speak English, or even write at all, the poor were always proud and

to use the dialect with them was an act of charity), "you will wait for me."

As she walked to the cafeteria, Miss Mijares thought how she could easily have said, Please wait for me, or will

you wait for me? But years of working for the placement section had dulled the edges of her instinct for

courtesy. She spoke now peremptorily, with an abruptness she knew annoyed the people about her.

When she talked with the jobless across her desk, asking them the damning questions that completed their

humiliation, watching pale tongues run over dry lips, dirt crusted handkerchiefs flutter in trembling hands, she

was filled with an impatience she could not understand. Sign here, she had said thousands of times, pushing the

familiar form across, her finger held to a line, feeling the impatience grow at sight of the man or woman tracing

a wavering "X" or laying the impress of a thumb. Invariably, Miss Mijares would turn away to touch the delicate

edge of the handkerchief she wore on her breast.

Where she sat alone at one of the cafeteria tables, Miss Mijares did not look 34. She was slight, almost bony, but

she had learned early how to dress herself to achieve an illusion of hips and bosom. She liked poufs and shirrings

and little girlish pastel colors. On her bodice, astride or lengthwise, there sat an inevitable row of thick

camouflaging ruffles that made her look almost as though she had a bosom, if she bent her shoulders slightly

and inconspicuously drew her neckline open to puff some air into her bodice.

Her brow was smooth and clear and she was always pushing off it the hair she kept in tight curls at night. She

had thin cheeks, small and angular, falling down to what would have been a nondescript, receding chin, but

Nature's hand had erred and given her a jaw instead. When displeased, she had a lippy, almost sensual pout,

surprising on such a small face.

So while not exactly an ugly woman, she was no beauty. She teetered precariously on the border line to which

belonged countless others who you found, if they were not working at some job, in the kitchen of some married

sister's house shushing a brood of devilish little nephews.


And yet Miss Mijares did think of love. Secret, short-lived thoughts flitted through her mind in the jeepneys she

took to work when a man pressed down beside her and through her dress she felt the curve of his thigh; when

she held a baby in her arms, a married friend's baby or a relative's, holding in her hands the tiny, pulsing body,

what thoughts did she not think, her eyes straying against her will to the bedroom door and then to her friend's

laughing, talking face, to think: how did it look now, spread upon a pillow, unmasked of the little wayward

coquetries, how went the lines about the mouth and beneath the eyes: (did they close? did they open?) in the

one final, fatal coquetry of all? to finally, miserably bury her face in the baby's hair. And in the movies, to sink

into a seat as into an embrace, in the darkness with a hundred shadowy figures about her and high on the

screen, a man kissing a woman's mouth while her own fingers stole unconsciously to her unbruised lips.

When she was younger, there had been other things to do--- college to finish, a niece to put through school, a

mother to care for.

She had gone through all these with singular patience, for it had seemed to her that love stood behind her,

biding her time, a quiet hand upon her shoulder (I wait. Do not despair) so that if she wished she had but to turn

from her mother's bed to see the man and all her timid, pure dreams would burst into glory. But it had taken her

parent many years to die. Towards the end, it had become a thankless chore, kneading her mother's loose flesh,

hour after hour, struggling to awaken the cold, sluggish blood in her drying body. In the end, she had died --- her

toothless, thin-haired, flabby-fleshed mother --- and Miss Mijares had pushed against the bed in grief and also in

gratitude. But neither love nor glory stood behind her, only the empty shadows, and nine years gone, nine years.

In the room for her unburied dead, she had held up her hands to the light, noting the thick, durable fingers,

thinking in a mixture of shame and bitterness and guilt that they had never touched a man.

When she returned to the bleak replacement office, the man stood by a window, his back to her, half-bending

over something he held in his hands. "Here," she said, approaching, "have you signed this?"

"Yes," he replied, facing her.

In his hands, he held her paperweight, an old gift from long ago, a heavy wooden block on which stood, as

though poised for flight, an undistinguished, badly done bird. It had come apart recently. The screws beneath

the block had loosened so that lately it had stood upon her desk with one wing tilted unevenly, a miniature

eagle or swallow? felled by time before it could spread its wings. She had laughed and laughed that day it had

fallen on her desk, plop! "What happened? What happened?" they had asked her, beginning to laugh, and she

had said, caught between amusement and sharp despair, "Some one shot it," and she had laughed and laughed

till faces turned and eyebrows rose and she told herself, whoa, get a hold, a hold, a hold!


He had turned it and with a penknife tightened the screws and dusted it. In this man's hands, cupped like that, it

looked suddenly like a dove.

She took it away from him and put it down on her table. Then she picked up his paper and read it.

He was a high school graduate. He was also a carpenter.

He was not starved, like the rest. His clothes, though old, were pressed and she could see the cuffs of his shirt

buttoned and wrapped about big, strong wrists.

"I heard about this place," he said, "from a friend you got a job at the pier." Seated, he towered over her, "I'm

not starving yet," he said with a quick smile. "I still got some money from that last job, but my team broke up

after that and you got too many jobs if you're working alone. You know carpentering," he continued, "you can't

finish a job quickly enough if you got to do the planing and sawing and nailing all by your lone self. You got to be

on a team."

Perhaps he was not meaning to be impolite? But for a jobseeker, Miss Mijares thought, he talked too much and

without call. He was bursting all over with an obtruding insolence that at once disarmed and annoyed her.

So then she drew a slip and wrote his name on it. "Since you are not starving yet," she said, speaking in English

now, wanting to put him in his place, "you will not mind working in our woodcraft section, three times a week at

two-fifty to four a day, depending on your skill and the foreman's discretion, for two or three months after

which there might be a call from outside we may hold for you."

"Thank you," he said.

He came on the odd days, Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday.

She was often down at the shanty that housed their bureau's woodcraft, talking with Ato, his foreman, going

over with him the list of old hands due for release. They hired their men on a rotation basis and three months

was the longest one could stay.

"The new one there, hey," Ato said once. "We're breaking him in proper." And he looked across several shirted

backs to where he stopped, planing what was to become the side of a bookcase.


How much was he going to get? Miss Mijares asked Ato on Wednesday. "Three," the old man said, chewing

away on a cud. She looked at the list in her hands, quickly running a pencil down. "But he's filling a four-peso

vacancy," she said. "Come now," surprised that she should wheedle so, "give him the extra peso." "Only a half,"

the stubborn foreman shook his head, "three-fifty."

"Ato says I have you to thank," he said, stopping Miss Mijares along a pathway in the compound.

It was noon, that unhappy hour of the day when she was oldest, tiredest, when it seemed the sun put forth cruel

fingers to search out the signs of age on her thin, pinched face. The crow's feet showed unmistakably beneath

her eyes and she smiled widely to cover them up and aquinting a little, said, "Only a half-peso --- Ato would have

given it to you eventually."

"Yes, but you spoke for me," he said, his big body heaving before her. "Thank you, though I don't need it as

badly as the rest, for to look at me, you would knew I have no wife --- yet."

She looked at him sharply, feeling the malice in his voice. "I'd do it for any one," she said and turned away, angry

and also ashamed, as though he had found out suddenly that the ruffles on her dress rested on a flat chest.

The following week, something happened to her: she lost her way home.

Miss Mijares was quite sure she had boarded the right jeepneys but the driver, hoping to beat traffic, had

detoured down a side alley, and then seeing he was low on gas, he took still another shortcut to a filling station.

After that, he rode through alien country.

The houses were low and dark, the people shadowy, and even the driver, who earlier had been an amiable,

talkative fellow, now loomed like a sinister stranger over the wheel. Through it all, she sat tightly, feeling oddly

that she had dreamed of this, that some night not very long ago, she had taken a ride in her sleep and lost her

way. Again and again, in that dream, she had changed direction, losing her way each time, for something huge

and bewildering stood blocking the old, familiar road home.

But that evening, she was lost only for a while. The driver stopped at a corner that looked like a little known part

of the boulevard she passed each day and she alighted and stood on a street island, the passing headlights

playing on her, a tired, shaken woman, the ruffles on her skirt crumpled, the hemline of her skirt awry.

The new hand was absent for a week. Miss Mijares waited on that Tuesday he first failed to report for some

word from him sent to Ato and then to her. That was regulation. Briefly though they were held, the bureau jobs

were not ones to take chances with. When a man was absent and he sent no word, it upset the system. In the

absence of a definite notice, someone else who needed a job badly was kept away from it.

"I went to the province, ma'am," he said, on his return.

"You could have sent someone to tell us," she said.


"It was an emergency, ma'am," he said. "My son died."

"How so?"

A slow bitter anger began to form inside her. "But you said you were not married!"

"No, ma'am," he said gesturing.

"Are you married?" she asked loudly.

"No, ma'am."

"But you have -- you had a son!" she said.

"I am not married to his mother," he said, grinning stupidly, and for the first time she noticed his two front teeth

were set widely apart. A flush had climbed to his face, suffusing it, and two large throbbing veins crawled along

his temples.

She looked away, sick all at once.

"You should told us everything," she said and she put forth hands to restrain her anger but it slipped away she

stood shaking despite herself.

"I did not think," he said.

"Your lives are our business here," she shouted.

It rained that afternoon in one of the city's fierce, unexpected thunder-storms. Without warning, it seemed to

shine outside Miss Mijares' window a gray, unhappy look.

It was past six when Miss Mijares, ventured outside the office. Night had come swiftly and from the dark sky the

thick, black, rainy curtain continued to fall. She stood on the curb, telling herself she must not lose her way

tonight. When she flagged a jeepney and got in, somebody jumped in after her. She looked up into the

carpenter's faintly smiling eyes. She nodded her head once in recognition and then turned away.

The cold tight fear of the old dream was upon her. Before she had time to think, the driver had swerved his

vehicle and swung into a side street. Perhaps it was a different alley this time. But it wound itself in the same

tortuous manner as before, now by the banks of overflowing esteros, again behind faintly familiar buildings. She

bent her tiny, distraught face, conjuring in her heart the lonely safety of the street island she had stood on for an

hour that night of her confusion.

"Only this far, folks," the driver spoke, stopping his vehicle. "Main street's a block straight ahead."


"But it's raining," someone protested.

"Sorry. But if I got into a traffic, I won't come out of it in a year. Sorry."

One by one the passengers got off, walking swiftly, disappearing in the night.

Miss Mijares stepped down to a sidewalk in front of a boarded store. The wind had begun again and she could

hear it whipping in the eaves above her head. "Ma'am," the man's voice sounded at her shoulders, "I am sorry if

you thought I lied."

She gestured, bestowing pardon.

Up and down the empty, rain-beaten street she looked. It was as though all at once everyone else had died and

they were alone in the world, in the dark.

In her secret heart, Miss Mijares' young dreams fluttered faintly to life, seeming monstrous in the rain, near this

man --- seeming monstrous but sweet overwhelming. I must get away, she thought wildly, but he had moved

and brushed against her, and where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she recalled how his hands had

looked that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and about the wooden bird (that had looked like a

moving, shining dove) and she turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the dark she turned to him.


Zita by Arturo B. Rotor

TURONG brought him from Pauambang in his small sailboat, for the coastwise steamer did not stop at any little

island of broken cliffs and coconut palms. It was almost midday; they had been standing in that white glare

where the tiniest pebble and fluted conch had become points of light, piercing-bright--the municipal president,

the parish priest, Don Eliodoro who owned almost all the coconuts, the herb doctor, the village character. Their

mild surprise over when he spoke in their native dialect, they looked at him more closely and his easy manner

did not deceive them. His head was uncovered and he had a way of bringing the back of his hand to his brow or

mouth; they read behind that too, it was not a gesture of protection. "An exile has come to Anayat… and he is so

young, so young." So young and lonely and sufficient unto himself. There was no mistaking the stamp of a strong

decision on that brow, the brow of those who have to be cold and haughty, those shoulders stooped slightly,

less from the burden that they bore than from a carefully cultivated air of unconcern; no common school-

teacher could dress so carelessly and not appear shoddy.

They had prepared a room for him in Don Eliodoro's house so that he would not have to walk far to school every

morning, but he gave nothing more than a glance at the big stone building with its Spanish azotea, its arched

doorways, its flagged courtyard. He chose instead Turong's home, a shaky hut near the sea. Was the sea rough

and dangerous at times? He did not mind it. Was the place far from the church and the schoolhouse? The walk

would do him good. Would he not feel lonely with nobody but an illiterate fisherman for a companion? He was

used to living alone. And they let him do as he wanted, for the old men knew that it was not so much the

nearness of the sea that he desired as its silence so that he might tell it secrets he could not tell anyone else.

They thought of nobody but him; they talked about him in the barber shop, in the cockpit, in the sari-sari store,

the way he walked, the way he looked at you, his unruly hair. They dressed him in purple and linen, in myth and

mystery, put him astride a black stallion, at the wheel of a blue automobile. Mr. Reteche? Mr. Reteche! The

name suggested the fantasy and the glitter of a place and people they never would see; he was the scion of a

powerful family, a poet and artist, a prince.

That night, Don Eliodoro had the story from his daughter of his first day in the classroom; she perched wide-

eyed, low-voiced, short of breath on the arm of his chair.

"He strode into the room, very tall and serious and polite, stood in front of us and looked at us all over and yet

did not seem to see us.

" 'Good morning, teacher,' we said timidly.


"He bowed as if we were his equals. He asked for the fist of our names and as he read off each one we looked at

him long. When he came to my name, Father, the most surprising thing happened. He started pronouncing it

and then he stopped as if he had forgotten something and just stared and stared at the paper in his hand. I

heard my name repeated three times through his half-closed lips, 'Zita. Zita. Zita.'

" 'Yes sir, I am Zita.'

"He looked at me uncomprehendingly, inarticulate, and it seemed to me, Father, it actually seemed that he was

begging me to tell him that that was not my name, that I was deceiving him. He looked so miserable and sick I

felt like sinking down or running away.

" 'Zita is not your name; it is just a pet name, no?'

" 'My father has always called me that, sir.'

" 'It can't be; maybe it is Pacita or Luisa or--'

"His voice was scarcely above a whisper, Father, and all the while he looked at me begging, begging. I shook my

head determinedly. My answer must have angered him. He must have thought I was very hard-headed, for he

said, 'A thousand miles, Mother of Mercy… it is not possible.' He kept on looking at me; he was hurt perhaps

that he should have such a stubborn pupil. But I am not really so, Father?"

"Yes, you are, my dear. But you must try to please him, he is a gentleman; he comes from the city. I was

thinking… Private lessons, perhaps, if he won't ask too much." Don Eliodoro had his dreams and she was his only

daughter.

Turong had his own story to tell in the barber shop that night, a story as vividly etched as the lone coconut palm

in front of the shop that shot up straight into the darkness of the night, as vaguely disturbing as the secrets that

the sea whispered into the night.

"He did not sleep a wink, I am sure of it. When I came from the market the stars were already out and I saw that

he had not touched the food I had prepared. I asked him to eat and he said he was not hungry. He sat by the

window that faces the sea and just looked out hour after hour. I woke up three times during the night and saw

that he had not so much as changed his position. I thought once that he was asleep and came near, but he

motioned me away. When I awoke at dawn to prepare the nets, he was still there."

"Maybe he wants to go home already." They looked up with concern.

"He is sick. You remember Father Fernando? He had a way of looking like that, into space, seeing nobody, just

before he died."

Every month there was a letter that came for him, sometimes two or three; large, blue envelopes with a gold

design in the upper left hand comer, and addressed in broad, angular, sweeping handwriting. One time Turong


brought one of them to him in the classroom. The students were busy writing a composition on a subject that he

had given them, "The Things That I Love Most." Carelessly he had opened the letter, carelessly read it, and

carelessly tossed it aside. Zita was all aflutter when the students handed in their work for he had promised that

he would read aloud the best. He went over the pile two times, and once again, absently, a deep frown on his

brow, as if he were displeased with their work. Then he stopped and picked up one. Her heart sank when she

saw that it was not hers, she hardly heard him reading:

"I did not know any better. Moths are not supposed to know; they only come to the light. And the light looked

so inviting, there was no resisting it. Moths are not supposed to know, one does not even know one is a moth

until one's wings are burned."

It was incomprehensible, no beginning, no end. It did not have unity, coherence, emphasis. Why did he choose

that one? What did he see in it? And she had worked so hard, she had wanted to please, she had written about

the flowers that she loved most. Who could have written what he had read aloud? She did not know that any of

her classmates could write so, use such words, sentences, use a blue paper to write her lessons on.

But then there was little in Mr. Reteche that the young people there could understand. Even his words were so

difficult, just like those dark and dismaying things that they came across in their readers, which took them hour

after hour in the dictionary. She had learned like a good student to pick out the words she did not recognize,

writing them down as she heard them, but it was a thankless task. She had a whole notebook filled now, two

columns to each page:

And what did such things as original sin, selfishness, insatiable, actress of a thousand faces mean, and who were

Sirse, Lorelay, other names she could not find anywhere? She meant to ask him someday, someday when his

eyes were kinder.

He never went to church, but then, that always went with learning and education, did it not? One night Bue saw

him coming out of the dim doorway. He watched again and the following night he saw him again. They would

not believe it, they must see it with their own eyes and so they came. He did not go in every night, but he could

be seen at the most unusual hours, sometimes at dusk, sometimes at dawn, once when it was storming and the

lightning etched ragged paths from heaven to earth. Sometimes he stayed for a few minutes, sometimes he

came twice or thrice in one evening. They reported it to Father Cesareo but it seemed that he already knew. "Let

a peaceful man alone in his prayers." The answer had surprised them.

The sky hangs over Anayat, in the middle of the Anayat Sea, like an inverted wineglass, a glass whose wine had

been spilled, a purple wine of which Anayat was the last precious drop. For that is Anayat in the crepuscule,

purple and mellow, sparkling and warm and effulgent when there is a moon, cool and heady and sensuous when

there is no moon.


One may drink of it and forget what lies beyond a thousand miles, beyond a thousand years; one may sip it at

the top of a jagged cliff, nearer peace, nearer God, where one can see the ocean dashing against the rocks in

eternal frustration, more moving, more terrible than man's; or touch it to his lips in the lush shadows of the

dama de noche, its blossoms iridescent like a thousand fireflies, its bouquet the fragrance of flowers that know

no fading.

Zita sat by her open window, half asleep, half dreaming. Francisco B. Reteche; what a name! What could his

nickname be. Paking, Frank, Pa… The night lay silent and expectant, a fairy princess waiting for the whispered

words of a lover. She was not a bit sleepy; already she had counted three stars that had fallen to earth, one

almost directly into that bush of dama de noche at their garden gate, where it had lighted the lamps of a

thousand fireflies. He was not so forbidding now, he spoke less frequently to himself, more frequently to her; his

eyes were still unseeing, but now they rested on her. She loved to remember those moments she had caught

him looking when he thought she did not know. The knowledge came keenly, bitingly, like the sea breeze at

dawn, like the prick of the rose's thorn, or--yes, like the purple liquid that her father gave the visitors during

pintakasi which made them red and noisy. She had stolen a few drops one day, because she wanted to know, to

taste, and that little sip had made her head whirl.

Suddenly she stiffened; a shadow had emerged from the shrubs and had been lost in the other shadows. Her

pulses raced, she strained forward. Was she dreaming? Who was it? A lost soul, an unvoiced thought, the

shadow of a shadow, the prince from his tryst with the fairy princess? What were the words that he whispered

to her?

They who have been young once say that only youth can make youth forget itself; that life is a river bed; the

water passes over it, sometimes it encounters obstacles and cannot go on, sometimes it flows unencumbered

with a song in every bubble and ripple, but always it goes forward. When its way is obstructed it burrows deeply

or swerves aside and leaves its impression, and whether the impress will be shallow and transient, or deep and

searing, only God determines. The people remembered the day when he went up Don Eliodoro's house, the light

of a great decision in his eyes, and finally accepted the father's request that he teach his daughter "to be a lady."

"We are going to the city soon, after the next harvest perhaps; I want her not to feel like a 'provinciana' when

we get there."

They remembered the time when his walks by the seashore became less solitary, for now of afternoons, he

would draw the whole crowd of village boys from their game of leapfrog or patintero and bring them with him.

And they would go home hours after sunset with the wonderful things that Mr. Reteche had told them, why the

sea is green, the sky blue, what one who is strong and fearless might find at that exact place where the sky

meets the sea. They would be flushed and happy and bright-eyed, for he could stand on his head longer than

any of them, catch more crabs, send a pebble skimming over the breast of Anayat Bay farthest.


Turong still remembered those ominous, terrifying nights when he had got up cold and trembling to listen to the

aching groan of the bamboo floor, as somebody in the other room restlessly paced to and fro. And his pupils still

remember those mornings he received their flowers, the camia which had fainted away at her own fragrance,

the kampupot, with the night dew still trembling in its heart; receive them with a smile and forget the lessons of

the day and tell them all about those princesses and fairies who dwelt in flowers; why the dama de noche must

have the darkness of the night to bring out its fragrance; how the petals of the ylang-ylang, crushed and soaked

in some liquid, would one day touch the lips of some wondrous creature in some faraway land whose eyes were

blue and hair golden.

ilang-ilang

Those were days of surprises for Zita. Box after box came in Turong's sailboat and each time they contained

things that took the words from her lips. Silk as sheer and perishable as gossamer, or heavy and shiny and tinted

like the sunset sky; slippers with bright stones which twinkled with the least movement of her feet; a necklace of

green, flat, polished stone, whose feel against her throat sent a curious choking sensation there; perfume that

she must touch her lips with. If only there would always be such things in Turong's sailboat, and none of those

horrid blue envelopes that he always brought. And yet--the Virgin have pity on her selfish soul--suppose one day

Turong brought not only those letters but the writer as well? She shuddered, not because she feared it but

because she knew it would be.

"Why are these dresses so tight fitting?" Her father wanted to know.

"In society, women use clothes to reveal, not to hide." Was that a sneer or a smile in his eyes? The gown showed

her arms and shoulders and she had never known how round and fair they were, how they could express so

many things.

"Why do these dresses have such bright colors?"

"Because the peacock has bright feathers."

"They paint their lips…"

"So that they can smile when they do not want to."

"And their eyelashes are long."

"To hide deception."

He was not pleased like her father; she saw it, he had turned his face toward the window. And as she came

nearer, swaying like a lily atop its stalk she heard the harsh, muttered words:

"One would think she'd feel shy or uncomfortable, but no… oh no… not a bit… all alike… comes naturally."


There were books to read; pictures, names to learn; lessons in everything; how to polish the nails, how to use a

fan, even how to walk. How did these days come, how did they go? What does one do when one is so happy, so

breathless? Sometimes they were a memory, sometimes a dream.

"Look, Zita, a society girl does not smile so openly; her eyes don't seek one's so--that reveals your true feelings."

"But if I am glad and happy and I want to show it?"

"Don't. If you must show it by smiling, let your eyes be mocking; if you would invite with your eyes, repulse with

your lips."

That was a memory.

She was in a great drawing room whose floor was so polished it reflected the myriad red and green and blue

fights above, the arches of flowers and ribbons and streamers. All the great names of the capital were there,

stately ladies in wonderful gowns who walked so, waved their fans so, who said one thing with their eyes and

another with their lips. And she was among them and every young and good-looking man wanted to dance with

her. They were all so clever and charming but she answered: "Please, I am tired." For beyond them she had seen

him alone, he whose eyes were dark and brooding and disapproving and she was waiting for him to take her.

That was a dream. Sometimes though, she could not tell so easily which was the dream and which the memory.

If only those letters would not bother him now, he might be happy and at peace. True he never answered them,

but every time Turong brought him one, he would still become thoughtful and distracted. Like that time he was

teaching her a dance, a Spanish dance, he said, and had told her to dress accordingly. Her heavy hair hung in a

big, carelessly tied knot that always threatened to come loose but never did; its dark, deep shadows showing off

in startling vividness how red a rose can be, how like velvet its petals. Her earrings--two circlets of precious

stones, red like the pigeon's blood--almost touched her shoulders. The heavy Spanish shawl gave her the most

trouble--she had nothing to help her but some pictures and magazines--she could not put it on just as she

wanted. Like this, it revealed her shoulder too much; that way, it hampered the free movement of the legs. But

she had done her best; for hours she had stood before her mirror and for hours it had told her that she was

beautiful, that red lips and tragic eyes were becoming to her.

She'd never forget that look on his face when she came out. It was not surprise, joy, admiration. It was as if he

saw somebody there whom he was expecting, for whom he had waited, prayed.

"Zita!" It was a cry of recognition.

She blushed even under her rouge when he took her in his arms and taught her to step this way, glide so, turn

about; she looked half questioningly at her father for disapproval, but she saw that there was nothing there but

admiration too. Mr. Reteche seemed so serious and so intent that she should learn quickly; but he did not

deceive her, for once she happened to lean close and she felt how wildly his heart was beating. It frightened her


and she drew away, but when she saw how unconcerned he seemed, as if he did not even know that she was in

his arms, she smiled knowingly and drew close again. Dreamily she closed her eyes and dimly wondered if his

were shut too, whether he was thinking the same thoughts, breathing the same prayer.

Turong came up and after his respectful "Good evening" he handed an envelope to the school teacher. It was

large and blue and had a gold design in one comer; the handwriting was broad, angular, sweeping.

"Thank you, Turong." His voice was drawling, heavy, the voice of one who has just awakened. With one

movement he tore the unopened envelope slowly, unconsciously, it seemed to her, to pieces.

"I thought I had forgotten," he murmured dully.

That changed the whole evening. His eyes lost their sparkle, his gaze wandered from time to time. Something

powerful and dark had come between them, something which shut out the light, brought in a chill. The tears

came to her eyes for she felt utterly powerless. When her sight cleared she saw that he was sitting down and

trying to piece the letter together.

"Why do you tear up a letter if you must put it together again?" rebelliously.

He looked at her kindly. "Someday, Zita, you will do it too, and then you will understand."

One day Turong came from Pauambang and this time he brought a stranger. They knew at once that he came

from where the teacher came--his clothes, his features, his politeness--and that he had come for the teacher.

This one did not speak their dialect, and as he was led through the dusty, crooked streets, he kept forever

wiping his face, gazing at the wobbly, thatched huts and muttering short, vehement phrases to himself. Zita

heard his knock before Mr. Reteche did and she knew what he had come for. She must have been as pale as her

teacher, as shaken, as rebellious. And yet the stranger was so cordial; there was nothing but gladness in his

greeting, gladness at meeting an old friend. How strong he was; even at that moment he did not forget himself,

but turned to his class and dismissed them for the day.

The door was thick and she did not dare lean against the jamb too much, so sometimes their voices floated away

before they reached her.

"…like children… making yourselves… so unhappy."

"…happiness? Her idea of happiness…"

Mr. Reteche's voice was more low-pitched, hoarse, so that it didn't carry at all. She shuddered as he laughed, it

was that way when he first came.

"She's been… did not mean… understand."

"…learning to forget…"


There were periods when they both became excited and talked fast and hard; she heard somebody's restless

pacing, somebody sitting down heavily.

"I never realized what she meant to me until I began trying to seek from others what she would not give me."

She knew what was coming now, knew it before the stranger asked the question:

"Tomorrow?"

She fled; she could not wait for the answer.

He did not sleep that night, she knew he did not, she told herself fiercely. And it was not only his preparations

that kept him awake, she knew it, she knew it. With the first flicker of light she ran to her mirror. She must not

show her feeling, it was not in good form, she must manage somehow. If her lips quivered, her eyes must smile,

if in her eyes there were tears… She heard her father go out, but she did not go; although she knew his purpose,

she had more important things to do. Little boys came up to the house and she wiped away their tears and told

them that he was coming back, coming back, soon, soon.

The minutes flew, she was almost done now; her lips were red and her eyebrows penciled; the crimson shawl

thrown over her shoulders just right. Everything must be like that day he had first seen her in a Spanish dress.

Still he did not come, he must be bidding farewell now to Father Cesareo; now he was in Doña Ramona's house;

now he was shaking the barber's hand. He would soon be through and come to her house. She glanced at the

mirror and decided that her lips were not red enough; she put on more color. The rose in her hair had too long a

stem; she tried to trim it with her fingers and a thorn dug deeply into her flesh.

Who knows? Perhaps they would soon meet again in the city; she wondered if she could not wheedle her father

into going earlier. But she must know now what were the words he had wanted to whisper that night under the

dama de noche, what he had wanted to say that day he held her in his arms; other things, questions whose

answers she knew. She smiled. How well she knew them!

The big house was silent as death; the little village seemed deserted, everybody had gone to the seashore. Again

she looked at the mirror. She was too pale, she must put on more rouge. She tried to keep from counting the

minutes, the seconds, from getting up and pacing. But she was getting chilly and she must do it to keep warm.

The steps creaked. She bit her lips to stifle a wild cry there. The door opened.

"Turong!"

"Mr. Reteche bade me give you this. He said you would understand."

In one bound she had reached the open window. But dimly, for the sun was too bright, or was her sight failing?--

she saw a blur of white moving out to sea, then disappearing behind a point of land so that she could no longer

follow it; and then, clearly against a horizon suddenly drawn out of perspective, "Mr. Reteche," tall, lean,


brooding, looking at her with eyes that told her somebody had hurt him. It was like that when he first came, and

now he was gone. The tears came freely now. What matter, what matter? There was nobody to see and criticize

her breeding. They came down unchecked and when she tried to brush them off with her hand, the color came

away too from her cheeks, leaving them bloodless, cold. Sometimes they got into her mouth and they tasted

bitter.

Her hands worked convulsively; there was a sound of tearing paper, once, twice. She became suddenly aware of

what she had done when she looked at the pieces, wet and brightly stained with uneven streaks of red. Slowly,

painfully, she tried to put the pieces together and as she did so a sob escaped deep from her breast--a great

understanding had come to her.


The Visitation of the Gods by Gilda Cordero-Fernando

The letter announcing the visitation (a yearly descent upon the school by the superintendent, the district

supervisors and the division supervisors for "purposes of inspection and evaluation") had been delivered in the

morning by a sleepy janitor to the principal. The party was, the attached circular revealed a hurried glance, now

at Pagkabuhay, would be in Mapili by lunchtime, and barring typhoons, floods, volcanic eruptions and other acts

of God, would be upon Pugad Lawin by afternoon.

Consequently, after the first period, all the morning classes were dismissed. The Home Economics building,

where the fourteen visiting school officials were to be housed, became the hub of a general cleaning. Long-

handled brooms ravished the homes of peaceful spiders from cross beams and transoms, the capiz of the

windows were scrubbed to an eggshell whiteness, and the floors became mirrors after assiduous bouts with

husk and candlewax. Open wood boxes of Coronas largas were scattered within convenient reach of the carved

sofa, the Vienna chairs and the stag-horn hat rack. The sink, too, had been repaired and the spent bulbs

replaced; a block of ice with patches of sawdust rested in the hollow of the small unpainted icebox. There was a

brief discussion on whether the French soap poster behind the kitchen door was to go or stay: it depicted a trio

of languorous nymphs in various stages of deshabille reclining upon a scroll bearing the legend Parfumerie et

Savonerie but the woodworking instructor remembered that it had been put there to cover a rotting jagged hole

- and the nymphs had stayed.

The base of the flagpole, too, had been cemented and the old gate given a whitewash. The bare grounds were,

within the remarkable space of two hours, transformed into a riotous bougainvillea garden. Potted blooms were

still coming in through the gate by wheelbarrow and bicycle. Buried deep in the secret earth, what supervisor

could tell that such gorgeous specimens were potted, or that they had merely been borrowed from the

neighboring houses for the visitation? Every school in the province had its special point of pride - a bed of giant

squashes, an enclosure or white king pigeons, a washroom constructed by the PTA. Yearly, Pugad Lawin High

School had made capital of its topography: rooted on the firm ledge of a hill, the schoolhouse was accessible by

a series of stone steps carved on the hard face of the rocks; its west windows looked out on the misty grandeur

of a mountain chain shaped like a sleeping woman. Marvelous, but the supervisors were expecting something

tangible, and so this year there was the bougainvillea.


The teaching staff and the student body had been divided into four working groups. The first group, composed

of Mrs. Divinagracia, the harassed Home Economics instructor, and some of the less attractive lady teachers,

were banished to the kitchen to prepare the menu: it consisted of a 14-lb. suckling pig, macaroni soup,

embutido, chicken salad, baked lapu-lapu, morcon, leche flan and ice cream, the total cost of which had already

been deducted from the teachers' pay envelopes. Far be it to be said that Pugad Lawin was lacking in generosity,

charm or good tango dancers! Visitation was, after all, 99% impression - and Mr. Olbes, the principal, had

promised to remember the teachers' cooperation in that regard in the efficiency reports.

The teachers of Group Two had been assigned to procure the beddings and the dishes to be used for the supper.

In true bureaucratic fashion they had relegated the assignment to their students, who in turn had denuded their

neighbors' homes of cots, pillows, and sleeping mats. The only bed properly belonging to the Home Economics

Building was a four-poster with a canopy and the superintendent was to be given the honor of slumbering upon

it. Hence it was endowed with the grandest of the sleeping mats, two sizes large, but interwoven with a detailed

map of the archipelago. Nestling against the headboard was a quartet of the principal's wife's heart-shaped

pillows - two hard ones and two soft ones - Group Two being uncertain of the sleeping preferences of division

heads.

"Structuring the Rooms" was the responsibility of the third group. It consisted in the construction (hurriedly) of

graphs, charts, and other visual aids. There was a scurrying to complete unfinished lesson plans and correct

neglected theme books; precipitate trips from bookstand to broom closet in a last desperate attempt to keep

out of sight the dirty spelling booklets of a preceding generation, unfinished projects and assorted rags - the key

later conveniently "lost" among the folds of Mrs. Olbes' (the principal's wife) balloon skirt.

All year round the classroom walls had been unperturbably blank. Now they were, like the grounds, miraculously

abloom - with cartolina illustrations of Parsing, Amitosis Cell Division and the Evolution of the Filipina Dress -

thanks to the Group Two leader, Mr. Buenaflor (Industrial Arts) who, forsaken, sat hunched over a rainfall graph.

The distaff side of Group Two were either practicing tango steps or clustered around a vacationing teacher who

had taken advantage of her paid maternity leave to make a mysterious trip to Hongkong and had now returned

with a provocative array of goods for sale.

The rowdiest freshman boys composed the fourth and discriminated group. Under the stewardship of Miss Noel

(English), they had, for the past two days been "Landscaping the Premises," as assignment which, true to its

appellation, consisted in the removal of all unsightly objects from the landscape. That the dirty assignment had

not fallen on the hefty Mr. de Dios (Physics) or the crafty Mr. Baz (National Language), both of whom were now

hanging curtains, did not surprise Miss Noel. She had long been at odds with the principal, or rather, the


principal's wife - ever since the plump Mrs. Olbes had come to school in a fashionable sack dress and caught on

Miss Noel's mouth a half-effaced smile.

"We are such a fashionable group," Miss Noel had joked once at a faculty meeting. "If only our reading could

also be in fashion!" -- which statement obtained for her the ire of the only two teachers left talking to her. That

Miss Noel spent her vacations taking a summer course for teachers in Manila made matters even worse - for Mr.

Olbes believed that the English teacher attended these courses for the sole purpose of showing them up. And

Miss Noel's latest wrinkle, the Integration Method, gave Mr. Olbes a pain where he sat.

Miss Noel, on the other hand, thought utterly unbecoming and disgusting the manner in which the principal's

wife praised a teacher's new purse of shawl. ("It's so pretty, where can I get one exactly like it?" - a heavy-

handed and graceless hint) or the way she had of announcing, well in advance, birthdays and baptisms in her

family (in other words, "Prepare!"). The lady teachers were, moreover, for lack of household help, "invited" to

the principal's house to make a special salad, stuff a chicken or clean the silverware. But this certainly was much

less than expected of the vocational staff - the Woodworking instructor who was detailed to do all the painting

and repair work on the principal's house, the Poultry instructor whose stock of leghorns was depleted after

every party of the Olbeses, and the Automotive instructor who was forever being detailed behind the wheel of

the principal's jeep - and Miss Noel had come to take it in stride as one of the hazards of the profession.

But today, accidentally meeting in the lavatory, a distressed Mrs. Olbes had appealed to Miss Noel for help with

her placket zipper, after which she brought out a bottle of lotion and proceeded to douse the English teacher

gratefully with it. Fresh from the trash pits, Miss Noel, with supreme effort, resisted from making an untoward

observation - and friendship was restored on the amicable note of a stuck zipper.

At 1:30, the superintendent's car and the weapons carrier containing the supervisors drove through the town

arch of Pugad Lawin. A runner, posted at the town gate since morning, came panting down the road but was

outdistanced by the vehicles. The principal still in undershirt and drawers, shaving his jowls by the window, first

sighted the approaching party. Instantly, the room was in a hustle. Grimy socks, Form 137's and a half bottle of

beer found their way into Mr. Olbes' desk drawer. A sophomore breezed down the corridor holding aloft a

newly-pressed barong on a wire hanger. Behind the closed door, Mrs. Olbes wriggled determinedly into her

corset.

The welcoming committee was waiting on the stone steps when the visitors alighted. It being Flag Day, the male

instructors were attired in barong, the women in red, white or blue dresses in obedience to the principal's

circular. The Social Studies teacher, hurrying down the steps to present the sampaguita garlands, tripped upon


an unexpected pot of borrowed bougainvillea. Peeping from an upstairs window, the kitchen group noted that

there were only twelve arrivals. Later it was brought out that the National Language Supervisor had gotten a

severe stomach cramp and had to be left at the Health Center; that Miss Santos (PE) and Mr. del Rosario

(Military Tactics) had eloped at dawn.

Four pairs of hands fought for the singular honor of wrenching open the car door, and Mr. Alava emerged into

the sunlight. He was brown as a sampaloc seed. Mr. Alava gazed with satisfaction upon the patriotic faculty and

belched his approval in cigar smoke upon the landscape. The principal, rivaling a total eclipse, strode towards Mr.

Alava minus a cuff link. "Compañero!" boomed the superintendent with outstretched arms.

"Compañero!" echoed Mr. Olbes. They embraced darkly.

There was a great to-do in the weapons carrier. The academic supervisor's pabaon of live crabs from Mapili had

gotten entangled with the kalamay in the Home Economics supervisor's basket. The district supervisor had

mislaid his left shoe among the squawking chickens and someone had stepped on the puto seco. There were

overnight bags and reed baskets to unload, bundles of perishable and unperishable going-away gifts. (The Home

Economics staff's dilemma: sans ice box, how to preserve all the food till the next morning). A safari of Pugad

Lawin instructors lent their shoulders gallantly to the occasion.

Vainly, Miss Noel searched in the crowd for the old Language Arts supervisor. All the years she had been in

Pugad Lawin, Mr. Ampil had come: in him there was no sickening bureaucracy, none of the self-importance and

pettiness that often characterized the small public official . He was dedicated to the service of education, had

grown old in it. He was about the finest man Miss Noel had ever known.

How often had the temporary teachers had to court the favor of their supervisors with lavish gifts of sweets, de

hilo, portfolios and what-not, hoping that they would be given a favorable recommendation! A permanent

position for the highest bidder. But Miss Noel herself had never experienced this rigmarole -- she had passed her

exams and had been recommended to the first vacancy by Mr. Ampil without having uttered a word of flattery

or given a single gift. It was ironic that even in education, you found the highest and the meanest forms of men.

Through the crowd came a tall unfamiliar figure in a loose coat, a triad of pens leaking in his pocket. Under the

brave nose, the chin had receded like a gray hermit crab upon the coming of a great wave. "Miss Noel, I

presume?" said the stranger.


The English teacher nodded. "I am the new English supervisor - Sawit is the name." The tall man shook her hand

warmly.

"Did you have a good trip, Sir?"

Mr. Sawit made a face. "Terrible!"

Miss Noel laughed. "Shall I show you to your quarters? You must be tired."

"Yes, indeed," said Mr. Sawit. "I'd like to freshen up. And do see that someone takes care of my orchids, or my

wife will skin me alive."

The new English supervisor gathered his portfolios and Miss Noel picked up the heavy load of orchids. Silently,

they walked down the corridor of the Home Economics building, hunter and laden Indian guide.

"I trust nothing's the matter with Mr. Ampil, Sir?"

"Then you haven't heard? The old fool broke a collar bone. He's dead."

"Oh."

"You see, he insisted on doing all the duties expected of him - he'd be ahead of us in the school we were visiting

if he felt we were dallying on the road. He'd go by horseback, or carabao sled to the distant ones where the road

was inaccessible by bus - and at his age! Then, on our visitation to barrio Tungkod - you know that place, don't

you?"

Miss Noel nodded.

"On the way to the godforsaken island, that muddy hellhole, he slipped on the banca - and well, that's it."

"How terrible."

"Funny thing is - they had to pass the hat around to buy him a coffin. It turned out the fellow was as poor as a

churchmouse. You'd think, why this old fool had been thirty-three years in the service. Never a day absent.


Never a day late. Never told a lie. You'd think at least he'd get a decent burial - but he hadn't reached 65 and

wasn't going to get a cent he wasn't working for. Well, anyway, that's a thorn off your side."

Miss Noel wrinkled her brow, puzzled.

"I thought all teachers hated strict supervisors." Mr. Sawit elucidated. "Didn't you all quake for your life when

Mr. Ampil was there waiting at the door of the classroom even before you opened it with your key?"

"Feared him, yes," said Miss Noel. "But also respected and admired him for what he stood for."

Mr. Sawit shook his head smiling. "So that's how the wind blows," he said, scratching a speck of dust off his

earlobe.

Miss Noel deposited the supervisor's orchids in the corridor. They had reached the reconverted classroom that

Mr. Sawit was to occupy with two others.

"You must be kind to us poor supervisors," said Mr. Sawit as Miss Noel took a cake of soap and a towel from the

press. "The things we go through!" Meticulously, Mr. Sawit peeled back his shirt sleeves to expose his pale

hairless wrists. "At Pagkabuhay, Miss What's-her-name, the grammar teacher, held a demonstration class under

the mango trees. Quite impressive, and modern; but the class had been so well rehearsed that they were

reciting like machine guns. I think it's some kind of a code they have, like if the student knows the answer he is

to raise his left hand, and if he doesn't he is to raise his right, something to that effect." Mr. Sawit reached for

the towel hanging on Miss Noel's arm.

"What I mean to say is, hell, what's the use of going through all that palabas? As I always say," Mr. Sawit raised

his arm and pumped it vigorously in the air, "Let's get to the heart of what matters."

Miss Noel looked up with interest. "You mean get into the root of the problem?"

"Hell no!" the English supervisor said, "I mean the dance! I always believe there's no school problem that a good

round of tango will not solve!"

Mr. Sawit groped blindly for the towel to wipe his dripping face and came up to find Miss Noel smiling.

"Come, girl," he said lamely. "I was really only joking."


As soon as the bell rang, Miss Noel entered I-B followed by Mr. Sawit. The students were nervous. You could see

their hands twitching under the desks. Once in a while they glanced apprehensively behind to where Mr. Sawit

sat on a cane chair, straight as a bamboo. But as the class began, the nervousness vanished and the boys

launched into the recitation with aplomb. Confidently, Miss Noel sailed through a sea of prepositions, using the

Oral Approach Method:

"I live in a barrio."

"I live in a town."

"I live in Pugad Lawin."

"I live on a street."

"I live on Calle Real…"

Mr. Sawit scribbled busily on his pad.

Triumphantly, Miss Noel ended the period with a trip to the back of the building where the students had

constructed a home-made printing press and were putting out their first school paper.

The inspection of the rest of the building took exactly half an hour. It was characterized by a steering away from

the less presentable parts of the school (except for the Industrial Arts supervisor who, unwatched, had come

upon and stood gaping at the French soap poster). The twenty-three strains of bougainvillea received such a

chorus of praise and requests for cutting that the poor teachers were nonplussed on how to meet them without

endangering life and limb from their rightful owners. The Academic supervisor commented upon the surprisingly

fresh appearance of the Amitosis chart and this was of course followed by a ripple of nervous laughter. Mr.

Sawit inquired softly of Miss Noel what the town's cottage industry was, upon instructions of his uncle, the

supervisor.

"Buntal hats," said Miss Noel.

The tour ended upon the sound of the dinner bell and at 7 o'clock the guests sat down to supper. The table,

lorded over by a stuffed Bontoc eagle, was indeed an impressive sight. The flowered soup plates borrowed from


Mrs. Valenton vied with Mrs. De los Santos' bone china. Mrs. Alejandro's willoware server rivalled but could not

quite outshine the soup tureens of Mrs. Cruz. Pink paper napkins blossomed grandly in a water glass.

The superintendent took the place of honor at the head of the table with Mr. Olbes at his right. And the feast

began. Everyone partook heavily of the elaborate dishes; there were second helpings and many requests for

toothpicks. On either side of Mr. Alava, during the course of the meal, stood Miss Rosales and Mrs. Olbes, the

former fanning him, the latter boning the lapu-lapu on his plate. The rest of the Pugad Lawin teachers,

previously fed on hopia and coke, acted as waitresses. Never was a beer glass empty, never a napkin out of

reach, and the supervisors, with murmured apologies, belched approvingly. Towards the end of the meal, Mr.

Alava inquired casually of the principal where he could purchase some buntal hats. Elated, the latter replied that

it was the cottage industry right here in Pugad Lawin. They were, however, the principal said, not for sale to

colleagues. The Superintendent shook his head and said he insisted on paying, and brought out his wallet, upon

which the principal was so offended he would not continue eating. At last the superintendent said, all right,

compañero, give me one or two hats, but the principal shook his head and ordered his alarmed teachers to

round up fifty; and the ice cream was served.

Close upon the wings of the dinner tripped the Social Hour. The hosts and the guests repaired to the sala where

a rondalla of high school boys were playing an animated rendition of "Merry Widow" behind the hat rack. There

was a concerted reaching for open cigar boxes and presently the room was clouded with acrid black smoke. Mr.

Olbes took Miss Noel firmly by the elbow and steered her towards Mr. Alava who, deep in a cigar, sat wide-

legged on the carved sofa. "Mr. Superintendent," said the principal. "This is Miss Noel, our English teacher. She

would be greatly honored if you open the dance with her."

"Compañero," twinkled the superintendent. "I did not know Pugad Lawin grew such exquisite flowers."

Miss Noel smiled thinly. Mr. Alava's terpsichorean knowledge had never advanced beyond a bumbling waltz.

They rocked, gyrated, stumbled, recovered, rolled back into the center, amid a wave of teasing and applause. To

each of the supervisors, in turn, the principal presented a pretty instructor, while the rest, unattractive or

painfully shy, and therefore unfit offering to the gods, were left to fend for themselves. The first number was

followed by others in three-quarter time and Miss Noel danced most of them with Mr. Sawit.

At ten o'clock, the district supervisor suggested that they all drive to the next town where the fiesta was being

celebrated with a big dance in the plaza. All the prettier lady teachers were drafted and the automotive

instructor was ordered behind the wheel of the weapons carrier. Miss Noel remained behind together with Mrs.

Divinagracia and the Home Economics staff, pleading a headache. Graciously, Mr. Sawit also remained behind.


As Miss Noel repaired to the kitchen, Mr. Sawit followed her. "The principal tells me you are quite headstrong,

Miss Noel," he said. "But then I don't put much stock by what principals say."

Miss Noel emptied the ashtrays in the trash can. "If he meant why I refused to dance with Mr. Lucban…"

"No, just things in general," said Mr. Sawit. "The visitation, for instance. What do you think of it?"

Miss Noel looked into Mr. Sawit's eyes steadily. "Do you want my frank opinion, Sir?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well, I think it's all a farce."

"That's what I've heard - what makes you think that?"

"Isn't it obvious? You announce a whole month ahead that you're visiting. We clean the schoolhouse, tuck the

trash in the drawers, bring out our best manners. As you said before, we rehearse our classes. Then we roll out

the red carpet - and you believe you observe us in our everyday surrounding, in our everyday comportment?"

"Oh, we know that."

"That's what I mean - we know that you know. And you know that we know that you know."

Mr. Sawit gave out an embarrassed laugh. "Come now, isn't that putting it a trifle strongly?"

"No," replied Miss Noel. "In fact, I overheard one of your own companions say just a while ago that if your

lechon were crisper than that of the preceding school, if our pabaon were more lavish, we would get a higher

efficiency rating."

"Of course he was merely joking. I see what Mr. Olbes meant about your being stubborn."

"And what about one supervisor, an acquaintance of yours, I know, who used to come just before the town

fiesta and assign us the following items: 6 chickens, 150 eggs, 2 goats, 12 leche flans. I know the list by heart - I

was assigned the checker."


"There are a few miserable exceptions…"

"What about the sweepstakes agent supervisor who makes a ticket of the teacher's clearance for the withdrawal

of his pay? How do you explain him?"

Mr. Sawit shook his head as if to clear it.

"Sir, during the five years that I've taught, I've done my best to live up to my ideals. Yet I please nobody. It's the

same old narrow conformism and favor-currying. What matters is not how well one teaches but how well one

has learned the art of pleasing the powers-that-be and it's the same all the way up."

Mr. Sawit threw his cigar out of the window in an arc. "So you want to change the world. I've been in the service

a long time, Miss Noel. Seventeen years. This bald spot on my head caused mostly by new teachers like you who

want to set the world on fire. In my younger days I wouldn't hesitate to recommend you for expulsion for your

rash opinions. But I've grown old and mellow - I recognize spunk and am willing to give it credit. But spunk is

only hard-headedness when not directed towards the proper channels. But you're young enough and you'll

learn, the hard way, singed here and there - but you'll learn."

"How are you so sure?" asked Miss Noel narrowly.

"They all do. There are thousands of teachers. They're mostly disillusioned but they go on teaching - it's the only

place for a woman to go."

"There will be a reclassification next month," continued Mr. Sawit. "Mr. Olbes is out to get you - he can, too, on

grounds of insubordination, you know that. But I'm willing to stick my neck out for you if you stop being such an

idealistic fool and henceforth express no more personal opinions. Let sleeping dogs lie, Miss Noel. I shall give

you a good rating after this visitation because you remind me of my younger sister, if for no other reason. Then

after a year, when I find that you learned to curb your tongue, I will recommend you for a post in Manila where

your talents will not be wasted. I am related to Mr. Alava, you know."

Miss Noel bit her lip in stunned silence. Is this what she had been wasting her years on? She had worked, she

had slaved - with a sting of tears she remembered all the parties missed ("Can't wake up early tomorrow, Clem"),

alliances forgone ("Really, I haven't got the time, maybe some other year?") the chances by-passed ("Why, she's

become a spinster!") - then to come face to face with what one has worked for - a boor like Mr. Sawit! How did


one explain him away? What syllogisms could one invent to rub him out of the public school system? Below the

window, Miss Noel heard a giggle as one of the Pugad Lawin teachers was pursued by a mischievous supervisor

in the playground.

"You see," the voice continued, "education is not so much a matter of brains as getting along with one's

fellowmen, else how could I have risen to my present position?" Mr. Sawit laughed harshly. "All the fools I

started out with are still head-teachers in godforsaken barrios, and how can one be idealistic in a mudhole?

Goodnight, my dear." Mr. Sawit's hot trembling hand (the same mighty hand that fathered the 8-A's that made

or broke English teachers) found its way swiftly around her waist, and hot on her forehead Miss Noel endured

the supreme insult of a wet, fatherly kiss.

Give up your teaching, she heard her aunt say again for the hundredth time, and in a couple of months you

might be the head. We need someone educated because we plan to export.

Oh, to be able to lie in a hammock on the top of the hill and not have to worry about the next lesson plan! To

have time to meet people, to party, to write.

She remembered Clem coming into the house (after the first troubled months of teaching) and persuading her

to come to Manila because his boss was in need of a secretary. Typing! Filing! Shorthand! She had spat the

words contemptuously back at him. I was given a head so I could think! Pride goeth… Miss Noel bowed her head

in silence. Could anyone in the big, lighted offices of the city possibly find use for a stubborn, cranky, BSE major?

As Miss Noel impaled the coffee cups upon the spokes of the drainboard, she heard the door open and the

student named Leon come in for the case of beer empties.

"Pandemonium over, Ma'am?" he asked. Miss Noel smile dimly. Dear perceptive Leon. He wanted to become a

lawyer. Pugad Lawin's first. What kind of a piker was she to betray a dream like that? What would happen to

him if she wasn't there to teach him his p's and f's? Deep in the night and the silence outside flickered an

occasional gaslight in a hut on the mountain shaped like a sleeping woman. Was Porfirio deep in a Physics book?

(Oh, but he mustn't blow up any more pigshed.) What was Juanita composing tonight? (An ode on starlight on

the trunk of a banana tree?) Leon walked swiftly under the window: in Miss Noel's eyes he had already won a

case. Why do I have to be such a darn missionary?

Unafraid, the boy Leon stepped into the night, the burden of bottles light on his back.


After breakfast the next morning, the supervisors packed their belongings and were soon ready. Mr. Buenaflor

fetched a camera and they all posed on the sunny steps for a souvenir photo: the superintendent with Mr. and

Mrs. Olbes on either side of him and the minor gods in descending order on the Home Economics stairs. Miss

Noel was late - but she ran to take her place with pride and humility on the lowest rung of the school's hierarchy.


The Day the Dancers Came by Bienvenido N. Santos

AS soon as Fil woke up, he noticed a whiteness outside, quite unusual for the November mornings they had

been having. That fall, Chicago was sandman's town, sleepy valley, drowsy gray, slumberous mistiness from

sunup till noon when the clouds drifted away in cauliflower clusters and suddenly it was evening. The lights

shone on the avenues like soiled lamps centuries old and the skyscrapers became monsters with a thousand

sore eyes. Now there was a brightness in the air land Fil knew what it was and he shouted, "Snow! It's snowing!"

Tony, who slept in the adjoining room, was awakened.

"What's that?" he asked.

"It's snowing," Fil said, smiling to himself as if he had ordered this and was satisfied with the prompt delivery.

"Oh, they'll love this, they'll love this."

"Who'll love that?" Tony asked, his voice raised in annoyance.

"The dancers, of course," Fil answered. "They're arriving today. Maybe they've already arrived. They'll walk in

the snow and love it. Their first snow, I'm sure."

"How do you know it wasn't snowing in New York while they were there?" Tony asked.

"Snow in New York in early November?" Fil said. "Are you crazy?"

"Who's crazy?" Tony replied. "Ever since you heard of those dancers from the Philippines, you've been acting

nuts. Loco. As if they're coming here just for you.

Tony chuckled. Hearing him, Fil blushed, realizing that he had, indeed, been acting too eager, but Tony had said

it. It felt that way--as if the dancers were coming here only for him.

Filemon Acayan, Filipino, was fifty, a U.S., citizen. He was a corporal in the U.S. Army, training at San Luis Obispo,

on the day he was discharged honorably, in 1945. A few months later, he got his citizenship papers. Thousands

of them, smart and small in their uniforms, stood at attention in drill formation, in the scalding sun, and pledged

allegiance to the flat and the republic for which it stands. Soon after he got back to work. To a new citizen, work


meant many places and many ways: factories and hotels, waiter and cook. A timeless drifting: once he tended a

rose garden and took care of a hundred year old veteran of a border war. As a menial in a hospital in Cook

Country, all day he handled filth and gore. He came home smelling of surgical soap and disinfectant. In the

hospital, he took charge of row of bottles on a shelf, each bottle containing a stage of the human embryo in

preservatives, from the lizard-like fetus of a few days, through the newly born infant, with its position

unchanged, cold and cowering and afraid. He had nightmares through the years of himself inside a bottle. l That

was long ago. Now he had a more pleasant job as special policemen in the post office.

He was a few years younger than Tony-Antonio Bataller, a retired pullman porter but he looked older in inspite

of the fact that Tony had been bedridden most of the time for the last two years, suffering from a kind of

wasting disease that had frustrated doctors. All over Tony's body, a gradual peeling was taking place. l At first,

he thought it was merely tiniaflava, a skin disease common among adolescent in the Philippines. It had started

around the neck and had spread to his extremities. His face looked as if it was healing from sever burns.

Nevertheless, it was a young face much younger than Fil's, which had never looked young.

"I'm becoming a white man," Tony had said once, chuckling softly.

It was the same chuckle Fil seemed to have heard now, only this time it sounded derisive, insulting.

Fil said, "I know who's nuts. It's the sick guy with the sick thoughts. You don't care for nothing but your pain,

your imaginary pain."

"You're the imagining fellow. I got the real thing," Tony shouted from the room. He believed he had something

worse than the whiteness spreading on his skin. There was a pain in his insides, like dull scissors scraping his

intestines. Angrily he added, "What for I got retired?"

"You're old, man, old, that's what, and sick, yes, but not cancer," Fil said turning towards the snow-filled sky. He

pressed his faced against the glass window. There's about an inch now on the ground, he thought, maybe more.

Tony came out of his room looking as if he had not slept all night. "I know what I got," he said, as if it were an

honor and a privilege to die of cancer and Fill was trying to deprive him of it. "Never a pain like this. One day, I'm

just gonna die."

"Naturally. Who says you won't?" Fil argued, thinking how wonderful it would be if he could join the company of

dancers from the Philippines, show them around walk with them in the snow, watch their eyes as they stared

about them, answer their questions, tell them everything they wanted to know about the changing seasons in

this strange land. They would pick up fistfuls of snow, crunch it in their fingers or shove it into their mouths. He

had done just that the first time, long, long ago, and it had reminded him of the grated ice the Chinese sold near

the town plaza where he had played tatching with an older brother who later drowned in a squall. How his


mother had grieved over that death, she who has not cried too much when his father died, a broken man. Now

they were all gone, quick death after a storm, or lingeringly, in a season of drought, all, all of them he had loved.

He continued, "All of us will die. One day. A medium bomb marked Chicago and this whole dump is tapus,

finished. Who'll escape then?"

"Maybe your dancers will," Fil answered, now watching the snow himself.

"Of course, they will," Fil retorted, his voice sounding like a big assurance that all the dancers would be safe in

his care. "The bombs won't be falling on this night. And when the dancers are back in the Philippines..."

He paused, as if he was no longer sure of what he was going to say. "But maybe, even in the Philippines the

bombs gonna fall, no?" he said, gazing sadly at the falling snow.

"What's that to you?" Tony replied. "You got no more folks over 'der right? I know it's nothing to me. I'll be dead

before that."

"Let's talk about something nice," Fil said, the sadness spreading on his face as he tried to smile. "Tell me, how

will I talk, how am I gonna introduce myself?"

He would go ahead with his plans, introduce himself to the dancers and volunteer to take them sight-seeing. His

car was clean and ready for his guests. He had soaped the ashtrays, dusted off the floor boards and thrown away

the old mats, replacing them with new plastic throw rugs. He had got himself soaking wet while spraying the car,

humming, as he worked, faintly-remembered tunes from the old country.

Fill shook his head as he waited for Tony to say something. "Gosh, I wish I had your looks, even with those white

spots, then I could face everyone of them," he said, "but this mug."

"That's the important thing, you mug. It's your calling card. It says, Filipino. Countrymen," Tony said.

"You're not fooling me, friend," Fil said. "This mug says, Ugly Filipino. It says, old-timer, muchacho. It says Pinoy,

bejo."

For Fil, time was the villain. In the beginning, the words he often heard were: too young, too young; but all of a

sudden, too young became too old, too late. What happened in between, a mist covering all things. You don't

have to look at your face in a mirror to know that you are old, suddenly old, grown useless for a lot of things

land too late for all the dreams you had wrapped up w ell against a day of need.


"It also says sucker," Fil answered, "but who wants a palace when they can have the most delicious adobo here

ands the best stuffed chicken... yum...yum..."

Tony was angry, "Yum, yum, you're nuts," he said, "plain and simple loco. What for you want to spend? You've

been living on loose change all your life and now on dancing kids who don't know you and won't even send you

a card afterwards."

"Never mind the cards," Fil answered. "Who wants cards? But don't you see, they'll be happy; and then, you

know what? I'm going to keep their voices, their words and their singing and their laughter in my magic sound

mirror."

He had a portable tape recorder and a stack of recordings, patiently labeled, songs and speeches. The songs

were in English, but most of the speeches were in the dialect, debates between him and Tony. It was evident

Tony was the better speaker of the two in English, but in the dialect, Fil showed greater mastery. His style,

however, was florid, sentimental, poetic.

Without telling Tony, he had experimented on recording sounds, like the way a bed creaked, doors opening and

closing, rain or sleet tapping on the window panes, footsteps through the corridor. He was beginning to think

that they did. He was learning to identify each of the sounds with a particular mood or fact. Sometimes, like

today, he wished that there was a way of keeping a record of silence because it was to him the richest sound,

like snow falling. He wondered as he watched the snow blowing in the wind, what took care of that moment if

memory didn't. Like time, memory was often a villain, a betrayer.

"Fall, snow, fall," he murmured and, turning to Tony, said, "As soon as they accept my invitation, I'll call you up.

No, you don't have to do anything, but I'd want to be here to meet them."

"I'm going out myself," Tony said. "And I don't know what time I'll be back."Then he added. "You're not working

today. Are you on leave?"

"For two days. While the dancers are here." Fil said.

"It still don't make sense to me," Tony said. "But good luck, any way."

"Aren't you going to see them tonight? Our reserved seats are right out in front, you know."

"I know. But I'm not sure I can come."

"What? You're not sure?"

Fil could not believe it. Tony was indifferent. Something must be wrong with him. He looked at him closely,

saying nothing.


"I want to, but I'm sick Fil. I tell you, I'm not feeling so good. My doctor will know today. He'll tell me." Tony said.

"What will he tell you?"

"How do I know?"

"I mean, what's he trying to find out?"

"If it's cancer," Tony said. l Without saying another word, he went straight back to is room.

Fil remembered those times, at night, when Tony kept him awake with his moaning. When he called out to him,

asking, "Tony, what's the matter?" his sighs ceased for a while, but afterwards, Tony screamed, deadening his

cries with a pillow against his mouth. When Fill rushed to his side, Tony dove him about the previous night, he

would reply, "I was dying," but it sounded more like disgust overt a nameless annoyance.

Fil has misgivings, too, about the whiteness spreading on Tony's skin. He had heard of leprosy. Every time he

thought of that dreaded disease, he felt tears in his eyes. In all the years he had been in America, he had not has

a friend until he meet Tony whom he liked immediately and, in a way, worshipped, for all the things the man

had which Fil knew he himself lacked.

They had shared a lot together. They made merry on Christmas, sometimes got drunk and became loud. Fil

recited poems in the dialect and praised himself. Tony fell to giggling and cursed all the railroad companies of

America. But last Christmas, they hadn't gotten drunk. They hadn't even talked to each other on Christmas day.

Soon, it would be Christmas again.

The snow was still falling.

"Well, I'll be seeing you," Fil said, getting ready to leave. "Try to be home on time. I shall invites the dancers for

luncheon or dinner maybe, tomorrow. But tonight, let's go to the theater together, ha?"

"I'll try," Tony answered. He didn't need boots. He loved to walk in the snow.

The air outside felt good. Fil lifted his face to the sky and closed his eyes as the snow and a wet wind drench his

face. He stood that way for some time, crying, more, more to himself, drunk with snow and coolness. His car

was parked a block away. As he walked towards it, he plowed into the snow with one foot and studied the scar

he made, a hideous shape among perfect footmarks. He felt strong as his lungs filled with the cold air, as if just

now it did not matter too much that he was the way he looked and his English way the way it was. But perhaps,

he could talk to the dancers in his dialect. Why not?


A heavy frosting of snow covered his car and as he wiped it off with his bare hands, he felt light and young, like a

child at play, and once again, he raised his face to the sky and licked the flakes, cold and tasteless on his tongue.

When Fil arrived at the Hamilton, it seemed to him the Philippine dancers had taken over the hotel. They were

all over the lobby on the mezzanine, talking in groups animatedly, their teeth sparkling as they laughed, their

eyes disappearing in mere slits of light. Some of the girls wore their black hair long. For a moment, the sight

seemed too much for him who had but all forgotten how beautiful Philippine girls were. He wanted to look away,

but their loveliness held him. He must do something, close his eyes perhaps. As he did so, their laughter came to

him like a breeze murmurous with sounds native to his land.

Later, he tried to relax, to appear inconspicuous. True, they were all very young, but there were a few elderly

men and women who must have been their chaperons or well-wishers like him. He would smile at everyone

who happened to look his way. Most of them smiled back, or rather, seemed to smile, but it was quick, without

recognition, and might not have been for him but for someone else near or behind him.

His lips formed the words he was trying to phrase in his mind: Ilocano ka? Bicol? Ano na, paisano? Comusta? Or

should he introduce himself---How? For what he wanted to say, the words didn't come too easily, they were

unfamiliar, they stumbled and broke on his lips into a jumble of incoherence.

Suddenly, he felt as if he was in the center of a group where he was not welcome. All the things he had been

trying to hide now showed: the age in his face, his horny hands. He knew it the instant he wanted to shake

hands with the first boy who had drawn close to him, smiling and friendly. Fil put his hands in his pocket.

Now he wished Tony had been with him. Tony would know what to do. He would harm these young people with

his smile and his learned words. Fil wanted to leave, but he seemed caught up in the tangle of moving bodies

that merged and broke in a fluid strangle hold. Everybody was talking, mostly in English. Once in a while he

heard exclamations in the dialect right out of the past, conjuring up playtime, long shadows of evening on the

plaza, barrio fiestas, misa de gallo.

Time was passing and he had yet to talk to someone. Suppose he stood on a chair and addressed them in the

manner of his flamboyant speeches recorded in his magic sound mirror?

"Beloved countrymen, lovely children of the Pearl of the Orient Seas, listen to me. I'm Fil Acayan. I've come to

volunteer my services. I'm yours to command. Your servant. Tell me where you wish to go, what you want to see

in Chicago. I know every foot of the lakeshore drive, all the gardens and the parks, the museums, the huge

department stores, the planetarium. Let me be your guide. That's what I'm offering you, a free tour of Chicago,

and finally, dinner at my apartment on West Sheridan Road--pork adobo and chicken relleno, name your dish.

How about it, paisanos?"


No. That would be a foolish thing to do. They would laugh at him. He felt a dryness in his throat. He was

sweating. As he wiped his face with a handkerchief, he bumped against a slim, short girl who quite gracefully,

stepped aside, and for a moment he thought he would swoon in the perfume that enveloped him. It was

fragrance, essence of camia, of ilang-ilang, and dama de noche.

Two boys with sleek, pomaded hair were sitting near an empty chair. He sat down and said in the dialect, "May I

invite you to my apartment?" The boys stood up, saying, "Excuse us, please," and walked away. He mopped his

brow, but instead of getting discouraged, he grew bolder as though he hand moved one step beyond shame.

Approaching another group, he repeated his invitation, and a girl with a mole on her upper lip, said, "Thank you,

but we have no time." As he turned towards another group, he felt their eyes on his back. Another boy drifted

towards him, but as soon as he began to speak, the boy said, "Pardon, please," and moved away.

They were always moving away. As if by common consent, they had decided to avoid him, ignore his presence.

Perhaps it was not their fault. They must have been instructed to do so. Or was it his looks that kept them away?

The though was a sharpness inside him.

After a while, as he wandered about the mezzanine, among the dancers, but alone, he noticed that they had

begun to leave. Some had crowded noisily into the two elevators. He followed the others going down the stairs.

Through the glass doors, he saw them getting into a bus parked beside the subway entrance on Dearborn.

The snow had stopped falling; it was melting fast in the sun and turning into slush.

As he moved about aimlessly, he felt someone touch him on the sleeve. It was one of the dancers, a mere boy,

tall and thin, who was saying, "Excuse, please." Fil realized he was in the way between another boy with a

camera and a group posing in front of the hotel.

"Sorry," Fill said, jumping away awkwardly.

The crowd burst out laughing.

Then everything became a blur in his eyes, a moving picture out of focus, but gradually, the figure cleared, there

was mud on the pavement on which the dancers stood posing, and the sun throw shadows at their feet.

Let them have fun, he said to himself, they're young and away from home. I have no business up their schedule,

forcing my company on them.

He watched the dancers till the last of them was on the bus. The voices came to him, above the traffic sounds.

They waved their hands and smiled towards him as the bus started. Fil raised his hand to wave back, but

stopped quickly, aborting the gesture. He turned to look behind him at whomever the dancers were waving


their hands to. There was no one there except his own reflection in the glass door, a double exposure of himself

and a giant plant with its thorny branches around him like arms in a loving embrace.

Even before he opened the door to their apartment, Fil knew that Tony had not yet arrived. There were no

boots outside on the landing. Somehow he felt relieved, for until then he did not know how he was going to

explain his failure.

From the hotel, he had driven around, cruised by the lakeshore drive, hoping he could see the dancers

somewhere, in a park perhaps, taking pictures of the mist over the lake and the last gold on the trees now wet

with melted snow, or on some picnic grounds, near a bubbling fountain. Still taking pictures of themselves

against a background of Chicago's gray and dirty skyscrapers. He slowed down every time he saw a crowd, but

the dancers were nowhere along his way. Perhaps they had gone to the theater to rehearse. He turned back

before reaching Evanston.

He felt weak, not hungry. Just the same, he ate, warming up some left-over food. The rice was cold, but the soup

was hot and tasty. While he ate, he listened for footfalls.

Afterwards, he lay down on the sofa and a weariness came over him, but he tried hard not to sleep. As he stared

at the ceiling, he felt like floating away, but he kept his eyes open, willing himself hard to remain awake. He

wanted to explain everything to Tony when he arrived. But soon his eyes closed against a weary will too tired

and weak to fight back sleep--and then there were voices. Tony was in the room, eager to tell his own bit of

news.

"I've discovered a new way of keeping afloat," he was saying.

"Who wants to keep afloat?" Fil asked.

"Just in case. In a shipwreck, for example," Tony said.

"Never mind shipwrecks. I must tell you about the dancers," Fil said.

"But this is important," Tony insisted. "This way, you can keep floating indefinitely."

"What for indefinitely?" Fil asked.

"Say in a ship... I mean, in an emergency, you're stranded without help in the middle of the Pacific or the Atlantic,

you must keep floating till help comes..." Tony explained.

"More better," Fil said, "find a way to reach shore before the sharks smells you. You discover that."

"I will," Tony said, without eagerness, as though certain that there was no such way, that, after all, his discovery

was worthless.


"Now you listen to me," Fil said, sitting up abruptly. As he talked in the dialect, Tony listened with increasing

apathy.

"There they were," Fil began, his tone taking on the orator's pitch, "Who could have been my children if I had

not left home-- or yours, Tony. They gazed around them with wonder, smiling at me, answering my questions,

but grudgingly, edging away as if to be near me were wrong, a violation in their rule book. But it could be that

every time I opened my mouth, I gave myself away. I talked in the dialect, Ilocano, Tagalog, Bicol, but no one

listened. They avoided me. They had been briefed too well: Do not talk to strangers. Ignore their invitations. Be

extra careful in the big cities like New York and Chicago, beware of the old-timers, the Pinoys. Most of them are

bums. Keep away ;from them. Be on the safe side--stick together, entertain only those who have been

introduced to you properly.

"I'm sure they had such instructions, safety measures, they must have called them. What then could I have done,

scream out my good intentions, prove my harmlessness and my love for them by beating my breast? Oh, but I

loved them. You see, I was like them once. I, too, was nimble with my feet, graceful with my hands; and I had

the tongue of a poet. Ask the village girls and the envious boys from the city--but first you have to find them.

After these many years, it won't be easy. You'll have to search every suffering pace in the village gloom for a hint

of youth and beauty or go where the grave-yards are and the tombs under the lime trees. One such face...oh,

God, what am I saying...

"All I wanted was to talk to them, guide them around Chicago, spend money on them so that they would have

something special to remember about us here when they return to our country. They would tell their folks: We

melt a kind, old man, who took us to his apartment. It was not much of a place. It was old-like him. When we sat

on the sofa in the living room, the bottom sank heavily, the broken springs touching the floor. But what a cook

that man was! And how kind! We never thought that rice and adobo could be that delicious. And the chicken

relleno! When someone asked what the stuffing was--we had never tasted anything like it, he smiled saying,

'From heaven's supermarket' touching his head and pressing his heart like a clown as if heaven were there. He

had his tape recorder which he called a magic sound mirror, and he had all of us record our voices. Say anything

in the dialect, sing, if you please, our kundiman, please, he said, his eyes pleading, too. Oh, we had fun listening

to the playback. When you're gone, the old man said, I shall listen to your voices with my eyes closed and you'll

be here again and I won't ever be alone, no, not anymore, after this. We wanted to cry, but he looked very funny,

so we laughed and he laughed with us.

"But, Tony, they would not come. They thanked me, but they said they had no time. Others said nothing. They

looked through me. I didn't exist. Or worse, I was unclean. Basura. Garbage. They were ashamed me. How could

I be Filipino?"

The memory, distinctly recalled, was a rock on his breast. He grasped for breath.

"Now, let me teach you how to keep afloat," Tony said, but is was not Tony's voice.


Fil was alone and gasping for air. His eyes opened slowly till he began to breathe more easily. The sky outside

was gray. He looked at his watch--a quarter past five. The show would begin at eight. There was time. Perhaps

Tony would be home soon.

The apartment was warming up. The radiators sounded full of scampering rats. He had a recording of that in his

sound mirror.

Fil smiled. He had an idea. He would take the sound mirror to the theater, take his seat close to the stage, and

make tape recordings of the singing and the dances.

Now he was wide-awake and somehow pleased with himself. The more he thought of the idea, the better he felt.

If Tony showed up now... He sat up, listening. The radiators were quiet. There were no footfalls, no sound of a

key turning.

Late that night, back from the theater, Fill knew at once that Tony was back. The boots were outside the door.

He, too, must be tired, and should not be disturb.

He was careful not to make any noise. As he turned on the floor lamp, he thought that perhaps Tony was awake

and waiting for him. They would listen together to a playback of the dances and songs Tony had missed. Then he

would tell Tony what happened that day, repeating part of the dream.

From Tony's bedroom came the regular breathing of a man sound asleep. To be sure, he looked into the room

and in the half-darkness, Tony's head showed darkly, deep in a pillow, on its side, his knees bent, almost

touching the clasped hands under his chin, an oversized fetus in the last bottle. Fill shut the door between them

and went over to the portable. Now. He turned it on to low. At first nothing but static and odd sounds came

through, but soon after there was the patter of feet to the rhythm of a familiar melody.

All the beautiful boys and girls were in the room now, dancing and singing. A boy and a girl sat on the floor

holding two bamboo poles by their ends flat on floor, clapping them together, then apart, and pounding them

on the boards, while dancers swayed and balanced their lithe forms, dipping their bare brown legs in and out of

the clapping bamboos, the pace gradually increasing into a fury of wood on wood in a counterpoint of panic

among the dancers and in a harmonious flurry of toes and ankles escaping certain pain--crushed bones, and

bruised flesh, and humiliation. Other dances followed, accompanied by songs and live with the sounds of life

and death in the old country; I go rot natives in G-strings walking down a mountainside; peasants climbing up a

hill on a rainy day; neighbors moving a house, their sturdy legs showing under a moving roof; a distant gong

sounding off a summons either to a feast for a wake. And finally, prolonged ovation, thunderous, wave upon

wave...

"Turn that thing off!" Tony's voice was sharp above the echoes of the gongs and the applause settling into

silence.


Fil switched off the dial and in the sudden stillness, the voices turned into faces, familiar and near, like gesture

and touch that stayed on even as the memory withdrew, bowing out, as it were, in a graceful exit, saying, thank

you, thank you, before a ghostly audience that clapped hands in silence and stomped their feet in a such

emptiness. He wanted to join the finale, such as it was, pretend that the curtain call included him, and attempt a

shamefaced imitation of a graceful adieu, but he was stiff and old, incapable of grace; but he said, thank you,

thank you, his voice sincere and contrite, grateful for the other voices and the sound of singing and the memory.

"Oh, my God..." the man in the other room cried, followed by a moan of such anguish that Fil fell on his knees,

covering the sound mirror with his hands to muffle the sounds that had started again, it seemed to him, even

after he had turned it off.

Then he remembered.

"Tony, what did the doctor say? What did he say?" he shouted and listened, holding his breath, no longer able to

tell at the moment who had truly waited all day for the final sentence.

There was no answer. Meanwhile, under his hands, there was Tony saying? That was his voice, no? Fil wanted to

hear, he must know. He switched dials on and off, again and again, pressing buttons. Suddenly, he didn't know

what to do. The spool were live, they kept turning. His arms went around the machine, his chest pressing down

on the spools. In the quick silence, Tony's voice came clear.

"So they didn't come after all?"

"Tony, what did the doctor say?" Fil asked, straining hard to hear.

"I knew they wouldn't come. But that's okay. The apartment is old anyhow. And it smells of death."

"How you talk. In this country, there's a cure for everything."

"I guess we can't complain. We had it good here all the time. Most of the time, anyway."

"I wish, though, they had come. I could..."

"Yes, they could have. They didn't have to see me, but I could have seen them. I have seen their pictures, but

what do they really look like?"

"Tony, they're beautiful, all of them, but especially the girls. Their complexion, their grace, their eyes, they were

what we call talking eyes, they say, things to you. And the scent of them!"

There was a sigh from the room soft, hardly like a sigh. A louder, grating sound, almost under his hands that had

relaxed their hold, called his attention. The sound mirror had kept going, the tape was fast unraveling.


"Oh, no! he screamed, noticing that somehow, he had pushed the eraser.

Frantically, he tried to rewind and play back the sounds and the music, but there was nothing now but the full

creaking of the tape on the spool and meaningless sounds that somehow had not been erased, the thud of

dancing feet, a quick clapping of hands, alien voices and words: in this country... everything... all of them...

talking eyes... and the scent... a fading away into nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming,

senseless kind of finale detached from the body of a song in the background, drums and sticks and the tolling of

a bell.

"Tony! Tony!" Fil cried, looking towards the sick man's room, "I've lost them all."

Biting his lips, Fil turned towards the window, startled by the first light of the dawn. He hadn't realized till then

the long night was over.


Dead Stars by Paz Marquez Benitez

Scene 1

Through the open window the air – steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into

his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to

weigh down, to crush – they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of

conversation issued from the brick – tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy pattering away

among the rose pots.

“Papa, and when will the ‘long table’ be set?”

“I don’t know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month.”

Carmen sighed impatiently. “Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a

bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting.”

“She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either,” Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors

busily snipped away.

“How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?” Carmen returned, pinching off a worm

with a careful, somewhat absent air. “Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?”

“In love? With whom?”

“With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of,” she said with good – natured

contempt. “What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic – flowers, serenades, notes, and things like

that –“

Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He

could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving

that had seized on him one quiet night when the mood was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees

in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love – he seemed to have missed it. Or was the

love that others told about a mere fabrication of fervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a

glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up of his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or

sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was

a stranger to love as he divined it might be.


Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous

haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was

trying to get there in time to see. “Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it,” someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So

he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from

time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much engaged to Esperanza.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed, - the desire to

crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men

commit themselves when but – meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for

immediate excitement.

“What do you think happened?” asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

“I supposed long – engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than

warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of

temperament – or of affection – on the part of either, or both.” Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking

now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. “That phase

you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo’s last race with

escaping youth –“

Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother’s perfect physical repose – almost indolence – disturbed in

the role suggested by her father’s figurative language.

“A last spurt of hot blood,” finished the old man.

Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as

cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on

grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer’s eyes,

and astonishing freshness of lips – indeed Alfredo Salazar’s appearance betokened little of exuberant

masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humour, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.

He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path

shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening,

now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.

The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse

through the heat – shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.


Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by

Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name;

but now –

One evening he had gone “neighbouring” with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to

avoid all appearance of currying favour with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself

to be persuaded. “A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial,” the old man had said. “Besides, a

judge’s good will, you know;” the rest of the thought – “is worth a rising young lawyer’s trouble” – Don Julian

conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.

A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge’s children that she

was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted

– the judge limiting himself to a casual “Ah, ya se conocen?” – with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss

del Valle throughout the evening.

He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian

informed him that she was not the Judge’s sister, as he had supposed, but his sister – in – law, and that her

name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have

corrected him. As it was, he was grandly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.

To his apology, she replied, “That is nothing, each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar

experience I had once before.”

“Oh,” he drawled out, vastly relieved.

“A man named Manalang – I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth or so, the young man rose from his seat

and said suddenly, ‘Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.’ You know, I never forgave him!”

He laughed with her.

“The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out,” she pursued, “is to pretend not to hear, and to

let the other person find out his mistake without help.”

“As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I –“

“I was thinking of Mr. Manalang.”

Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young man had

tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat

in the vine – covered porch. The lone piano in the neighbourhood alternately tinkled and banged away as the

player’s moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming

speaking voice.


He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge’s wife,

although Dona Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly

defined eyebrows, and delicately modelled hips – a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the

expression of a likeable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but

she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the

impression she gave of abounding vitality.

On Sunday mornings after the mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on the

hill. The Judge’s wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half

hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat.

She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours – warm, quiet March hours – sped by. He

enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between

them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly

about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.

Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for several

Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had

been eager to go “neighbouring.”

He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added, “Sometimes I

go with Papa to Judge del Valle’s.”

She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a believer in the

regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married,

why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman.

That half – lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas something

which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously,

and he followed on.

It was easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The

beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.

“Up here I find – something –“

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman – like,

asking, “Amusement?”

“No; youth – its spirit –“


“Are you so old?”

“And heart’s desire.”

Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?

“Down there,” he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, “the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too

barren of mystery.”

“Down there” beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies

glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a

dream.

“Mystery –“ she answered lightly, “that is so brief –“

“Not in some,” quickly. “Not in you.”

“You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery.”

“I could study you all my life and still not find it.”

“So long?”

“I should like to.”

Those six weeks were now so swift – seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living, so charged

with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he

lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a wilful shutting out a fact as astounded him in his

calmer moments.

Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda where

he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She

and Dona Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the

likeable absurdities of their husbands – how Carmen’s Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that he would not

even take off to accompany her on this visit to her father; how Dona Adela’s Dionisio was the most

absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.

After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young coconut looked

like – “plenty of leaves, close set, rich green” – while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending

entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of the water,

indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out – curving beach.


Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps, narrow, arched.

He laughed at himself for his back canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.

When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.

“I hope you are enjoying this,” he said with a questioning inflection.

“Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach.”

There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the tucked – up skirt

around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight.

The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more

compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of

an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce

to charm.

“The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn’t it?” Then, “This, I think, is the last time – we can visit.”

“The last? Why?”

“Oh, you will be too busy perhaps.”

He noted an evasive quality in the answer.

“Do I seem especially industrious to you?”

“If you are, you never look it.”

“Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be.”

“But –“

“Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm.” She smiled to herself.

“I wish that were true,” he said after a meditative pause.

She waited.

“A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid.”

“Like a carabao in a mud pool,” she reported perversely.

“Who? I?”

“Oh, no!”


“You said I am calm and placid.”

“That is what I think.”

“I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves.”

It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.

“I should like to see your home town.”

That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that

background claimed her and excluded him.”

“Nothing. There is you.”

“Oh, me? But I’m here.”

“I will not go, of course, until you there.”

“Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn’t even one American there!”

“Well – Americans are rather essential to my entertainment.”

She laughed.

“We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees.”

“Could I find that?”

“If you don’t ask for Miss del Valle,” she smiled teasingly.

“I’ll inquire about –“

“What?”

“The house of the prettiest girl in the town.”

“There is where you will lose your way.” Then she turned serious. “Now, that is not quite sincere.”

“It is,” he averred slowly, but emphatically.

“I thought you, at least, would not say such things.”

“Pretty – pretty – a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite –“


“Are you withdrawing the compliment?”

“Re – enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye – it is more than that when –“

“If it saddens?” she interrupted hastily.

“Exactly.”

“It must be ugly.”

“Always?”

Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of a crimsoned gold.

“No, of course your right.”

“Why did you say this is the last time?” he asked quietly as they turned back.

“I am going home.”

The end of an impossible dream!

“When?” after a long silence.

“Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at home.”

She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. “That is why I said this is the last time.”

“Can’t I come to say good – bye?”

“Oh, you don’t need to!”

“No, but I want to.”

“There is no time.”

The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the rim of the

world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment

but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned

and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.

“Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life.”

“I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things.”


“Old things?”

“Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage.” He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He walked

close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.

Don Julian’s nasal summons came to them on the wind.

Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard her voice

say very low, “Good – bye

Scene 2

Alfredo Salazar turned to the right where, farther on,, the road broadened and entered the heart of the town –

heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low – hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe

– repairing establishments, a cluttered goldsmith’s cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens;

heart of old brick – roofed houses with quaint hand – and – ball knockers of the door; heart of grass – grown

plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convent, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth

and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells

kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid

apparel (for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts. Came too the

young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice –

paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses hung coloured glass globes,

heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device.

Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street like a huge

jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints’ platforms were. Above the measured music rose

the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.

The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly destroyed the

illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self –

consciously, tried to look unaware, and could not.

The line moved on.

Suddenly, Alfredo’s slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line – a girl that

was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in

the completed ordering of his life.

Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.


The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again, where,

according to the old proverb, all processions end.

At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices now echoed

from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.

A round orange moon, “huge as a winnowing basket,” rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron roofs and

dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear

guard of males loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home.

Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had dispersed into the

side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be

expecting him in a little while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said “Good evening” and fell into step

with the girl.

“I had been thinking all this time that you had gone,” he said in a voice that was both excited and troubled.

“No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go.”

“Oh, is the judge going?”

“Yes.”

The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As lawyer – and as

lover – Alfredo had found that out long before.

“Mr. Salazar,” she broke into his silence, “I wish to congratulate you.”

Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.

“For what?”

“For your approaching wedding.”

Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?

“I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about getting the

news,” she continued.

He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to enlighten him,

except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice

– cool, almost detached from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.


“Are weddings interesting to you?” he finally brought out quietly.

“When they are of friends, yes.”

“Would you come if I asked you?”

“When is it going to be?”

“May,” he replied briefly, after a long pause.

“May is the month of happiness they say,” she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony.

“They say,” slowly, indifferently. “Would you come?”

“Why not?”

“No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?”

“If you will ask me,” she said with disdain.

“Then I ask you.”

“Then I will be there.”

The gravel road lay before them; at the road’s end the lighted windows of the house on the hill. There swept

over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the

bewilderments of the present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife, returning

with him to the peace of home.

“Julita,” he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, “did you ever have to choose between something you wanted to

do and something you had to do?”

“No!”

“I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such a situation.”

“You are fortunate,” he pursued when she did not answer.

“Is – is this man sure of what he should do?”

“I don’t know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward of its own

weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on

him.”


“But then why – why –“ her muffled voice came. “Oh, what do I do know? That is his problem after all.”

“Doesn’t it – interest you?”

“Why must it? I – I have to say good – bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at house.”

Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.

Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind though set

against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect understanding between the

parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself – Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza

the efficient, the literal – minded, the intensely acquisitive.

He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which he tried

to control.

She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She never

surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the

street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of

breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self – conscious care, even elegance; a

woman distinctly not average.

She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their note – career,

Alfredo perceived, so he merely half – listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out fill in the

gap: “Well, what of it?” The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.

“She is not married to him,” Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. “Besides, she should have

thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out bad.”

What had Calixta done? Homely, middle – aged Calixta?

“You are very positive about her badness,” he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.

“But do you approve?”

“Of what?”

“What she did.”

“No,” indifferently.

“Well?”


He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. “All I say is that it is not

necessarily wicked.”

“Why shouldn’t it be? You talked like an – immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that.”

“My ideas?” he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. “The only test I wish to apply to conduct

is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a

man to whom she is not married – is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not.”

“She has injured us. She was ungrateful.” Her voice was tight with resentment.

“The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are –“ he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.

“Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferently to me

lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me.” The blood surged

into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?

“Why don’t you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will say.”

Her voice trembled.

Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say – what will

they not say? What don’t they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of the wedding?

“Yes,” he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, “one tries to be fair – according to his lights –

but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one’s self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare –“

“What do you mean?” she asked with repressed violence. “Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt they are

many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man.”

Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack on Julia

Salas?

“Esperanza –“ a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. “If you – suppose I –“ Yet how could a mere man

word such a plea?

“If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of – why don’t you tell me you are tired of me?”

she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.


The last word has been said.

Scene 3

As Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he wondered if

Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the

case of the People of the Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida

Samuy had not been so important to the defence. He had to find that elusive old woman. That the search was

leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia Salas’ home should not disturb him unduly yet he was

disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no

surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that

he could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of

mountains who has known the back – break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level

paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he

knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.

He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he recognized as

irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no

more stirring up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a

strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being in the core of his thought, would, he

reflected, always be free and alone. When claims encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he

retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote and

alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even

tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.

Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up – tilted town nestling in the dark

greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening

smudges glowed red through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple shadows of

the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker

blues of evening.

The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water. Peculiar hill

infections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat – slow, singing, cadences, characteristic

of the Laguna lake – shore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of

knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted.

“Is there abogado there? Abogado!”

“What abogado?” someone irately asked.


That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.

It was a policeman, a tall pock – marked individual. The presidente had left with Bridgida Samuy – Tandang

“Binday” – that noon for Santa Cruz. Senor Salazar’s second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and

said, “Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house.”

Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would leave at four

the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that

official had not sent an answer. “Yes,” the policeman replied, but he could not write because we heard that

Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her.”

San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the president! He, Alfredo, must do something for him. It was not

every day that one met with such willingness to help.

Eight o’clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet. A cot had

been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he

would walk around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to

sundry piles driven into the water.

How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing forlornly through

the single window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women’s chinelas making

scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street – tubigan

perhaps, or “hawk – and – chicken.” The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a pitying

sadness.

How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That unforgettable red –

and – gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of incompleteness as restless other unlaid ghosts.

She had not married – why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was

something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles – a cool wind on his

forehead, far – away sounds as of voices in a dream – at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to

listen as to an interest, unfinished prayer.

A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree – ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct filigrees

of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in

the cool, stilly midnight the cock’s first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.


Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting at the

window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in the sala behind her

threw her head into unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.

“Good evening,” he said, raising his hat.

“Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?”

“On some little business,” he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.

“Won’t you come up?”

He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her mother

as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last – he was

shaking her hand.

She had not changed much – a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He missed it,

sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the home town, about

this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing

wonder that she should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the

loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze.

Gently – was it experimentally? – he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and emotionless.

Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly interested him.

The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star – studded sky. So that was all over. Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?

So all these – since when? – he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in

their appointed places in the heavens.

An immense sadness of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far

away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of

vanished youth.




May Day Eve by Nick Joaquin

The old people had ordered that the dancing should stop at ten o’clock but it was almost midnight

before the carriages came lining up to the front door, the servants running to and fro with torches to light the

departing guests, while the girls who were staying were promptly herded upstairs to the bedrooms, the young

men gathering around to wish them a good night and lamenting their ascent with mock signs and moanings,

proclaiming themselves disconsolate but drunk already and simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment,

arrogance and audacity, for they were young bucks newly arrived from Europe; the ball had been in their honor;

and they had waltzed and polka – ed and bragged and swaggered and flirted all night and were in no mood to

sleep yet – no, caramba, not on this moist tropic eve! Not on this mystic May eve! – with the night still young

and so seductive that it was madness not to go out, not to go forth – and serenade the neighbours! cried one;

and swim in the Pasig! cried another; and gather fireflies! cried a third – whereupon there arose a great clamour

for coats and capes, for hats and canes, and they were presently stumbling out among the medieval shadows of

the foul street where a couple of street – lamps flickered and a last carriage rattled away upon the cobbles while

the blind black houses muttered hush – hush, their tile roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wile sky

murky with clouds, save where an evil young moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind

whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting

unbearable childhood fragrances of ripe guavas to the young men trooping so uproariously down the street that

the girls who were disrobing upstairs in the bedrooms scattered screaming to the windows, crowded giggling at

the windows, but were soon sighing amorously over those young men bawling below; over those wicked young

men and their handsome apparel, their proud flashing eyes, and their elegant moustaches so black and vivid in

the moonlight that the girls were quite ravished with love, and began crying to one another how carefree were

men but how awful to be a girl and what a horrid, and chased them off to bed – while from up the street came

the clackety – clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobbles, and the clang – clang of his lantern against his knee,

and the mighty roll of his great voice booming through the night, “Guardia sereno – o – o! A las doce han dado –

o – o.”

And it was May again, said the old Anastasia. It was the first day of May and witches were abroad in the night,

she said – for it was a night of divination, a night of flowers, and those who cared might peer in a mirror and

would there behold the face of whoever it was they were fated to marry, said the old Anastasia as she hobbled

about picking up the piled crinolines and folding up shawls and raking slippers to a corner while the girls


climbing into the four great poster beds that overwhelmed the room began shrieking with terror, scrambling

over each other and imploring the old woman not to frighten them.

“Enough, enough, Anastasia! We want to sleep!”

“Go scare the boys instead, you old witch!”

“She is not a witch, she is a maga. She was born on Christmas Eve!”

“St. Anastasia, virgin and martyr.”

“Huh? Impossible! She has conquered seven husbands! Are you a virgin, Anastasia?”

“No, but I am seven times a martyr because of you girls!”

“Let her prophesy, let her prophesy! Whom will I marry, old gypsy? Come, tell me.”

“You may learn in a mirror if you are not afraid.”

“I am not afraid, I will go,” cried the young cousin Agueda, jumping up in bed.

“Girls, girls – we are making too much noise! My mother will hear and will come and pinch us all. Agueda, lie

down! And you Anastasia, I command you to shut your mouth and go away!”

“Your mother told me to stay here all night, my grandlady!”

“And I will not lie down!” cried the rebellious Agueda, leaping to the floor. “Stay, old woman. Tell me what I

have to do.”

“Tell her! Tell her!” chimed the other girls.

The old woman dropped the clothes she had gathered and approached and fixed her eyes on the girl. “You must

take a candle,” she instructed, “and go into a room that is dark and that has a mirror in it and you must be alone

in the room. Go up to the mirror and close your eyes and say:

Mirror, mirror,

Show to me

Him whose woman

I will be.

If all goes right, just above your left shoulder will appear the face of the man you will marry.”


A silence. Then: “And what if all does not go right?” asked Agueda.

“Ah, then the Lord have mercy on you!”

“Why?”

Because you may see – the Devil!”

The girls screamed and clutched one another, shivering.

“But what nonsense!” cried Agueda. “This is year 1847. There are no devils anymore!” Nevertheless she had

turned pale. “But where could I go, huh? Yes, I know! Down to the sala. It has that big mirror and no one is there

now.”

“No, Agueda, no! It is a mortal sin! You will see the devil!”

“I do not care! I am not afraid! I will go!”

“Oh, you wicked girl! Oh, you mad girl!”

“If you do not come to bed, Agueda, I will call my mother.”

“And if you do I will tell her who came to visit you at the convent last March. Come, old woman – give me that

candle. I go.”

“Oh girls – come and stop her! Take hold of her! Block the door!”

But Agueda had already slipped outside; was already tiptoeing across the hall; her feet bare and her dark hair

falling down her shoulders and streaming in the wind as she fled down the stairs, the lighted candle sputtering in

one hand while with the other she pulled up her white gown from her ankles.

She paused breathless in the doorway to the sala and her heart failed her. She tried to imagine the room filled

again with lights, laughter, whirling couples, and the jolly jerky music of the fiddlers. But, oh, it was a dark den, a

weird cavern, for the windows had been closed and the furniture stacked up against the walls. She crossed

herself and stepped inside.

The mirror hung on the wall before her; a big antique mirror with a gold frame carved into leaves and flowers

and mysterious curlicues. She saw herself approaching fearfully in it; a small white ghost that the darkness

bodied forth – but not willingly, not completely, for her eyes and hair were so dark that the face approaching in

the mirror seemed only a mask that floated forward; a bright mask with two holes gaping in it, blown forward by


the white cloud of her gown. But when she stood before the mirror she lifted the candle level with her chin and

the dead mask bloomed into her living face.

She closed her eyes and whispered the incantation. When she had finished such a terror took hold of her that

she felt unable to move, unable to open her eyes and thought she would stand there forever, enchanted. But

she heard a step behind her, and a smothered giggle, and instantly opened her eyes.

“And what did you see, Mama? Oh, what was it?”

But Dona Agueda had forgotten the little girl on her lap: she was staring pass the curly head nestling at her

breast and seeing herself in the big mirror hanging in the room. It was the same room and the same mirror but

the face she now saw in it was an old face – a hard, bitter, vengeful face, like a white mask, that fresh young face

like a pure mask than she had brought before this mirror one wild May Day midnight ten years ago...

“But what was it Mama? Oh please go on! What did you see?”

Dona Agueda looked down at her daughter but her face, did not soften though her eyes filled with tears. “I saw

the devil,” she said bitterly.

The child blanched. “The devil, Mama? Oh... Oh...”

“Yes my love. I opened my eyes and there in the mirror, smiling at me over my left shoulder, was the face of the

devil.”

“Oh, my poor little Mama! And were you very frightened?”

“You can imagine. And that is why good little girls do not look into mirrors except when their mothers tell them.

You must stop this naughty habit, darling, of admiring yourself in every mirror you pass – or you may see

something frightful some day.”

“But the devil, Mama – what did he look like?”

“Well, let me see... he has curly hair and a scar on his cheek –“

“Like the scar of Papa?”

“Well, yes. But this of the devil was a scar of sin, while that of your Papa is a scar of honour. Or so he says.”

“Go on about the devil.”

“Well, he had mustaches.”


“Like those of Papa?”

“Oh, no. Those of your Papa are dirty and graying and smell horribly of tobacco, while these of the devil were

very black and elegant – oh, how elegant!”

“And did he have horns and tail?”

The mother’s lips curled. “Yes, he did! But, alas, I could not see them at that time. All I could see were his fine

clothes, his flashing eyes, his curly hair, and moustaches.”

“And did he speak to you, Mama?”

“Yes... Yes, he spoke to me,” said Dona Agueda. And bowing her graying head, she wept.

“Charms like yours have no need for a candle, fair one,” he had said, smiling her in the mirror and stepping back

to give her a low mocking bow. She had whirled around and glared at him and he had burst into laughter.

“But I remember you!” he cried. “You are Agueda, whom I left a mere infant and came home to find a

tremendous beauty, and I danced a waltz with you but you would not give me the polka.”

“Let me pass,” she muttered fiercely, for he was barring her the way.

“But I want to dance the polka with you, fair one,” he said.

So they stood before the mirror; their panting breath the only sound in the dark room; the candle shining

between them and flinging their shadows to the wall. And young Badoy Montiya (who had crept home very

drunk to pass out quietly in bed) suddenly found himself cold sober and very much awake and ready for

anything. His eyes sparkled and the scar on his face gleamed scarlet.

“Let me pass!” she cried again, in a voice of fury, but he grasped her by the wrist.

“No,” he smiled. “Not until we have danced.”

“Go to the devil!”

“What a temper has my serrana!”

“I am not your serrana!”

“Whose, then? Someone I know? Someone I have offended grievously? Because you treat me, you treat all my

friends like your mortal enemies.”

“And why not?” she demanded, jerking her wrist away and flashing her teeth in his face. “Oh, how I detest you,

you pompous young men! You go to Europe and you come back elegant lords and we poor girls are too tame to


please you. We have no grace like the Parisiennes, we have no fire like the Sevillians, and we have no salt, no

salt, no salt! Aie, how you weary me, how you bore me, you fastidious young men!”

“Come, come – how do you know about us?”

“I heard you talking, I have heard you talking among yourselves, and I despise the pack of you!”

“But clearly you do not despise yourself, senorita. You come to admire your charms in the mirror even in the

middle of the night!”

She turned livid and he had a malicious satisfaction.

“I was not admiring myself, sir!”

“You were admiring the moon perhaps?”

“Oh!” she gasped, and burst into tears. The candle dropped from her hand and she covered her face and sobbed

piteously. The candle had gone out and they stood in darkness, and young Badoy was conscience – stricken.

“Oh, do not cry, little one! Oh, please forgive me! Please do not cry! But what a brute I am! I was drunk, little

one, I was drunk and knew not what I said.”

He groped and found her hand and touched it to his lips. She shuddered in her white gown.

“Let me go,” she moaned, and tugged feebly.

“No. Say you forgive me first. Say you forgive me, Agueda.”

But instead she pulled his hand to her mouth and bit it – bit so sharply into the knuckles that he cried with pain

and lashed out with his other hand – lashed out and hit the air, for she was gone, she had fled, and he heard the

rustling of her skirts up the stairs as he furiously sucked his bleeding fingers.

Cruel thoughts raced through his head: he would go and tell his mother and make her turn the savage girl out of

the house – or he would himself to the girl’s room and drag her out of bed and slap, slap, slap her silly face! But

at the same time he was thinking that they were all going up to Antipolo in the morning and was already

planning how he would manoeuvre himself into the same boat with her.

Oh, he would have his revenge, he would make her pay, that little harlot! She should suffer for this, he thought

greedily, licking his bleeding knuckles. But – Judas! – what eyes she had! And what a pretty colour she turned

when angry! He remembered her bare shoulders: gold in the candlelight and delicately furred. He saw the

mobile insolence of her neck, and her taunt breasts steady in the fluid no fire or grace? And no salt? An arroba

she had of it!


“... No lack of salt in the chrism

At the moment of thy baptism!”

He sang aloud in the dark room and suddenly realized that he had fallen madly in love with her. He ached

intensely to see her again – at once! – to touch her hands and her hair; to hear her harsh voice. He ran to the

window and flung open the casements and the beauty of the night struck him back like a blow. It was May, it

was summer, and he was young – young! – and deliriously in love. Such a happiness welled up within him that

the tears spurted from his eyes.

But he did not forgive her – no! He would still make her pay, he would still have his revenge, he thought

viciously, and kissed his wounded fingers. But what a night it had been! “I will never forget this night!” he

thought aloud in an awed voice, standing by the window in the dark room, the tears in his eyes and the wind in

his hair and his bleeding knuckles pressed to his mouth.

But, alas, the heart forgets; the heart is distracted; and May – time passes; summer ends; the storms break over

the rot – ripe orchards and the heart grows old; while the hours, the days, the months, and the years pile up and

pile up, till the mind becomes too crowded. Too confused: dust gathers it; cobwebs multiply; the walls darken

and fall into ruin and decay; the memory perishes... and there came when Don Badoy Montiya walked home

through a May Day midnight without remembering, without even caring to remember; being merely concerned

in feeling his way across the street with his cane; his eyes having grown quite dim and his legs uncertain – for he

was old; he was over sixty; he was a very stooped and shrivelled old man with white hair and moustaches,

coming home from a secret meeting of conspirators; his mind still resounding with the speeches and his patriot

heart still exultant as he picked his way up the steps to the front door and inside into the slumbering darkness of

the house; wholly unconscious of the May night, till on his way down the hall, chancing to glance into the sala,

he shuddered, he stopped, his blood ran cold – for he had seen a face in the mirror there – a ghostly candlelit

face with the eyes closed and the lips moving, a face that he suddenly felt he had seen there before though it

was a full minute before the lost memory came flowing, came tiding back, so overflooding the actual moment

and so swiftly washing away the piled hours and days and months and years that he was left suddenly young

again; he was a gay young buck again, lately come from Europe; he had been dancing all night; he was very

drunk; he stopped in the doorway; he saw a face in the dark; he cried out... and the lad standing before the

mirror (for it was a lad in a night gown) jumped with fright and almost dropped his candle, but looking around

and seeing the old man, laughed out with relief and came running.

“Oh Grandpa, how you frightened me!”


Don Badoy had turned very pale. “So it was you, you young bandit! And what is all this, hey? What are you doing

down here at this hour?”

“Nothing, Grandpa. I was only... I am only...”

“Yes, you are the great Senor Only and how delighted I am to make your acquaintance, Senor Only! But if I break

this cane on your head you may wish you were someone else, sir!”

“It was just foolishness, Grandpa. They told me I would see my wife.”

“Wife? What wife?”

“Mine. The boys at school said I would see her if I looked in a mirror tonight and said:

Mirror, mirror

Show to me

Her whose lover

I will be.”

Don Badoy cackled ruefully. He took the boy by the hair, pulled him along into the room, sat down on a chair,

and drew the boy between his knees.

“Now, put your candle down on the floor, son, and let us talk this over. So you want your wife already, hey? You

want to see her in advance, hey? But do you know that these are wicked games and that wicked boys who play

them are in danger of seeing horrors?”

“Well, the boys did warn me I might see a witch instead.”

“Exactly! A witch so horrible you may die of fright. And she will bewitch you, she will torture you, she will eat

your heart and drink your blood!”

“Oh, come now Grandpa. This is 1890. There are no witches anymore.”

“Oh – ho, my young Voltaire! And what if I tell you that I myself have seen a witch.”

“You? Where?”


“Right in this room and right in that mirror,” said the old man, and his playful voice had turned savage.

“When, Grandpa?”

“Not so long ago. When I was a bit older than you. Oh, I was a vain fellow and though I was feeling very sick that

night and merely wanted to lie down somewhere and die. I could not pass that doorway of course without

stopping to see in the mirror what I looked like when dying. But when I poked my head in what should I see in

the mirror but... but...”

“The witch?”

“Exactly!”

“And did she bewitch you, Grandpa?”

“She bewitched me and she tortured me. She ate my heart and drank my blood,” said the old man bitterly.

“Oh, my poor little Grandpa! Why have you never told me! And she was very horrible?”

“Horrible? God, no – she was beautiful. She was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen! Her eyes were

somewhat like yours but her hair was like black waters and her golden shoulders were bare. My God, she was

enchanting! But I should have known – I should have known even then – the dark and fatal creature she was!”

A silence. Then: “What a horrid mirror this is, Grandpa,” whispered the boy.

“What makes you say that, hey?”

“Well, you saw this witch in it. And Mama once told me that Grandma once told her that Grandma once saw the

devil in this mirror. Was is of the scare that Grandma died?”

Don Badoy stared. For a moment he had forgotten that she was dead, that she had perished – the poor Agueda;

that they were at peace at last, the two of them, her tired body at rest; her broken body set free at last from the

brutal pranks of the earth – from the trap of a May night; from the snare of a summer; from the terrible silver

nets of the moon. She had been a mere heap of white hair and bones in the end: a whimpering withered

consumptive, lashing out with her cruel tongue; her eyes like live coals; her face like ashes... Now, nothing –

nothing save a name on a stone; save a stone in a graveyard – nothing! – nothing at all! All that was left of the

young girl who had flamed so vividly in a mirror one wild May Day midnight, long, long ago.

And remembering how she had sobbed so piteously; remembering how she had bitten his hand and fled and

how he had sung aloud in the dark moon and surprised hi heart in the instant of falling in love: such a grief tore

up his throat and eyes that he felt ashamed before the boy; pushed the boy away; stood up and fumbled his way

to the window, threw open the casements and looked out – looked out upon the medieval shadows of the foul


street where a couple of street lamps flickered and a last carriage was rattling away upon the cobbles, while the

blind black houses muttered hush – hush, their tiled roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wild sky

murky with clouds, save where an evil old moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled,

whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable

Maytime memories of an old, old love to the old man shaking with sobs by the window; the bowed old man

sobbing so bitterly at the window; the tears streaming down his cheeks and the wind in his hair and one hand

pressed to his mouth – while from up the street came the clackety – clack of the watchman’s boots on the

cobbles, and the clang – clang of his lantern against his knee, and the mighty roll if his voice booming through

the night: “Guardia sereno – o – o! A las doce han dado – o – o!”




My Father Goes To Court by Carlos Bulosan

When I was four, I lived with my mother and brothers and sisters in a small town on the island of Luzon. Father’s

farm had been destroyed in 1918 by one of our sudden Philippine floods, so several years afterwards we all lived

in the town though he preferred living in the country. We had as a next door neighbour a very rich man, whose

sons and daughters seldom came out of the house. While we boys and girls played and sang in the sun, his

children stayed inside and kept the windows closed. His house was so tall that his children could look in the

window of our house and watched us played, or slept, or ate, when there was any food in the house to eat.

Now, this rich man’s servants were always frying and cooking something good, and the aroma of the food was

wafted down to us form the windows of the big house. We hung about and took all the wonderful smells of the

food into our beings. Sometimes, in the morning, our whole family stood outside the windows of the rich man’s

house and listened to the musical sizzling of thick strips of bacon or ham. I can remember one afternoon when

our neighbour’s servants roasted three chickens. The chickens were young and tender and the fat that dripped

into the burning coals gave off an enchanting odour. We watched the servants turn the beautiful birds and

inhaled the heavenly spirit that drifted out to us.

Some days the rich man appeared at a window and glowered down at us. He looked at us one by one, as though

he were condemning us. We were all healthy because we went out in the sun and bathed in the cool water of

the river that flowed from the mountains into the sea. Sometimes we wrestled with one another in the house

before we went to play. We were always in the best of spirits and our laughter was contagious. Other

neighbours who passed by our house often stopped in our yard and joined us in laughter.

As time went on, the rich man’s children became thin and anaemic, while we grew even more robust and full of

life. Our faces were bright and rosy, but theirs were pale and sad. The rich man started to cough at night; then

he coughed day and night. His wife began coughing too. Then the children started to cough, one after the other.

At night their coughing sounded like the barking of a herd of seals. We hung outside their windows and listened

to them. We wondered what happened. We knew that they were not sick from the lack of nourishment because

they were still always frying something delicious to eat.

One day the rich man appeared at a window and stood there a long time. He looked at my sisters, who had

grown fat in laughing, then at my brothers, whose arms and legs were like the molave, which is the sturdiest

tree in the Philippines. He banged down the window and ran through his house, shutting all the windows.

From that day on, the windows of our neighbour’s house were always closed. The children did not come out

anymore. We could still hear the servants cooking in the kitchen, and no matter how tight the windows were

shut, the aroma of the food came to us in the wind and drifted gratuitously into our house.


One morning a policeman from the presidencia came to our house with a sealed paper. The rich man had filed a

complaint against us. Father took me with him when he went to the town clerk and asked him what it was about.

He told Father the man claimed that for years we had been stealing the spirit of his wealth and food.

When the day came for us to appear in court, father brushed his old Army uniform and borrowed a pair of shoes

from one of my brothers. We were the first to arrive. Father sat on a chair in the centre of the courtroom.

Mother occupied a chair by the door. We children sat on a long bench by the wall. Father kept jumping up from

his chair and stabbing the air with his arms, as though we were defending himself before an imaginary jury.

The rich man arrived. He had grown old and feeble; his face was scarred with deep lines. With him was his young

lawyer. Spectators came in and almost filled the chairs. The judge entered the room and sat on a high chair. We

stood in a hurry and then sat down again.

After the courtroom preliminaries, the judge looked at the Father. “Do you have a lawyer?” he asked.

“I don’t need any lawyer, Judge,” he said.

“Proceed,” said the judge.

The rich man’s lawyer jumped up and pointed his finger at Father. “Do you or you do not agree that you have

been stealing the spirit of the complaint’s wealth and food?”

“I do not!” Father said.

“Do you or do you not agree that while the complaint’s servants cooked and fried fat legs of lamb or young

chicken breast you and your family hung outside his windows and inhaled the heavenly spirit of the food?”

“I agree.” Father said.

“Do you or do you not agree that while the complaint and his children grew sickly and tubercular you and your

family became strong of limb and fair in complexion?”

“I agree.” Father said.

“How do you account for that?”


Father got up and paced around, scratching his head thoughtfully. Then he said, “I would like to see the children

of complaint, Judge.”

“Bring in the children of the complaint.”

They came in shyly. The spectators covered their mouths with their hands, they were so amazed to see the

children so thin and pale. The children walked silently to a bench and sat down without looking up. They stared

at the floor and moved their hands uneasily.

Father could not say anything at first. He just stood by his chair and looked at them. Finally he said, “I should like

to cross – examine the complaint.”

“Proceed.”

“Do you claim that we stole the spirit of your wealth and became a laughing family while yours became morose

and sad?” Father said.

“Yes.”

“Do you claim that we stole the spirit of your food by hanging outside your windows when your servants cooked

it?” Father said.

“Yes.”

“Then we are going to pay you right now,” Father said. He walked over to where we children were sitting on the

bench and took my straw hat off my lap and began filling it up with centavo pieces that he took out of his

pockets. He went to Mother, who added a fistful of silver coins. My brothers threw in their small change.

“May I walk to the room across the hall and stay there for a few minutes, Judge?” Father said.

“As you wish.”

“Thank you,” father said. He strode into the other room with the hat in his hands. It was almost full of coins. The

doors of both rooms were wide open.


“Are you ready?” Father called.

“Proceed.” The judge said.

The sweet tinkle of the coins carried beautifully in the courtroom. The spectators turned their faces toward the

sound with wonder. Father came back and stood before the complaint.

“Did you hear it?” he asked.

“Hear what?” the man asked.

“The spirit of the money when I shook this hat?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you are paid,” Father said.

The rich man opened his mouth to speak and fell to the floor without a sound. The lawyer rushed to his aid. The

judge pounded his gravel.

“Case dismissed.” He said.

Father strutted around the courtroom the judge even came down from his high chair to shake hands with him.

“By the way,” he whispered, “I had an uncle who died laughing.”

“You like to hear my family laugh, Judge?” Father asked?

“Why not?”

“Did you hear that children?” father said.

My sisters started it. The rest of us followed them soon the spectators were laughing with us, holding their

bellies and bending over the chairs. And the laughter of the judge was the loudest of all.




My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat”: such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but

thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,

—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretence

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!


Summary

This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th

century. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come to

negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the daughter of another powerful family. As

he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and

lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings

give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his

“gift of a nine-hundred-years- old name.” As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more

chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behavior escalated, “*he+

gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Having made this disclosure, the Duke returns to the

business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk

leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in his collection.

Form

“My Last Duchess” comprises rhyming pentameter lines. The lines do not employ end-stops; rather, they use

enjambment—gthat is, sentences and other grammatical units do not necessarily conclude at the end of lines.

Consequently, the rhymes do not create a sense of closure when they come, but rather remain a subtle driving

force behind the Duke’s compulsive revelations. The Duke is quite a performer: he mimics others’ voices, creates

hypothetical situations, and uses the force of his personality to make horrifying information seem merely

colorful. Indeed, the poem provides a classic example of a dramatic monologue: the speaker is clearly distinct

from the poet; an audience is suggested but never appears in the poem; and the revelation of the Duke’s

character is the poem’s primary aim.

Commentary

But Browning has more in mind than simply creating a colorful character and placing him in a picturesque

historical scene. Rather, the specific historical setting of the poem harbors much significance: the Italian

Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for it represented the flowering

of the aesthetic and the human alongside, or in some cases in the place of, the religious and the moral. Thus the

temporal setting allows Browning to again explore sex, violence, and aesthetics as all entangled, complicating

and confusing each other: the lushness of the language belies the fact that the Duchess was punished for her

natural sexuality. The Duke’s ravings suggest that most of the supposed transgressions took place only in his


mind. Like some of Browning’s fellow Victorians, the Duke sees sin lurking in every corner. The reason the

speaker here gives for killing the Duchess ostensibly differs from that given by the speaker of “Porphyria’s Lover”

for murder Porphyria; however, both women are nevertheless victims of a male desire to inscribe and fix female

sexuality. The desperate need to do this mirrors the efforts of Victorian society to mold the behavior—sexual

and otherwise—of individuals. For people confronted with an increasingly complex and anonymous modern

world, this impulse comes naturally: to control would seem to be to conserve and stabilize. The Renaissance was

a time when morally dissolute men like the Duke exercised absolute power, and as such it is a fascinating study

for the Victorians: works like this imply that, surely, a time that produced magnificent art like the Duchess’s

portrait couldn’t have been entirely evil in its allocation of societal control—geven though it put men like the

Duke in power.

A poem like “My Last Duchess” calculatedly engages its readers on a psychological level. Because we hear only

the Duke’s musings, we must piece the story together ourselves. Browning forces his reader to become involved

in the poem in order to understand it, and this adds to the fun of reading his work. It also forces the reader to

question his or her own response to the subject portrayed and the method of its portrayal. We are forced to

consider, Which aspect of the poem dominates: the horror of the Duchess’s fate, or the beauty of the language

and the powerful dramatic development? Thus by posing this question the poem firstly tests the Victorian

reader’s response to the modern world—git asks, Has everyday life made you numb yet?—gand secondly asks a

question that must be asked of all art—git queries, Does art have a moral component, or is it merely an

aesthetic exercise? In these latter considerations Browning prefigures writers like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar

Wilde.


When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge by Jose Garcia Villa

When, I, was, no, bigger, than, a, huge,

Star, in, my, self, I, began, to, write,

My,

Theology,

Of, rose, and,

Tiger: till, I, burned, with, their

Pure, and, Rage. Then, was, I, Wrath-

Ful,

And, most,

Gentle: most,

Dark, and, yet, most, Lit: in, me, an,

Eye, there, grew: springing, Vision,

Its,

Gold, and,

Its, wars. Then,

I, knew, the, Lord, was, not, my, Creator!

--Not, He, the, Unbegotten—but, I, saw,

The,

Creator,

Was, I—and,

I, began, to, Die, and, I, began, to, Grow.


Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,


Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,


Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,


And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.



philippine short stories and selected poems

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