Lit-1A Philippines Literature

The Sun, The Moon, The Stars

(Moro-Isolan)

Many, many years ago, there was daylight throughout the years. There was no night because the Sun and the Moon were always together. The Moon was the wife of the Sun and the two lived happily with their children for many thousands of years.

But one day, the Sun told the Moon that he was going out for a walk. He requested her to cook some gabi leaves for him to eat after his walk.

"The pot must be filled with cooked gabi by the time I arrive home," he said.

"The leaves will shrink as they cook, so you cannot expect the pot to be full," replied the Moon.

"The pot must be filled when I arrive home," insisted the Sun, "or something terrible will happen." Then he left the worried Moon.

The Moon was very sad, but she was a very good wife. She went out to her vegetable garden to gather some gabi leaves. When she was cooking the vegetable, she found out that the longer she cooked it, the less bulky it became. She tried cooking again and again to see if she could get the pot filled to the brim.

When the Sun came home, he immediately asked the Moon for the pot of gabi. When he saw that the pot was not full, he became very angry, and scolded the moon severely. The couple quarreled for a long time.

At last the Sun said, "Here after, we shall be separated. I want you to go your own way."

"What will happen to our children?" the moon asked. "Who will take care of them?"

"I will not take care of them," thundered the Sun.

"But if I take them along with me, they will surely suffer from cold," replied the Moon.

"And they will suffer the heat if they stay with me," the Sun said.

The Moon would not take the children along with her. This enraged the Sun. He took the bolo, killed the children, and chopped them to pieces. He took small pieces of the children's flesh from the floor and threw them outside the window of their house saying, "You shall go with them, and look after them in darkness."

Every piece of the flesh of the dead children of the Sun and the Moon turned into a star. The Moon went away from the Sun, and with her were the stars. To this day, we see the Moon and the Stars together at night and because of the quarrel of the Sun and the Moon, we now have day and night.

The Story of Unfinished Bridge

(Southern Kalinga)

At Balatoc, which is part of the municipality of Lubuagan, and the province of Kalinga-Apayao, is one of the oldest barrios. This barrio is situated at the foot of a high mountain where there is located a huge rock. The people who dwell there are the Tinguians from Abra, the the Isnegs from Apayao, and some people from Dananao which is part of the district of Tinglayan. Some people in this barrio made caves at the foot of a huge stone as their houses in times past and even now.

In this barrio there was a beautiful woman. Her name was Ipogao. One day, a man whom none of the inhabitants knew, appeared. He went to Ipogao and said, "Ipogao, I am God (Kabunyan), from a distant place. I come to see you because I want to marry you." Ipogao answered, "I would like to marry you if you truly like me."

After this conversation was finished, Ipogao led God to her house which was very small. The house of Ipogao to which they went was very far from where the real barrio was situated. After many days had passed, God thought of a good thing that he would do. He went and wandered around the farms to look for some good work that he would do. When he looked down on Pasil, he decided to make a bridge across to the other side for the people to pass when they go to the opposite side to work for their supplies.

So then, God returned to their house to tell Ipogao what he wanted to do. He instructed her, "You, Ipogao, tomorrow I'll start out to go and work. Don't worry if I'll not be here or if no one will come to me. I don't need anything to eat. It will be just up to me, and I'll come here if I get hungry." When he had finished giving his instructions he started out to go to his work.

After many days had passed by, Ipogao longed for her husband. So then, she cooked rice to take to her husband. When she was almost at Pasil, she heard what sounded like a machine. So then, she silently drew near. When she had drawn near and spied what was making the noise, she saw God working. She carefully watched and was frightened to see flame of fire coming out from the navel of God. He was pointing the flame at the bridge that he was making.

Ipogao was frightened and so went silently away. As she was going away from the scene, a small piece of cooked rice fell and she made footprints at God's resting place.

When it was evening, God was tired so he went to rest at his resting place. As he was resting he saw some cooked rice and a person's footprint on the ground. He said, "There was a person who came here to my resting place. He plainly saw me working. I want no one to see me working until I am finished with the work that I'm doing." After he'd finished what he was saying to himself, he went to their house to go and ask his wife who'd seen him. He arrived at their house and saw his wife worrying. He conversed with her, "Ipogao, who went to that place where I am working and dropped some cooked rice and whose footprint is it that is at my resting place?"

Ipogao told the truth, "I'm the one who went. I was coming to bring your food. I was only worrying because you had not been here for many many days." God answered, telling Ipogao, "You were and saw me working and interrupted me; you didn't listen to what I told you, so that thing I was working on will not be finished. I thought I would make a bridge for the benefit of the people here." God then returned to the bridge. When he arrived, he cut it into four pieces. One-fourth was left connected to the big stone. The part left measured about 4-1/2 meters. The other cut parts fell into the river. When God had finished destroying the bridge, he returned to their house and instructed Ipogao, "I am repenting, Ipogao, for I thought that I would come to marry you so that I would do something for your benefit. Being therefore interrupted, I will leave you and these people here." So the next day, God was no longer there.

When God had already gone away, Ipogao led the people to what he had worked. The people were surprised when they saw a part of the bridge that was left suspended and connected to the rock. While the people were carefully gazing at the bridge, they reprimanded Ipogao, "You should not have come and interrupted him until he was finished. Why ever did you come when he had instructed you?" When Ipogao answered, she said, "It's just that in my mind I thought he was a person like us." After the people had seen that bridge they believed that God was that one who had come. There is a part of the bridge left there even now.

Why The B'laans Are Ignorant

(B'laan)

In the olden days, according to the old B’laans, the American, Muslim and the Blaan were the only people in this world.

One day, Melu the chief god, summoned the representatives of the three races. He gave each one a book of knowledge and instructed them: "Go back to your people and teach them the contents of the book I gave you today."

"Yes," chorused the three men.

"Alright, you may go."

The three left. On their way home, they had to cross a wide and deep river.

"The current is swift," the American observed.

"Yes," agreed the Muslim, "we better cross one at a time."

"Alright, you American, you go first; you, Muslim, will follow; I'll cross last," said the Blaan.

So the three agreed. The American went first. When he was midway, he felt as if he would be swept away by the current. In order to keep his book from getting wet, he held it up with his hands. He kept his hands raised until he reached the other side of the river. This is the reason, they say, why Americans always struggle for liberty until today.

Meanwhile, when it was his turn to cross, the Muslim put his book on his head to prevent it from getting wet. He, too, successfully crossed the river. Because the Muslim put his book on his head with great energy, Muslim nowadays are strict in following the doctrines of their Koran.

It was now the Blaan's turn to cross the river.

"I will not imitate them, and I will also be able to cross," he whispered boastfully. Placing his book under his armpit, he pressed it against his body with his arm. Then he started to cross.

By that time the current of the water had grown stronger. When he reached the middle of the river, the current swept him away, because he was smaller than his two companions. The Blaan became confused and panicked. Thinking only of saving his life he struck out with his arms, forgetting all about the book under his armpit. The book fell into the water and was carried away by the current. He tried to retrieve it but the current was very strong so he thought it's best to cross to the other side.

When he was safely on the shore, he ran after floating book. Meanwhile, the book got caught in some rocks in a shallow part of the river. Happily the Blaan ran to get it, but when he almost had it in his grasp, the Almugan bird snatched it, swiftly flew away, and disappeared from sight.

Weak with disappointment and his realization that he had nothing to teach his people, the Blaan started walking away. Suddenly he heard the Almugan's call. That, he thought, was he could interpret for his people. If the call came from the right, it was the good omen and they should continue whatever they are doing. But if the call came from the left, they should stop it because it could only end in disaster.

Until now, this is what people believe as the reason why the Blaans are ignorant.

The Legend of Magat River

(Gaddang)

A long time ago, there lived in Bayombong a tall, handsome man called Magat. He was young and strong, and fast as a hunter and sure in his spear shot. He could run as fast as a deer and strong as he was, he could down a bull with ease. He was strong-willed and obstinate but he was also kind and gentle. Except for a few who envied him his prowess, everybody in the village loved and respected him. Magat loved outdoor life, and roamed in the forest surrounding the struggling settlement.

One day, fired by adventure he wandered farther than usual. Soon night came. Being far from home, he kindled a fire in his crude, primitive way. he lay beside the fire and fell asleep.

Early the next morning, he pursued his solitary way. Finally he came upon the largest stream he had ever seen. He stopped and crawled noisily to the bank of the river near the fall. Upon parting the tall grasses he beheld a lovely sight just across the stream-beneath the shade of the outspreading branches of the big balete tree was a very beautiful maiden. She was bathing and was nude from the waist up. She was the most beautiful woman Magat had ever seen and he fell in love with her at first sight.

From where he was hiding, Magat's attention was attracted by a silent movement on a spreading branch; Magat saw a great python, coiled around the branch, which was ready to attack the beautiful woman. He jumped backward. The noise he made drew the attention of the maiden, who, turning around, saw him poise a spear. She mistook his attitude for hostility and ducked under water. Just as the python sprang, the spear flew from Magat's hand. The snake was struck right through the eyes and brain.

The next moment, Magat was in the water and carried the beautiful Maiden ashore. She struggled a little but did not scream, as she modestly tried to cover her body with her long dark hair.

Magat pointed to the writhing python. Upon seeing it, she screamed instinctively and drew close to Magat, who put a protecting arm around her lovely shoulders. Gratitude and admiration were all over her pretty face.

Magat picked up his broken spear and went back to the young woman. They wandered about in the forest. Under the spell of nature, Magat asked the woman to be his wife; the woman, after making Magat promise in the name of the great Kabunian not to see her at noon, consented.

He brought her home and made a cozy room for her. Everything went well and happily for a while. But the passing days, his curiosity mounted more and more and at last, it grew out of bounds.

One noon, he broke his promise and broke into his wife's seclusion. In his wife's bed of soft leaves and grasses he beheld a sight that chilled his heart. A great crocodile was lying on his wife's bed. Believing that his wife had met a horrible death, he rushed to the kitchen, fetched an ugly weapon and returned to his wife's room. He raised his weapon to kill the crocodile when suddenly he saw his wife on the bed instead of the crocodile. His wife was dying.

"you broke your promise. I can no longer be happy nor live any longer. I must die." his wife sobbed. Slowly life ebbed from her. On her beautiful skin, scales appeared, as she turned into a crocodile before his very eyes. That was his punishment for having broken his promise made in the name of Kabunian.

Sadly, Magat buried the dead crocodile in his front yard. Worn out by sorrow and grief for his lack of fidelity to his word and over the death of his lovely wife, he drowned himself and his miseries shortly afterwards in the same stream that blessed him with a shortlived, lovely wife. With the fickleness of time, the stream grew into the mighty and turbulent Magat River.

The Monkey and The Turtle

(B’laan)

One morning, a monkey and a turtle who were close friends talked about their situation. After a while, the monkey said, let’s go to the forest and make a trap for wild pigs." The turtle agreed. When they came upon a Dakit tree, they saw the tracks of wild pigs. "Let's make a trap here." said the turtle, pointing to a base of the tree.

"No, let's make one trap up the tree because pigs go there and gather fruit," said the monkey.

"No, let's stay down here because the tracks are here."

"All right, you make your trap here while I make one up the tree."

So the monkey and the turtle went their separate ways. After setting their traps, the monkey said, "Let's return after two days. Wild pig should be here by then."

But the day after the traps were laid, the monkey went back to the dakit tree by himself. The turtle's trap had a pig, his has a bird. The turtle was right. To save face, the monkey brought the pig from the turtle's trap to his own and replaced it with the bird caught in his.


On his way home, he met the turtle.

"Where have you been?" asked the turtle.

"I went to the river to take a bath," was the reply.

As agreed, on the day after the traps were laid, the monkey and the turtle went to the dakit tree.

"Let's hurry so we can get there early. Last night, I had a good dream. Our traps must surely have something in them," the monkey said.

The turtle was surprised to find a pig up the tree and a bird in his trap which was set on the ground. He knew the monkey tricked him and told the monkey so. The monkey insisted that he had nothing to do with the result of their catch. Without saying another word, the monkey and the turtle went home with the pig and the bird respectively.

When they came near the monkey's house, they decided to fight it out.

"Wait," the monkey said. "I'll build myself a fort." He proceeded to make a fort out of banana leaves. He believed them impregnable.

"Shoot first," the turtle said. "After all you challenged me to this fight. If it were true that my trap caught a bird, pray that i will be killed at once."

The monkey took careful aim while his family watched from behind the banana fort. The turtle was hit. The monkey rejoiced.

The turtle cried, "You hit my back but I'm protected by my shell. Can't you see I am alive?"

The monkey was dismayed he was a good sport. "Then shoot," he called from the fort.

The turtle took careful aim and when his arrow found its mark, he heard a monkey cry. One of the monkey's children was killed.

"No, I was not hit. It was one of my children," lied the monkey.

The monkey's turn to shoot came but the turtle was not afraid, His shell was very thick. The arrows bounced.

Each Each time the turtle released an arrow, it hit the monkey. One by one, the monkey's wife and children died.

"Why don't we become friends again?" shouted the monkey from his fort. "I'll tell you the truth. Your trap caught the pig. It's yours."

The monkey and the turtle reconciled once more. If the monkey did not shout after the last of his children was killed, the turtle would have killed him too. They sealed their friendship by partaking of nama from the monkey's chew box.

Sometimes later, the monkey felt lonely because his wife and children were dead. "Please keep me company," the monkey pleaded. "We can go to the river and fish."

They left for the river to fish. At the river bank they saw a banana stalk. "Let's cut this in two," the monkey suggested. I'll take the upper half because the leaves and the fruit are too heavy for you."

The monkey and the turtle went to their respective kaingin and planted their respective parts. The ext visit to their kaingin brought happiness to turtle and sadness to the monkey. The turtle saw his plant heavy with fruit. The monkey's plant had wilted.

The monkey volunteered to get the fruit for the turtle. When he was up there, He did not care to go down any more. He ate everything. He was so full that he slept with a banana in his mouth. This made the turtle very mad.

Silently, the turtle planted bamboo stakes around the banana stalk. When the monkey turned on his side, he fell and was at once impaled. Helpless, the monkey agonizingly died.

The turtle feasted on the monkey. His ears were like good buyo leaves, his tail were like betel nut, and his brain tasted like superior lime. He chewed the concoction and was pleased with himself.

On his way home, he met a pack of monkeys who were on their way to the kaingin. They saw the turtle's black teeth so they asked for some of his nama. He hesitated for a while because he was afraid the monkeys might harm him. Then a wonderful idea struck his mind. He turned his back and wrapped some of his nama in a leaf from a wild tree that grew by the roadside. He told the monkey to open the package only when they reached their kaingin.

The monkeys did as bidden. When they reached their kaingin they gathered around the package and looked forward to a wonder nama. After chewing some, many threw up; others felt weak and dropped dead. Those who did not partake the nama realized that what their companions chewed was a monkey. They decided to run after the turtle and kill him.

The monkeys found the turtle near the riverbank. The turtle was subdued at once. The monkeys laid him on flat stone. Each monkey beat him with a stone. They saw how turtle enjoyed it. "Go ahead, continue beating me so I'll turn out wide and flat; then I will be able to lick you all with my tail." So the monkeys decide to throw him into the river. This seemed to frighten the turtle. Seeing how pale the turtle was, the monkeys were sure they decided on the right thing. So into the water the turtle went with a splash.

"Ha-ha!" The monkey heard the turtle laugh. "Don’t you know that i can live in water?"

The monkeys were very mad. Then it happened that a deer was drinking upstream. They asked the deer to drink to drink all the water there so they could get the turtle.

The deer promised to help the monkeys. He asked them to put a stopper in his anus. They used a corn cob to close the orifice.

The monkey waded toward the turtle while the deer drew water from the river. When the monkeys could almost make it to the turtle, tabkuko pecked on the corn cob and out went the water again. Thrice the deer drew the water; thrice did the tabkuko remove the corn cob. Three monkeys drowned.

The tabkuko incurred the monkeys' wrath because they never succeeded in laying their hands on the turtle. They seized the bird and twisted its neck. The bird writhed in pain and felt its end was near. "You won't kill me that way. Can't you see you’re even making me beautiful? See how red my bill is? The harder you twist my neck the redder my bill becomes. But if you want to kill me, pull the feathers and leave me on that stone near the river. In a week's time you will see worms feasting on my body."

The monkeys stripped the tabkuko of its entire plume and left it on the stone. After a week, they saw what looked like worms all over the tabkuko's body. They thought it was rotting. When the monkeys left, the bird stretched its wings and examined what it knew would turn out into beautiful feathers.

But the turtle did not go unpunished. When he went out of the water, he met a red-tailed lizard. He wanted to have a tail as red as the lizard's. The lizard told him that he only had to climb a red tree and jump from it. The lizard offered to bring him up the tree.

So up the tree they went. The turtle held on to the lizard's tail as hard as he could, but he slipped! Down he go with a hard crash. His lizard friend went to him but he was beyond help; its shell was broken into a thousand pieces. And while the sun hid behind a tree, the turtle died.

Sa Aking Mga Kababata

 (Dr. Jose Rizal)

Kapagka ang baya'y sadyang umiibig,
Sa kanyang salitang kaloob ng langit
Sanglang kalayaan nasa ring masapit
Katulad ng ibong nasa himpapawid.

Pagka't ang salita'y isang kahatulan,
Sa bayan, sa nayo't mga kaharian,
At ang isang tao'y katulad, kabagay
Ng alinmang likha noong kalayaan.

Ang hindi magmahal sa kanyang salita'y
Mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda,
Kaya ang marapat ay pagyamaning kusa
Na tulad sa isang tunay na pinagpala.

Ang wikang Tagalog, tulad din sa Latin,
Sa Ingles, Kastila at sa salitang anghel,
Sapagkat ang Poong maalam tumingin
Ang Siyang naggawad, nagbigay sa atin.

Ang salita nati’y huwad din sa iba
Na may alpabeto at sariling letra
Na kaya nawala'y dinatnan ng sigwa
Ang lunday sa lawa noong dakong una.

The Spouse

(Luis G. Dato)

Rose in her hand, and moist eyes young with weeping,
She stands upon the threshold of her house,
Fragrant with scent that wakens love from sleeping,
She looks far down to where her husband plows.

Her hair disheveled in the night of passion,
Her warm limbs humid with the sacred strife,
What may she know but man and woman fashion,
Out of the clay of wrath and sorrow, Life?

She holds no joys beyond the days's tomorrow,
She finds no worlds beyond his arms's embrace,
She looks upon the Form behind the furrow,
Who is her Mind, her Motion, Time and Space.

Oh, somber mystery of eyes unspeaking,
And dark enigma of Life's loves for lorn,
The sphinx beside the river smiles with seeking,
The secret answer since the world was born.

Picture Show

(Guillermo Castillo)

By God's divine will,

I waken sitting in the dark

with my attention set

upon a Screen before me

while God behind me in His closet

with His intricate machines

projects a Moving Picture Show

a masterpiece which we call – LIFE

Youth

(Maximi D. Ramos)

These have known the tingling freshness
Of the coming forth from God;
The sweetness of mother's breast
The ringing sinewiness of growth,
The feel of the loved one's cheek, the song
Of April suns and showers...

And these will know
The quiet dimming down of age
And the silent wonder
of going back
To God.

Death

(Herminio M. Beltran)

We are

Leaves of Life's tree --

And death is the wind that shakes

The branches gently 'till its leaves

All fall.

I Vialed The Universe

(Leoncio P. Deriada)

I vialed the universe

And laughed at the concentrated Gods.

But the Genie escaped with His halo of riddles.

I pondered anew and unslept.

Thoughts were strange with the strangeness of new towns

Thoughts were as vast as the unvialed God.

I could not bottle or battle Him.

There: I saw Him mark in the matutinal mist.

I surrendered.

Return To The Primitive

By: Salvador Lopez

A species of nationalism is being preached in the Philippines that ought to be scrutinized more closely for the dangerous fallacies it contains. The people are being enjoined to beware of “foreign influences” and to stick to the cultivation of “native traditions and virtues”. Because the warning has been voiced by men who are recognized as typical representatives of the adulterated culture which we are being urged to shun, their views carry weight and must, therefore, be carefully examined.

The burden of the charge against the present state of our culture is that the Filipinos of the younger generation have repudiated their glorious inheritance of tradition. They have imbibed innumerable foreign influences indiscriminately. The existing education system has failed miserably to make “real Filipinos” out of the youth. And what is the remedy proposed for this deplorable condition? This: that the Filipino people, especially the youth, contemplate more avidly the “glorious past” of their country; steep themselves in the beauty of the ancient folkways, beliefs, and precepts of their ancestors; and learn anew the social graces and amenities the their forefathers found so necessary if no so pleasing in their time. The folk songs, folk dances, and folklore of the ancient Filipinos must be given a place of honor in the curriculum of the schools.

 It is common place to say that nationalism is one of the most potent factors in the cultural development of people. Love of one’

s own is essential in the equipment of all truly civilized human beings; it is the only safe and sensible basis for the appreciation of things that pertain to others. Only those who truly love their own country and people – their tradition, history, and destiny – can develop a sincere interest in, and admiration for, tradition, history, and destiny of other countries and people. Only they can become genuine cosmopolites, “citizens of the world.”

There can be no objection to any movement which seeks to show that the Filipinos had a high level of indigenous culture even before the coming of the Spaniards, to acquaint the youth with the history of their country, with the nobble struggles of their people for liberty, and with the lives of those men and women whose sacrifices have made possible the freedom and enlightenment they now enjoy. Nor, above all, can there be any objection to the efforts of many sincere lovers of the ancient Filipino folk arts to retrieve these where they lie neglected or forgotten, in order that an intelligent and enduring interest in them may be revived.

 

Successive waves of physical and cultural invasion have destroyed valuable monuments of native culture and civilization. In the feverish haste of the invaders to impose their own ways of thinking and living upon the conquered race, it was inevitable that the ingredients and vessels of the latter’s culture were often utterly destroyed. Existing folklore and folkways had to be uprooted, as weeds might be uprooted, as weeds might be uprooted, to permit the growth of the new planting. Obviously, any movement deserves to be encouraged which attempts to restore, in the eyes of the people, the faded but still fascinating colors of their past. Such a movement would not only serve the ends of historical curiosity; it would confirm the Filipino people in their pride of race and nationality; it would give continuity to the inspiration of their history and provide them with a vital sense of tradition.

But here we must draw the line. We must make sure that in urging the people to look backward, our only desire is to place before their eyes the continuous thread of their history as a nation, so that from here onward they may move without hesitancy, fearless for the future because they are certain of the past. This is the only valid reason for the backward glance. For it may not be used also as an excuse for urging the people to assume attitudes towards living that may have served our fathers   well but which are no longer adequate to meet the demands of the  world we inhabit. Certainly it would be dangerous to urge the doctrine that was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us. A far more salutary doctrine is, that nothing is too good for our people, and that they are entitled to the best that the world has fashioned for man’s more gracious and more abundant living. The world keeps moving, and we must move-with it or we are lost. The wife of lot in the biblical story took one backward glance and was turned into statue of salt.

By all means, the Filipino people ought to know that they have a past of which they can be proud and therefore also a future which shall be a worthy   flowering of that past. The young people must be told that even before the coming of the Spaniards, the Filipinos had a culture of their own which compared favorably with the culture of those arrogant nations that now pretend to be the “civilizers “ of the world. But such an effort should at the same time recognize the danger of inculcating a nationalism which is born of a suspicion or a hatred of things foreign and which takes such fanatical pride and the country’s past that it tend to magnify what great things have already been done at the expense of what needful things yet remain to be accomplished. A healthy of the people’s debt to the past must be develop but only in order they may recognized more avidly still there tremendous obligation to the future.

The danger above that must be avoided is the tendency to make a movement an instrument of reaction in primitivism. For after all, the validity of any given culture lies, not in its peculiar charm (which is usually born of a sense of strangeness or romanticism of the memory), but in it fitness and utility as an instrument of the people’s security and happiness.

Every age creates instruments by which the livelihood and social relationships of the people are promoted and enriched. It stands to reason that any instrument which no longer serves this purpose must be fashioned anew or be replaced. Such an instrument may be a fit object for a historical museum, there to be treasured as a curiosity or as an object of art, but to suggest that we use it still for no other reason than that it served the purposes of our fathers well, is absurd. We must admit, in all humility, that our whole strength derives from the past; at the same time, we must clearly understand that this strength is to be used in creating a better world to live in for ourselves and our children. In short, we should beware of any invitation to return to ways of thinking and living that are “truly our own,” lest we led also into abandoning those ways of thinking and living that may not have been ours three centuries back but which have since become part and parcel of our social inheritance. We may not throw these things away merely because we did not start, discover or invent them, any more than we should throw electricity away because Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday were not Filipinos. Nor should we return to the ancient ways because they were the ways of our ancestors, any more than we ought to revive head-hunting because this used to be the one of the most exhilarating pastimes of our fathers.

The Philippines today is not merely what Filipinos have made it in the past; it is also what innumerable factors working inward from without have made it through centuries of commerce with the rest of the world, not only in things material but in things intellectual and spiritual. To talk of a “native Filipino culture” that is exclusively of our own invention and fashioning, is to refer to something that is wholly without objective content, something unreal and imaginary. It is to indulge in fantasy.

What, by the way, are those things and ways of life that are truly our own? Does not the history of the pre-Spanish period give abundant evidences of the fact that our culture was even then highly heterogeneous, deriving from various “foreign” elements, absorbing generous doses of Chinese, Hindu, and Mahammedan influences. And what, to take a parallel instances, are those things and ways of life that are truly English, French, German, or American? To ask these question is to be confronted by the fact that there is no country in the world that possesses a culture which is exclusively the product of its own genius. If race language and religion are basic elements of culture anywhere, which country among those that are considered as the most progressive in the world today, has not experienced an alien infusion in one or more of these culture elements.

The Filipinos pride themselves in two things more than in all others: their Christian civilization and their democratic system of government. Yet neither is indigenous; both have come to them from the outside. Should they go back to the worship of anitos and to the tribal system of government because these are truly their own?

The historical process is moving slowly but surely towards the more complete internalization of culture. The triumphs of humanity in the arts and sciences, in the physical world as well as in the intellectual and spiritual, soon project themselves beyond the frontiers of the particular countries that first produced them, to become the common property of all civilized nations.

Cultural isolation is fatal. The Filipino people must learn from the fate of those countries that have raised mighty walls of prejudice against” foreign cultural influences “ and have consequently suffered from the depredations of those imperialist powers that cloak their greed in the sanctimonious guise of “civilizing” the benighted portions of the globe.

College Uneducation

(Jorge Bacobo)

I wish to speak on “College Uneducation.” Is it possible that our college education may “uneducate” rather than educate? I answer “Yes.” It is a paradox but nonetheless the truth—the grim, unmerciful truth. We all believe in higher education; else we should not be in the University. At the same time, college education—like all other human devices for human betterment—may build or destroy, lead, or mislead.

My ten years’ humble service in the University of the Philippines has afforded me an opportunity to watch the current of ideals and practices of our student body. In some aspects of higher education, most of our students have measured up to their high responsibilities. But in other features—alas, vital ones!—the thoughts and actions of many of them tend to stunt the mind, dry up the heart, and quench the soul. These students are being uneducated in college. I shall briefly discuss three ways in which many of our students are getting college uneducation, for which they pay tuition fees and make unnumbered sacrifices.

Book Worship

In the first place, there is the all but delirious worship of the printed page. “What does the book say?” is, by all odds, the most important question in the student’s mind whenever he is faced with any problem calling for his own reasoning. By the same token, may students feel a sort of frenzy for facts till these become as huge as the mountains and the mind is crushed under them. Those students think of nothing but how to accumulate data; hence, their capacity for clear and powerful thinking is paralyzed. How pathetic to hear them argue and discuss! Because they lack the native vitality of unhampered reason, their discourse smacks of cant and sophistry rather than of healthy reasoning and straight thinking.

It is thus that many of our students surrender their individuality to the textbook and lose their birthright—which is to think for themselves. And when they attempt to form their own judgment, they become pedantic. Unless a student develops the habit of independent and sound reasoning, his college education is a solemn sham.

Compare these hair-splitting college students with Juan de la Cruz in the barrios. Now, Juan de la Cruz has read very little: no undigested mass of learning dulls the edge of his inborn logic, his mind is free from the overwhelming, stultifying weight of unassimilated book knowledge. How penetrating his perception, how unerring his judgment, how solid his common sense! He contemptuously refers to the learned sophists, thus: ”Lumabis ang karunungan mo,” which means, “Your learning is too much.”

Professional Philistinism

The second manner of college uneducation that I want to speak of is this: most students make professional efficiency the be-all and end-all of college education. They have set their hearts upon becoming highly trained lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, and agriculturists. I shall not stop to inquire into the question of how much blame should be laid at the door of the faculties of the University for this pernicious drift toward undue and excessive specialization. That such a tendency exists is undeniable, but we never pause to count, the cost! We are all of one mind: I believe that college education is nothing unless it widens a man’s vision, broadens his sympathies, and leads him to higher thinking and deep feeling. Yet how can we expect a; this result from a state of affairs which reduces a law student to a code, a prospective doctor to a prescription, and a would-be engineer to a mathematical formula? How many students in our professional colleges are doing any systematic reading in literature? May we not, indeed, seriously ask whether this fetish of specialization does not smother the inspiring sense of beauty and the ennobling love of finer things that our students have it in them to unfold into full-blown magnificence.

The Jading Dullness of Modern Life

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,””says Keats. But we know that beauty us a matter of taste; and, unless we develop in us a proper appreciation of what is beautiful and sublime, everything around us is tedious and commonplace. We rise early and go out into, but our spirit is responsive to the hopeful quietude and the dew-chastened sweetness of dawn. At night we behold the myriad stars, but they are just so many bright specks—their soft fires do not soothe our troubled hearts, and we do not experience that awesome, soul stirring fascination of the immense ties of God’s universe. We are bathed in the silver sheen of the moon and yet feel not the beatitude of the moment. We gaze upon a vista of high mountains, but their silent strength has no appeal for us. We read some undying verses; still, their vibrant cadence does not thrill us, and their transcendent though is to us like a vision that vanishes. We look at a masterpiece of the chisel with its eternal gracefulness of lines and properties, yet to us it is no more than a mere human likeness. Tell me, is such a life worth coming to college for? Yet, my friends, the overspecialization which many students pursue with zeal and devotion is bound to result in such an unfeeling, dry-as-dust existence.

I may say in passing that the education of the older generation is in this respect far superior to ours. Our older countrymen say, with reason, that the new education does not lawfully cultivate the heart as the old education did.

Misguided Zeal

Lastly, this selfsame rage for highly specialized training, with a view to distinguished professional success, beclouds our vision of the broader perspectives of life. Our philosophy of life is in danger of becoming narrow and mean because we are habituated to think almost wholly in terms of material wellbeing. Of course we must be practical. We cannot adequately answer this tremendous question unless we thoughtfully develop a proper sense of values and thus learn to separate the dross from the gold, the chaff from the grain of life. The time to do this task is not after but before college graduation; for, when all is said and done, the sum and substance of higher education is the individual formulation of what life is for, with special training in some advanced line of human learning in order that such a life formula may be executed with the utmost effectiveness. But how can we lay down the terms of our philosophy of life if every one of our thoughts is absorbed by the daily assignment, the outside reading, and the laboratory experiment, and when we continuously devour lectures and notes?
“Uneducated” Juan de la Cruz as Teacher

Here, again, many of our students should sit at the feet of meagrely educated Juan de la Cruz and learn wisdom. Ah! He is often called ignorant, but he is the wisest of the wise, for he has unravelled the mysteries of life. His is the happiness of the man who knows the whys of human existence. Unassuming Juan de la Cruz cherishes no “Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself.” His simple and hardy virtues put to shame the studied and complex rules of conduct of highly educated men and women. In adversity, his stoicism is beyond encomium. His love of home, so guilelessly faithful, is the firm foundation of our social structure. And his patriotism has been tested and found true. Can our students learn from Juan de la Cruz, or does their college education unfit them to become his pupils?

In conclusion, I shall say that I have observed among many of our students certain alarming signs of college uneducation, and some of these are: (1) lack of independent judgment as well as love of pedantry, because of the worship of the printed page and the feverish accumulation of undigested data;

(2) the deadening of the delicate sense of the beautiful and the sublime, on account of overspecialization; and (3) neglect of the formulation of a sound philosophy of life as a result of excessive emphasis on professional training.

Footnotes To The Youth

(Jose Garcia Villa)

The sun was salmon and hazy in the west. Dodong thought to himself he would tell his father about Teang when he got home, after he had unhitched the carabao from the plow, and let it to its shed and fed it. He was hesitant about saying it, but he wanted his father to know. What he had to say was of serious import as it would mark a climacteric in his life. Dodong finally decided to tell it, at a thought came to him his father might refuse to consider it. His father was silent hard-working farmer who chewed areca nut, which he had learned to do from his mother, Dodong's grandmother.

I will tell it to him. I will tell it to him.

The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish earthy smell. Many slender soft worms emerged from the furrows and then burrowed again deeper into the soil. A short colorless worm marched blindly to Dodong's foot and crawled calmly over it. Dodong go tickled and jerked his foot, flinging the worm into the air. Dodong did not bother to look where it fell, but thought of his age, seventeen, and he said to himself he was not young any more.


Dodong unhitched the carabao leisurely and gave it a healthy tap on the hip. The beast turned its head to look at him with dumb faithful eyes. Dodong gave it a slight push and the animal walked alongside him to its shed. He placed bundles of grass before it land the carabao began to eat. Dodong looked at it without interests.

Dodong started homeward, thinking how he would break his news to his father. He wanted to marry, Dodong did. He was seventeen, he had pimples on his face, the down on his upper lip already was dark--these meant he was no longer a boy. He was growing into a man--he was a man. Dodong felt insolent and big at the thought of it although he was by nature low in statue. Thinking himself a man grown, Dodong felt he could do anything.

He walked faster, prodded by the thought of his virility. A small angled stone bled his foot, but he dismissed it cursorily. He lifted his leg and looked at the hurt toe and then went on walking. In the cool sundown he thought wild you dreams of himself and Teang. Teang, his girl. She had a small brown face and small black eyes and straight glossy hair. How desirable she was to him. She made him dream even during the day.

Dodong tensed with desire and looked at the muscles of his arms. Dirty. This field
work was healthy, invigorating but it begrimed you, smudged you terribly. He turned back the way he had come, then he marched obliquely to a creek.

Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts, on the grass. The he went into the water, wet his body over, and rubbed at it vigorously. He was not long in bathing, then he marched homeward again. The bath made him feel cool.

It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already was lighted and the low unvarnished square table was set for supper. His parents and he sat down on the floor around the table to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish, rice, bananas, and caked sugar.

Dodong ate fish and rice, but did not partake of the fruit. The bananas were overripe and when one held them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong broke off a piece of the cakes sugar, dipped it in his glass of water and ate it. He got another piece and wanted some more, but he thought of leaving the remainder for his parents.

Dodong's mother removed the dishes when they were through and went out to the batalan to wash them. She walked with slow careful steps and Dodong wanted to help her carry the dishes out, but he was tired and now felt lazy. He wished as he looked at her that he had a sister who could help his mother in the housework. He pitied her, doing all the housework alone.

His father remained in the room, sucking a diseased tooth. It was paining him again, Dodong knew. Dodong had told him often and again to let the town dentist pull it out, but he was afraid, his father was. He did not tell that to Dodong, but Dodong guessed it. Afterward Dodong himself thought that if he had a decayed tooth he would be afraid to go to the dentist; he would not be any bolder than his father.

Dodong said while his mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There it was out, what he had to say, and over which he had done so much thinking. He had said it without any effort at all and without self-consciousness. Dodong felt relieved and looked at his father expectantly. A decrescent moon outside shed its feeble light into the window, graying the still black temples of his father. His father looked old now.

"I am going to marry Teang," Dodong said.

His father looked at him silently and stopped sucking the broken tooth. The silence became intense and cruel, and Dodong wished his father would suck that troublous tooth again. Dodong was uncomfortable and then became angry because his father kept looking at him without uttering anything.

"I will marry Teang," Dodong repeated. "I will marry Teang."

His father kept gazing at him in inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his seat.

"I asked her last night to marry me and she said...yes. I want your permission. I... want... it...." There was impatient clamor in his voice, an exacting protest at this coldness, this indifference. Dodong looked at his father sourly. He cracked his knuckles one by one, and the little sounds it made broke dully the night stillness.

"Must you marry, Dodong?"

Dodong resented his father's questions; his father himself had married. Dodong made a quick impassioned easy in his mind about selfishness, but later he got confused.

"You are very young, Dodong."

"I'm... seventeen."

"That's very young to get married at."

"I... I want to marry...Teang's a good girl."

"Tell your mother," his father said.

"You tell her, tatay."

"Dodong, you tell your inay."

"You tell her."

"All right, Dodong."

"You will let me marry Teang?"

"Son, if that is your wish... of course..." There was a strange helpless light in his father's eyes. Dodong did not read it, so absorbed was he in himself.

Dodong was immensely glad he had asserted himself. He lost his resentment for his father. For a while he even felt sorry for him about the diseased tooth. Then he confined his mind to dreaming of Teang and himself. Sweet young dream....

Dodong stood in the sweltering noon heat, sweating profusely, so that his camiseta was damp. He was still as a tree and his thoughts were confused. His mother had told him not to leave the house, but he had left. He had wanted to get out of it without clear reason at all. He was afraid, he felt. Afraid of the house. It had seemed to cage him, to compares his thoughts with severe tyranny. Afraid also of Teang. Teang was giving birth in the house; she gave screams that chilled his blood. He did not want her to scream like that, he seemed to be rebuking him. He began to wonder madly if the process of childbirth was really painful. Some women, when they gave birth, did not cry.

In a few moments he would be a father. "Father, father," he whispered the word with awe, with strangeness. He was young, he realized now, contradicting himself of nine months comfortable... "Your son," people would soon be telling him. "Your son, Dodong."

Dodong felt tired standing. He sat down on a saw-horse with his feet close together. He looked at his callused toes. Suppose he had ten children... What made him think that? What was the matter with him? God!

He heard his mother's voice from the house:

"Come up, Dodong. It is over."

Suddenly he felt terribly embarrassed as he looked at her. Somehow he was ashamed to his mother of his youthful paternity. It made him feel guilty, as if he had taken something no properly his. He dropped his eyes and pretended to dust dirt off his kundiman shorts.

"Dodong," his mother called again. "Dodong."

He turned to look again and this time saw his father beside his mother.

"It is a boy," his father said. He beckoned Dodong to come up.

Dodong felt more embarrassed and did not move. What a moment for him. His parents' eyes seemed to pierce him through and he felt limp.

He wanted to hide from them, to run away.

"Dodong, you come up. You come up," he mother said.

Dodong did not want to come up and stayed in the sun.

"Dodong. Dodong."

"I'll... come up."

Dodong traced tremulous steps on the dry parched yard. He ascended the bamboo steps slowly. His heart pounded mercilessly in him. Within, he avoided his parents eyes. He walked ahead of them so that they should not see his face. He felt guilty and untrue. He felt like crying. His eyes smarted and his chest wanted to burst. He wanted to turn back, to go back to the yard. He wanted somebody to punish him.

His father thrust his hand in his and gripped it gently.

"Son," his father said.

And his mother: "Dodong..."

How kind were their voices. They flowed into him, making him strong.

"Teang?" Dodong said.

"She's sleeping. But you go on..."

His father led him into the small sawali room. Dodong saw Teang, his girl-wife, asleep on the papag with her black hair soft around her face. He did not want her to look that pale.

Dodong wanted to touch her, to push away that stray wisp of hair that touched her lips, but again that feeling of embarrassment came over him and before his parents he did not want to be demonstrative.

The hilot was wrapping the child, Dodong heard it cry. The thin voice pierced him queerly. He could not control the swelling of happiness in him.

“You give him to me. You give him to me," Dodong said.

Blas was not Dodong's only child. Many more children came. For six successive years a new child came along. Dodong did not want any more children, but they came. It seemed the coming of children could not be helped. Dodong got angry with himself sometimes.

Teang did not complain, but the bearing of children told on her. She was shapeless and thin now, even if she was young. There was interminable work to be done. Cooking. Laundering. The house. The children. She cried sometimes, wishing she had not married. She did not tell Dodong this, not wishing him to dislike her. Yet she wished she had not married. Not even Dodong, whom she loved. There has been another suitor, Lucio, older than Dodong by nine years, and that was why she had chosen Dodong. Young Dodong. Seventeen. Lucio had married another after her marriage to Dodong, but he was childless until now. She wondered if she had married Lucio, would she have borne him children. Maybe not, either. That was a better lot. But she loved Dodong...

Dodong whom life had made ugly.

One night, as he lay beside his wife, he rose and went out of the house. He stood in the moonlight, tired and querulous. He wanted to ask questions and somebody to answer him. He wanted to be wise about many things.

One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youth's dreams. Why it must be so. Why one was forsaken... after Love.

Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question was not to be answered. It must be so to make youth Youth. Youth must be dreamfully sweet. Dreamfully sweet. Dodong returned to the house humiliated by himself. He had wanted to know a little wisdom but was denied it.

When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered and happy. It was late at night and Teang and the other children were asleep. Dodong heard Blas's steps, for he could not sleep well of nights. He watched Blas undress in the dark and lie down softly. Blas was restless on his mat and could not sleep. Dodong called him name and asked why he did not sleep. Blas said he could not sleep.

"You better go to sleep. It is late," Dodong said.

Blas raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice.

Dodong did not answer and tried to sleep.

"Itay ...," Blas called softly.

Dodong stirred and asked him what it was.

"I am going to marry Tona. She accepted me tonight."

Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving.

"Itay, you think it over."

Dodong lay silent.

"I love Tona and... I want her."

Dodong rose from his mat and told Blas to follow him. They descended to the yard, where everything was still and quiet. The moonlight was cold and white.

"You want to marry Tona," Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas was very young. The life that would follow marriage would be hard...

"Yes."

"Must you marry?"

Blas's voice stilled with resentment. "I will marry Tona."

Dodong kept silent, hurt.

"You have objections, Itay?" Blas asked acridly.

"Son... n-none..." (But truly, God, I don't want Blas to marry yet... not yet. I don't want Blas to marry yet....)

But he was helpless. He could not do anything. Youth must triumph... now. Love must triumph... now. Afterwards... it will be life.

As long ago Youth and Love did triumph for Dodong... and then Life.

Dodong looked wistfully at his young son in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad and sorry for him.

The Small Key

(Paz M. Latonera)

It was very warm. The sun, up above a sky that was blue and tremendous and beckoning to birds ever on the wing, shone bright as if determined to scorch everything under heaven, even the low, square nipa house that stood in an unashamed relief against the gray-green haze of grass and leaves.

It was lonely dwelling located far from its neighbors, which were huddled close to one another as if for mutual comfort. It was flanked on both sides by tall, slender bamboo tree which rustled plaintively under a gentle wind.

On the porch a woman past her early twenties stood regarding the scene before her with eyes made incurious by its familiarity. All around her the land stretched endlessly, it seemed, and vanished into the distance. There were dark, newly plowed furrows where in due time timorous seedling would give rise to sturdy stalks and golden grain, to a rippling yellow sea in the wind and sun during harvest time. Promise of plenty and reward for hard toil! With a sigh of discontent, however, the woman turned and entered a small dining room where a man sat over a belated a midday meal.

Pedro Buhay, a prosperous farmer, looked up from his plate and smiled at his wife as she stood framed by the doorway, the sunlight glinting on her dark hair, which was drawn back, without relenting wave, from a rather prominent and austere brow.

“Where are the shirts I ironed yesterday?” she asked as she approached the table.

“In my trunk, I think,” he answered.

“Some of them need darning,” and observing the empty plate, she added, “do you want some more rice?”

“No,” hastily, “I am in a burry to get back. We must finish plowing the south field today because tomorrow is Sunday.”

Pedro pushed the chair back and stood up. Soledad began to pile the dirty dishes one on top of the other.

“Here is the key to my trunk.” From the pocket of his khaki coat he pulled a string of non-descript red which held together a big shiny key and another small, rather rusty looking one.

With deliberate care he untied the knot and, detaching the big key, dropped the small one back into his pocket. She watched him fixedly as he did this. The smile left her face and a strange look came into her eyes as she took the big key from him without a word. Together they left the dining room.

Out of the porch he put an arm around her shoulders and peered into her shadowed face.

“You look pale and tired,” he remarked softly. “What have you been doing all morning?”

“Nothing,” she said listlessly. “But the heat gives me a headache.”

“Then lie down and try to sleep while I am gone.” For a moment they looked deep into each other’s eyes.

“It is really warm,” he continued. “I think I will take off my coat.”

He removed the garment absent mindedly and handed it to her. The stairs creaked under his weight as he went down.

“Choleng,” he turned his head as he opened the gate, “I shall pass by Tia Maria’s house and tell her to come. I may not return before dark.”

Soledad nodded. Her eyes followed her husband down the road, noting the fine set of his head and shoulders, the case of his stride. A strange ache rose in her throat.

She looked at the coat he had handed to her. It exuded a faint smell of his favorite cigars, one of which he invariably smoked, after the day’s work, on his way home from the fields. Mechanically, she began to fold the garment.

As she was doing so, s small object fell from the floor with a dull, metallic sound. Soledad stooped down to pick it up. It was the small key! She stared at it in her palm as if she had never seen it before. Her mouth was tightly drawn and for a while she looked almost old.

She passed into the small bedroom and tossed the coat carelessly on the back of a chair. She opened the window and the early afternoon sunshine flooded in. On a mat spread on the bamboo floor were some newly washed garments.

She began to fold them one by one in feverish haste, as if seeking in the task of the moment in refuge from painful thoughts. But her eyes moved restlessly around the room until they rested almost furtively on a small trunk that was half concealed by a rolled mat in a dark corner.

It was a small old trunk, without anything on the outside that might arouse one’s curiosity. But it held the things she had come to hate with unreasoning violence, the things that were causing her so much unnecessary anguish and pain and threatened to destroy all that was most beautiful between her and her husband!

Soledad came across a torn garment. She threaded a needle, but after a few uneven stitches she pricked her finger and a crimson drop stained the white garment. Then she saw she had been mending on the wrong side.

“What is the matter with me?” she asked herself aloud as she pulled the thread with nervous and impatient fingers.

What did it matter if her husband chose to keep the clothes of his first wife?

“She is dead anyhow. She is dead,” she repeated to herself over and over again.

The sound of her own voice calmed her. She tried to thread the needle once more. But she could not, not for the tears had come unbidden and completely blinded her.

“My God,” she cried with a sob, “make me forget Indo’s face as he put the small key back into his pocket.”

She brushed her tears with the sleeves of her camisa and abruptly stood up. The heat was stifling, and the silence in the house was beginning to be unendurable.

She looked out of the window. She wondered what was keeping Tia Maria. Perhaps Pedro had forgotten to pass by her house in his hurry. She could picture him out there in the south field gazing far and wide at the newly plowed land with no thought in his mind but of work, work. For to the people of the barrio whose patron saint, San Isidro Labrador, smiled on them with benign eyes from his crude altar in the little chapel up the hill, this season was a prolonged hour during which they were blind and dead to everything but the demands of the land.

During the next half hour Soledad wandered in and out of the rooms in effort to seek escape from her own thoughts and to fight down an overpowering impulse. If Tia Maria would only come and talk to her to divert her thoughts to other channels!

But the expression on her husband’s face as he put the small key back into his pocket kept torturing her like a nightmare, goading beyond endurance. Then, with all resistance to the impulse gone, she was kneeling before the small trunk. With the long drawn breath she inserted the small key. There was an unpleasant metallic sound, for the key had not been used for a long time and it was rusty.

That evening Pedro Buhay hurried home with the usual cigar dangling from his mouth, pleased with himself and the tenants because the work in the south field had been finished. Tia Maria met him at the gate and told him that Soledad was in bed with a fever.

“I shall go to town and bring Doctor Santos,” he decided, his cool hand on his wife’s brow.

Soledad opened her eyes.

“Don’t, Indo,” she begged with a vague terror in her eyes which he took for anxiety for him because the town was pretty far and the road was dark and deserted by that hour of the night. “I shall be alright tomorrow.”

Pedro returned an hour later, very tired and very worried. The doctor was not at home but his wife had promised to give him Pedro’s message as soon as he came in.

Tia Maria decides to remain for the night. But it was Pedro who stayed up to watch the sick woman. He was puzzled and worried – more than he cared to admit it. It was true that Soledad did not looked very well early that afternoon. Yet, he thought, the fever was rather sudden. He was afraid it might be a symptom of a serious illness.

Soledad was restless the whole night. She tossed from one side to another, but toward morning she fell into some sort of troubled sleep. Pedro then lay down to snatch a few winks.

He woke up to find the soft morning sunshine streaming through the half-open window. He got up without making any noise. His wife was still asleep and now breathing evenly. A sudden rush of tenderness came over him at the sight of her – so slight, so frail.

Tia Maria was nowhere to be seen, but that did not bother him, for it was Sunday and the work in the south field was finished. However, he missed the pleasant aroma which came from the kitchen every time he had awakened early in the morning.

The kitchen was neat but cheerless, and an immediate search for wood brought no results. So shouldering an ax, Pedro descended the rickety stairs that led to the backyard.

The morning was clear and the breeze soft and cool. Pedro took in a deep breath of air. It was good – it smelt of trees, of the rice fields, of the land he loved.

He found a pile of logs under the young mango tree near the house and began to chop. He swung the ax with rapid clean sweeps, enjoying the feel of the smooth wooden handle in his palms.

As he stopped for a while to mop his brow, his eyes caught the remnants of a smudge that had been built in the backyard.

“Ah!” he muttered to himself. “She swept the yard yesterday after I left her. That, coupled with the heat, must have given her a headache and then the fever.”

The morning breeze stirred the ashes and a piece of white cloth fluttered into view.

Pedro dropped his ax. It was a half-burn panuelo. Somebody had been burning clothes. He examined the slightly ruined garment closely. A puzzled expression came into his eyes. First it was doubt groping for truth, then amazement, and finally agonized incredulity passed across his face. He almost ran back to the house. In three strides he was upstairs. He found his coat hanging from the back of a chair.

Cautiously he entered the room. The heavy breathing of his wife told him that she was still asleep. As he stood by the small trunk, a vague distaste to open it assailed to him. Surely he must be mistaken. She could not have done it; she could not have been that… that foolish.

Resolutely he opened the trunk. It was empty.

It was nearly noon when the doctor arrived. He felt Soledad’s pulse and asked question which she answered in monosyllables. Pedro stood by listening to the whole procedure with an inscrutable expression on his face. He had the same expression when the doctor told him that nothing was really wrong with his wife although she seemed to be worried about something. The physician merely prescribed a day of complete rest.

Pedro lingered on the porch after the doctor left. He was trying not to be angry with his wife. He hoped it would be just an interlude that could be recalled without bitterness. She would explain sooner or later, she would be repentant, perhaps she would even listen and eventually forgive her, for she was young and he loved her. But somehow he knew that this incident would always remain a shadow in their lives.

Love In The Cornhusks

(Aida L. Rivera-Ford)

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

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

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

“Aba, you are so tall now, Tito.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Ma,” Tito shouted from downstairs. “And the ears are huge!”

“What do you expect,” replied his mother; “the father is a Bagobo. Even Tinang looks like a Bagobo now.”

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

“Ano, Tinang, is it not a good thing to be married?” the Señora asked, pitying Tinang because her dress gave way at the placket and pressed at her swollen breasts. It was, as a matter of fact, a dress she had given Tinang a long time ago.
“It is hard, Señora, very hard. Better that I were working here again.”

“There!” the Señora said. “Didn’t I tell you what it would be like, huh? . . . That you would be a slave to your husband and that you would work a baby eternally strapped to you. Are you not pregnant again?”

Tinang squirmed at the Señora’s directness but admitted she was.

“Hala! You will have a dozen before long.” The Señora got up. “Come, I will give you some dresses and an old blanket that you can cut into things for the baby.”

They went into a cluttered room which looked like a huge closet and as the Señora sorted out some clothes, Tinang asked, “How is Señor?”

“Ay, he is always losing his temper over the tractor drivers. It is not the way it was when Amado was here. You remember what a good driver he was. The tractors were always kept in working condition. But now . . . I wonder why he left all of a sudden. He said he would be gone for only two days . . . .”

“I don’t know,” Tinang said. The baby began to cry. Tinang shushed him with irritation.

“Oy, Tinang, come to the kitchen; your Bagobito is hungry.”

For the next hour, Tinang sat in the kitchen with an odd feeling; she watched the girl who was now in possession of the kitchen work around with a handkerchief clutched I one hand. She had lipstick on too, Tinang noted. The girl looked at her briefly but did not smile. She set down a can of evaporated milk for the baby and served her coffee and cake. The Señora drank coffee with her and lectured about keeping the baby’s stomach bound and training it to stay by itself so she could work. Finally, Tinang brought up, haltingly, with phrases like “if it will not offend you” and “if you are not too busy” the purpose of her visit–which was to ask Señora to be a madrina in baptism. The Señora readily assented and said she would provide the baptismal clothes and the fee for the priest. It was time to go.

“When are you coming again, Tinang?” the Señore asked as Tinang got the baby ready. “Don’t forget the bundle of clothes and . . . oh, Tinang, you better stop by the drugstore. They asked me once whether you were still with us. You have a letter there and I was going to open it to see if there was bad news but I thought you would be coming.”

A letter! Tinang’s heart beat violently. Somebody is dead; I know somebody is dead, she thought. She crossed herself and after thanking the Señora profusely, she hurried down. The dogs came forward and Tito had to restrain them. “Bring me some young corn next time, Tinang,” he called after her.

Tinang waited a while at the drugstore which was also the post office of the barrio. Finally, the man turned to her: “Mrs., do you want medicine for your baby or for yourself?”

“No, I came for my letter. I was told I have a letter.”

“And what is your name, Mrs.?” He drawled.

“Constantina Tirol.”

The man pulled a box and slowly went through the pile of envelopes most of which were scribbled in pencil, “Tirol, Tirol, Tirol. . . .” He finally pulled out a letter and handed it to her. She stared at the unfamiliar scrawl. It was not from her sister and she could think of no one else who could write to her.

Santa Maria, she thought; maybe something has happened to my sister.

“Do you want me to read it for you?”

“No, no.” She hurried from the drugstore, crushed that he should think her illiterate. With the baby on one arm and the bundle of clothes on the other and the letter clutched in her hand she found herself walking toward home.

The rains had made a deep slough of the clay road and Tinang followed the prints left by the men and the carabaos that had gone before her to keep from sinking mud up to her knees. She was deep in the road before she became conscious of her shoes. In horror, she saw that they were coated with thick, black clay. Gingerly, she pulled off one shoe after the other with the hand still clutching to the letter. When she had tied the shoes together with the laces and had slung them on an arm, the baby, the bundle, and the letter were all smeared with mud.

There must be a place to put the baby down, she thought, desperate now about the letter. She walked on until she spotted a corner of a field where cornhusks were scattered under a kamansi tree. She shoved together a pile of husks with her foot and laid the baby down upon it. With a sigh, she drew the letter from the envelope. She stared at the letter which was written in English.

My dearest Tinay,

Hello, how is life getting along? Are you still in good condition? As for myself, the same as usual. But you’re far from my side. It is not easy to be far from our lover.

Tinay, do you still love me? I hope your kind and generous heart will never fade. Someday or somehow I’ll be there again to fulfill our promise.

Many weeks and months have elapsed. Still I remember our bygone days. Especially when I was suffering with the heat of the tractor under the heat of the sun. I was always in despair until I imagine your personal appearance coming forward bearing the sweetest smile that enabled me to view the distant horizon.

Tinay, I could not return because I found that my mother was very ill. That is why I was not able to take you as a partner of life. Please respond to my missive at once so that I know whether you still love me or not. I hope you did not love anybody except myself.

I think I am going beyond the limit of your leisure hours, so I close with best wishes to you, my friends Gonding, Sefarin, Bondio, etc.

Yours forever,

Amado


P.S. My mother died last month.

Address your letter:

Mr. Amado Galauran

Binalunan, Cotabato

It was Tinang’s first love letter. A flush spread over her face and crept into her body. She read the letter again. “It is not easy to be far from our lover. . . . I imagine your personal appearance coming forward. . . . Someday, somehow I’ll be there to fulfill our promise. . . .” Tinang was intoxicated. She pressed herself against the kamansi tree.

My lover is true to me. He never meant to desert me. Amado, she thought. Amado.

And she cried, remembering the young girl she was less than two years ago when she would take food to Señor in the field and the laborers would eye her furtively. She thought herself above them for she was always neat and clean in her hometown, before she went away to work, she had gone to school and had reached sixth grade. Her skin, too, was not as dark as those of the girls who worked in the fields weeding around the clumps of abaca. Her lower lip jutted out disdainfully when the farm hands spoke to her with many flattering words. She laughed when a Bagobo with two hectares of land asked her to marry him. It was only Amado, the tractor driver, who could look at her and make her lower her eyes. He was very dark and wore filthy and torn clothes on the farm but on Saturdays when he came up to the house for his week’s salary, his hair was slicked down and he would be dressed as well as Mr. Jacinto, the schoolteacher. Once he told her he would study in the city night-schools and take up mechanical engineering someday. He had not said much more to her but one afternoon when she was bidden to take some bolts and tools to him in the field, a great excitement came over her. The shadows moved fitfully in the bamboo groves she passed and the cool November air edged into her nostrils sharply. He stood unmoving beside the tractor with tools and parts scattered on the ground around him. His eyes were a black glow as he watched her draw near. When she held out the bolts, he seized her wrist and said: “Come,” pulling her to the screen of trees beyond. She resisted but his arms were strong. He embraced her roughly and awkwardly, and she trembled and gasped and clung to him. . . .

A little green snake slithered languidly into the tall grass a few yards from the kamansi tree. Tinang started violently and remembered her child. It lay motionless on the mat of husk. With a shriek she grabbed it wildly and hugged it close. The baby awoke from its sleep and cries lustily. Ave Maria Santisima. Do not punish me, she prayed, searching the baby’s skin for marks. Among the cornhusks, the letter fell unnoticed.

Magnificience

 (Estrella Alfon)

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

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

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

Add to the man’s gentleness and his kindness in knowing a child’s desires, his promise that he would give each of them not one pencil but two. And for the little girl who he said was very bright and deserved more, ho would get the biggest pencil he could find.

One evening he did bring them. The evenings of waiting had made them look forward to this final giving, and when they got the pencils they whooped with joy. The little boy had two pencils, one green, one blue. And the little girl had three pencils, two of the same circumference as the little boy’s but colored red and yellow. And the third pencil, a jumbo size pencil really, was white, and had been sharpened, and the little girl jumped up and down, and shouted with glee. Until their mother called from down the stairs. What are you shouting about? And they told her, shouting gladly, Vicente, for that was his name. Vicente had brought the pencils he had promised them.

Thank him, their mother called. The little boy smiled and said, Thank you. And the little girl smiled, and said, Thank you, too. But the man said are you not going to kiss me for those pencils? They both came forward, the little girl and the little boy, and they both made to kiss him but Vicente slapped the boy smartly on his lean hips, and said, Boys do not kiss boys. And the little boy laughed and scampered away, and then ran back and kissed him anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vicente was earlier than usual that evening. The children immediately put their lessons down, telling him of the envy of their schoolmates, and would he buy them more please?

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

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

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

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

Then go ahead and write and I will watch you.

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

The man shook his head, and said nothing, but held her on his lap just the same. The little girl kept squirming, for somehow she felt uncomfortable to be held thus, her mother and father always treated her like a big girl, she was always told never to act like a baby. She looked around at Vicente, interrupting her careful writing to twist around. His face was all in sweat, and his eyes looked very strange, and he indicated to her that she must turn around, attend to the homework she was writing.

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

not knowing what to do.

By and by, in a very short while her mother came down the stairs, holding in her hand a glass of sarsaparilla, Vicente.

But Vicente had jumped up too soon as the little girl had jumped from his lap. He snatched at the papers that lay on the table and held them to his stomach, turning away from the mother’s coming. The mother looked at him, stopped in her tracks, and advanced into the light. She had been in the shadow. Her voice had been like a bell of safety to the little girl. But now she advanced into glare of the light that held like a tableau the figures of Vicente holding the little girl’s papers to him, and the little girl looking up at him frightenedly, in her eyes dark pools of wonder and fear and question.

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

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

Go upstairs, she said.

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

The man said nothing, for she said nothing either. Up the stairs went the man, and the mother followed behind. When they had reached the upper landing, the woman called down to her son, Son, come up and go to your room. The little boy did as he was told, asking no questions, for indeed he was feeling sleepy already.

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

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

He made no resistance, offered no defense. Before the silence and the grimness of her attack he cowered, retreating, until out of his mouth issued something like a whimper.

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

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

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

girl, she bundled into a tight wrenched bunch, which she threw into the kitchen range.

Take also the pencils, said the mother to the watching newly bathed, newly changed child. Take them and throw them into the fire. But when the girl turned to comply, the mother said, No, tomorrow will do. And taking the little girl by the hand, she led her to her little girl’s bed,

made her lie down and tucked the covers gently about her as the girl dropped off into quick slumber.

The Visitation of the Gods

(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 Coronaslar gas 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 dishabille reclining upon a scroll bearing the legend Parfumerie et Savonerie but the wood working 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-lbs. 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, A mitosis 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 church mouse. 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 waiteresses. 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 bunt al 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 sal a 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, and 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, 12leche 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.

Dark

(Delfin Fresnosa)

A woman and her son sat by the window looking upon the darkening road. Every now and then the woman would turn to the boy anxiously, trying to read the expression of his eyes. The boy, sickly looking, with dark and sensitive features, seeming to note her gaze, would avert his face and shield it with his hand. She felt a great wordless pity for him, and a sense of her helplessness gave her keen anguish. He knew of her love for him and sensed her hurt like a sharp stabbing pain.

Men and women passed by on the road in front of the house, some coming from the fields carrying bundles or farm implements. Most of them walked slowly, tired after the day's work but glad of the cool wind and the coming night. They talked and laughed as they went by.

Farther down the road children were at play, shouting and kicking an empty tin can about. Occasionally they had to stop their game to let some carabao cart or automobile pass.

"Did you see that car that just went by, full of people?" the woman asked her son.

"Yes." He said. "They must have come from an excursion."

"Yes, they were all talking and laughing. The people on the road shouted and laughed back at them."

Sometimes a man or a woman stopped a while in front of the house to exchange greetings with the woman at the window. The boy listened to his mother and to the voices of her friends. Some of them asked how he was, and he replied in a courteous voice that he was all right.

"Leon," suddenly said the mother. "Look at that boy with the monkey . He has monkey on hi shoulder. The monkey is jumping up and down."

"Yes," he said, laughing a little as if amused at the sight. "The boy is carrying a monkey."

He was again aware of his mother looking at him, trying to find his eyes, and again he turned his face away.

The boy with the monkey, and his father, a farmer, were now passing by the house. The monkey was a tame one and was crying out sharply and chattering.

"Can you see him, Leon?" asked the mother. "Can you see him? Can you see him a little?" The mother's voice was eager and urgent. There was desperateness in it. The boy knew that her lips were soundlessly forming the word she wanted him to say.

"Yes," he said softly.

The mother was suddenly deliriously happy. She crushed the boy's head against her bosom.

Snatches of incoherent talk came from her lips. She wanted to shout to the people on the road that her boy could see again. Tears stream down her face and wetted the boy's head.

Her husband had not come yet. Where was he now? When would he come come so that she could tell him? He would be very glad. They would laugh and cry together in their gladness. She was almost choking with joy and she pressed the boy's frail form to her.

He was crying too, softly, silently, and then convulsively. How sharply he now regretted that "YES" that he had almost unconsciously given her, that word that he had felt almost wrung out of him.

Almost every afternoon when the sun was setting, he and his mother would sit at the window. She had become sad and a little embittered. But a few weeks before, a stranger had come to their town who people said was a healer. They had brought the boy to him. At night when she and her husband thought the boy asleep, they would talk about him and the sight that had become affected and then he had finally entirely lost. After the visit to the healer, they had taken some hope again.

The mother notice the boy was weeping. "What is the matter, Leon? Tell me why you are crying so hard," she said anxiously. But he could not tell her and went on sobbing.

"Look at those boys on the road," she said, as if to banish a renewed but unspoken fear." It won't be long now before you are playing with them again." She bade him look out of the window, gently holding his chin up with a finger. He could not hide his face from her any more as she looked first at him and then at the boys in the road.

The boys had suddenly stopped playing and were huddled together in a group. Some passerby stopped, peering curiously at something the boys had picked up.

"What happened, mother?" said the boy.

"I don't know," said the mother. But the people were going on their way again and the boys were left to themselves. Again their voices were raised.

"It was a swallow," the mother said. "It was flying and hit the telephone wires. It fell to the ground and the boys found it."

"A bird," said the boy. "A swallow."

They sat silent now waiting for the father to come home. The mother was still excited, still impatiently awaiting her husband to tell him the reason for her happiness.

Finally she said: "There is your father coming down the road." The boy heard him at the gate.

"Hello, son!" he cried, but he slowed his steps and for some time tarried in the yard.

The boy listened anxiously for his footsteps and agitatedly turned to face the door. The stood up watching him. There was complete silence in the house.

Then the boy, extending his two arms and widely smiling, cried "Hello, Father!" But the smile froze on his lips. The woman turned to the window, and seeing her husband still in the yard, burst into a sob.

How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife

(Manuel E. Arguilla)

My brother Leon was returning to Nagrebcan from far away Manila, bringing home his young bride who had been born and had grown up in the big city. Father would not accept her for a daughter-in-law unless he taught her worthy to live in Nagrebcan.Father devised an ingenious way to find out, and waited for the result.

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

“You are Baldo.” She said and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder.Her nails were long,but they were not painted.She was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in bloom.And a small dimple appeared momentarily high up on her cheek.

“And this is Labang,of whom I have heard so much.” She held the wrist of one hand with the other and looked at Labang, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud. He swallowed and brought up to his mouth more cud, and the sound of his inside was like a drum.

I laid a hand on Labang’s massive neck and said to her: “You may scratch his forehead now.”She hesitated and I saw that her eyes were on the long curving horns.But she came and touched Labang’s forehead with her long fingers, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud except that his big eyes were half closed. And by and by, she was scratching his forehead very daintly.

My brother Leon put down the two trunks on the grassy side of the road.He paid Ca Celin twice the usual fare from the station to the edge of Nagrebcan. Then he was standing beside us,and she turned to him eagerly. I watched Ca Celin,where he stood in front of his horse, and he ran his fingers through its forelock and could not keep his eyes away from her.”Maria—“ my brother Leon said.He did not say Maring.He did not say Mayang.I knew then that he had always called her Maria; and in my mind I said, “Maria,” and it was a beautiful name.”Yes,Noel” Now where did she get that name? I pondered the matter quietly to myself, thinking Father might not like it. But it was only the name of my brother Leon said backwards, and it sounded much better that way.

“There is Nagrebcan, Maria” my brother said gesturing widely toward the west. She moved close to him. And after a while she said quietly: You love Nagrebcan, don’t you, Noel?

Ca Celin drove away hi-yi-ing to his horse loudly. At the bend of the camino real where the big duhat tree grew, he rattled the handle of his braided rattan whip against the spokes of the wheel. We stood alone on the roadside. The sun was in our eyes, for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide deep and very blue above us; but along the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the southwest flamed huge masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a golden haze through which floated big purple and red and yellow bubbles when I looked at the sinking sun. Labang’s white coat, which I had washed and brushed that morning with coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and his horns appeared tipped with fire. He faced the sun and from his mouth came a call so loud and vibrant that the earth seemed to tremble underfoot. And far way in the middle of the fields a cow lowed soflty in answer.

“Hitch him to the cart, Baldo,” my brother Leon said, laughing and she laughed with him a bit uncertainly, and I saw he had put his arms around her shoulders.”Why does he make that sound?” she asked. “I have never heard the like of it.” “There is not another like it,” my brother Leon said. “I have yet to hear another bull call like Labang. In all the world there is no other bull like him.”

She was smiling at him, and I stopped in the act of tying the vinca across Labang’s neck to the opposite end of the yoke, because her teeth was very white, her eyes were so full of laughter, and there was a small dimple high up on her right cheek.

“If you continue to talk about him like that, either I shall fall in love with him or become very jealous.” My brother Leon laughed and she laughed and they looked at each other and it seemed to me there was a world of laughter between them and in them.I climbed into the cart over the wheel and Labang would have bolted for he was always like that, but I kept firm hold on his rope.He was restless and would not stand still., so that ny brother Leon had to say “Labang” again, my brother Leon lifted the trunks into the cart, placing the smaller one on top.She looked down once on her high heeled shoes, then she gave her left hand to my brother Leon, placed a foot on the hub of the wheel, and in one breath she had swung into the cart. Oh,the fragrance of her! But Labang was fairly dancing with impatience and it was all I could do to keep him from running away.

“Give us the rope, Baldo,” my brother Leon said. “ Maria , set on the hay and hold on to anything.” Then he put a foot on the left shaft and that instant Labang leaped forward. My brother Leon laughed as he drew himself up to the top of the side of the cart and made the slack of the rope hiss above the back of Labang. The wind whistled against my cheeks and the rattling of the wheels on the pebbly road echoed in my ears.

She sat up straight on the bottom of the cart, legs bent together to one side, her skirt spread over them so that only the toes and the heels of her shoes were visible. Her eyes were on my brother Leon’s back; I saw the wind on her hair.When Labang slowed down, my brother Leon handed me the rope. I knelt on the straw inside the cart and pulled on the rope until Labang was merely shuffling along, then I made him turn around.

“What is it you have forgotten now, Baldo?” my brother Leon said. I did not say anything but tickled with my fingers the rump of Labang; and away we went back to where I had inhitched and waited for them. The sun had sunk and down from the wooeded sides of the Katayaghan hills shadows were stealing into the fields.When I sent Labang down the deep cut that would take us to the dry bed of the Waig, which could be used as a path to our place during the dry season, my brother Leon laid a hand on my shoulder and said sternly: “Who told you to drive through the fields tonight?”His hand was heavy on my shoulder, but I did not look at him or utter a word until we were on the rocky bottom of the Waig.

“Baldo, you fool, answer me before I lay the rope of Labang on you. Why do you follow the Waig instead of the camino real?” His fingers bit into my shoulder.”Father- he told me to follow the Waig tonight, Manong.” Swiftly his hand fell away from my shoulder and he reached for the rope of Labang. Then my brother Leon laughed, and he sat back, and laughing still, he said: “And I suppose Father also told you to hitch Labang to the cart and meet us with him instead of the Castano and the calesa.”

Without waiting forn me to answer, he turned to her and said, “Maria, why do you think Father should do that, now?” He laughed and added, “Have you ever seen so many stars before?” I looked back and they were sitting side by side, leaning against the trunks, hands clasped across the knees. Seemingly but a man’s height above the tops of the steep banks of the Waig, hung the stars. But in the deep gorge the shadows had fallen heavily, and even the white of Labang’s coat was chirped from their homes in the cracks in the banks. The thick, unpleasant smell of dangla bushes and cooling sun-heated earth mingled with the clean,sharp scent of arrais roots exposed to the night air and of the hay inside the cart.

“Look, Noel, yonder is our star!” Deep surprise and gladness were in her voice. Very low in the west, almost touching the ragged edge of the bank, was the star, the biggest and brightest in the sky. “I have been looking at it,” my brother Leon said. “Do you remember how I would tell you that when you want to see stars you must come to Nagrebcan?”. “Yes, Noel,” she said. “Look at it she murmured, half to herself. “It is so many times bigger than it was at Ermita beach.”The air here is clean and free of dust smoke.” So it is Noel,” she said,drawing a long breath.

“Making fun of me, Maria?”She laughed then, and they laughed together and she took my brother Leon’s hand and put it against her face.I stopped Labang, climbed down, and lighted the lantern that hung from the cart, and my heart sang. Now the shadows took fright and did not crowd so near. Clumps of andadasi and arrais flashed into view and quickly disappeared as we passed by. Ahead, the elongated shadow of Labang bobbled up and down and swayed drunkenly from side to side, for the lantern rocked jerkily with the cart.

“Have we far to go yet, Noel?” she asked. “Ask Baldo,” my brother Leon said,”we have been neglecting him.” “I am asking you, Baldo,”she said. Without looking back, I answered, picking my words slowly: “Soon we will get out of the Waig and pass into the fields. After the fields is home – Manang.” “So near already.”

I did not say anything more, because I did not know what to make of the tone of her voice as she said her last words. All the laughter seemed to have gone out of her. I waited for my brother Leon to say something, but he was not saying anything. Suddenly he broke out into song and the song was “Sky Sown with Stars” –the same that he and father sang when he cut hay in the fields of nights before he went away to study. He must have taught her the song because she joined him, and her voice flowed into him like a gentle stream meeting a stronger one. And each time the wheel encountered a big rock, a voice would catch in her throat, but my brother Leon would sing on, until, laughing softly, she would join him again.

Then we were climbing out into the fields, and through the spokes of the wheels the light of the lantern mocked the shadows. Labang quickened his steps. The jolting became more frequent and painful as we crossed the low dikes. “But it is so very wide here,” she said. The light of the stars broke and scattered the darkness so that one could see far on every side, though indistinctly.

“You miss the houses, and the cars, and the people and the noise, don’t you?” My brother Leon stopped singing. “Yes, but in a different way. I am glad they are not here.” With difficulty, I turned Labang to the left, for he wanted to go straight on. He was breathing hard, but I knew he was more thirsty than tired. In a little while , we drove up the grassy side onto the camino real.
“-you see,” my brother Leon was explaining, “the camino real curves around the foot of the Katayaghan hills and passes by our house. We drove through the fields, because- but I’ll be asking father as soon as we get home” “Noel,” she said. “Yes, Maria.” “I am afraid. He may not like me.” “Does that worry you still, Maria?” my brother said. “From the way you talk, he might be an ogre, for all the world. Except when his leg that was wounded in the revolution is troubling him, Father is the mildest tempered, gentlest man I know.”

We came to the house of Lacay Julian and I spoke to Labang loudly, but Moning did not come to the window, so I surmised she must be eating with the rest of her family. And I thought of the food being made ready at home and my mouth watered. We met the twins, Urong and Celin, and I said “ Hoy,” calling them by name. And they shouted back and asked if my brother Leon and his wife were with me. And my brother Leon shouted to them and then told me to make Labang run; their answers were lost in the noise of the wheels.

I stopped Labang on the road before our house and would have gotten down, but my brother Leon took the rope and told me to stay in the cart. He turned Labang into the open gate and we dashed into our yard. I thought we would crash into the bole of the camachile tree, but my brother Leon reined in Labang in time. There was light downstairs in the kitchen, and Mother stood in the doorway, and I could see her smiling shyly. My brother Leon was helping Maria over the wheel.

The first words that fell from his lips after he had kissed Mother’s hand were: “Father – where is he?” “He is in his room upstairs,” Mother said, her face becoming serious. “His leg is bothering him again.” I did not hear anything more because I had to go back to the cart to unhitch Labang. But I had hardly tied him under the barn when I heard Father calling me. I met my brother Leon going to bring up the trunks. As I passed through the kitchen, there were Mother and my sister Aurelia and Maria, and it seemed to me they were crying, all of them. There was no light in Father’s room. There was no movement. He sat in the big armchair by the eastern window, and a star shone directly through it. He was smoking, but he removed the roll of tobacco from his mouth when he saw me. He laid it carefully on the windowsill before speaking.

“Did you meet anybody on the way?” “No, Father,” I said. “Nobody passes through the Waig at night.” He reached for his roll of tobacco and hitched himself up in the chair. “She is very beautiful, Father.” “Was she afraid of Labang?” My father had not raised his voice, but the room seemed to resound with it. And again I saw her eyes on the long curving horns and the arm off my brother Leon around her shoulders. “No, Father, she was not afraid.” “On the way-““She looked at the stars, Father And Manong Leon sang.”

“What did he sing?” “Sky Sown with Stars.” She sang with him. He was silent again. I could hear the low voices of Mother and my sister Aurelia downstairs. There was also the voice of my brother Leon, and I thought that Father’s voice must have been like it when he was young. He had laid the roll of tobacco on the windowsill once more. I watched the smoke waver faintly upward from the lighted end and vanish slowly into the night outside. The door opened and my brother Leon and Maria came in. “Have you watered Labang?” Father spoke to me. I told him that Labang ws resting yet under the barn. “It is time you watered him, my son.” My father said.

I looked at Maria and she was lovely. She was tall. Beside my brother Leon, she was tall and very still. Then I went out, and in the darkened hall the fragrance of her was like a morning when papayas are in bloom.

My Father Goes To Court

(Carlos Bulosan)

When I was four, I lived with my mother and brothers and sisters in a small town on the island of Luzon. Father’s farm had been destroyed in 1918 by one of our sudden Philippine floods, so for several years afterward we all lived in the town, though he preffered living in the country. We had a next-door neighbor, a very rich man, whose sons and daughters seldom came out of the house. While we boys and girls played and sand in the sun, his children stayed inside and kept the windows closed. His house was so tall that his children could look in the windows of our house and watch us as we played, or slept, or ate, when there was any food in the house to eat.

Now, this rich man’s servants were always frying and cooking something good, and the aroma of the food was wafted down to us from the windows of the big house. We hung about and took all the wonderful smell of the food into our beings. Sometimes, in the morning, our whole family stood outside the windows of the rich man’s house and listened to the musical sizzling of thick strips of bacon or ham. I can remember one afternoon when our neighbor’s servants roasted three chickens. The chickens were young and tender and the fat that dripped into the burning coals gave off an enchanting odor. We watched the servants turn the beautiful birds and inhaled the heavenly spirit that drifted out to us.

Some days the rich man appeared at a window and glowered down at us. He looked at us one by one, as though he were condemning us. We were all healthy because we went out in the sun every day and bathed in the cool water of the river that flowed from the mountains into the sea. Sometimes we wrestled with one another in the house before we went out to play.

We were always in the best of spirits and our laughter was contagious. Other neighbors who passed by our house often stopped in our yard and joined us in our laughter.

Laughter was our only wealth. Father was a laughing man. He would go in to the living room and stand in front of the tall mirror, stretching his mouth into grotesque shapes with his fingers and making faces at himself, and then he would rush into the kitchen, roaring with laughter.

There was plenty to make us laugh. There was, for instance, the day one of my brothers came home and brought a small bundle under his arm, pretending that he brought something to eat, maybe a leg of lamb or something as extravagant as that to make our mouths water. He rushed to mother and through the bundle into her lap. We all stood around, watching mother undo the complicated strings. Suddenly a black cat leaped out of the bundle and ran wildly around the house. Mother chased my brother and beat him with her little fists, while the rest of us bent double, choking with laughter.

Another time one of my sisters suddenly started screaming in the middle of the night. Mother reached her first and tried to calm her. My sister criedand groaned. When father lifted the lamp, my sister stared at us with shame in her eyes.

“What is it?” Father asked.

“I’m pregnant!” she cried.

“Don’t be a fool!” Father shouted.

“You’re only a child,” Mother said.

“I’m pregnant, I tell you!” she cried.

Father knelt by my sister. He put his hand on her belly and rubbed it gently. “How do you know you are pregnant?” he asked.

“Feel it!” she cried.

We put our hands on her belly. There was something moving inside. Father was frightened. Mother was shocked. “Who’s the man?” she asked.

“There’s no man,” my sister said.

‘What is it then?” Father asked.

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

When the fire was extinguished and Mother was revived, we turned to bed and tried to sleep, but Father kept on laughing so loud we could not sleep any more. Mother got up again and lighted the oil lamp; we rolled up the mats on the floor and began dancing about and laughing with all our might. We made so much noise that all our neighbors except the rich family came into the yard and joined us in loud, genuine laughter.

It was like that for years.

As time went on, the rich man’s children became thin and anemic, while we grew even more robust and full of fire. 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 barking of a herd of seals. We hung outside their windows and listened to them. We wondered what had happened to them. We knew that they were not sick from lack of nourishing food 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 with 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 the house, shutting all the windows.

From that day on, the windows of our neighbor’s house were closed. The children did not come outdoors 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 filled a complaint against us. Father took me with him when he went to the town clerk and asked him what it was all 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 center of the courtroom. Mother occupied a chair by the door. We children sat on a long bench by the wall. Father kept jumping up his chair and stabbing the air with his arms, as though he 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 up in a hurry and sat down again.

After the courtroom preliminaries, the judge took at father. “Do you have a lawyer?” he asked.

“I don’t need a lawyer judge.” He said.

“Proceed,” said the judge.

The rich man’s lawyer jumped and pointed his finger at Father, “Do you or do you not agree that you have been stealing the spirit of the complainant’s wealth and food?”

“I do not!” Father said.

“Do you or do you not agree that while the complainant’s servants cooked and fried fat legs of lambs and young chicken breasts, you and your family hung outside your windows and inhaled the heavenly spirit of the food?”

“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 the complainant, Judge.”

“Bring the children of the complainant.”

They came 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 complainant.”

“Proceed.”

“Do you claim that we stole the spirit of your wealth and became a laughing family while yours became morose and sad?” Father asked.

“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 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 minutes, Judge?” Father asked.

“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 coins carried beautifully into the room. The spectators turned their faces toward the sound with wonder. Father came back and stood before the complainant.

“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 to 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 sister started it. The rest of us followed them and 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.

The Chieftest Mourner

(Aida Rivera-Ford)

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

When people mentioned Uncle's wife, there was no way of knowing whether they referred to my aunt or to the woman. After a while a system was worked out by the mutual friends of the different parties. No. 1 came to stand for Aunt Sophia and No. 2 for the woman.I hadn't seen Uncle since the episode of the lemonade, but one day in school all the girls were asked to come down to the lecture room--Uncle was to read some of his poems! Up in my room, I stopped to fasten a pink ribbon to my hair thinking the while how I would play my role to perfection--for the dear niece was to be presented to the uncle she had not seen for so long. My musings were interrupted, however, when a girl came up and excitedly bubbled that she had seen my uncle--and my aunt, who was surprisingly young and so very modern!I couldn't go down after all; I was indisposed.Complicated as the situation was when Uncle was alive, it became more so when he died. I was puzzling over who was to be the official widow at his funeral when word came that I was to keep Aunt Sophia company at the little chapel where the service would be held. I concluded with relief that No. 2 had decamped.The morning wasn't far gone when I arrived at the chapel and there were only a few people present. Aunt Sophia was sitting in one of the front pews at the right section of the chapel. She had on a black and white print which managed to display its full yardage over the seat. Across the aisle from her was a very slight woman in her early thirties who was dressed in a dramatic black outfit with a heavy veil coming up to her forehead. Something about her made me suddenly aware that Aunt Sophia's bag looked paunchy and worn at the corners. I wanted to ask my aunt who she was but after embracing me when I arrived, she kept her eyes stolidly fixed before her. I directed my gaze in the same direction. At the front was the president's immense wreath leaning heavily backward, like that personage himself; and a pace behind, as though in deference to it, were other wreaths arranged according to the rank and prominence of the people who had sent them. I suppose protocol had something to do with it.I tiptoed over to the muse before Uncle as he lay in the dignity of death, the faintest trace of his somber smile still on his face. My eyes fell upon a cluster of white flowers placed at the foot of the casket. It was ingeniously fashioned in the shape of a dove and it bore the inscription "From the Loyal One." I looked at Aunt Sophia and didn't see anything dove-like about her. I looked at the slight woman in black and knew of a sudden that she was the woman. A young man, obviously a brother or a nephew, was bending over her solicitously. I took no notice of him even though he had elegant manners, a mischievous cowlick, wistful eyes, a Dennis Morgan chin, and a pin which testified that he belonged to what we girls called our "brother college." I showed him that he absolutely did not exist for me, especially when I caught him looking in our direction.I always feel guilty of sacrilege everytime I think of it, but there was something grimly ludicrous about my uncle’s funeral. There were two women, each taking possession of her portion of the chapel just as though stakes had been laid, seemingly unmindful of each other, yet revealing by this studied disregard that each was very much aware of the other. As though to give balance to the scene, the young man stood his full height near the woman to offset the collective bulk of Aunt Sophia and myself, although I was merely a disproportionate shadow behind her.The friends of the poet began to come. They paused a long time at the door, surveying the scene before they marched self-consciously towards the casket. Another pause there, and then they wrenched themselves from the spot and moved--no, slithered--either towards my aunt or towards the woman. The choice must have been difficult when they knew both. The women almost invariably came to talk to my aunt whereas most of the men turned to the woman at the left. I recognized some important Malacañang men and some writers from seeing their pictures in the papers. Later in the morning a horde of black-clad women, the sisters and cousins of the poet, swept into the chapel and came directly to where my aunt sat. They had the same deep eye-sockets and hollow cheek-bones which had lent a sensitive expression to the poet's face but which on them suggested t.b. The air became dense with the sickly-sweet smell of many flowers clashing and I went over to get my breath of air. As I glanced back I had a crazy surrealist impression of mouths opening and closing into Aunt Sophia's ear, and eyes darting toward the woman at the left. Uncle's clan certainly made short work of my aunt for when I returned, she was sobbing. As though to comfort her, one of the women said, in a whisper which I heard from the door, that the president himself was expected to come in the afternoon.Toward lunchtime, it became obvious that neither my aunt nor the woman wished to leave ahead of the other. I could appreciate my aunt's delicadeza in this matter but then got hungry and therefore grew resourceful: I called a taxi and told her it was at the door with the meter on. Aunt Sophia's unwillingness lasted as long as forty centavos.We made up for leaving ahead of the woman by getting back to the chapel early. For a long time she did not come and when Uncle's kinswomen arrived, I thought their faces showed a little disappointment at finding the left side of the chapel empty. Aunt Sophia, on the other hand, looked relieved. But at about three, the woman arrived and I perceived at once that there was a difference in her appearance. She wore the same black dress but her thick hair was now carefully swept into a regal coil; her skin glowing; her eyes, which had been striking enough, looked even larger. The eyebrows of the women around me started working and finally, the scrawniest of the poet's relations whispered to the others and slowly, together, they closed in on the woman.I went over to sit with my aunt who was gazing not so steadily at nothing in particular.At first the women spoke in whispers, and then the voices rose a trifle. Still, everybody was polite. There was more talking back and forth, and suddenly the conversation wasn't polite any more. The only good thing about it was that now I could hear everything distinctly."So you want to put me in a corner, do you? You think perhaps you can bully me out of here?" the woman said."Shh! Please don't create a scene," the poet's sisters said, going one pitch higher."It's you who are creating a scene. Didn't you come here purposely to start one?""We're only trying to make you see reason.... If you think of the dead at all...""Let's see who has the reason. I understand that you want me to leave, isn't it? Now that he is dead and cannot speak for me you think I should quietly hide in a corner?" The woman's voice was now pitched up for the benefit of the whole chapel. "Let me ask you. During the war when the poet was hard up do you suppose I deserted him? Whose jewels do you think we sold when he did not make money... When he was ill, who was it who stayed at his side... Who took care of him during all those months... and who peddled his books and poems to the publishers so that he could pay for the hospital and doctor's bills? Did any of you come to him then? Let me ask you that! Now that he is dead you want me to leave his side so that you and that vieja can have the honors and have your picture taken with the president. That's what you want, isn't it--to pose with the president....""Por Dios! Make her stop it--somebody stop her mouth!" cried Aunt Sophia, her eyes going up to heaven."Now you listen, you scandalous woman," one of the clan said, taking it up for Aunt Sophia. "We don't care for the honors--we don't want it for ourselves. But we want the poet to be honored in death... to have a decent and respectable funeral without scandal... and the least you can do is to leave him in peace as he lies there....""Yes," the scrawny one said. "You've created enough scandal for him in life--that's why we couldn't go to him when he was sick... because you were there, you--you shameless bitch. "The woman's face went livid with shock and rage. She stood wordless while her young protector, his eyes blazing, came between her and the poet's kinswomen. Her face began to twitch. And then the sobs came.  Big noisy sobs that shook her body and spilled the tears down her carefully made-up face. Fitfully, desperately, she tugged at her eyes and nose with her widow's veil. The young man took hold of her shoulders gently to lead her away, but she shook free; and in a few quick steps she was there before the casket, looking down upon that infinitely sad smile on Uncle's face. It may have been a second that she stood there, but it seemed like a long time."All right," she blurted, turning about. "All right. You can have him--all that's left of him!"At that moment before she fled, I saw what I had waited to see. The mascara had indeed run down her cheeks. But somehow it wasn't funny at all.

The House of Zapote Street

(Quijano De Manila)

About the Author
Quijano de Manila is the pen name of Nick Joaquin. He started writing before the war and his first story, “Three Generations” has been hailed as a masterpiece. He has been recipient of almost all the prestigious awards in literature and the arts, including the National Artist Award for Literature in 1976. He was also conferred, among other recognitions, the Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature in 1961, the Journalist of the Year Award in the early 1960s, the Book of the Year Award in 1979 for his Almanac for Manileños, the national Book award for several of his works, the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, Creative Communication Arts (the Asian counterpart of Nobel Prize) in 1996, and the Tanglaw ng Lahi Award in 1997.

Dr. Leonardo Quitangon, a soft-spoken, mild-mannered, cool-tempered Caviteno, was still fancy-free at 35 when he returned to Manila, after six years abroad. Then, at the University of Santo Tomas, where he went to reach, he met Lydia Cabading, a medical intern. He liked her quiet ways and began to date her steadily. They went to the movies and to baketball games and he took her a number of times to his house in Sta. Mesa, to meet his family.
Lydia was then only 23 and looked like a sweet unspoiled girl, but there was a slight air of mystery about her. Leonardo and his brothers noticed that she almost never spoke of her home life or her childhood; she seemed to have no gay early memories to share with her lover, as sweethearts usually crave to do. And whenever it looked as if she might have to stay out late, she would say: "I'll have to tell my father first". And off she would go, wherever she was, to tell her father, though it meant going all the way to Makati, Rizal, where she lived with her parents in a new house on Zapote Street.
The Quitangons understood that she was an only child and that her parents were, therefore, over-zealous in looking after her. Her father usually took her to school and fetched her after classes, and had been known to threaten to arrest young men who stared at her on the streets or pressed too close against her on jeepneys. This high-handedness seemed natural enough, for Pablo Cabading, Lydia's father was a member of the Manila Police Depatment.
After Lydia finished her internship, Leopardo Quitangon became a regular visitor at the house on Zapote Street: he was helping her prepare for the board exams. Her family seemed to like him. The mother Anunciacion, struck him as a mousy woman unable to speak save at her husband's bidding. There was a foster son, a little boy the Cabadings had adopted. As for Pablo Cabading, he was a fine strapping man, an Ilocano, who gave the impression of being taller than he was and looked every inch an agent of the law: full of brawn and guts and force, and smoldering with vitality. He was a natty dresser, liked youthful colors and styles, decorated his house with pictures of himself and, at 50, looked younger than his inarticulate wife, who was actually two years younger than he.
When Leonardo started frequenting the house on Zapote Street, Cabading told him: ill be frank with you. None of Lydia's boy friends ever lasted ten minutes in this house. I didn't like them and I told them so and made them get out." Then he added laying a hand on the young doctor's shoulder:" But I like you. You are a good man."
The rest of the household were two very young maids who spoke almost no Tagalog, and two very fierce dogs, chained to the front door in the day time, unchained in the front yard at night.
The house of Zapote Street is in the current architectural cliché: the hoity-toity Philippine split-level suburban style—a half-story perched above the living area, to which it is bound by the slope of the roof and which it overlooks from a balcony, so that a person standing in the sala can see the doors of the bedrooms and bathroom just above his head. The house is painted, as is also the current fashion, in various pastel shades, a different color to every three or four planks. The inevitable piazza curves around two sides of the house, which has a strip of lawn and a low wall all around it. The Cabadings did not keep a car, but the house provides for an eventual garage and driveway. This, and the furniture, the shell lamps and the fancy bric-a-brac that clutters the narrow house indicate that the Cabadings had not only risen high enough to justify their split-level pretensions but were expecting to go higher.
Lydia took the board exams and passed them. The lovers asked her father's permission to wed. Cabading laid down two conditions: that the wedding would ba a lavish one and that was to pay a downy of P5.000.00. The young doctor said that he could afford the big wedding but the big dowry. Cabading shrugged his shoulders; no dowry, no marriage.
Leonarado spent some frantic weeks scraping up cash and managed to gather P3.000.00. Cabading agreed to reduce his price to that amount, then laid down a final condition: after the wedding, Lydia and Leonardo must make their home at the house on Zapote Street.
"I built this house for Lydia," said Cabading, "and I want her to live here even when she's married. Besides, her mother couldn't bear to be separated from Lydia, her only child."
There was nothing. Leonardo could do but consent.
Lydia and Leonardo were on September 10 last year, at the Cathedral of Manila, with Mrs. Delfin Montano, wife of the Cavite governor, and Senator Ferdinand Marcos as sponsors. The reception was at the Selecta. The status gods of Suburdia were properly propitiated. Then the newlyweds went to live on Zapote Street -- and Leonardo almost immediately realized why Lydia had been so reticent and mysterious about her home life.
The cozy family group that charmed him in courtship days turned out to be rather too cozy. The entire household revolved in submission around Pablo Cabading. The daughter, mother, the foster-son, the maids and even the dogs trembled when the lifted his voice. Cabading liked to brag that was a "killer": in 1946 he had shot dead two American soldiers he caught robbing a neighbor's house in Quezon City.
Leonardo found himself within a family turned in on itself, self-enclosed and self-sufficient — in a house that had no neighbors and no need for any. His brothers say that he made more friends in the neighborhood within the couple of months he stayed there than the Cabadings had made in a year. Pablo Cabading did not like what his to stray out of, and what was not his to stray into, his house. And within that house he wanted to be the center of everything, even of his daughter's honeymoon.
Whenever Leonardo and Lydia went to the movies or for a ride, Cabading insisted on being taken along. If they seated him on the back scat while they sat together in front, be raged and glowered. He wanted to sit in front with them.
When Leonardo came home from work, he must not tarry with Lydia in the bedroom chatting: both of them must come down at once to the sala and talk with their father. Leonardo explained that he was not much of a talking: "That's why I fell in love with Lydia, because she's the quiet type too". No matter, said Cabading. They didn't have to talk at all; he would do all the talking himself, so long as they sat there in the sala before his eyes.
So, his compact family group sat around him at night, silent, while Cabading talked and talked. But, finally, the talk had stop, the listeners had to rise and retire - and it was this moment that Cabading seemed unable to bear. He couldn't bear to see Lydia and Leonardo rise and go up together to their room. One night, unable to bear it any longer he shouted, as they rose to retire:
"Lydia, you sleep with your mother tonight. She has a toothache." After a dead look at her husband, Lydia obeyed. Leonardo went to bed alone.
The incident would be repeated: there would always be other reasons, besides Mrs. Cabading's toothaches.
What horrified Leonardo was not merely what being done to him but his increasing acquiesces. Had his spirit been so quickly broken? Was he, too, like the rest of the household, being drawn to revolve, silently and obediently, around the master of the house?
Once, late at night, he suddenly showed up at his parents’ house in Sta. Mesa and his brothers were shocked at the great in him within so short a time. He looked terrified. What had happened? His car had broken down and he had had it repaired and now he could not go home. But why not?
"You don't know my father-in-law," he groaned. "Everybody in that house must be in by a certain hour. Otherwise, the gates are locked, the doors are locked, the windows are locked. Nobody can get in anymore!”
A younger brother, Gene offered to accompany him home and explain to Cabading what had happened. The two rode to Zapote and found the house dark and locked up.
Says Gene: "That memory makes my blood boil -- my eldest brother fearfully clanging and clanging the gate, and nobody to let him in. 1 wouldn't have waited a second, but he waited five, ten, fifteen minutes, knocking at thai gate, begging to be let in. I couldn't have it!"
In the end the two brothers rode back to Sta. Mesa, where Leonardo spent the night. When he returned to the house on Zapote the next day, his father-in-law greeted him with a sarcastic question: "Where were you? At a basketball game?"
Leonardo became anxious to take his wife away from that house. He talked it over with her, then they went to tell her father. Said Cabading bluntly: "If she goes with you, I'll shoot her head before your eyes."
His brothers urged him to buy a gun, but Leonardo felt in his pocket and said, "I've got my rosary." Cried his brother Gene: "You can't fight a gun with a rosary!".
When Lydia took her oath as a physician, Cabading announced that only he and his wife would accompany Lydia to the ceremony. I would not be fair, he said, to let Leonardo, who had not borne the expenses of Lydia's education, to share that moment of glory too. Leonardo said that, if he would like them at least to use his car. The offer was rejected. Cabading preferred to hire a taxi.
After about two months at the house on Zapote Street, Leonardo moved out, alone. Her parents would not let Lydia go and she herself was too afraid to leave. During the succeeding weeks, efforts to contact her proved futile. The house on Zapote became even more closed to the outside world. If Lydia emerged from it at all, she was always accompanied by her father, mother or foster-brother, or by all three.
When her husband heard that she had started working at a hospital he went there to see her but instead met her father coming to fetch her. The very next day, Lydia was no longer working at the hospital.
Leonardo knew that she was with child and he was determined to bear all her prenatal expenses. He went to Zapote one day when her father was out and persuaded her to come out to the yard but could not make her make the money he offered across the locked gate. "Just mail it," she cried and fled into the house. He sent her a check by registered mail; it was promptly mailed back to him.
On Christmas Eve, Leonardo returned to the house on Zapote with a gift for his wife, and stood knocking at the gate for so long the neighbors gathered at windows to watch him. Finally, he was allowed to enter, present his gift to Lydia and talk with her for a moment. She said that her father seemed agreeable to a meeting with Leonardo's father, to discuss the young couple's problem. So the elder Quitangon and two of his younger sons went to Zapote one evening. The lights were on in Cabading house, but nobody responded to their knocking. Then all the lights were turned off. As they stood wondering what to do, a servant girl came and told them that the master was out. (Lydia would later tell them that they had not been admitted because her father had not yet decided what she was to say to them.)
The last act of this curious drama began Sunday last week when Leonardo was astounded to receive an early-morning phone call from his wife. She said she could no longer bear to be parted from him and bade him pick her up at a certain church, where she was with her foster brother. Leonardo rushed to the church, picked up two, dropped the boy off at a street near Zapote, then sped with Lydia to Maragondon, Cavite where the Quitangons have a house. He stopped at a gasoline station to call up his brothers in Sta. Mesa, to tell them what he had done and to warn them that Cabading would surely show up there. "Get Mother out of the house," he told his brothers.
At about ten in the morning, a taxi stopped before the Quitangon house in Sta. Mesa and Mrs. Cabading got out and began screaming at the gate: "Where's my daughter? Where's my daughter?" Gene and Nonilo Quitangin went out to the gate and invited her to come in. "No! No! All I want is my daughter!" she screamed. Cabading, who was inside the waiting taxi, then got out and demanded that the Quitangons produce Lydia. Vexed, Nonilo Quitangon cried: "Abah, what have we do with where your daughter is? Anyway, she's with her husband." At that, Cabading ran to the taxi, snatched a submachinegun from a box, and trained it on Gene Quitangon. (Nonilo had run into the house to get a gun.)
"Produce my daughter at once or I'll shoot you all down!" shouted Cabading.
Gene, the gun's muzzle practically in his face, sought to pacify the older man: "Why can't we talk this over quietly, like decent people, inside the house? Look, we're creating a scandal in the neighborhood.."
Cabading lowered his gun. "I give you till midnight tonight to produce my daughter," he growled. "If you don't, you better ask the PC to guard this house!"
Then he and his wife drove off in the taxi, just a moment before the mobile police patrol the neighbors had called arrived. The police advised Gene to file a complaint with the fiscal's office. Instead, Gene decided to go to the house on Zapote Street, hoping that "diplomacy" would work.
To his surprise, he was admitted at once by a smiling and very genial Cabading. "You are a brave man," he told Gene, "and a lucky one", And he ordered a coke brought for the visitor. Gene said that he was going to Cavite but could not promise to "produce". Lydia by midnight: it was up to the couple to decide whether they would come back.
It was about eight in the evening when Gene arrived in Maragondon. As his car drove into the yard of this family's old house, Lydia and Leonardo
appeared at a window and frantically asked what had happened. "Nothing," said Gene, and their faces lit up. "We're having our honeymoon at last," Lydia told Gene as he entered the house. And the old air of dread, of mystery, did seem to have lifted from her face. But it was there again when, after supper, he told them what had happened in Sta. Mesa.
"I can't go back," she moaned. "He'll kill me! He'll kill me!"
"He has cooled down now," said Gene. "He seems to be a reasonable man after all."
"Oh, you don't know him!" cried Lydia. "I've known him longer, and I've never, never been happy!"
And the brothers at last had glimpses of the girlhood she had been so reticent about. She told them of Cabading's baffling changes of temper, especially toward her; how smiles and found words and caresses could abruptly turn into beatings when his mood darkened.
Leonardo said that his father-in-law was an artista, "Remember how he used to fan me when I supped there while I was courting Lydia?"
(At about that time, in Sta. Mesa, Nonilo Quitanongon, on guard at the gate of his family's house, saw Cabading drive past three times in a taxi.)
"I can't force you to go back," said Gene. "You'll have to decide that yourselves. But what, actually, are you planning to do? You can't stay forever here in Maragondon. What would you live on?"
The two said they would talk it over for a while in their room. Gene waited at the supper table and when a long time had passed and they had not come back he went to the room. Finding the door ajar, he looked in. Lydia and Leonardo were on their knees on the floor, saying the rosary, Gene returned to the supper table. After another long wait, the couple came out of the room.
Said Lydia: "We have prayed together and we have decided to die together.” We'll go back with you, in the morning."
They we’re back in Manila early the next morning. Lydia and Leonardo went straight to the house in Sta. Mesa, where all their relatives and friends warned them not to go back to the house on Zapote Street, as they had decided to do. Confused anew, they went to the Manila police headquarters to ask for advice, but the advice given seemed drastic to them: summon Cabading and have it out with him in front of his superior officer. Leonardo's father then offered to go to Zapote with Gene and Nonilo, to try to reason with Cabading.
They found him in good humor, full of smiles and hearty greetings. He reproached his balae for not visiting him before. "I did come once," drily remarked the elder Quitangon, "but no one would open the gate." Cabading had his wife called. She came into the room and sat down. "Was I in the house that night our balae came?" her husband asked her. "No, you were out," she replied. Having spoken her piece, she got up and left the room. (On their various visits to the house on Zapote Street, the Quitangons noticed that Mrs. Cabading appeared only when summoned and vanished as soon as she had done whatever was expected of her).
Cabading then announced that he no longer objected to Lydia's moving out of the house to live with her husband in an apartment of their own. Overjoyed, the Quitangons urged Cabading to go with them in Sta. Mesa, so that the newlyweds could be reconciled with Lydia's parents. Cabading readily agreed.
When they arrived in Sta. Mesa, Lydia and Leonardo were sitting on a sofa in the sala.
"Why have you done this?" her father chided her gently. "If you wanted to move out, did you have to run away?" To Leonardo, he said: "And you - are angry with me?" house by themselves. Gene Quitangon felt so felt elated he proposed a celebration: "I'll throw a blow-out! Everybody is invited! This is on me!" So they all went to Max's in Quezon City and had a very merry fried-chicken party. "Why, this is a family reunion!" laughed Cabading. "This should be on me!" But Gene would not let him pay the bill.
Early the next morning, Cabading called up the Sta. Mesa house to pay that his wife had fallen ill. Would Lydia please visit her? Leonardo and Lydia went to Zapote, found nothing the matter with her mother, and returned to Sta. Mesa. After lunch, Leonardo left for his classes. Then Cabading called up again. Lydia's mother refused to eat and kept asking for her daughter. Would Lydia please drop in again at the house on Zapote? Gene and Nonilo Quitangon said they might as well accompany Lydia there and start moving out her things.
When they arrived at the Zapote house, the Quitangon brothers were amused by what they saw. Mrs. Cabading, her eyes closed, lay on the parlor sofa, a large towel spread out beneath her. "She has been lying there all day," said Cabading, "tossing restlessly, asking for you, Lydia." Gene noted that the towel was neatly spread out and didn't look crumpled at all, and that Mrs. Cabading was obviously just pretending to be asleep. He smiled at the childishness of the stratagem, but Lydia was past being amused. She wont straight to her room, were they heard her pulling out drawers. While the Quitangons and Cabading were conversing, the supposedly sick mother slipped out of the sofa and went upstairs to Lydia's room.
Cabading told the Quitangons that he wanted Lydia and Leonardo to stay there; at the house in Zapote. "I thought all that was settled last night," Gene groaned.
"I built this house for Lydia," persisted Cabading, "and this house is hers. If she and her husband want to be alone, I and my wife will move out of here, turn this house over to them." Gene wearily explained that Lydia and Leonardo preferred the apartment they had already leased.
Suddenly the men heard the clatter of a drawer falling upstairs. Gene surmised that it had fallen in a struggle between mother and daughter. "Excuse me," said Cabading, rising. As he went upstairs, he said to the Quitangons, over his shoulder, “Don't misunderstand me. I'm not going to 'coach' Lydia". He went into Lydia's room and closed the door behind him.
After a long while, Lydia and her father came out of the room together and came down to the sala together. Lydia was clasping a large crucifix. There was no expression on her face when she told the Quitangon boys to go home. "But I thought we were going to start moving your things out this afternoon,," said Gene. She glanced at the crucifix and said it was one of the first things she wanted taken to her new home. "Just tell Narding to fetch me," she said.
Back in Sta. Mesa, Gene and Nonilo had the painful task of telling Leonardo, when he phoned, that Lydia was back in the house on Zapote. "Why did you leave her there?" cried Leonardo. "He'll beat her up! I'm going to get her." Gene told him not you go alone, to pass by the Sta. Mesa house first and pick up Nonilo. Gene could not go along; he had to catch a bus for Subic, where he works. When Leonardo arrived, Gene told him: "Don't force Lydia to go with you. If she doesn't want to, leave at once. Do not, for any reason, be persuaded to stay there too."
When his brother had left for Zapote, Gene realized that he was not sure he was going to Subic. He left too worried. He knew he couldn't rest easy until he had seen Lydia and Leonardo settled in their new home. The minutes quickly ticked past as he debated with himself whether he should stay or catch that bus. Then, at about a quarter to seven, the phone rang. It was Nonilo, in anguish.
"Something terrible has happened in Lydia's room! I heard four shots," he cried.
"Who are up there?"
"Lydia and Narding and the Cabadings."
"I'll be right over.
Gene sent a younger brother to inform the family lawyer and to alert the Makati police. Then he drove like mad to Zapote. It was almost dark when he got there. The house stood perfectly still, not a light on inside. He watched it from a distance but could see no movement, Then a taxi drove up and out jumped Nonilo. He had telephoned from a gasoline station. He related what had happened.
He said that when he and Leonardo arrived at the Zapote house, Cabading motioned Leonardo upstairs: "Lydia is in her room." Leonardo went up; Cabading gave Nonilo a cup of coffee and chatted amiably with him. Nonilo saw Mrs. Cabading go up to Lydia's room with a glass of milk. A while later, they heard a woman scream, followed by sobbing. "There seems to be trouble up there," said Cabading, and he went upstairs. Nonilo saw him enter Lydia's room, leaving the door open. A few moments later, the door was closed. Then Nonilo heard three shots. He stood petrified, but when he heard a fourth shot he dashed out of the house, ran to a gasoline station and called up Gene.
Nonilo pointed to the closed front gate; he was sure he had left it open when he ran out. The brothers suspected that Cabading was lurking somewhere in the darkness, with his gun.
Before them loomed the dark house, now so sinister and evil in their eyes. The upper story that jutted forward, forming the house's chief facade, bore a curious sign: Dra. Lydia C. Cabading, Lady Physician. (Apparently, Lydia continued- or was made- to use her maiden name.) Above the sign was the garland of colored lights that have been put up for Christmas and had not yet been removed. It was an ice-cold night, the dark of the moon, but the two brothers shivered not from the wind blowing down the lonely murky street but from pure horror of the house that had so fatally thrust itself into their lives.
But the wind remembered when the sighs it heard here were only the sighing of the ripe grain, when the cries it heard were only the crying of birds nesting in the reeds, for all these new suburbs in Makati used to be grassland, riceland, marshland, or pastoral solitudes where few cared to go, until the big city spilled hither, replacing the uprooted reeds with split-levels, pushing noisy little streets into the heart of the solitude, and collecting here from all over the country the uprooted souls that now moan or giggle where once the carabao wallowed and the frogs croaked day and night. In very new suburbs, one feels human sorrow to be a grass intrusion on the labors of nature. Even barely two years ago, the talahib still rose man-high on the plot of ground on Zapote Street where now stands the relic of an ambiguous love.
As the Quitangon brothers shivered in the darkness, a police van arrived and unloaded quite a large contingent of policemen. The Quitangons warned them that Cabading had a submachinegun. The policemen crawled toward the front gate and almost jumped when a young girl came running across the yard, shaking with terror and shrieking gibberish. She was one of the maids. She and her companion and the foster son had fled from the house when they heard the shooting and had been hiding in the yard. It was they who had closed the front gate.
A policeman volunteered to enter the house through the back door; Gene said he would try the front one. He peered in at a window and could detect no one in the sala. He slipped a hand inside, opened the front door and entered, just as the policeman came in from the kitchen. As they crept up the stairs they heard a moaning in Lydia's room. They tried the door but it was blocked from inside. "Push it, push it," wailed a woman's voice. The policeman pushed the door hard and what was blocking it gave. He groped for the switch and turned light. As they entered, he and Gene shuddered at what they saw.
The entire room was spattered with blood. On the floor, blocking the door, lay Mrs. Cabading. She had been shot in the chest and stomach but was still alive. The policeman tried to get a statement from her but all she could say was: "My hand, my hand- it hurts!" She was lying across the legs of her daughter, who lay on top of her husband's body. Lydia was still clutching an armful of clothes; Leonardo was holding a clothes hanger. He had been shot in the breast; she, in the heart. They had died instantly, together.
Sprawled face up on his daughter's bed, his mouth agape and his eyes bulging open as though still staring in horror and the bright blood splashed on his face lay Pablo Cabading.
"Oh, I cursed him!" cries Eugenio Quitangon with passion. "Oh, I cursed him as he lay there dead, God forgive me! Yes, I cursed that dead man there on that bed, for I had wanted to find him alive!"
From the position of the bodies and from Mrs. Cabading's statements later at the hospital, it appears that Cabading shot Lydia while she was shielding her husband, and Mrs. Cabading when she tried to shield Lydia. Then he turned the gun on himself, and it's an indication of the man's uncommon strength and power that, after the first shot, through the right side of the head, which must have been mortal enough, he seems to have been able, as his hands dropped to his breast, to fire at himself a second time. The violent spasm of agony must have sent the gun - a .45 caliber pistol- flying from his hand. It was found at the foot of the bed, near Mrs. Cabading's feet.
The drama of the jealous father had ended at about half-past six in the evening, Tuesday last week.
The next day, hurrying commuters slowed down and a whispering crowd gathered before 1074 Zapote Street, to watch the police and the reporters going through the pretty little house that Pablo Cabading built for his Lydia.

Table of Contents

            Introduction to  Literature……………………………………………….1

The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars……………………………………...2

The Story of the Unfinished Bridge…………………………………..….3

Why the B’laans are Ignorant……………………………………..……..4

The Legend of Magat River…………………………………...………….5

The Monkey and The Turtle………………………..……………….........6

Sa Aking Mga Kababata………………...………………………………..7

The Spouse…………………………………………………………………8

Picture Show……………………………………………………………….9

Youth………………………………………………………………………10

Death……………………………………………………………………….11

I Vialed the Universe…………………………………..………………….12

Return to the Primitive…………………………….……………………..13

College Uneducated………………...…………………………………….14

Footnote to Youth……………………………...…………………………15

The Small Key…………………………………………………………….16

Love in the Cornhusks……………………..……………………………..17

Magnificence…………………………………………………..………….18

The Visitation of the Gods……………………………………………….19

Dark………………………….………………………………….………...20

How my Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife………………….………21

My Father Goes to Court…………………………………….…………..22

The Chieftest Mourner………………………………………….…….….23

The House on Zapote Street………………………………..…….………24

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