The True and the Plain : a collection of personal essays

The True and the Plain a collection of personal essays Kerima Polotan The University of the Philippines Press Diliman...

Author: Kerima Polotan

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The True and the Plain

a collection of personal essays

Kerima Polotan

The University of the Philippines Press Diliman, Quezon City

T H E UNIVERSITY OF T H E PHILIPPINES PRESS E. de los Santos St., UP Campus, Diliman, Quezon City 1101 Tel. No.: 9253243, 9266642 / Telefax No.: 9282558 E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Website: www.uppress.org

© 2005 by Kerima Polotan All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, and/or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author. *

Book Design Arwin U. Ayson

The title of the book is taken from a prayer of Sir Thomas More: "God make me faithful, true, and plain." All except one of these essays first appeared in FOCUS Philippines from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. "The Remains of the Day" was published in The Evening

Paper on 12 December 1996.

ISBN 971-542-473-2

Printed in the Philippines by the UP Press Printery Division

This book is for my late father, Jose G. Polotariy Lt. Col. (Retired) and for my husband\ Juan C. Tuvera. It is also for my daughters: Patricia Tuvera Abogado, Mariam Soraya Tuvera, and Katrina Tuvera Quimbo.

The True and the Plain

a collection of personal essays

Estrella Games . Child on a Seesaw God in the Afternoon Early Encounter Court Scene My Misbegotten Christmases A1 Primo Incontro Easy Rider One Life Many Things in a Life Apartment In the Anteroom The Operative Law Vacations I Never Will Get to Go On The Last Patriarch The Happy Hoi Polloi South Road A Little Night Music The Remains of the Day

1 4 7 11 14 17 19 24 29 34 37 45 53 56 60 68 74 81 89 93

I

to speak of Estrella Alfon in the past tense for if there was anyone who seemed ready to live forever, it was Estrella, although the last few years of her life were difficult and painful years for she suffered from a myriad physical illnesses, one of which was finally to kill her, including the terrible burden that all of us who have loved anyone are familiar with, that of a broken heart. I do not think that she ever recovered from the death of her daughter, Rita, in the Saudia plane tragedy, though she strove mightily to carry on, running in the National Press Club elections, working for Joe Aspiras, attending press luncheons, going to China, dropping her copy at the office, sometimes staying long enough for coffee and talk, all the while keeping a taxi waiting in the parking lot, its infernal meter ticking mercilessly on. While Ester was various things to various persons, she was to me just two essences: she was a writer, and she was a woman, and it is impossible now to say where one ended and the other began, for she went at being both—rather she brought to both pursuits an unbelievable passion that is not given to all of us to possess. She rushed at life full tilt, embracing it and all its burdens unreservedly, balancing its terrors and its joys so finely one often could not tell if Ester wept when she was laughing, that singular laugh she had, that chuckle which began in the back of her throat and, if one listened closely enough, sounded half waterfall, and half despairing sigh. She was very young, just out of her teens when she left Compostela in Cebu for Manila in the mid-thirties to become the rage of the writing crowd at UP, and the darling of the pre-war Graphics Alfredo Efren Litiatco, famous T IS DIFFICULT

1

2 •> The True and the Plain

that time as the discoverer and nurturer of many talents, an advantage that Estrella was not going to leave unseized. Restless and adventurous, she matched the high spirits of the other writers who moved around her—Hernando R. Ocampo, Abelardo Subido, Fidel de Castro, Oscar de Zuniga, C.V. Pedroche, Manuel Arguilla, all dead; the still living Manuel Viray and Narciso G. Reyes, both ambassadors, and Lazaro Espinosa, who has disappeared somewhere in Laguna or Quezon; Cornelio Reyes, unheard from for many years; the sonneteer Tarrosa Subido, Delfin Fresnosa, who farms in Sorsogon, the poet Gerson Malilin, NVM Gonzalez, now in Hayward, California; Commander Angel de Jesus, retired from the Navy; Bienvenido N. Santos, an expatriate here on a brief visit; and of course, T. D. Agcaoili and Franz Arcellana, Sr. Estrella was an intuitive writer, impatient with classroom theory. She distrusted structure and emotional distancing, brushed aside the artifices of symbolism, and would have nothing to do with the language of teachers teaching the writing of fiction. She wrote the way she lived, from a primal urge, the need to tell a story because something had happened to her; she had perhaps looked up and then a star had fallen—no star had plummeted that way before anyone elses eyes except Estrellas. She wrote the way she lived, drawing water from the well with her cupped hands. She wrote of recovering from tuberculosis in a small hut on a farm; she wrote of growing up in Compostela, her hometown; she wrote of her father and her mother together; she wrote of women waiting for the war to end; she wrote of lying in a bed at Quezon Institute, waiting for the visits of boys who all adored her; she wrote of the magnificent rage of a mother who witnesses the innocence of her little daughter violated, but mostly she wrote of the tenderness and love possible between a man and a woman. This was her metier: the wonderful things we do when we love someone and the frightful things we do when we cease to love. You have to have seen her when I did, sometime after the war, when she was young and healthy, in the prime of her life, in the utter bloom of it, when writer and woman had melded so completely you could not tell the shape of one from the other, to understand why this is how I would like to remember her—she stands on those lovely legs of hers (the most perfect I have ever seen on a woman), smiling at the sun, moving with pure languor, an absolute

Estrella •> 3

enchantress, a thoroughly desirable woman in whom lived a writer who wrote with unending wonderment and an exquisite trust in the value of human love and life.

is A little girl in the house around whom my life revolves and heaven help me if she doesn't lead me on a merry chase. Over and over I must woo her, since she is fickle, imperious, and stubborn, but if I touch the right switches and say the right prayers, she turns into the dearest thing alive on two feet. She salutes the cake vendor, kisses the hand of the maid (whose clogs she borrows), sweeps the floor with a fly swat, and talks to the fishes in the aquarium with her nose pressed against the glass. Since it is currently raining babies in the house, she has elected to become a mother, too, to a stuffed doll which she carries, most unmaternally, tucked like a clutch bag under her arm, or swinging from her hand by a foot. This is her second baby, by the way, since we made the mistake of washing the first one and, horror of horrors, if its colors didn't run. It hung by its chin from the clothesline, dripping wet, its cloth face turning muddy, its cowlick wilting, and the cotton stuffing hardening into lumps. I calmed her outraged wails by sending to the grocery for a replica of her firstborn, something like it except that the new one was orange from head to foot, but such is the trustingness of two-year-olds that she accepted this without question. She cooks on my bed, stirring imaginary dishes with a large-toothed comb and turning knobs that don't exist on the side of the mattress. I tell her, watch out! her flame is leaping, and she quickly turns it down, her eyes twinkling because she knows I know it is a game we're playing, but we play it seriously. She seasons her cooking, makes a face, pronounces it too salty, and dilutes the soup with water. Then she cries, "Oh!" and steps aside—she has been splattered with lard. Bake a cake, I suggest, because we have decided guests are coming, though my friends in real life know better than to drop in, unannounced. She pulls out a small flat box from somewhere, slides this HERE

4

Games ••• 5

under the mattress, and we have a cake baking. Pretty soon, she draws it out again, tests it with a finger, says solemnly, "Not done," and begins to worry. At this point, our game gets complicated because she announces without warning, "No gas," spreading her little fingers. In real life, when we run out of cooking gas in the kitchen, we have only to phone the supplier, and in an hour or so, a bottle is being rolled in. This is what she insists we do now. She has "called" A-l Gas. She has lifted the phone, without bothering to dial, so great is her faith in the PLDT (Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.), and with a mild oath that she has picked up from the help, says: "Damn! No gas." She begins to bother me to become the delivery man. The nearest thing to a cooking gas bottle in my bedroom is a fire extinguisher and this is what I drag to her bed-stove, but she will have none of it, because she says we have not "paid" for the delivery. "Pay," she says, "money," she says, waving away the silver peso I offer. I dig into my bag for some paper money and fish out a two-peso bill. The roles get mixed^up because she accepts the bill though I have done the delivering, but this is how our games go. We can each be several characters at the same time. She lays the bill to one side and returns to her cooking with renewed vigor. In quick order, the meat is done; the fish is done, the cake is brown and beautiful; we are playing with nothing but our empty hands and our imaginations. I dont know what to do with all that food on my bed but she solves it for me by grandly sweeping it all away with one hand, and with the other, offering me a drink. What are we doing now? I ask. Very logically, she says we are drinking now. She is my husband (and she taps herself on the chest to make sure I know), and I am me, and naturally, she gets to drink the beer, while I stick to the coffee. She is laughing now, tossing her head and guzzling her beer. She will not let me do that with my drink, because coffee is for sober people and must be drunk with circumspection. She will not let me have any ice, either, because ice is for beer. She looks at me quizzically, wondering why I dont know these little refinements. She drops a cube into her closed fist, and offers me sugar and cream for mine. Drink up, she urges, while she leans back, crosses her leg, and then suddenly tosses her empty glass (or bottle) against the wall. She likes the sound of breaking glass and slaps her thigh, laughing. I


play straight man to her comedian and I think that if we practise enough, we can get some bookings. Every night when I get home, it is always something else. Sometimes, it is riding in a car, and I am shushed to silence and sung to sleep because I am suddenly her baby brother, and she is my mother. Since we never discuss the scripts, we improvise as we go along, and there is much upstaging. All two-year-olds are big hams, after all, and all grandmothers are dotty. We play with a minimum of props, leaping from one thing to another. She leads and I happily follow. Cooking is a great favorite. Vacuum cleaning the rug is another. Once, a lion darted across our path, I think we were in a car; rather she was in a car, I was on a horse. Coolly, she jammed on her brakes, reached for my shower cap, and walked away, leaving me with her racer. Fortunately, it was the latest model, the kind you could fold and slip under the bed. The lion leaped through the window to disappear in our vegetable patch below, where we have also lost a zebra and a shark. The horse—red, by the way—was a different problem altogether. I tethered it to the coffee table but it neighed, and back came the two-yearold in my life, walking in stark naked except for the shower cap (it was time for her bath). She offered the horse her milk bottle, planted a loud kiss on its wet nose, called it our neighbors name, and walked out again, looking unmistakably smug, having done her duty by man and beast,

I

as a child on a twilight, riding a seesaw in Cabanatuan, and from the dusk around me, a cousin had stepped out, herself also now dead and buried at the other end of the island. "Your mother is dead," she said and I rose on the seesaw, and thats how that scene has since been frozen in my mind all these years, forty, if a day. Many times, I had wanted to find my mothers grave, or the child on that seesaw in the park, the word orphan brushing past her like bats wings—she will never find her way home. Finally, I made contact: a lady who lived in that town would look for it but I could only give the year and the name. 1933. Maria Laguda Taga. She called weeks later. "We have found it," she said. Because I was mildly skeptical, she insisted, "Its the one." Name and year matched, she said. The records were intact, and oh, yes, one more detail, she added—there was an angel, all right, with a horn. We left the city at dawn and made good time. Earlier that summer, we had practised for this trip by venturing out to Dau, picking up four cans of imported peaches, and heading back home, feeling foolish and heady, like circumnavigators trying out their sails before the big day. For the Cabanatuan trip, I had traced the route on the road map. Translating it in terms of flame trees, traffic signs, and other landmarks, it seemed easy enough. In the towns of Gapan and Sta. Rosa, there was nothing I remembered and only the market looked familiar. The cemetery was in the outskirts, near a rice granary, and I was all for beginning our search but the lady who had found my mothers grave expected us at her home first. Her home was in the barrio of Sangitan, where I had lived as a child, but forty years had wiped out the rice and sugar cane fields, the footpaths and the carabao trails, and now, there were shops and hospitals and nursing schools HAD SPRUNG

7


instead. Where was the old public school? I asked. "Right around the corner," she said, pointing out the high school. The storied posts were there and the second floor windows. "There's the park," she said. Somewhere there, a child waited to be shown the way home. The seesaw in my mind began to move slowly. First, we had lived in the heart of town, in a small concrete house with a porch where I had stood on Sundays to await the papers. And then we had moved to a house near a road lined with old acacia trees beneath which we had played, and then, finally to Sangitan, to a two-story building owned by a kindly woman. The house where my mother had taken ill and, from there, been brought to a hospital to die, was a two-story house, painted green, and we had lived on the second floor. There was a long, wide window fronting the main street, where I sat for hours, watching the hustle and bustle below. Somewhere in the house, behind me, the woman who was my mother would make the sounds of home: a bed scraping the floor, water running, firewood fed into a stove, and I sat at the window, safe and warm, enveloped by the presence of this woman who figured briefly in my life. I remember her like that, as an emanation, a light, constant, true. When she died, she lay in state for three days in the living room that she had scrubbed in life. Another girl sits by the coffin, watching the immobile face beneath the glass, because the other one, the daughter I really was, had skipped to the nearby park, to ride the seesaw, though her mother lay bleeding to death. After three days, men had boarded up that glass panel and picked up her coffin to pass it through the window, to other arms waiting below, on the street. I rode in a car, I think, a small black car, and from where I sat, squeezed by other bodies, I had looked up at the green house and seen this big black cloth, flapping at the windows, signifying a death. Many years later, with a family of my own, I came across a picture of that cortege. It must have been shot from afar because the mourners are like ants in that picture—no one distinguishable from that distance, no one and nothing, except for the hearse covered with wreaths and pulled by plumed horses. I finger the photograph;—where am I? It has been mailed from somewhere South, by a relative displeased by the irreverent things I write of my youth.

Child on a Seesaw ••• 9

"To write of yourself as though your mother never loved you ..." she said. "Here are pictures of yourself as a child. Look at your shoes, your dress, the fan in your hand, the curls on your head. Look at how she holds you in this one, her arms enclosing you possessively, her hand on your heart, and you are pulled close to her, see? like a lioness and her cub. How can you write of those days the way you do?" I never got to meet this relative. This was her first and last letter to me, written, as she so carefully put it, "when I am old and not too well anymore, and I just want to make sure you remember the correct things about your mother." She lived in Bukidnon, where it was cold, among the mountains, tending to some cattle and a small business, "and strange as it may seem, your writings reach us here and I would otherwise leave you alone, except when you begin writing about your mother." I had written foolishly of playing in cobwebby corners of the house, conversing with shadows, and my relative had singled that out as seeming to imply that I had wandered around, abandoned and neglected. She had enclosed a picture of my mother, young, on the threshold of life. Decked in jusi finery, she has just graduated from college and poses for posterity against the protraitist s usual canvas backdrop of sea and sky, and real potted plants at her feet. She looks away from the camera, searching an invisible horizon, a white carved fan in her hand. Her clear brown face rises from the deep scoop of her gown—what does she think of, what does she see? She has not met my father yet, therefore, doesn't think of love; is full of trust and hope, therefore, doesn't see her death a few years hence. Shortly thereafter, she sails for Lanao and meets my father in the hinterlands, and sails off with him to Jolo and has two children there, and sails a third time for Luzon where she is to die in Cabanatuan, and I am left with wanting to know her and nothing much to start on except memories that have upset a relative and a sepia-colored pitcure in my hand. I pass a finger over her face, touching those dark eyes, as though some knowledge and understanding might seep from the picture to my bloodstream. I want to understand, I ache to know why some things that have happened to me, have happened to me; if it was possible at all to have deflected some of the pain and the loneliness; tenderness or love I would as lief have missed;


missed being hurt or used wrongly or sold short, had I but walked away from a corner a second earlier or hopped on a later bus or left a door unopened. M Y MOTHER'S GRAVE lay in the middle of the cemetery, weeded and cleaned, thanks to my lady friend, and bigger than I remembered. The marker tilted to one side, the earth beneath was crumbling. The posts were there but the chain was gone, the floor was cracked. "They built them sturdy in their time," said the caretaker, summoned from his home nearby. "This should really all have crumbled a long time ago." The angel disturbed me because I remembered her blowing the horn, but this noon, she stood to one side, peeled and graying, looking down quietly holding the horn against her robe. "I swear she was blowing that horn," I said aloud. She couldn't have been not blowing it, I thought, dismayed. My face must have betrayed me because someone asked, "Anything wrong?" There were the cross and the marker and my mother's name and the caretaker who insisted he remembered her funeral, but the angel with the horn was not the angel of that little child in the deserted park. There had been a funeral earlier and now the mourners filed out, some lingering around us. It made for quite a crowd and you would think we were burying my mother all over again. I remembered a pair of eyes, tendrils of hair bent over some task, a flash of arm stirring something on the stove in the kitchen. Did I want it spruced up? someone asked. Not spruced up, really, I said, choosing my words slowly. Only the crack sealed, the marker set aright, a bit of paint, some grass, and then I looked at the angel and did not know what to say. The tip of her nose was gone, a sad creature, weary from looking down for forty years. Her folded wings drooped from her shoulders—too much to think she had held them spread out, poised for flight, through many wars and many upheavals. If I prettified her now, the seesaw in my mind would never descend, and the little girl, aloft forever, would yield to the terror of the night. "Leave her alone," I said. Then, "Perhaps the horn," I thought. If I could only bring it to her mouth (that small, tormenting detail), so she could be as I remembered her, blowing the final tune that awaits us all—but the heat, the dust, the cold curious crowd were beginning to turn the morning into a farce, so I stepped back and prepared to leave.

A

N OLD FRIEND

and classmate recently came to see me and offered me

salvation and, for a moment there, I could not find the strength to laugh or deflect his earnestness with a quip. He had been trying to see me for sometime. I remembered vaguely the name he had sent up, and though he had written on the slip something to recall the past ("Classmate in college"), I was in no particular rush to see him. I remembered him instantly, though, when he walked in, one of those who leave a light but permanent imprint on your mind, being a face you recall in class for no special reason except that he was one of the quiet ones who smiled when your glances crossed. A gentle, slight, inoffensive man who had probably made his way through life in the same manner (so I deduced), who sat primly now with his knees together while we exchanged small talk over coffee. Initially, I am always unhinged when old friends from many years back call, since I am never sure that we will like what each of us has become. As much as possible, I stay on safe ground, conversationally that is, holding the course of the talk steady on sure stuff, hearth and home, until the moment comes when I must ask the inevitable: "And now, tell me, what can I do for you: There is always a slight second there when I am completely vulnerable, because the question is essentially one of condescension, though I don't mean it to be, and try so hard to keep from sounding patronizing. With this friend, however, I kept putting off having to ask him, until he had been there for nearly an hour and we had covered the years of his life since we had parted. He spoke of a good job he had had in government that he had lost with 1081, but he had retired with a sizeable sum that he had promptly plunked down in a business venture that had predictably crashed, and now he was 11


doing what he had first studied for, lawyering, but he said he did not enjoy putting people through the pains of a trial. Sitting there, listening to him recount the unhappiness he felt browbeating witnesses on the stand, I guessed (wrongly) that he wanted a job. So that when he finally blurted, "I came because I want to write for you," I giggled foolishly, partly from relief, and partly from nervousness. But of course, I said, smoothly. Of course, anything, I cooed, how about how you feel about lawyering? I said, and he made a violent face and said, No, that wasn't what he had in mind. All right then, I said, how about— God, he said, cutting in abruptly. May I write about God? I put down my cup and touched my mouth with a napkin. Then I put down the napkin and smoothed my skirt. Then I wet my lips, which I do when I am unnerved, and then caught myself pursing my lips and preparing to whistle, as though I had just singed my fingers. I know what you're thinking of, he said softly, you're thinking: He's crazy. My old friend is crazy. No, I said, no, but my denials were feeble. He laughed this time. You looked frightened, he said. Not frightened, I said stoutly, just confused. Others have walked in here who have talked of insurance, loans, equipment, labor, and so on, but you're the very first one to come for afternoon coffee and talk of God. I stumbled upon it, he said. Touching a veritable low in his life, he had come upon a church (naming a minor sect) and returned a few times, taking a back pew, emptying himself of everything except the desire to listen. He held out for a long time, but one day when a call for baptism was issued, something propelled him down that aisle right to the font, where he felt a gentle touch; a fire seared his mind, and he fell in a dead faint. When I woke up, he continued, I knew. Things I had never known before, such a fullness of knowledge in my mind, and for some time, I spoke in a language I could not understand, my fingers tingled with a new power, a new strength I could not explain. And did you try it? I asked him. Did you go to the bay and try walking on water? Are you still frightened? he taunted me. I'm sorry, I said.

God in the Afternoon • 13

No, he said, I didn't go to the bay and walk on water. I moved no mountains, performed no miracles. Nothing, except for this explosion inside me. And that's what you want to write about? Yes. And the freedom from the old fears of my life, the fears men carry all their lives, provoked by their appetites. We are all frightened, he said, and the more things we have in life, the more frightened we become—do you still think I'm crazy? Not really, I said, in all honesty. You must try it, he said, leaning forward, his earnestness shining in his face, leaping from the hand he held toward me as though he himself would lead me to that church for that baptism of searing fire. I smiled sadly, by turns attracted and repelled, pleading what I don t recall now, work, I think, and a heavy schedule. "Later," I said. "Later," I repeated and looked around at the prison of my room.

A

ND DO YOU love me?" The sudden question catches me offguard where I sit in a dark corner of the living room, studying the fish. It is dawn, the house is quiet, and I have staggered out of fitful sleep to mix me some coffee. I sit drinking the black and bitter brew, watching the aquarium come alive. It is getting more and more difficult to snatch such moments for oneself; a stray wind comes and sweeps all the gold dust of time, time alone, and you begin all over again. Someone stirs faintly in the house; a door opens and closes, footsteps sound in the hallway, and then this figure confronts me. She is three. In the muted light of the aquarium, her face slightly swollen with sleep, she rubs, then blinks her eyes, and asks, "Are you there?" Yes, I say. She smells of milk and tousled blankets, yesterdays games and last nights childhood dreams. When she clambers up beside me, she spills my coffee, and I make a little sound. You re not angry, she says. It is a statement, not a question. No, I say. No, she echoes, no, because your eyes are not angry. Then she goes into a story, something about an argument between herself and one of my children, her aunt or uncle. Do you love them? she asks. Why? (Why?) They're always making me cry. How? They say, We don't love you, we love your little brother more, you are a naughty child, and we don t love you. Pay no attention to them, I say, they have pimples as you can see, and people with pimples often say those things. Yesterday, she had returned from school nearby to announce she was getting married to Felix, the six-year-old who goes to class in blue sneakers 14

Early Encounter •> 15

and long pants. He is the only boy who wears long pants in class and I think that's one reason she has decided she will marry him. He has not asked; at least, she says he has not asked, but that's all right, she will marry him even if he does not ask. Once, she came home with a ring on her forefinger and I nearly fainted. Where did you get that? I asked. It seems she had swapped with a friend— girl, this time. Friend had given her this ring and she had offered her friend in exchange a red toy watch. Don't lose the ring, I said, she may get angry. No, she said, we love each other, she won't get angry. Just the same, she pulled off the ring to drop it into a jar where she kept old pencils and crayola stubs, and next morning, she remembered to run back into the room to pick it up, The fish have all come out of their lair now and they fill the glass box with motion: flurry and feint and glide, rising abruptly to snap at the food above them and then diving for the sand. Outside, the sky is beginning to light up. The chickens jump down from their roost in the guava tree in the middle of my garden patch. I make out a handful of orchids I've been trying hard to grow but it is clear they do not reciprocate my affection. I have given them everything, including conversation, but the blooms they vouchsafe on me are few and far between. Down the yard a bit, there is a tree-lined walk and if you look at it a ways off, with your head cocked to one side, it looks like something out of an impressionist painting, the curve of trunk and toss of leaf, and in a moment you expect women in hoop gowns and men in top hats to step through the net of green and begin walking up and down, as at the Ascot, for instance. It is to hold all this together, fish and fowl and flora, that I have stumbled out of bed to hide in a corner of the house and hold my life in my hands for one still moment, but it is not to be. There is a child at my elbow, by blood two generations removed from me, three from the grandmother of the house who sits in the morning sun, waiting for death. The gold dust has slipped through my fingers. It is then she asks: And do you love me? In the dark, I don't know who is holding her breath, she or I, but I answer quickly, because no one who is three and asks that question should ever, ever have to wait. Yes, I say. How much? she presses. A great deal. How big, big as a mountain?


Big as two mountains, I answer, big as two very big mountains, and I want to touch my face because I feel a pimple coming on. Satisfied, she jumps down, to return to her room to retrieve her milk bottle, and left alone like that, I realize I have just measured love, not by what I wanted to keep, but by what I was willing to lose.

I

T WAS THE kind of scene that must be duplicated all over the country and I had wandered unwittingly into it, after waiting for two long hours for the Ganzon* trial to begin. Announced by the papers, the Ganzon trial was to have been held in the social hall of the government building but nothing greeted the visitor there except a public address system busy magnifying the voice of Pat Boone and "Yellow Bird." "Postponed," said a man, one of the team that had cleaned the hall and fixed it up with benches and tables, complete with rostrum draped in magisterial red-white-and-blue and six swivel chairs for the military tribunal. From there I walked away, curious and restless, wondering what else of interest awaited the transient in the capitol of Cebu City, a flat yellow building sitting at one end of Jones Avenue. The droning pulled me into the room, a judges sala, filled with a desultory audience. There, a lawyer, in a brown silk suit that changed into gold from the sun streaming in through the French windows, stood cutting the air with his hands. He was loud and showy, the sort to intimidate his opponents with gesture and voice, and just right now, he seemed to be pinning down a woman in the witness box who looked at him with an expressionless face. It could be that his manner was for our benefit—myself and three or four other curiosity-seekers—because he grew more flamboyant after glancing around, but the judge was unperturbed by it all, hardly listening where he sat a few steps above us, stewing in mid-morning heat in his awful blue suit, thick and corded, compounded by a printed shirt and an elegant tie, his eyes growing smaller and more distant as the lawyer droned on. An interpreter translated the lawyer's English for the witness's benefit. She spoke only Visayan, it seemed. The interpreter was a thin man who wore the most sensible thing * A famous murder trial in Cebu in the late 1970s. 17


in the room, a white cotton polo, and took his job seriously, swinging his body back and forth between the lawyer and the witness, offering one ear to the first and the other to the second, approximating the city-mouse elegance of the lawyer and the taciturn air of the woman. The lawyer was making much of a hammer which he held aloft, an old battered hammer and, pressing the witness, asked repeatedly, if circumlocutorily, if she was sure the man had pounded on her door that night with this hammer or with his fist? She opened her mouth and moved it, and from the soundless syllables, the interpreter picked up the answer. The hammer. All right, the lawyer said preening, the hammer. Which part of the hammer, he asked. The handle or the head of the hammer? The woman stared at him, a woman past middle age, who thought well of herself, though, and had come for her day in court in her best lace dress, with powder and rouge, and a pair of sling-back shoes that she wore like heeled slippers. The judge stared out of the window, yawning, obviously detached from it all, probably yearning for mahjongg or golf. Where I sat cooled by the air, I gathered that no murder had been done, only the death of a marriage. The lawyer said something like "conjugal life together"—"How many times did he hit the door with this hammer?"—and the woman mumbled and looked away, her eyes like faded buttons, glancing over the hammer-wielder who sat in a chair below her, studying his hands, indifferent to the post-mortem of their life together. "Recess," the judge suddenly said, pounding his gavel and disappearing into a backroom. The stenographer stood up and pulled down her skirt. The noisy lawyer hunched his golden shoulders and passed his hands over his head. The interpreter reached into a pocket for biscuits and munched them, rubbing his ears. The witness addressed a question to the air and was pointed to the rest room. She stepped down and limped away in her stiletto shoes, disdaining to look at the man who had shared her bed. The hammer lay on the rough table, the absurdest thing in the room, bathed in the hot sun that poured in through the wide open windows.

right down to it, there should be a Presidential Decree outlawing Christmas, or that part of it anyway that means lights, tinsel, gifts, all the expensive and hypocritical claptrap that it has acquired through the years. It should be given back to those who started it: the beasts and the children, but if even the beasts are no longer happy with straw, and children want something more than the story of the star, what are we to do? For one thing, I keep resisting doing anything about it, until it's too late, and then I have to run around like mad, torn between fulfilling my so-called obligations and trying to save money, and I end up doing neither very well, and feeling like a cheapskate, to boot, when I hand my children the same old stuff. "Same old stuff," they tell me to my face, these products of my youthful passion, who sport shaggy hair and hip huggers that show their belly buttons. Twenty years ago, I got up at night to warm their milk and change their diapers and now they wrinkle their noses, the girls anyway, at the handkerchiefs and bags I have bought them, and the boys put their heads together and indict my offerings as pangit and carelessly toss away the T-shirts I have chosen, and I stand there gritting my teeth, wishing I had drowned them all, as babies, in the bathtub. I remind them they were happy enough, years ago, with rattles or teething rings but I am drowned in catcalls, and that's how I know how it's going to be when I am old and helpless: I'll probably be tied to a tree in the backyard and fed, like the dogs, twice a day, and given water, like the birds, hardly ever. That's the reason I'm such a fiend about staying fit, a lot of milk and vegetables for me, and no rice or cholesterol, if I can help it, and jogging when it doesn't rain, and we'll see who's going to be tied to a tree in the backyard and fed twice a day. HEN YOU COME

19


When I was younger, Christmas didn t faze me since I had enough energy to survive ten of them at a time. Yd grab my husband s bonus and spend it all at Central Market, and then dump my purchases at home, and run right out again to the corner of Libertad and Harrison where Christmas trees were being sold. This was long before Pasay City got ambitious and made Derham Park into a real park, complete with bulbs that dont work and No Parking signs and a cute little police outpost where no policeman has ever been. The last time I saw anyone open that outpost, it was to take out some dirty old mops and brooms. At Derham, I always got the biggest and tallest tree—or I probably had the lowest ceiling in the neighborhood because that tree never got to stand straight in my living room and a buffalo could hide behind it and not be found till New Year s, so thick were its branches. The years I lived in that neighborhood, I always bought my trees at night when the man selling them had gotten tired of customers pulling and tearing his trees apart. He had a corps of helpers who nailed extra branches if you wanted them and, I suppose, a soft sppt for women like me who settled the transaction quickly. I never haggled over a tree, just told him his price was too much if it was, and showed him my money. I guess the night, my pregnant state, the whizz of cars on the boulevard, and the faint smell of the sea wrought some magic on him and I'd get my tree. That was the time I liked to think I turned out the best trees in the neighborhood. Every year, the star I tacked on grew bigger and brighter, and snow weighted down my pine branches—and why there should be snow in Pasay then, I didn t bother to ask. Late at night when I was through, I would leave the children briefly to walk on the sidewalk outside our fence, up and down, looking at the tree through the window, and wondering if it was pretty enough to show off that way. I always thought it was, and then my throat would tighten with feeling, but today, the only time my throat catches at Christmas is when I eat a daughters pizza, and I tell her that if she keeps baking them that way, we could put the munitions makers of America right out of business. You just pack a bazooka with her pizza and fire away, and no tank could stand it. But the years in Pasay when I was a young mother and the pizza maker was only a toddler, I was always just a few months away from having another baby. Probably, it was this condition, this constantly primiparous state that gave my Christmases a joy and an innocence that I have since lost.

My Misbegotten Christmases ••• 21

The youngest daughter in my family now is a very blase eight whose ambition is to dance with the Aldeguer Sisters on TV, and when Christmas comes around, she and all her other sisters keep me out of the preparations. "Sit there," they tell me, pointing to a corner, as peremptorily as they dare—"please," they add as an afterthought, and the daughter who plucks her eyebrows like Jean Harlow teams up with the daughter who has just discovered nylon stockings and under the directions of still another daughter who has had a year and a half of very expensive lessons in interior decoration but still sets a breakfast table badly, they work on a Christmas tree made of string and plastic straws. String and plastic straws! What could be more artificial than that? I am the despair of the interior decorator because our curtains are eight years old and she wants not only to have new curtains but also to be allowed to "re-do" the house. The curtains were a nice gold when I bought them and today are a not so nice yellow, and I could never get their hems even, but thats because my sons use them to shine their shoes. Everything in the house serves a dual purpose, you see. Even this ersatz tree of cheap twine that I so disapprove of, when the season is over, is unwound and becomes a clothesline. Part of it will help to pull the switch that lights up the poultry at night or will be used to stop the leaks in our old garden hose. I remember one particular Christmas when the children were still babies, we planned on a lechon and this woman agreed she would get the pig, and the man to do it. She wasn't my cook exactly, just someone who came around on Sundays, to market and whip up some meals, a relief for my family from the hogwash I generally give them. In better times, she was some kind of a technical adviser to a local politician, which must have meant that for twelve cans of sardines, she could deliver an equal number of votes, but her fortune had taken a temporary downswing, and that was how she came into my life. She showed up on Christmas Day in a caretela, with the pig already trussed up and ready for roasting, and the man who was to do it was with her, but unknown to us, well into his third or fourth bottle of gin. The pig was done in an hour, done to a bright brown turn, if I must say so, but so eager and ignorant were we all, that we didn't stop to ask him why it had taken him so quick. We were all lined up in the backyard, my children and I, forks and knives on the ready—the man and the woman had by then said a hasty good-bye—and when we fell to, we discovered that the lechon


was bloody raw inside. Which explained why they had come with several bottles of sioktong. They had used it to baste the lechon and give it a cooked, though spurious, look. I spent the rest of Christmas day chasing the woman, in and out the devious backstreets of Pasay, and if you don't know Pasay, I suggest you keep out of its backstreets on Christmas, or any day. I found the woman at last, in her house, but by then my anger was spent and I was only anxious to return to the brood that I had fed some kind of a Christmas lunch out of cans. I had given her twenty or thirty pesos for her trouble, besides paying the gin-soaked man—add to that the cost of the pig— and all I had to show for it was this half-cooked animal at home, still dripping with blood, nearly alive, and eight bitterly disappointed children. When I came upon her, she was dressing up to spend her money. I had heard vaguely she was carrying on with a fireman, and was probably on her way to meet him, and though she had just about cleaned me out, I couldn't even gather enough energy to say something cutting, like, "Make sure your boyfriends hose is working," or some such dirty crack. I let her go and that was my Christmas gift to her. Then, that night, my husband and my children and I went riding on the Matorco, eating peanuts, and that was our Christmas gift to ourselves. The menu at home for the season has improved considerably, since nearly all my daughters know how to cook, and they've got these certificates to prove they can do more than spell "Chicken a la King" or "Fish Vinagrette." And their grandmother has taught them well, indeed. Out in the yard where the goats sleep, there is such marathon cooking one day before Christmas, a ham, if we can afford one, and huge vats of suman, and that screen door in the kitchen swings and slams so often and so sharply I can tell how many dishes have been done. When the dogs start barking, that means they've killed the chicken, but the dogs are quiet while the suman is cooking. All the banana trees in the yard lose their leaves for the suman wrappers, but that sacrifice does not impress the subdivision guards and hired hands who look, when I give them rice cakes for Christmas, as if they'd been hit on the head with a hammer. Quite obviously, suman and goodwill don't suffice for the season. One year, I sent the security outpost in the subdivision a case of beer and the word I got back was "Beer lang" So the next year, I sent beer and P5.00 each, and I was told they'd asked among themselves if the envelopes had

My Misbegotten Christmases • 23

been sealed tight before I sent them because a fiver each seemed, you know, inadequate for Christmas. Then, a day after Christmas my car stopped near the outpost and wouldn't start, and the guards just looked at me and went back to their dama. So, of course, now when they come around on the 25th, all I give them is the children's rice cakes, plus a little homily: "Sa ikauunlad ng bay an, suman ang kailangan." That also means when my car breaks down near the outpost, I push. Fair enough. My husband has given me for several Christmases in a row dress material colored salmon. It wouldn't be so bad if the fabric changed yearly, but it's the same double-knit, wash and wear cloth, two-and-a-half yards at a time, almost as if he'd bought one bolt of cloth once and decided he would give it to his wife but one whole bolt at one time seemed too generous, to an Ilocano, and so I get it every year now, two-and-a-half yards at a time. Shortly before Christmas, he tells me at supper, surprise-like as if the thought had just come to him, "I'm going to get you a beautiful dress for Christmas. I'm sure you'll love it! Guess what color it's going to be?" Well, after the third Chiistmas, I didn't love it—I tried but couldn't. I have a salmon-colored dress and salmon pair of pants. I have a salmon bathrobe and a salmon nightgown, but he never gives me enough to make a salmon-colored mosquito net, or I'd have that too. Once, I sort of hinted: "What I could do if you gave me five yards of this lovely cloth!" "What?" he said. "Something to cover the car with while I'm having the garage painted." And he said, "Why're you being sarcastic—you starting a fight or something?" and he wiped his face on my salmon-colored blouse. One of my daughters was beginning to have the same problem. Five Christmases running, her favorite and only godfather sent her toy pianos. So I suggested perhaps she could write him a nice letter, thanking him for the pianos but reminding him sweetly that she had only two hands and was twelve years old and ready for other gifts. She did, and that Christmas he sent her a cowboy set. Christmas carries its calculated risks—you don't know if speaking up is better than not speaking up, and that's the reason I'm bowing out of this year's festivities.

I

all look forward to at the end of a long week, some place where you can kick off your shoes and let down your hair and pad around in an old loose dress; where you can sit with no one to bother you while you peer at your eyebrows in a mirror and decide which end to pluck. Or listen to music. The record player is in one of its moods again, but I can make out Madame Butterfly. Un bel di vedremo. One lovely day we'll see. Pinkerton's Oriental love stands on a hill, looking out to sea, scanning the horizon for that fateful smoke which will signal that the white boat of her dreams has dropped anchor, but the water pump below my windows gets in the way. It's wheezing gamely now, the pump, filling up the rusty tank overhead with subdivision water. We used to get better service before but there are more factions than issues in this neighborhood, and the end result is rationing and acrimony. I have to wait till midnight to wash my hair. If it's not music or the pump, it's the clatter of pans in the kitchen, and the help calling out to one another, laughing uproariously over bits of backyard gossip. They may look like demure barrio lasses but they're really earthy creatures. There are no more innocents out in the sticks. They've all come to Manila, and hired themselves out to suburban dwellers like me, and on Sunday, like a flock of birds, they converge in the subdivision park, in a hopeful search for love (thanks toTagalog movies), which accosts them in the person of a vendor, a photographer, or even a pimp. There are the dogs chasing the chickens once more; the chickens make for the trees; the napping cat on the garden step bestirs itself faintly; the newly-arrived deer, its antlers sawn off, looks sadly at the scene, tossing its head and chewing cud. It is a little bewildered; it has just been uprooted from its natural habitat in the province and is trying to adjust to life in the city. T'S WHAT WE

24

A1 Primo Incontro •> 25

Now and then, the protesting cry of a child sails over the garden: some play aborted, a toy withheld. I will soon hear of it, if i dont put the Dont Disturb sign outside my door and lock it. In the terrace, the talking bird has been in a monologue since dawn. It is a rich-black mynah, with a striking yellow ribbon around its neck, and it has been offering its unsolicited opinions since the clock struck five. It is a one-man band, it sings, and whistles, and gurgles. It even barks. It also roars. It hops about in a cage over an antique sewing machine that is at least 60 years old and has journeyed from one end of the country to the other, with several stops in between, engendered by death, war, and the Occupation, losing nothing but one leg roller. Not bad for something that has sewn a hundred thousand diapers. The bird does not really talk, I think, because all those sounds come from its throat. Where I sit eating breakfast beneath it, I can see its neck distend and contract, and the rapid flexing produces those questions: Have you eaten, huh, hello, hello? Of course, I have eaten, and now what I want is a moments peace, to put up my feet, coffee cup nearby, and listen to the sounds of my house midmorning. The sun falls on my faded bedspread. I should really—I tell myself, looking up at the mildewed ceiling—fix the place up; paint the walls, hang new curtains, buy decent furniture, and get it to look like House Beautiful, so that when people come to see where I have lived, they will say, She kept a lovely house. But I have been saying this for many years now, and never getting around to it. I like the way it is, time-worn, comfortable, genteel ruin, in other words, and everything here somehow belonging. The chipped ashtrays, and the beatup cushions, and the Muslim brass tray given to me by a childhood friend transplanted from Central Luzon to the heartland of Mindanao. It belongs where I have put it, with the telephone atop it, beside a scarred easy chair. A Japanese doll sent by someone who had hoped I could somehow get him a job in Customs, swings from a nail on a book shelf. It is blind in one eye, mealy bugs and ants and weevils, all the millipedes that triumph over man, having gouged out the other, and it has looked like that, partly sightless, on all my comings and goings. There is, in fact, a mouse I must put in my will. It has survived everything Fve brought against it, poison, traps, cats, bludgeons. Nightly, it joins me for


supper, creeping out of its corner and stopping in the middle of the room to look quizzically at me. The turntable is spinning smoothly now. There is a speck at the foot of the hill, Butterfly exults. It has broken away from the crowd; it is a man! It starts to climb! See? she tells her servant, how groundless your fears were? It is a man—Un uom, un picciolpunto! Her woman's heart flutters and she caresses her obi. How long has it been since Pinkerton clasped her fragile form, and crushed her to him, and called her Little Wife, Verbena Blossom? She will hide, she sings, to tease him, also partly not to die, at their first encounter. Al primo incontro. I like the shape of those words. I spread them on my tongue, like butter, and turn and taste them. The syllables roll on my tongue, hit the roof of my mouth and slide off: the echoes reverberate in a cavern. I should teach that blasted bird the words, to widen its repertoire, but there are my night clothes on the floor waiting to be put in the hamper, and the damp towels I must shake and then send out to hang in the sun. I have also a life-long fetish about bathrooms: I like their floors dry, the washbowls, clean. My children say it comes from being forever guilt-ridden, but I think a clean bathroom is the last bulwark of civilization. For now, laundry and bathroom can wait. For now, however, I stay where I am, sitting back in a battered wicker chair beside an open door that looks out on a spot of garden. There is a breadfruit tree growing faster than it should, propped up by lumber and rope. I picked up that slender sapling in Urdaneta, a town three hours' drive away, one peripatetic summer some seasons ago, where I also bought a squealing pig. I just rode out suddenly one day, burning to get away, and returned with my odd purchases, my fever strangely gone. The pig has long since been butchered, but the fruit tree may upend the house if I don't do something about it. The mid-morning sounds of life in my house are a commingling of whispers and purrs and silences. That is a rag being passed over the floor. Somewhere, a faucet leaks, in steady, maddening drops. A door is kicked open—mentally, I count the number of flies that have come in. Lard sizzles on the stove. Someone's chopping wood in the yard. The water hose is pulled across the garden—I see a pair of legs—and slithers wetly, like a snake. Is that a baby's head bobbing among the bushes? Perpetuity—my son's daughter.

A1 Primo Incontro • 27

The world to her right now is green grass, butterflies to chase, and cascades of bougainvillea flowers. Over the kitchen roof, the branches of Janet Walker's mango tree move in the wind, close by the betel nut, with its hard, red berries. The mango tree bears a red-skinned fruit with very stringy flesh, which makes for rather poor eating, but it has survived countless storms, and we tend it for the shade and the memory of the woman who gave it, Janet Walker, whose husband set up the first sugar central in the country, and who led me one day to the back of her wide garden to point out this giant tree, at the foot of which she had buried the ashes of her husband. Trees and birds and animals—and babies. How we surround ourselves with them as we age, thinking for some reason that they slow down time, stave off death, providing reprieve from all our fears, but I think they sharpen our sense of end, instead. Someone was telling me the other night about the galaxies; the "big bang" and what transpired the first three minutes thereafter, and I felt diminished. We were having dinner somewhere. I watched him spread his ten fingers before me to simulate that explosion. I followed the invisible arcs shooting off his fingertips—"Off they spun into space," he quietly said, amused by my ignorance, "hundreds of trillions of particles," on one of which I live and fret, with a billion others. The candle on our table sputtered. The violins on the podium sobbed. A richly-gowned woman swept by, leaving a train of scent. What was of moment then? But I don't brood unduly. I know when day begins and night ends. I sleep well, too well, in fact, attributable in part to the finger or two of brandy that I have learned to snitch at night. I rather anticipate my occasional nightmares, where headless men gallop across deserts and the earth opens to suck in whole houses and entire neighborhoods, brought on by the video tapes I rent from a retired movie star across the street. The music on the turntable has entered its final reprise—he is not coming, after all, poor Butterfly! No encounter for her, and she will turn to the small cabinet to grope among her tea cups for her knife, and spread her tatami on the floor, and plunge the blade into her belly. My coffee's gone, I wonder if I have time for another? The sun is higher now and floods my dark floor, heading inexorably for the door where even now a knock impends because the sounds of living have become shrill and


imperative. A telephone rings. Someone draws a bath for a child. A car pulls up. A tardy firecracker explodes. The mynah has signed off for the morning. I must do this again, I tell myself, sit down and ruminate, al primo incontro, an initial encounter, a calm perusal of my soul, the sum of which is in this old, familiar room.

I

to General Santos once before, but having gone by air, was not familiar with the approaches to town. Places in Mindanao have a way of simply popping up from under the wheels of the plane, with the airports looking dismally similar, but the invitation this time was to go by land. Friends had arranged for us to be picked up in Davao City in a Scout and to be driven 150 miles all the way to General Santos, or Dadiangas, if you wish. Old-timers switch one name for the other, with neither explanation nor apology: Dadiangas is presumably the older name, of course, but General Santos is more vivid history. Paulino Santos was the tall and slender soldier who, with the blessings of Manuel Quezon, had brought a group of hardy settlers to this place and founded Koronadal Valley. In Manila, when I had been told of the Scout, I had visions of an Indian fighter in fringed buckskin, knocking on my door, but the Scout turned out to be a heavy duty Ford pickup, red, with the look of having been knocked about and therefore being very reliable. It had first-rate shock absorbers, a concession, my hosts had said, to my "condition." My condition was having gone under the knife recently and being divested at some inconvenience and loss of dignity of several stones in my gall bladder and kidney, leaving me the uncertain possessor of two scars, each one six inches long, running horizontally all the way from the middle of my back to the middle of my diaphragm rather like a string of barbed wire along a demilitarized zone; the possessor, furthermore, of this unladylike but compelling impulse to drop my pants or lift: my skirt at the slightest encouragement and show off my surgeons handiwork, savoring the comments I elicited which ranged from "exquisite" to "sexy" to "neat." If anyone had told me while I grappled with countless aches or pains in the hospital that I would in just a few short weeks be bouncing about in HAD BEEN

29


a hardy Scout in the heart of Mindanao, I would probably have hurled a bedpan at him. But there is nothing about me that surprises me any longer. I was in company as unpredictable as I, my youngest daughter, and two of my hell-for-leather sons, one 11 and the other 17. The younger boy was on a pre-circumcision fling; the thought of having his prepuce trimmed had been on his mind all school year <md I had promised him this visit to Mindanao if he would gather his courage together when the time came for him to walk into the surgeons room. We would part a few days later, the two youngest voyagers leaving for home with their father, and when I saw the boy a full week later, he would be in an elder sister's skirt, lifting his dark and laughing eyes to me, torn between chagrin and pride, hesitating ever so briefly when I asked to look at the object of his ordeal. He would pull that absurd girl's skirt open, and I would see his possession cradled tenderly in a sling. This was all in the future, but in Davao City preparing for that trip to Dadiangas, I stacked up on diatabs and aspirins and chewing gum; picked up a box of prunes, bought rubber slippers, checked bathing trunks and suits, made sure we had enough towels, and packed my little girl's soakers. The soakers would present a small problem. My girl, you see, still wets her bed, which is a problem when you travel and must put up in hotels. In the Davao hotel, I said, keeping my voice light, that she would have to try very very hard to keep dry at night, and she replied that she was anxious to please, that she did indeed try very very hard but it was not easy when she began dreaming. When you are nine, dreams come easy. The night before the Scout came, I watched her make her own bed, watched her lay out her familiar plastic sheet and spread the old blankets over it, her lower lip caught worriedly between her teeth. She was trying not to look at me. We had had a full day, our diminished family of three children and two parents, a dip in the hotel pool, lunch at Toril, supper on the highway, a brief ride in the mayor's limousine, a venture into some stores, a rediscovery of one another in what was a sudden, happy seizure of familial togetherness. The ride out of Davao is as tortured as the ride into it. There is only one bridge in and out of the city, a fact that would be demonstrated quite sharply late the next day when returning from General Santos, we hit Toril in the outskirts of Davao City at 5 p.m. but were not at the hotel until one hour later.

Easy Rider • 31

The road to General Santos this Saturday, however, stretched 150 miles away, the first 50 till the town of Digos being as good as any in the country, of smooth cement cutting across flat country, conducive to unimpeded speed. We suffered a flat before Digos and pulled up by the road while the backup, a Land Cruiser, maneuvered beside the Scout and the men jumped out and fussed over the tires. Meanwhile, the children and I explored the underbrush. We would get burrs on our pants and make the acquaintance of a little girl, Sheila, she said her name was, who had come running from a little shack some distance from the road to view the goings-on. Yes, she said, she lived in that house and yes, that was her father working on the engine of a jeep beneath the coconut trees, and yes, they had a bathroom, a bano, around the house, and a fierce dog that now headed for us with aggression clearly on its mind. But its little mistress clapped her small hands together and bade it go. It will not bite, my companion asked, dili mamaad Dwarfed by the tall trees, Sheila threw us a forgiving look—if she was lending us their bathroom, would she let the dog bite? Her father finally approached, unlatched the bathroom door and drew us a pail of water besides, and then stood by respectfully till everyone was through, to ask if we had had breakfast? The question caught me offguard and I noticed the tendrils of a wayward orchid swaying in the breeze. I called my children together, the young boy and the young girl, but suddenly with them beside me, did not know exactly what it was I wanted to tell them. Holding them close however, I said thank you to the man, for the bano and the dog that did not bite and the offer of breakfast, thank you, I said, and thank you also for something else that filtered through the trees overhead and lost itself in the carpet of dead leaves at my feet. We got to Digos finally and stopped at a vulcanizing shop. Digos is a rich town, thanks to the sugar central nearby. It was formerly owned by Alejandro Almendras but someone has taken it over, probably the government, we are told. But who owns it now doesn't matter because the town reflects the central. Digos has good sturdy houses, a bustling commercial center, plenty of traffic. Everything reflects spirited living, even the woman who has established herself by the roadside. Beneath a scraggly ratiles tree, she does a thriving business of bananacue. While the tire is being fixed, we watch fascinated as she slices the bananas, dips them in batter, then slides them into the hissing lard. Her customers crowd around, three or four deep. Buses and jeeps and cars and


tricycles all whizz past her, missing her by a few inches, but it is obvious that she has been here for years. Nothing disturbs her. The road turned bad after Digos; less bad than dusty; not so bad as that from Cagayan de Oro to Butuan three years ago, but bad enough. When it rained, it was suicidal. When it was hot, the dust was blinding. The baby buses of La Suerte, the only line plying the Davao City-General Santos route caromed past us at the rate of once every 15 minutes, heedless of death, and I caught glimpses of the drivers faces, masked with towels, hurtling their load against gravity; and the row upon row of rigid passengers, helpless and trapped behind, their terrified eyes seeing nothing, all driven by an urgency to get to their destination. Where I bounced in the Scout, cradling first my daughter, then my son; dispensing gum, hard candy and tissue paper; I quickly picked up the rhythm set by our young driver, the son of our host. When he espied an approaching vehicle, he waited till the last second before rolling up the window and pulling the vents shut. If someone overtook us, raising such a cloud of dust we saw absolutely nothing of the road, our young man would deftly move to the left side while I waited to be crushed by an oncoming vehicle. But some sixth sense had been sharpened in him (he drove back and forth at least thrice a week, he said) and he knew when exactly to get back to his side. "We are riding into the mountains," he said, and true enough, the mountains rose before us, filling the windshield, and now we began to climb. The road wound along the hillside but I had seen far greener country elsewhere. Huts clustered together after a turn, to form a sitio or a town on a plain. A stray Fiera or jeepney unloaded men and produce. We passed cargo trucks, bogged down in yesterday's mud. A huge soft drinks monster tilted at a precarious angle with the ground, its load of bottles nearly sliding off. There would be a face at a window, quickly lost to sight—or a woman at some door engrossed in a chore, and the shouts of children flying kites, shuttered and open houses, boys dribbling a ball, and a schoolteacher picking her way carefully in the mud. I thought of the shower at the end of my trip, a soft bed and perhaps some sleep. We had been promised a picnic by the sea, and roast pig, and freedom no matter how illusory from the paper clip and rubber band problems of our lives. The scar in my side throbbed and I remembered what I had left behind, the long dreamless sleep that had ended in a mist of pain and the faded hospital curtains drawing eerie shapes in the night.

Easy Rider • 33

We passed a red Fiera crushed against a mountainside, folded up like an accordion. Four people died there, the young man at our wheel said. Last week, four, he repeated, and I turned around to look at the tangled body, the pulverized glass, the wheels lifted in the air, and at the mountains rising sheer and detached above it. But who was dying today? The heat and the dust were real, and so was the seat of the Scout thumping against my thighs. My own little girl was real. She lurched against my arm, asleep, her soakers forgotten for the moment. My son munched away like a goat, his palms protecting the vulnerable crotch he would take to the surgeon a week later. I fingered my scar gently and began to count the few more hills before our journeys end.

I

GOT A letter recently, from a woman who had obviously labored over it, tracing with a pencil the block letters that made up the words, and this was

ironic for she had taught school for forty-five years, and used to write a fine and legible hand.

I made out "half-blind" and "seventy years old," and looked up, starded to realize it had been all that many years. She thanked me for something, then wound up with a line about the "empty house" and a reiteration that I was constantly in "our prayers." I closed my eyes and saw the house, the unfinished porch with rotting beams that must have been thought up by someone in the family yearning for gracious living, but I cant say why, when I conjure up the house, it is the kitchen that fills the "screen" in my mind. Ample, open, and with three native stoves forever cooking something, cats sleeping to one side of the ash heap, a pair of tongs, vegetables in a basin—verdura in the native tongue—ready to be dropped into the stew, that kitchen underscored what living in that house meant; fire burning, food cooking, warmth, and sustenance. Now, I wonder how goes it? Who cooks there now, who sups at the well-scoured table, and how does she cope as she moves, blind, among the furniture, groping for her slippers under her bed, and making her way to the wick at the altar? When she retired some years ago, I brought her to the government insurance agency and went through the mill with her, stopping at tables and getting overbearing clerks to initial her claim—the staggering sum of P7,000 for forty-five years' teaching; in rain or in sun, in lean-tos that passed for classrooms, reached after treks across treacherous streams, or perchcd on impossible mountains. 34

One Life •> 35

She looked like a child, bewildered by bureaucracy and red tape where she sat quietly in one corner of the imposing building, studying the straps of her market-bought shoes. Forty-five years, and countless generations of neighborhood children who had learned to read at her knee; how many stubby fingers she had enclosed in her own and guided on ruled pad, to write out figures, and some of them must have learned exceedingly well for they went on to public office to plunder public funds! With that nest egg, she opened a store in the market, selling rice and eggs and cheap candy, stretching the small monthly pension that arrived but eventually, she closed the store, and helped out at a nieces establishment, measuring out rice and wrapping dried fish. It hurt to see her thus reduced, but I could say nothing openly for she disdained pity. It was work (she might say); it was honest, what was there to be ashamed of? A few times, I invited her to the city, to live with me, and she would come, alighting from the bus, head wrapped in a scarf, her forehead cleaved by a deep worry line, surrounded by bags of rice cake and native sweets, and the first thing she would do at home would be to go to the kitchen and cook, and wash the dishes. I tried introducing her to the delightful decadence of the city, but she was uneasy in public eating places. She dozed off in moviehouses, and at parties, she sat stiff and unyielding, afraid to blow her nose, pleading with her eyes to be allowed to go to the backyard where all the cutting up and the ladling were going on. In a short while, she would asked to be driven to the bus station. No enticement could hold her here. Here, she seemed so like a fish out of water, even the way she walked and moved clearly marked her as a creature apart, with her small affrighted gestures; but back home, in the grove near the dried-out riverbed, in the house with the porch that hung, unfinished, in the air, where somnolence wrapped a blanket around the rooms that smelled of mothballs and camphor, outside of which an orange tree brushed its flowers against the brown walls, how different she was! Because she had known nothing else, she wanted nothing else, only this life of patience and piety, limned by the fire burning in the hearth, before which she sits in my mind, leaning her white head against the cupboard piled with the china that they had buried during the war; leaning there, seeing through blurred lines the yellow flames, and framing in her mind the words


she would draw on paper for me to read, importuning God to take her quietly when the time came, and delivering me to the care of her cherished saints.

T

twenty-year-old nurse riding in the last car of a New York City subway was forced to submit to sodomy by a knife-wielding Jamaican, was the week my friend blew in from the South, and rang me up one noon wondering if we could have lunch together. There was no connection between the two events except that the first hung very much on my mind. The victim was twenty, white? the papers didn't say, and left her also mercifully unidentified. The time was morning, an unlikely hour for raping. The police caught the man and he gave his name as Ernest McNorris. The news was buried inside the pages of the New York Times, sandwiched between rich advertisements of the latest matte rayon jersey Donald Brooks gown at Lord and Taylor, and another dress called Carol Horns swan, "string-strapped body-tank that one could wear with perfectly cut pants, or a soft and floaty long skirt" and it was the essence of life's absurdity that the airy language of fashion should crowd out the spare idiom of human tragedy. I said so at lunch, and my friend replied that since there were no subways in the province, she would reserve her comments for later, which sounded cynical, but it was not anything I could hold properly against her. She came to Manila four or five times a year, a bit oftener when business demanded it, and then she would call from the airport to say hello before she was swallowed up in endless meetings with financiers and such, leaving me with a few crumbs of her time: quick lunches like this, coffee shared on the run, one hour squeezed out of her schedule during which we would shop haphazardly, catch up on each other, and say goodbye. This time, she said, she would make it a proper visit, and we could go wherever we wished and talk for as long as we wanted. I asked what had happened to all her business commitments, and she said, stirring her coffee, HE WEEK A

37


"I'm tired," sounding a bit sad and touching her hair tentatively. She had just had it cut short that day. She looked suddenly like a clock coming unwound. I thought, however, it was a mood engendered by her eldest son and the disappointment he had recently dealt her. He had announced he was quitting college, just like that, one semester short of graduation, and she didn't know what to make of it. They were a family of professionals; she was a businesswoman, her husband was an accountant, and they had wanted the boy to become something, but now he wanted to go into announcing, and it seemed like the end of the world to her. I was tempted to comfort her but she had always been tougher than I. It's probably what he's always wanted, I murmured, and she said, Why did it take him so long to find out? He's only going into announcing, I said, he's not going to be a ballroom dancer or a couturier. She stopped and considered that, then said, The last car in a New York subway might perhaps be better than that. BUT SHE WAS hurt, that was plain, and bewildered. She talked bitterly— "All the love and care," she said, "and the money, the sacrifice, the things I've done without to give them what they have—" and I could only remember us twenty-five years ago. She clerked somewhere and I was just a little better than a clerk at a newspaper. Every morning, I fought my way out of a jeepney in Quiapo and walked from Plaza Miranda to Dasmarinas, carrying a paper bag with three pieces of bread in it; I punched a bundy clock and anxiously ran up the steps to the office, and at the top of the stairs, a columnist stood with his arms akimbo, berating me for my proofreading mistakes. At noon, we lunched on chop suey rice at Hong Ning's, or borrowed some money from Enchong of the Log Cabin coffee shop and went to a movie. We parted at 2 p.m., only to meet again in school at six, to sit through three hours of boring lectures, but sometimes, when there was a really good teacher, I would lean my chair against the window sill, thinking of the world beyond the school rotonda, waiting to be discovered. I was something of a killjoy. When we went out riding, you could be sure I always wanted to go home first. I never drank, never sang aloud, just sat in one corner of the car, scowling, thinking of sin and worrying whether I

Many Things in a Life ••• 39

could get into the dorm or not. We had another girlfriend who was delightful when she got drunk. When she was drunk, she was another person altogether, brilliant, scintillating, beautiful. She told the wittiest stories and did the most impulsive things, like putting her feet up on the back of the front seat and tickling the drivers ears with her toes. She walked barefoot into restaurants, and when they ended up in a nightclub, she danced till dawn, till the waiters came to take the chairs away and fold the tables and mop the floor. Still she danced to the music of a jukebox, swaying with heartrending abandon, assuaging an anger and a hurt that wasn't there when she was sober. It all seemed so long ago, I said, shaking my head unbelievingly. We wore thick-heeled, ankle-strapped shoes, and puffed sleeves and peplums, and layers and layers of stiffly starched crinolines. We put on bright rouge and bleeding lipstick shades, and it was all coming back, at least, the papers said so. Many things in our lives were coming back, I said aloud. Here we were brooding about the frustrations our children brought us, but in our time, were we any better? She had worried her mother sick because she drank and smoked and had many boyfriends and seemed to be frittering her life away, while I tortured a dying father because he couldn't give me the things I wanted. Once, I wrote my old man an accusing letter because I had no clothes and I was in college. All I had was one Unrra dress that I washed so many times it turned white and looked like a flour sack, and when my clogs snapped one afternoon, I picked them up and walked home in my bare feet, in the rain. My father was sick then in an army camp and bedded down in a tent, and as soon as he read my letter, he must have slipped it under his pillow, and then drawn from a precious store of sweets a small can of Almond Roca to send to me. None of the money that I needed, nor the letter that I half dreaded, only that can of candy, brought by a junior officer who waited in the sitting room of the dorm. Like my father, he must have gone through the war, but he was as young as I, and yet so much older, because he said nothing as he handed me the can, only gave me a small salute, and walked away. I ran after him, asking, "Did my father say anything?" and he replied, politely, "No, he sent only the candy." In my Unrra dress, I walked back to the dorm with the candy burning my hands. I wouldn't open it for a long time because I knew my father wanted me to understand something when he had sent it.


restaurant and stood on the sidewalk, waiting for our ride. The Embassy glistened dully across the street. Beyond it was the wall, and beyond the wall, the sea, and in the sea, ships lay anchored. The small plaza nearby was an oasis of leaf and blade. Overhead, the clouds gathered but although the wind foretold rain, it was a warm afternoon. There was an unrealness to the hour, or perhaps the unrealness was within—I saw it all through a haze, and if the haze should lift, everything would disappear. It was like half a canvas, but a breeze could blow it all away, leaving nothing, or a giant hand could blot it out. I could not tell, however, if the mist was only in my mind. I looked at my friend, at her brief, becoming bob. The languor that had seemed like insolence when we were both so much younger was something else now. It used to irritate me in school, her half-shut eyes, the smile that hinted at more than it knew, the slow, dreamy gestures, but the years had given all these a depth and a potency that now made her a thoroughly attractive woman. I thought I would say so—she would surely have been pleased—but we had never spoken sweetly like this before and I was not about to begin. I wondered how she herself saw me. My head swam a bit, though I had not drunk, then unable to resist it, I said the first thought that came to me, "I have never left me, did you know that?" The admission wrenched from me, I looked away, ashamed. "You feel this way often?" she asked. "Yes," I said, "often. And oftener and oftener, as I grow older. What is it?" She shook her head, her bob swinging. "You know what it is," she said, "and I know what it is, but there is not courage enough in the world to put it into words." When our ride came, we climbed in. On the way, she asked what else I had been doing in the months between her visits, besides blurting out secrets while standing on burning sidewalks, and I said I followed the worlds upheavals. Famine was not real until you saw pictures of bloated children picking up stray grains in the sand, and terror merely a word until a volcano erupted as it did on this island called Vestmannaeyjar and buried 200 houses. I tried imagining smoldering rocks landing on my roof, tons and tons of them, black ash piling up until the beams gave way and brought the sky in. What else, she asked. Hijackings and kidnapings and murders and wars, a running obituary of our species. I let her off at the corner and said I would keep in touch—we might do the town together. She smiled at that expression: "Do the town?" she said. W E LEFT THE


"That's very city/' sounding young and impish. I would not know till much later that her father was critically ill, one reason she had come. He was a kind and hardworking old man who had welcomed me each time I had appeared, hungry and broke, in San Andres where they lived. His wife always set a place for me at the table, though my friend would not be home, but somewhere else driving a smitten boy out of his mind. She said they did not expect him to live beyond Christmas since he was bedridden and barely hanging on. Everything he could possibly have, he had, a bad heart, high blood pressure, diabetes. She did not look disturbed while she talked but appeared to accept the situation calmly. He lived, she said now, in the past. Each time he saw her, he carried on as though she had just arrived from school and nagged her about her hours. In the middle of that week, we went to a fashion show. I thought she might like that, I said, since where she lived not only where there were no subways but there were also no dress designers. Thats what you think, she said over the phone, and then showed up in stylish denim pants and a bow tie. When the doors of the hall slid shut, I knew it was a mistake to come. There was a touch of subtle poison in the air, escaping from beneath the billows of fabric, the smell of decay in the swirling perfume around us, something macabre in the noise and the music. The dresses were illusory, as though no children clawed the earth for food. The sequins glittered like hard, cold stars, rising untouched by murderous volcanoes; I thought suddenly of the woman on the subway, her slashed face dripping with tears and blood, bent over in the last car, submitting with hate and fear to her tormentor's perversion. Lunch was late and cold. The photographers crouched below the ramp, fighting to catch the girls flinging their limbs apart, flaunting their mounds. A strand of hair strayed beneath a pair of molded tights and someone behind me snickered. I thought of me washing my Unrra dress in the backyard long ago, near a standing pool where there were many frogs, and dragonflies bloomed on the grass. We lived then in a callejon of pushcarts and bougainvillea, and by our wooden gate, near the rubble of burnt-out houses, I had fallen in love with someone twenty. Each weekend, I returned from the dorm to do my laundry, the flour sack dress, and a WAC skirt cut down to my size, and at night, with my wash flapping on the line, we gathered in the garden to play a little game of matchsticks. Someone lighted a match and passed this from hand to hand, and


if it died on you, you kissed everyone in the circle. Many times, in the hand of that boy, it sputtered and died, and when he kissed me on the forehead, his touch was like a cold tadpole's, but one night, suddenly, in the vague starlight, he loomed taller and broader, blotting out the night, and as he bent to brush my forehead, his eyes shining in the dark, I found myself rising to meet him, and heard the laughter in his throat. Afterwards, sitting on the trunk of a fallen mango tree, we talked. Do you love me, he asked, and I said yes, but did not know what I was saying, only that he had brought, together with joy, also doubt and fear. I saw my father's shadow move behind a window, and I shut my eyes because I did not want to be broken, though I knew even then that loving was like that. In my locker in the dorm across the river, a can of candy gathered dust—I would not open it until I was certain how I wanted to be hurt. You could be hurt because you were young and wore flour sacks to school and that was one kind of hurt, and another kind of hurt was listening to a young man's wooing below your father's window and hearing your father make sad, furtive movements* in his room. The night the boy said goodbye, I did not ask where he was going, or why. I did not ask if he was coming back, because I knew that promises were a burden, and I did not want that. I wondered aloud what would happen now—"What will happen to me?" I addressed the window—and like someone comforting a child, the boy said, You'll be all right, you'll see. We'll both be all right, he said, but he did not say that we would be all right together. That was another kind of hurt, and it was only when he did not say that, that I realized how important it was. It was a warm April night when he said goodbye but my hands were cold. I thought of my flour sack dress and told myself I would make my life go beyond the pool where I washed my clothes. I sat very still, because movement caused the pain to grow unbearable, but of course, later, when I looked back, having moved on to other things, time had worn the memory banal. I was only a few weeks away from having escaped the siege of the Philippine General Hospital where I had spent the last eight months studying to be a nurse. The American howitzers had zeroed in on us and bombs had fallen night and day for more than a week that February 1945. Refugees from Ermita and Singalong and Paco had converged on the Ateneo, thinking that because it was Catholic and had a church, the bombs would spare it. They


didn't. Bombs rained on the church and the observatory and when the fence between the school and the hospital crumbled, the people poured in like the waves of a sea, only to rush back and forth from one end of the hospital to the other, leaving in the wake of their stampede, the crushed and the dead: the very young, the very old, and the very sick. I had teamed up with two other probationers, Neny and Irene, both from Tayabas, and we shared the hospital's thin gruel that we supplemented later, in the week with slices of grilled horse meat. The animal had been hit by a sharpnel where its owner had abandoned it, tied to the only artesian well that served the entire compound. It lay there for several hours, raising a sweet, sick stink, attracting the flies, and beginning to bloat with early decay, until the interns decided to carve it up and distribute the meat. We lined up for our share, it was twilight, it was drizzling, and the snipers had forgotten us momentarily. It was then a man was brought in, to my ward, not really a man but only a boy, eighteen, the age of my son today, brought in in the dead of night, bleeding from bullet wounds, and dumped in a dirty bed of Ward 10, one more body I had to bathe, one more mouth I had to feed before I could rush off to my morning classes. His chart didn't say how he had come by his wounds. He'd been shot in the pier and you conjectured, if you wished, that he was either a guerrilla or a wire thief, with a common enough face, undernourished like a million others, and worse, hungry like me. He'd been operated on and was recovering, or so in my ignorance I thought, because he talked and kidded, even flirted shyly with my classmates. I can't remember how the teasing began but in a week's time, I was hounded by jokes—you don't know how earthy hospital jokes can be—pairing us off together. As a consequence, I was civil with the boy, since I did not wish to encourage him, turning him sharply like a side of beef when I sponged him, gruff with my replies when he asked questions, slapping his hand away when he raised it, it seemed to me, to brush my cheek. Two mornings later, just before I left for my dietetics class, he asked me to hold his hand. He said, "Hold my hand." Here I am writing this, and I repeat those words, speaking them to the air in my room but the timber of that youth's voice escapes me, an old woman with ten children howling outside my door for their supper. But one war


ago, I stood in a hospital ward, ignoring a young boy's pale face and his plea, determined, though I was hungry and frightened, to be proper at all costs. Perhaps, he had wakened from a dream of darkness and cold, and seen the visage of death, and could not bear it, and my hand in his for what warmth it could give might have helped him a little, but I did not know. To my shame, I did not know, and so let him go without comfort. Exactly one hour later, just long enough to solve the caloric content of a bowl of bean soup, I returned to the ward to find him dead. Someone had covered him with a tattered bed sheet and left him there for me to wrap in the approved manner. His feet stuck out of the short sheet; his white hands lay at his side. I picked up one hand and turned it palm up in mine. It looked like a strange pale flower. With more kindness than I had shown him in life, I proceeded to wash him and wrap him up, then wheeled him to the morgue on a stretcher. There, the mortician greedily reached for him, rolled him free of the shroud and hacked away at his young head. I sank against a wall, the smell of blood assailing my nostrils, unable to weep for the boy whose name I didn t even know, who had been only a number to my friends and me, and a hand I had refused to hold. I took the escalator down and wandered around in the hotel lobby. She trailed me as I entered a gallery, then when something in the next shop caught my eye, I entered that one, too. Finally, we stood side by side looking at some souvenir pins, but because our moods had joined, we did not have to talk. She was leaving the next day, a very early plane, and it would be foolish of me to suffer the cold just to see her off, she said. And your father? I asked. Well, two things could happen, she said. He will die or he will not die, but I am making no bargains with God. Our children will be saying that of us, too, a few years from now, I replied, yours and mine, but of me, they will add: she brooded at fashion shows and went quietly mad afterwards. Oh, you'll be all right, she said. We'll both be all right, Jamaican rapists and volcanoes in Iceland notwithstanding, just stop following the obituaries, she said, and you'll be all right—and when her taxi roared up the driveway, I tried to recall who, in my life before this life, had said those words to me. M Y FRIEND AND

I

N ONE OF those impulsive decisions that people often make when (1) they dont get enough sleep, (2) they dont have enough money, and (3) they dont get the right advice, we rented out our house last year and scanned the classified ads for an apt for two ideal loc nr chr mkt sch & trans.

I was not the bride of twenty years ago, opening doors and peering up stairways in a dither of anticipation—all I wanted was space enough to dump our books in and a bathroom handy for a pair of weary kidneys. I landed on Apartment Row itself, a street in Mandaluyong lined with nothing but apartments, each one planned with an eye to squeezing out as much space as possible from lots originally intended for bungalows. They rose in odd heights—of two, two-and-a-half, three, even four stories (but this one included a penthouse), and the number of doors to an apartment indicated the size of a landlords avarice. Going by this, therefore, mine was not an unusually greedy landlord, but he was greedy enough: four doors, each renting at PI40 (I paid an extra PI0 for a tiny carport), packed into a lot the size of a longish narrow swimming pool. I had forgotten how it was to rent. It was not a simple matter of handing over the first months payment and receiving a key to the front door. First, my landlord interviewed my husband and me in a common alley (a distinguishing feature of all apartment houses, I was later to find out), quizzing us closely on such sundries as jobs, income, number of children, pets, voting preferences, and so on; if we gambled and/or drank, went to nightclubs, and kept rowdy friends; if we were, in short, the kind of citizens who would help him pay off his SSS amortizations. He seemed satisfied with our answers and I expected him to draw a sword and knight us then and there, but all he did was tell us what he was like. He didn't like big dogs; he didn't like noisy children (but we were expected to take a kindly view of his own children's barbaric ways); and he didn't like

45


delayed rentals. He said nothing about loud fights, and I would find out later why. W E HADN'T UNLOADED our furniture from the van when his wife walked in and, between wiping the sweat off our faces and trying to make out what she wanted, we signed a contract that bound us to a three-month stay in the cubicle. We were not to keep inflammables—a paragraph in fine print gave him the right to knock at our door any time he pleased to check our store of lighter fluid. We were, at all times, to keep the apartment in the condition we had found it (we found it rat- and roach-infested), and if ejected for any reason, we were to surrender the keys without any trouble. A verbal notice of ejection meant that in fifteen minutes he would have a For Rent sign outside the gate and would bring in prospective tenants whenever they came, whether 3 p.m. or 3 a.m. That wasn't all. He demanded a deposit equal to a month's rent, besides a month's rent in advance. The first, he explained, was to cover such contretemps as bathroom tiles chipping, toilet bowls cracking, faucet screws unscrewing and glass windows breaking. The previous tenant of our apartment, a rather lively grass widow who had stepped out too often and received more male callers than the landlord approved of, had burned a kitchen shelf to a crisp. He hoped I would be different. Wives these days, he philosophized on the side, tended to be footloose and fancy-free, but perhaps, I would make an effort not to damage his kitchen shelves? I forgave him that crack about wives. The man was jobless, you see, with nothing to do except tend his four apartments, which did not belong to him at all but to his father-in-law. The lady of his house was deceptively slightlooking but fierce-mannered, screeching away in a many-decibeled voice. She tended a market stall. Nothing in the contract protected me against the apartment and its sounds. The paper-thin walls reverberated to the rasp of TV sets all day long, a steady drone of Bentot, Sylvia, Cachupoy, Uncle Bob, Dancetime, Pilita, Carmen, Tia Dely, and Bat Masterson. If these had been all, I might have stood it, but the more intimate sounds of the body processes echoed like gunshots in a canyon.

Apartment •> 47

The nights seemed particularly made for such betrayals. When someone dropped his false teeth in a cleansing solution, you could hear the telltale click of his dentures as he swished them around in a glass. A man breaking wind in Apartment C would cause the baby in A to scream as if stabbed; the chamber pot in D sounded like the roar of waterfalls; and the old woman's moan in B was like a death rattle. In another apartment house close by, one family liked to demonstrate its togetherness with loud and jolly sing-alongs, mostly Ilocano songs and some early Perry Como. The dog howled, the cat yowled, a pet bird chirped an entire chorus all by itself, Grandfather kept time with his cane, and the demijohn of basi rolled back and forth across the floor. On occasions like this, someone who's taking up voice culture is sure to be around. There's nothing diffident about our opera hopeful—she likes to measure the distance of her uvula to the Met with long and anguishing trills that set your bile ducts pumping. This was across the fence, to the right. Now, across the fence, to the left, were an old sow and her litter; augmented, before my three months were up, by an old bitch and her litter. For the sow, the maids in the household rose at 4 a.m. and began chopping banana stalk, standard pig fare, stirring this into a cauldron full of yesterday's table scraps. It made for a strong odor at 4 a.m. For the bitch, which yelped and scratched in the night, the mistress roused herself long enough to yell something ear-splitting at the animal. One wall away lived a young bride and her groom. Both had a habit of dropping their shoes heavily on the floor at 5 in the morning. It's just possible they slept with their shoes on—I don't know—but my husband, who likes to recall the memories of a durable and happy marriage, often said that not all the couple's noises were made by their shoes. When the newlyweds moved in with their belongings, each chair and cushion so heart-achingly new, their wedding gifts still wrapped in gay paper, bright like their hopes, the entire alley sighed collectively. She was pretty and sweet—he was tall and dashing. Probably, we looked at them through our own private memories, gilded with nostalgia, but when they had trouble fitting their large bed into the small bedroom upstairs, the male population in all four apartments consulted seriously with one another one noon in the alley. Someone suggested a pulley, hitching up the double


mattress and swinging it through an open second floor window. Another said, had they considered removing the banister of the staircase? My husband said, why not exchange it for two singles, at which the bride looked wide-eyed, hurt, and smitten, as if someone had suggested divorce so early. I think they finally got it up, and in, because we began to hear those shoes thumping on the floor at 5 a.m. but by then, I did not think the bride so sweet and pretty. She had a voice that was flat and wet and common, especially when she complained about the way the toilet flushed, and he was slightly bowlegged and a mite too meek; in two weeks, he was cooking breakfast and putting out the garbage while she lingered in bed, doing her toenails. One night, past twelve, down in the tiny living room, I was finishing a book when I heard a timid rap on my door. Apartments are so built that you cant tell if the knock is on your door or the next ones. I opened our door and found no one, but at C, pretty Mrs. Y stood clutching a thin nightdress about her, her hair in curlers. Mine is a particularly dirty mind and so I thought that she had sneaked out to meet someone, the landlord perhaps—wherever did he get the guts, I wondered—or the paterfamilias of the sing-alongs next to us, or the master of the sow and the bitch. Earlier that evening, the alley had heard some loud arguing going on in C, but the voices had died away. It had to do with money. " Utang mo/" cried a man, "bayaran mo!" Then followed Mrs. Ys voice, angry and defensive. A door slammed, the building shook to its rafters, and afterwards, a sob. Now here was Mrs. Y, shivering in the cold air. I asked if she had forgotten her key. No, no, she said. I asked if she wanted me to pound on the wall. No, no, she said. When we fight, she said, the darkness helping her embarrassment along, he locks me out. I took a good look at Mr. Y when he pased by the next day. Such an unprepossessing fellow—he stooped, he wore horn-rimmed glasses, he carried an umbrella to the bus stop, rain or shine, and when he paid for anything, a paper or a shoe shine, he pulled out a change purse and counted his money out fussily, rather like my old unmarried aunt. my landlords turn to be locked out, I felt like cheering, shooting off rockets, or getting drunk. He was a genuine peeve, coming around every so often to count the number of nails I had driven into his walls and making sure I used the proper detergent for his tiles. His own turn WHEN IT WAS

Apartment •> 49

came after a protracted quarrel with his wife that lasted for several hours about an overdrawn bank account. Since she was employed and he wasn't, she banked and he withdrew. It seemed he had drawn more than she allowed and she accused him now of throwing money around that he didn't help to earn. He said he helped to earn it, too; why, he kept her content—in the night, in the dialect, in the state he was in, the statement took on several shades of vulgarity. The furniture crashed, the children wept, the servants rushed—pale-faced—into the alley. Everyone pretended nothing much was happening, but my gnomish landlord was putting up a bitter fight to recoup lost dignity, for how now would he look before his tenants when he sallied forth to count the bathroom tiles and measure the scratches on the floor if his wife bested him? The resistance proved to be more real than token. "I'll hit you!" he said, and did. We heard the thump of a body against a wall. "I'll kill you!" he said, and very nearly did, for clear above the treetops and the TV antennae rose the full-bodied scream of his wife. It was obvious he didn't give a hoot about being stricken off a joint bank account. Then he marched off, with my bloodied and bruised landlady vowing vengeance. She did it with a set of keys. She locked the main gate and the side gate. She locked the front door. She locked the windows. I suppose he could have swung himself, Tarzan-fashion, up the porch and tried the French windows there but she had locked those too. Then she must have distributed two dozen sleeping pills to the entire household for when he came and banged away, no one woke up. When I stepped out for bread the following morning, I found him squeezed between the garbage and the gate, sleeping fitfully. vendors, salesmen, and oddballs. The woman who brings a basket of wilted vegetables and sick-looking meat cuts, to save the Missus a trip to the market, is actually a blessing, if only she'd learn to knock at the right time. She comes, however, just when you're ready to take a bath or you're upstairs, half-dressed, tracking down some underclothes. The junkman is there every Wednesday for your empty sauce and beer bottles, your old newspapers, magazines, and paper bags. Salesmen plague you with stereos, TV sets, refrigerators, stoves, air-conditioners, floor polishers, their manner ranging from dapper to desperate, their clothes from casual to shabby. APARTMENTS ALSO ATTRACT


The dapper ones, who are difficult to get rid of, dress like haberdashers, complete with pin, cuff links, frat pin, even a cummerbund (which is also, if you look it up, sometimes called a cholera belt). They mesmerize you with their sensual voices, dismissing the down payment and the monthly installments of whatever you've made the mistake of seeming to be interested in, as some trifle. What Is Important Is That They've Met You, at last! after miles and miles of apartment alleys. They convey this with tender smiles, loving looks, and delicate gestures. The real pros dilate their nostrils and roll their eyes, breathing passionately and—once when I began to wonder how any woman could squeeze in amour between a pile of dirty clothes and a stew, what with the added risk of a husband storming in promptly at noon and demanding a brisk alcohol rub, the sheik across my coffee table leaned forward intimately and said I reminded him (heavy pause) of a woman in his past. Oh? I said archly. My mother, he said, with a catch in his throat. I asked, as sweetly as I could manage, And what did you sell her? These survey houses should get around to studying the relation between increased appliance sales in a given neighborhood and the number of agreeable seductions. Those who look like college students are, indeed, college students. They're red-eyed, pale and shaky, and touchingly eager to make a sale. They'll offer to do anything, even wash your floor, if you'd only look at their can openers and their plastic basins. Once you let them tell you the story of their lives, you'll find yourself with more can openers than you've got cans for. appliances or can openers, it's insurance they sell, books, subscriptions, and—believe it or not—salvation. Heaven's peddlers, however, are, in looks, as far removed from angels as possible. They surface when there's a fiesta anywhere within a radius of 50 miles. They belong to the same guild that solicits contributions for an anonymous deceased, to be mourned at a wake for the umpteenth time. They also service policemen too shy to do their own tong collection. One afternoon, one of them came to the door and rapped smartly, and when I looked from a second floor window, all I could see was a leather jacket and something difficult to make out which was big, heavy, and wrapped in a newspaper, cradled in the crook of his elbow. I wondered if my landlord had IF IT ISN'T

Apartment •> 51

finally strangled his wife and there downstairs perhaps was a police officer, with a warrant and a pair of handcuffs (in fashionable silver finish), carrying a piece of torso it was to be my painful duty to identify. Our exchange went thus: "Katoliko ka ba? " (It did not endear me to him that he had to push his head back and look up to talk to me). "Bakit?" " Tinatanong ko lang kung Katoliko ka" he pressed belligerently. (I had washed my hair and the dripping strands hung right over him.) " O anof Kung Katoliko ka, bumaba ka! " "Bakit nga?" "Aba-, anak ngp , wala ka bang relihiyon? 0 tingnan mo, binabasa mo na pati ang Diyos/" When I had sufficiently recovered from his natural but abrupt charm, I found out he had God in his arms, more accurately a lesser deity, some saint whose gentle intercession would protect me from warts, cancer, and the diminution of sexual energy, if I came down, kissed its foot, and gave him some money. I waved him away. "Hindi ka ba natatakot maimpiyerno?" "Bahala na kung mabarbecue/" Stratagems they didn't lack. One foot through the door, they said, "I'm thinking of your children's future, Madam" (educational insurance). Or, "Misis, why don't you take good care of your eyes?" (color film for the TV set). "Twenty centavos a day, per child, the price of a coke?" (Harvard Classics, or some of the encyclopedias). "Surprise your husband tonight!" (hair spray, ten months' supply). "Something for your old age?" (jewelry, on installment). Besides putting up with persistent salesmen and other people's marital troubles, I contended with impractical closets that were so high and so narrow the landlord must have had stiltsan mind when he built them. Outside, my wash mysteriously disappeared off a common line. I lost count of how many handkerchiefs, undershirts, slips, and towels I missed in three months. It did not make me feel any better to know that some of my underwear belonged to Mrs. Y who must have been, in an unwitting lend-lease agreement, wearing some of my own.


a kind of person quite hard of hearing and more than a trifle uncaring of the rights of others. His dwelling forces him to be that way. Stifling, airless, shockingly public, the architecture of the popular three-by-six apartment, though stylized with the latest in doorknobs and light switches—my landlord s apartment had a chandelier—is still oppressive to all that is human in one. The soul must have room to move in, where it is quiet and dark and private, where neighbors dont intrude with their sneezes and their grunts, where walls protect and not reveal. It isn't a stray theory that children who grow up in apartments must suffer some twisting, eventually acquiring much of their elders malicious curiosity. Thrown too closely together, separated only by a thin plaster of cement, apartment dwellers pry, listen, peep, keep track of, speculate, with more than subliminal interest. I suppose with a sturdy wall between us, a breadth of yard and some trees, the quirks of Mr. Y wouldn't have been too horrible, nor my landlord seem too much of a runt. The bride's overdone languor next door would not annoy me and her way with shoes at dawn would have been charming. When I finally moved out, it was like the day we moved in—a line of slack-jawed houseboys and maids (and unwashed babies) watching intently, while the men trooped by with our belongings. My landlord, for the last time, nervously counted the keys and asked repeatedly if I had settled my light and water bills. Yes, yes, I said, I was leaving nothing behind, except the roaches that belonged to him. APARTMENTS INVARIABLY MOLD

T

HE DOCTOR'S ANTEROOM

was small, hard by a busy road where traffic

roared past without letup. A dozen hardbacked chairs stood against a wall; on a coffee table lay old, well-thumbed magazines, and a small receptionist s desk was manned by a male secretary who obviously was not one of those who grew into the job. He said nothing by way of welcome nor did anything to make the wait bearable, except to push a piece of paper where he indicated by grunts and handsigns that you were to write your name and state whether you were a new or an old patient. He carefully avoided all communication with us and when anyone ventured to ask about clinic hours, he pointed indifferently to the sign on the wall that read: "First Come, First Served. As You Enter, Please Be Seated 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon." The room was full when I arrived but space on the sofa was made for me by a grandfather who was there with his sons son, I suppose, a young boy whose age was hard to tell. He wore rubber sandals, a pair of short pants, a striped T-shirt, and a grotesque look—he was a Mongoloid, one of Nature s cruel jokes. He was having trouble with his motor movements for he twitched and twisted involuntarily, rolling his eyes and dropping his neck with every spasm. He was not there for this, I was sure, for this was the anteroom of a dermatologist. On his limbs and his hands was a thick patchwork of oozing scabies. The old man with him leaned close, often and solicitously, and there seemed perfect understanding between the two. When the boys itches bothered him, the grandfather pulled out an old soft shirt with which he soothed and dried the moist patches, murmuring something comforting into the young boys ears until he was quiet once more. To my other side sat a mother and her seven-year-old son who had an allergy contracted from playing in the canal in front of their house. "Probinsiyano kasi ito ," she remarked, as though to explain the boys affinity 53

54 ••• The True and the Plain

for canals. She fretted over the doctors delay because she was a working mother and had today asked her boss to excuse her for two hours. If the doctor did not show up at all, she would be absent again tomorrow—"All for you," she told the boy, who replied by burying his face in her neck. He was really only a baby, she remarked, with a little laugh. "Are you hungry?" she asked him, and when he shook his head, she said, "Well, I am," opening and shutting her handbag. Myself, I had brought a familiar rash afflicting me when I was nervous or unhappy, aggravated by the weather and too much swimming. The mother continued to sigh, "He scratches himself all night long," she said, "until he bleeds and stains his sheets." She had tried tying his hands but he would rub his legs against his bedding. He was the eldest and, of all her children, the best-looking and the one with the smoothest skin, and here he was, with dripping sores. Except for me, no one listened to her. The teenagers across the room sat slumped and bored in their chairs. A young husband and his wife put their heads together, reading from a magazine. A matron walked in with a red wig and a silk scarf and a manner that announced she would not wait long. A man opened the door, poked his head in and asked with a telltale accent if the doctor was really coming. The receptionist pointed to the sign and looked away. The man stepped inside, swinging a forearm on which crawled a flaming infection, then changed his mind, and stepped out again. By then it was noon and only the doctors reputation held me to my seat. The blighted grandson beside me swayed where he sat. His grandfather stood up and stepped out. When he returned, he had three rolls in a plastic bag, and he alternately fed the boy and dried his sores. Only the waiting was long, because when the doctor finally arrived, we were all treated with dispatch. I heard the boy who loved canals asked if he suffered from asthma, followed by the buzz of an infra red lamp. The mother smiled at me as they left. The teenager was in and out of the doctor s cubicle quickly—diet and tablets, I heard him told. "May I go in with my wife?" asked the young husband, and stepped into the cubicle before he could be stopped. Some murmurs there, the sound of the wife struggling out of her clothes, something clanking, the open and shut of a dustbin, and finally, it was my turn.

In the Anteroom •> 55

POWDER, THE DOCTOR said, chuckling, and lighter, cooler clothes. This is summer, after all, he said. Nothing serious, he said. I closed my eyes, uncertain whether from relief or disappointment. For a long time now, I have fed my fears. Let but a muscle ache and I am dead certain I have lupus, or a shoulder twitch and I have angina pectoris. Every day without fail, a sweet young neighbor-doctor takes my blood pressure, and many times I sit at a table, fingering my pulse, counting my heartbeat. I sweat and I think it is my sugar. I shiver and it is my nerves. Death perches close by. I have seen myself falling down the stairs and cracking my skull at the bottom, or on the road crushed by a huge truck, but it is really old age that sends me bringing my bladder and my female tubes and my headaches to the doctors. He does not charge me, waving me off. On the sidewalk waiting for my ride, I spot the old man and the Mongoloid crossing the street in what is such an agony of effort and love. May he live long! I call out quietly, watching the boy struggle like a lost crab on the asphalt, thinking also of the courage and the strength that can love the imperfect and the maimed.

S

Cagayan de Oro, a large and awkward girl of indeterminate age, "around 16," she said when asked, who appeared at my door one day, asking to work for me. I dont have this kind of luck often, help materializing from the neighborhood underbrush and ringing my doorbell, offering me their services. For the last ten years, my household has run on child labor, a fact that has given me uneasy moments vis-a-vis the Department of Labor. Fortunately, the children have come of age, have neither struck nor unionized and still do their tasks with some grace and variable efficiency, so that someone appearing like that, with an offer like that, is like winning in the sweepstakes. A little too good to be true. But in this case, it seemed to be true. And was, finally, when she brought in her usual grocery bag of worldly belongings, and safely ensconced in my household, was to be seen about her daily tasks, rather heavy-set and fumbling, slightly slow of mind but quick to smile, much like a friendly St. Bernard. She skipped and hopped about the house, the occasional butt of my younger children's jokes, principally because of her nickname, Gaga, which in Visayan, I take it, is a corruption of the word palangga, meaning beloved. Hers was a round plain face, made plainer by the long hair she pulled back in a loose and careless knot. When she smiled, however, it made quite a difference. She would flash white even teeth, her fat cheeks melting away, wreathed with joy, her mirth flooding her eyes which disappeared into slits. And it took very little to make her smile, a bit of food, snatches of music, birds in the cage, puppies underfoot, a glistening table top—those things, sensual perceptions no longer sharp to those, like me, so rushed by time and problems. HE CAME FROM

56

The Operative Law •> 57

What few dresses she had brought suddenly seemed too small for her and I put that down to her adolescence. I sent someone to market to pick up a few large blouses and skirts and she received them with this devastating smile, once or twice dropping her head to study her wiggling toes. My husband said it was clear we understood each other, like two St. Bernards, but it was really the openness of her manner, her utter guilelessness that took me in. I left on a trip soon after that and returned several weeks later to the shocked report of my mother-in-law, delivered in hissing whispers, that the new maid was pregnant, had been pregnant all along, had left home in the South precisely because of that. Having established that no male in my immediate family was responsible for the pregnancy, I proceeded to mull the problem. Was I keeping her or not, and if I kept her, would I keep the child too, but relatives from the province who found out advised me to get rid of her since old wives tales pointed to the bad luck such a situation visited on the host family. If I sent her away, she would creep back into the underbrush, and since I am instinctively perverse about some (only some) Ilocano traditions, I decided to defy this one and announced she could stay. She stayed. And daily got bigger and heavier and slower. There was some difficulty explaining to the smaller children why Gaga was pregnant but did not have a husband, but they see too many TV shows and eavesdrop on the whispered conversations of their elder sisters and brothers that there is really nothing I can tell them they don t know already. The elder ones said nothing, treating her no differently from the past; the only yelps of pain came from my mother-in-law, all of seventy-eight years, who remembered a world and a generation where Sin Was Dealt With Appropriately. She swelled like a balloon and her varicose veins were really quite bad. Many times, I told her she didn't have to work: she should lie down and put up her feet so that the swelling would subside. I cautioned her about her diet and her hygiene, trying to recall precautions from my own birthing days. She followed my advice haphazardly, but she seemed to thrive, and finally, since there was no one else, I realized I was a surrogate parent. I brought her to the doctor, a funny situation, because I wore a pair of pants, and she had on one of my (old) maternity clothes. Whenever she ran out of vitamins, she quietly put the empty bottle on the floor of the car where I was sure to see it. I arranged for her pre-natal


care at a hospital, and as her day drew near, I made sure someone would be available to drive at night, just in case. When I came home from work, she greeted me with some news—the baby had kicked for the first time, and then that artless, open smile would work its miracle on her simple face and I would laugh, sharing her excitement. One day, I asked her what her plans were and she said she had none. She had assumed that after the baby's birth, she would come home to me, and then I would have not one but two more people to take care of. Her parents did not know where she was; she did not want to go back. I suggested gently that she give the child away and for the first time, her face went dead. I had shown no interest in finding out who the father was, nor in prying out the story of her life, but she had volunteered bits of it to the children: a man back home, who had taken advantage of her. She had not fought back because she had loved him. Now she said she would keep the child, whatever happened. Where would you stay? I asked. She pointed to the room behind the kitchen. I suddenly remembered something I had read somewhere. When a man is drowning, a wise old lawyer had said, and he calls for help, the passerby is under no obligation to go to his rescue, but the moment he moves toward him, then certain laws that govern just such situations begin to be operative. What was operative here? I thought. Her hour came in the night, just as I feared, and I bundled her off in the car with a driver and two others, to do the explaining at curfew checkpoints. She gave birth to a boy and was home in one day, but proceeded to a squatters shack nearby, where I had made arrangements that she stay after her delivery. I said the room behind the kitchen would now be too small, and those huge dogs running around loose would endanger her baby; there would be too much traffic in the house—one by one, I had stacked up these reasons before her and she had nodded dumbly, accepting the fact that I was reluctant to have her return to the house with her baby. One week later, she brought the baby to me and we stood in the landing, fussing over it, a small, dark, wet creature sleeping peacefully in the arms of its girl-mother. She looked at me, seeming to ask a question, and I could not meet her eyes. I had been kind, yes, but not unconditionally, not absolutely kind, and I wondered now if my kindness had not been an affectation all along.

The Operative Law • 59

Fortunately for me, she was only a friendly St. Bernard, very gentle and very trusting. She returned to the squatter's house that night and then a few days later, when I was in the office, she called me from the house. She was saying goodbye, she said, she was leaving. I killed the question, "For where?" before I could ask it, making a few accepted sounds instead, like "Keep in touch;" like "Let me know how you are;" the calculated charity of the wary Christian. I put the phone down, feeling disquieted. I had walked toward my drowning man, all right, but had found the ice too thin.

tell myself I will do something different, pack up and leave for Exuma or Caracas or the Amazon jungles, but the best I can manage when I'm particularly lucky is a trip to Baguio with ten children (thats a vacation?) where the most exciting thing I get to do is pit my Legarda English against the mission school English of the locals selling leeks and cabbages. In Manila, I don't have go to market more than once every ten days, and not even that anymore since a daughter has elected to relieve me of the chore, but in Baguio, life is so arranged that I have no sooner returned from the market with things to cook for lunch and supper, when someone says hotcajces will make good merienda but there is no baking powder and since I am the only one in the family who brings rubber shoes to Baguio, I put them on again and dutifully jog down Session Road. I bring my typewriter, of course, and plenty of clean paper that I am determined will be filled with words by the time I leave, a lot of things to read, and notes of articles I mean to write, but half my vacation is given to wrestling with the water situation, and half, with who will go horseback riding this time or out to Burnham to sail that murky lagoon, and on our last day, I realize I have done nothing except keep track of expenses, referee fights, fry bananas, clean the bathroom, play solitaire—and it does not help any that when I call up home, my husband always sounds so disconcertingly cheerful. Going down, I swear to myself, as soon as we hit Carmen, Pangasinan, where we buy gas and bagoong and patopat, that it is the last time I'm packing thermos jug and hot water bag for our yearly trek to Baguio. Next year will be different; if I eat bananas at all, it will be at the Explorama Lodge in western South America, simple fare that will come served with rice and braised lamb, which we will fall to with no great ceremony, shirt sleeves EVERY YEAR, I

60

Vacations I Never Will Get to Go On •> 61

and bare feet, having just pulled ourselves up from a quick swim in the opaque waters surrounding the lodge. For only $75, I can have three weeks of this "friendly" jungle, seen from the safety of a long bamboo bunkhouse rising on sixteen-foot stilts in the water—frogs, snakes, porpoises, kingfishers, apes, tigers, tarantulas, the whole lot, and maybe a nocturnal ride down the Upper Amazon, in a dugout canoe with a dark-eyed Peruvian called Antonio or Ernesto or Juan at the bow, pointing out two red eyes on the riverbank—Senoray mira al crocodillo—and later, we may stop at an Indian settlement, to eat live caterpillars and drink manioc, a brew of maize fermented by human saliva, watching the native Yaguas put on a blowgun exhibition just for me—I will drink till I am quite soporific. I AM, AS you can tell by now, an avid reader of travel brochures. I follow all the travel pieces written by people who seem to have everything I don t: time, money, leisure, wardrobe, jetting or sailing to places I know I will never go to, the West Indies, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico: the acme of my dreams is to stand on a tongue of rock in Exuma ("Youll never leave and always come back") and look down on a golden sea garden stretching for twenty-two magnificent miles, anticipating an adventure in cays, caves, and conches. In all likelihood, I will end up fetching water from a lone tap beneath a sisal palm, but there is always the possibility that George Segal will be at the "Flamingo, Fin, and Feather" to buy me a Goombay. I don t know what a Goombay is but I know all about George Segal. It is part of the lure of travel brochures that they presume you know what they are speaking of. In other words, if you don t know what a Goombay is, you don t count. Such cheekiness lends itself admirably to the language of travel—it is a dead giveaway to walk up to a hotel desk and ask for, simply, a room; not in Martinique, or San Juan, or Lucaya; not in Aruba, or Valparaiso, or Acapulco. They will toss you into a cellar near the incinerator, and serves you right, too, for no one should travel who is not prepared to leave his provincialism at home. Rather, sweep up to the clerk and demand a "roomy room," tell them anything less than a suite suffocates you, and make sure he knows the Plan youve come on. Choices run from Honeymoon Plan to Dream Holiday to Swinging Singles to Runaway Weekends, and prices range from $69 to $266, per


person MAP, dbl occ. Dbl Occ is double occupancy, naturally, not Double Occtopus—but MAP? I safely take that to mean what it reads, because at those rates, a free map is the least they can throw in. I would sign for everything, of course, from catarman rides to funicular glides. Try my hand at roulette, blackjack, dice, bridge, golf, skin diving, fishing, dancing: why, I may even sing, with the Captain, on the Lido Deck of the MS Sea Venture or the Atlantis or the MS de Grasse, while we make the fourteen-day run to Curacao or Las Croabas, assaulted on all sides by continental charm and joie de vivre, not to mention warm, rich paneling, and fine Scandinavian carpets. I look with a pang at the illustrations, fine-bodied women taking in the sun, sea, and sky, always attended by good-looking men with lots of money and lots of charm—"burn(ing) their candles at both ends" or so invite the brochures, at these "Linger Longer" spots where, if you're tired of playing in the sand, you can always run up to your room to try your water bed. There is no hint of Monday morning and the long trip home, the hundry awaiting you, the sink full of dirty dishes; dyspepsia, bunions, boredom, hangovers, cockroaches, and clogged toilets. M Y DREAMS, HOWEVER, are not always Indies-bound. I understand that Crete is an unpredictable land, full of color, violence, and zany-ness, with Zorba awaiting me in every taverna, ready to drink me under the table, or dance his ageless tempo around me. Occasionally, the bartender shoots you dead, but thats only if you happen to be a German who had spent the war on the island, and you make the mistake of coming around on a Quickie Getaway Vacation, inquiring about people and places you remember from the German Occupation. Otherwise, says this travel writer I read, they're a very special people, sort of super-Greek, very fierce but very gentle. If you ask them for directions, they will oblige you, then dump a basket of oranges at your feet, and if you offer to pay for them, they will shake a fist in your face. Now, that's a nice way to get a fist shaken in your face. In Crete, make no plans—"They evaporate in the morning sunshine"— but go where the goats go, up the mountains where some little Orthodox monastery is sure to offer you a welcome of orange-flavored water and delicious preserved plums, and if you elect to stay the night, the monks will


leave their easels long enough to throw open a guest cell for you where await a tiny window, a candle, a bed, and sheets smelling of mountain herbs. No prior notice necessary, but leave your donations in the box near the main gate. Paris, of course, Paris is everything rolled into one. Its London and Copenhagen and Zurich and Hamburg and Manila, and the quintessence of all that is on Avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt, the restaurant Lasserre, where the only criticism, says my favorite travel writer, is that its too perfect. Here, in this low structure of Directoire style, in the courtyard of an old town house, even middle-aged women, dragging themselves in for their last taste of a European spring, are made to feel wanted. There are doves in cages at the foyer, a glut of Louis XV furniture, and satin walls; the elevator is lined with tapestry. When you order anything, it comes with a sculpted symbol of the food— glorious broiled duck is served with an orange carved out like a pumpkin, a lighted candle inside; sherbet is brought to your table with a foot-long chocolate seal, a candy balloon on its nose, and an elbow away may be any of the illustrious personages who dine at Lasserre ($50 a dinner for two, including gratuities), when they're in town, Andre Malraux, the Shah of Iran, Audrey Hepburn, Orson Welles. The maitre d' is in black jacket and black tie; the chief waiter is in white jacket and black tie; the assistant waiter is in white jacket (no tie?), and the ordinary waiter is trained to spring to your side if you so much as stare at a cigarette. It is a four-star restaurant, reports my writer who is quite obviously a gourmet. Its menu changes twice weekly. Its labyrinth of cellars holds 160,000 bottles and when I am handed the wine list, I will certainly count all hundred burgundies he says it offers, and an even larger number of bordeaux. It is the only other restaurant that carries Mr. Malrauxs drink, Chateau Petrus, a "remarkable bordeaux," costing 95 to 290 francs a bottle, and at 18 cents to a franc, I don t suppose it can be too remarkable. But the menu is, especially if you're dining with a Dutch girl, as my travel writer was. Poor man, he was so busy jotting down the dollar equivalent of the francs, that's probably why she went ahead with a vengeance and ordered delice de sole homardine—poached filet of sole stuffed with lobster croquettes and topped with a spicy American sauce containing chunks of lobster ("33 francs," he dutifully marked down in his little noteook). Then from there,


she slithered to red burgundy, Gevry-Chambertin, 35 francs; to a main dish of pintadeau Alexandre III, "a young guinea hen, boned, stuffed with rice, garnished with olives, its sauce under a tomato influence," 32 francs. She worked her way through Mesciagne landais Mere Irma, the summit of French cooking, he said, delightful but untranslatable: a thin steak of foie gras (duck liver) enveloped in chicken breast, browned in a skillet and served with generous helpings of morilles, rare morel mushrooms: food for the gods, he said, and costing all of 33 francs. His arithmetic seemed to goad her into an orgy of eating because she just couldn't stop, and ate her way through pannquet souffle (a crepe with souffle filling, flamed in Grand Mariner, 17 francs). There were twenty-one other desserts but she happily passed all that up and I don't know how the evening ended but he must have staggered away to hunt up the nearest pawnshop, wondering how anyone Dutch could eat so much. I COULD go fishing in Yugoslavia—"You have not fished," goes this travel magazine, "until you have fished in Yugoslavia, and you have not plumbed the depths of human emotion until you have seen the hard gray eyes of a Swiss banker brimming with tears after he has played and lost the trout of a lifetime." Well, if I were a Swiss banker, my eyes would probably brim with tears, but not over fish. You can never tell about Swiss bankers, though. Cold-blooded about money they are, but only in Zurich. Elsewhere, they can stand thigh-deep as in the Gacka River, casting fly after fly, baiting pink striped trout, its back broad as a forearm, a good nine pounds, until they catch their death of pneumonia, their plague of rheumatism, breaking down like babies when the Thing finally gets away. Anyway, this magazine writer knows all about fishing in the River Trebisnica, the Plitvice Lakes, the Kra (a nice, pronounceable Yugoslavian name). He says accommodations are no problem. You can live for fifteen days with your wife and your flies, on less than $100 for hotels and food, and still strike up friendships with fellow tourists named Luigi-Filippo d'Acquarone, talking fish until the trouts are running out of your ears. The trick to a happy vacation is to follow the heart and go where it leads—impetuously. Go to Trieste, Italy—and become enamored of it as James Joyce was, walk where he did through its raw beauty; see him in your mind, "lean, bespectacled, carrying a cane," wandering, unhurried, aimless, OR


thinking perhaps of the Ireland he had renounced: "That lovely land that has always sent her writers and artists to banishment." Ridiculously infatuated with a young student for whom he didn't exist, he stood for hours outside her house, gazing at her windows, watching the candles move from room to room as she dressed for the opera, and then returning to his home, pursued by the mists of the city. He would later immortalize her as Molly Bloom. The Miramar Castle that dominates Trieste is a fourteenth-century fort surrounded by ancient gardens that can be reached by cable car, swinging 1,000 feet above the ground. One is told Joyce has promissory notes scattered all over the place—I would trace those—and manuscripts reportedly owned by people who fear they will hurt a few still alive. To keep going, Joyce gave lessons in a pink five-story house, bored by the task, but by then, he had a wife, a brother-in-law, a sister, and two children to feed. THERE ARE PLACES like that all over the world that I would like to visit, permeated by the private histories of people whose lives fire the imagination, Joyce and his impossible love, but wilder and more reckless than Joyce in Trieste is the story of an impetuous and reckless Englishwoman, Jane Digby, whose grave her biographer, Margaret Fox Schmidt, urges that one should visit—in Damascus, of all places. Born to the manor at the turn of the eighteenth century, she was a ravishing beauty at fourteen, the despair of her family, the scandal of her neighborhood, "a typical Aries," as though that explained everything completely. She contracted an early first marriage with an ambitious politician who was twice her age and who left her, soon after the wedding, to become Lord Privy Seal to Queen Victoria. Thereafter, Jane cut a trail of love and rage across England, Europe, and the Middle East, beginning with a librarian who came to her grandfathers house to catalogue the books. The biography doesn't say how many books he catalogued but he would leave that house, shaken but changed, because she had come to him in the library, brushed aside his work and sung him Italian arias, "this creature not quite 20," he wrote when already an old man, warmed only by his memories now, "blue eyes that would move a saint, and lips that would tempt one to forswear Heaven to touch them..."


He forswore Heaven but only briefly, for a cousin-colonel soon replaced him in her affection, and when the wayward beauty dumped the army, it was for the foreign service, the mustache of an attache in the Austrian embassy. The Austrian's embraces caused her to climb the roof one day, in an excess of happiness and shout clear across the British isles: "I am the mistress of Prince Schwarzenberg!"—but, alas, it was too soon in the century for such candidness and she shocked all the ladies who had lovers but did not climb roofs. The resulting scandal drove her to France where the ardor of the Austrian cooled. In Munich, she dallied with Ludwig II of Bavaria, then thought she had found true love in another baron, and married him, but when a Count from Corfu appeared on the scene, she left her second husband for this "exotic bird in (a) gold-trimmed fustanella." But that, too, did not last, Driven by a large appetite for love and life, at once defenseless and indestructible, Jane traveled unerringly towards her destiny in the Middle'East. She was nearing forty now, when in Athens she met a Pallikar, a mountain man, Hadji Petros, a brigand, who sported a generalship for participating in the Greek War Independence. She gave up everything and went to the mountains with him, living with drunkards, riding on horseback, eating on the run, sleeping under the stars. "I have never been in such excellent health," she wrote her thin-blooded kinfolk in England. She had come far from the staid gardens of her birthplace. When Hadji Petros proved a disillusion, she became an exile once more. She could not return to Athens; London had disavowed her a hundred loves ago. She turned her face farther east, and in Syria, at last, her destiny stepped forward, an Arab, a Bedouin chief, who offered to escort her through the desert to the ruins of Palmyra. Momentarily, she was distracted by another, younger man, whom she had decided to marry, but when she returned from a last trip to Athens to close her house and end her "(non-amorous) affairs," she discovered that the younger Arab had not waited, but the older one had. Sheik Medjuel el Mezrab, drawn irresistibly by her beauty and her courage, wooed and won her, and over the violent objections of the English consul in Damascus, she married him, "without exactly knowing why." She was almost fifty. It was the only love affair of her life to start with "a sigh (not) an explosion," but the only one to fulfill her. Until her death twenty-five years


later, an old but still lovely woman, she had all the adventure, all the romance and affection she needed from her Arab. For six months of the year, they lived, European-style, in Damascus, then for the next six months, moved to the desert, living on horseback, in Bedouin tents. Travelers who saw her still marveled at her beauty, though she had blackened those matchless eyes with kohl and wore the blue burnoose of her husbands tribe. Like any desert wife, she washed her husbands feet, and waited on him, passionate to the end. "It is nearly three weeks," she complains to her diary, "since Medjuel last slept with me. Whatever can be the matter?" (She is seventy-five.) In the scorching month of August 1881, a "conventional" illness, dysentery, felled her, though a few years earlier, she had survived the blood of 7,000 Christians drenching the streets of Damascus in a Druse uprising. She was buried in a Protestant funeral that her husband resisted, refusing to take his place in the closed black carriage reserved for the principal mourner. After much cajoling, he forbore to be borne away in it, but half way to the cemetery, he leaped out and fled, surprising everyone, only to return when they were lowering her to her grave. He was mounted on a horse, a handsome Arabic steed that had been his wifes favorite, and, urging the animal on, he gave Jane Digby his final homage, leaping across her grave. Damascus, therefore, Trieste, Krka, Exuma, the Amazon, Crete, wherever people leave their mark—one plots an impossible itinerary, going by a highly personal compass, mindful that one mans vacation might be another mans exile. One way of saying, perhaps, that every woman should have an Arab in her life, and every husband should ride a horse over his wife's grave.

M

sometime last year, November, and remembering now, I marvel at how calmly I took the news. He was ninety-one, and for thirty years the only father-figure in my life, my own having died a few weeks after I was married. The wire announcing his death was handed to me, together with a sheaf of my usual quota of mishaps—canceled flights to the South and our shipments off-loaded; machines breaking down; people being absent, requests for loans, and bills, and I remember pushing it aside with all the rest, as something that was a mistake, was unreal, and would rectify itself later in the day/but at the same time I turned around to look for this young girl I employ who is related to me vaguely, who comes from the same town as I, and is my uncles grandchild. Even when I was told she was gone, had taken the first train home, I couldn't quite believe it. Since I knew, whether I believed it or not, that a gesture would still be expected of me, I decided to send one of my sons back home, to represent the family. He had only, in fact, recently arrived from there, and it was to fetch him that I had gone back and visited my ninety-one-year-old uncle for the last time. This was the uncle of whom I had written intermittently, a tall and huge man of sturdy farmer stock, who had never worn shoes in his entire life, who had instinctively known—when apprised of my writings—that I was doing it from love and affection. Though not too well schooled, he was a literate man, abreast of the times, a modest landowner who had come by everything the hard way, rather wild in his youth, a skeptic in his middle age, but returning to God and His church as his years piled up. Y UNCLE DIED

68

The Last Patriarch • 69

He had deeded nearly everything of value away and retired to a daughters orchard in a barrio twenty minutes by jeep from town, living there in a nipa hut obscured from the road by ancient trees. He used to live in Danao, a nearer sitio, accessible by foot in a small house no better than a lean-to that hugged the earth and seemed not to change at all, weathering all disasters to visit the town—typhoons, droughts, politics. In Danao, I had a right to the most honored seat, a rocking chair beside a window outside which ran a deep canal he regularly seeded with fish. When he moved out of there to Pandan, he brought the chair with him, and a few other relics—some santos, a chipped marble topped table, and pictures of my dead father. I liked to think he could have afforded more comfort in life, shoes surely, porcelain instead of tin plates, even a transistor, but he was a man who at some point had reduced his life to basics, although I dont suppose he was conscious of what he was doing. His attitude about possessions was best illustrated by the sight of him, one day, on a bus. I waited for him where I knew he would alight, and when the bus drew near, sitting there stiff and straight and not a little angry, I thought, distrusting the contraption. I did not call out immediately, preferring to see what he would do. This was the terminal and the bus was going no farther, but he sat on, staring ahead, seeming to brace himself for the next stop, until I tapped him on the thigh, and laughed. "I dont like buses," he said, dusting himself. "Then why do you take them?" I asked. "I was told you were here and wanted to come quickly." Otherwise, he would have walked. A twentykilometer walk was nothing to him, but it would have been evening when he arrived, and he knew how my visits to the old town were, sudden and short, no sooner come than gone. I remember him in flashes like this, but mostly seated across me where I rock in my chair, a round scarred table between us, and we talk on till it is evening and his housekeeper lights an oil lamp and puts that down, flickering, on the table top. Then the room is peopled by shadows; the floor is packed earth; the beams are rough tree trunks, centuries old; I hear the sounds of cooking in the small kitchen beyond; he will ask me to supper but I will demur, though I stay as long as I can, listening to his stories. He never learned Tagalog; I never mastered Bicol, but I caught the slightest nuance of his tales, the diphthongs shaped by jaw and tongue and


uttered sometimes with gentle scorn, sometimes with ruefulness to indicate what he thought of relatives richer than he, who owned vast lands of coconut and rice, and gave lavish gifts of diamonds and satin to the church; or a piece of human folly, lust, murder, greed. He was full of anecdotes, of his pranks and my father's when they were boys, and then their hijinks as young men, the number of porches they climbed and the beds they warmed—"You probably have," he would say, breaking off suddenly, "a respectable number of half brothers and sisters living here and there, all born before your father married your mother," and though I begged him to tell me their names, or give me even the slightest hint of who they were, he refused: "Why bother?" he said, "It's all in the past," laughing at rne across the table, his big dark teeth showing in that leathery face, the eyes disappearing in tiny slits—I could never tell if they were faintly mocking or affectionate. One story that grew better with every telling was of my father and a priest who had made of one of Father's female cousins, his mistress. Today, that won't raise an eyebrow, but in my uncle and father's time, such a relationship called for drastic measures, a duel, no less, to the death. But there was no duel, only my old man, then nineteen, heckling the man of God in church while he delivered a sermon, asking him to come down from the pulpit so that he might be properly punished. One night, the priest went for a walk, and returned battered, barely recognizable, and his story was that ghosts had set upon him and beaten him within an inch of his life. That was for polite consumption. But the town knew better, for my father disappeared soon after and sailed for Mindanao, returning only twenty years later. I was a wife and mother when my uncle took me out fishing for the first time. Not fishing, really, but trapping fish. There was a small brook in Pandan, rather tricky in parts, narrow but deep, reeds on either side, where he had staked out traps. I had merely said, on one of my vacations, that I had never gone fishing, and he had thrown that right back at me by asking if I would care to? He had a habit of doing just that, as though he were testing something he wasn't sure I had, mettle, or simply energy. Once, I had wondered how the back of a carabao would feel beneath me, and the next day, he was at the door, with a carabao on which he had thrown an empty sack. "Come on," he had called. Getting me up on that animal was


an operation but once on top, the world looked quite different. He handed me a fine whip. "Touch it, don't lash it," he said, "and draw the rope where you want it to go." I rode it down main street, through the heart of town, to a small footbridge beyond the Chinese rice mill. When I made the mistake of remarking about fishing, I found myself the next morning on a raft, being punted down Malisen, a fish trap in my hands. "You don't want to go back, do you?" he taunted. I had left my children on the shore. "Where were the fish?" I asked, after he had deposited me behind a fenced area. "All over you," he said. "Plant the trap, then reach through the hole." I stood chest-deep in water, hating the cold and the mud, and my first touch of a slimy back sent me screaming about snakes, but on the raft, he stood, unmoved by my cries, my unschooled uncle with the bare splayed feet, and this appraising look on his face, as though he wanted to know if I measured up to his favorite cousin, my father, who had waylaid priests and climbed the porches of the daughters of rich men. I think of all the times I had gone home to visit, I used to say, to make a proper visit, which meant standing quietly before my father's grave and then taking a tricycle back to town and dropping off at, first, Danao, and then, later, Pandan, to look up my old uncle. He would emerge, dressed in his cotton underwear, knee-length, held together by a drawstring at the waist, and, parting the faded curtain of his door, say: Tara! a Bicol word that is a compound of many indescribable things—surprise, joy, greeting, rebuke. I went alone when I was unmarried; then later, with a baby or two in tow; babies who grew up and became adults, taller, and broader than I, persons apart from the babies I had suckled, with minds and wills of their own, capable now of inflicting pain and causing heartbreak. He would tell me stories before them, offering us his store of cookies and native chocolate, and I wondered what they thought of him, and more importantly, what he thought of them. That he never offered to take any of them trapping fish or riding on a carabao perhaps meant something; that my father's line and his ended with me, and there would be no more testing of familial mettle now. These children were a different breed altogether, in their jeans and Adidas, with their blush-ons and eyeliners, but still I brought them to my hometown, again and again, to meet the man who had outlived my father. Sitting there in his tumbling house, watching my children bored, listless, inattentive, I realized I brought them for my sake and no other, to sit with me


while I conjured, in my uncle's stories, my dead father, feeling him take shape and substance in the small room beside the canal full of fish. I wanted them to acquire a reverence for the past, to have stories to tell their own young, but against their ennui, I had no weapon. On the table, beneath a glass top, up at me stared an old picture of my dead father, elegant in his uniform, holding a riding whip in his hands, in high boots, straps across his chest, and measuring the world with a level gaze. "He wept when you married," my uncle said, and he could not understand it. A man who had stared calmly at the shotguns of outraged fathers, fought in many campaigns and one war, picking up my wire and walking to the back of his yard, beyond the poultry houses, to grip the fence—and weep. When my uncle repeated this story the last time I saw him in Pandan, I said my father had wept not over my marriage, but because of our estrangement. Walking out of my father's home many years ago, I was never to return again except as a stranger, asking polite questions, and fleeing as quickly as I could. For many years, something had stood between us, the memory of an earlier dying, a wounded ghost that refused to be buried, intruding whenever we met, moving quietly about to rattle doorknobs and try out shutters, aching to be let out. Neither of us dared speak of the intruder for we both feared the cost. Yet there were words we needed to say to each other, gestures we needed to make, but I had married and he had died. My uncle was alive and well when I saw him last in Pandan, as full of zest as ever, making little jokes about his looks and his complexion. We went out to his orchard and stood talking beside a tall orange bush around whose branches a bougainvillea had wound itself, so that it looked like a bougainvillea heavy with orange fruit. He offered me some orchids brought down from the mountains, but I declined, "They die on me." He had donated a chapel to the barrio, and he proudly led the way, past goat and horse dung, pushing the small side door open, and walking ahead into the rude church. There were dried flowers at the altar, above which towered a patron saint with deep eyes, and a face full of anger, the whole interior splashed with bright, primitive colors. Long ago, he had once told me of an image he owned, whose missing arms he had found while plowing his field. I don't know if I ever believed that story, nor that other story of the bell, before which we now stood, ringing with no one pulling at it.


"It has a rich sound," he said, pointing to the bell now. "Yes," I said, "but you have to pull it." "You remember after all," he laughed. "Was it ever true?" I asked. "Well," he said simply, "it rang that day, though no one pulled the rope." "Oh, I don't know," I said, "saint's arms in open fields I might believe, but bells sounding by themselves?" "I am an old man," he laughed, the familiar mocking love shining in his eyes, "I have no time not to believe." When I returned from that trip, I wanted to write of my uncle once more but work swallowed me up. For many weeks, an old album lay on my desk, and I turned the pages idly when I had the chance, returning several times to this picture of us grinning at the camera soon after he had pushed me into the river to trap my first fish. We stand there leaning against each other, the afternoon sun on our faces. The belfry of his chapel is to one side, the dirt road where we pose stretches behind us and disappears in the fields. I have tilted my chin, my glasses slip on my nose; he stands in his big, dark, bare feet. They put on shoes on those feet for the first time when they buried him, and took his walking cane away. I must remember to write for that. My son tells me it was a long procession of mourners that followed him to the cemetery on the edge of a rice field where he now rests in a niche above my father.

F

IVE DAYS A week,

the wage earner gulps his coffee, grabs a ride, and races for the office bundy clock. He gets one breather in the morning, another in the afternoon, and at noon, the fiambreras come. He spreads his cheap lunch on his desk, spattering in the process typed endorsements and a pocketbook entitled How To Increase Word Power. With that institution known as the office canteen, the home-packed baon of cold rice and fried fish is going out of style. The average canteen generally serves hot meals at reasonable prices, planned by a nutritionist with, probably, a Stateside degree. To ones knowledge, however, there are stubborn holdouts here and there, pockets of resistance manned by employees who, resenting the tasteless menus in their canteens and unwilling to put up with abominable hygiene, bring their own lunches to the office, but disguised as important Work-in-Progress: cold cuts in James Bond portfolios, hard-boiled eggs wrapped in crepe and ribbon, and that good old standby, bagoong, in a bottle that may have contained Eau de Toilette, Le De Givenchy. Where to go for lunch can be quite a problem if youve a finicky palate. One isn't thinking of the connoisseur who must have fried frogs legs or lobster thermidor, or rabbit stewed in vintage wine, but simply of the man who, while setting a modest limit on how much to spend for lunch, nonetheless wants a good meal. Those places on Roxas Boulevard, the Pasay and Paranaque end, besides being the usual (delightful) dens of inquity, are strictly for the heavy tippers and anyone with less than six bodyguards would feel terribly self-consious there. You also risk such surprises as real live bullets creasing your steak and possibly some politician slumping, dead, across your soup. But if you can stand the company of expensive courtesans, the smell of graft, the taste of corruption, and you have a digestion strong enough for 74

The Happy Hoi Polloi • 75

the sight of old men lusting after young girls, you can get what is billed as "superb cuisine" at these places, but buried under a sea of obscure sauces and served with much meaningless flourish. The bill, incidentally, can rise to superb figures, too, and although several of these spots have adopted the service charge, presumably to spare you the anguish of deciding how much to tip, their waiters unfortunately have not absorbed the ethics of this forced tax. A few stare fixedly at the change tray, groaning audibly when you stubbornly pick up, and pocket, each bill and coin on it. The tough ones crack their knuckles and comment loudly on the high cost of living, but those who strike the fear of God in you, pull and bang and slap away while clearing the table. They may even hold you up in the comfort room. That leaves you with the panciteria, the Filipino turo-turo, and the semiautomated hamburger stands of Makati. T H E BEST PANCITERIAS, reasonably priced, are still in Chinatown, and the best panciterias in Chinatown are on Salazar. Wa Nam, Ma Mon Luk, Moderna, New England—provincial folk, not knowing any better, flock to them, and also to any one of the hundreds lining Quezon Boulevard and Rizal Avenue, but the man of true faith makes straight for Salazar. There are other panciterias of lesser stature off Florentino Torres, where you can get such delicacies as fish lips—fish lips?—fish heads, and mayhap fish stories. Two huddle close together on a sidestreet off Dasmarinas, a few doors away from some banks and windows that display machinery, and in both places, you can tell the man all you have is a few pesos, and he will feed you on that without your having to feel guilty. Of course, the service is pedestrian, loud and common—you dont exactly whisper in Chinese restaurants, but you come away full of good will towards mankind. The best chicken with casuy is to be had, one is told, at the Waldorf Astoria in Malate, but you use the hotel, and therefore respectable front, entrance. Also in Malate, around the so-called exclusive schools, numerous eating places have sprouted in recent years, places with pink cafe curtains and names awkwardly French (Le Nook) or nicely American (Texas Cafe). They serve what colegialas supposedly go for—spaghetti with meat balls (nothing to go crazy about, really), barbecued spareribs, and the numerous sundaes, but these are not for the office worker. Again, you might wander into one of those grab-and-gab restaurants where taxi and jeepney drivers like


to go for something hot, generally at busy intersections and across a gasoline station, but only if you're a beginning writer wanting to soak in atmosphere. The lunch hour is just that, an hour, for even if you knock off promptly at noon, you waste precious time freshening up, waiting for a ride, and crawling through Manila traffic. How to make the most of what youve left depends on how well you follow your nose: ask and ye shall be told. Theres a prosperous turo-turo just behind the Malate Aristocrat, nameless for the moment, but because of its location, dubbed Aristoback by some wag. But for the fact that its still undiscovered by society writers—it hires no PRO and distributes no Christmas gifts—it could show the name restaurants around it a thing or two about native cooking. An old woman owns it, and she stands just behind the door, a one-man reception line, beside running water. She offers you soap and towel, and also dispenses dessert when you're through with lunch: banana, often shaved ice with colored syrup, a slice of sweet. Choices in the glass cases range from shrimps to crabs to oysters, all fresh; a variety of meat, simple and elaborate; several stews and all kinds of vegetables. It's strictly hoi polloi—you eat off an oil cloth and you don't get a knife unless you ask for it. The clientele's what you would call motley: clerks, account executives, laborers, policemen, students, but the food is clean and good, and no one comes around strumming a balalaika. Newspapermen, however, swear there are two places to rival this—across the Pasig, far beyond the eating cages on the Escolta (where the waitresses are glum and everything tastes of flour), right in the heart ofTondo: Lardizabal. "Bundles of onions swing overhead, all the recado you can think of. You can also point out the cuts of meat you want cooked, and everything's served off the stove." Another turo-turo is near the a-building Cultural Center, on a tongue of reclaimed land; someone who looks like a cop and invokes the names of Pasay City's remarkable politicians runs the venture, but one's informant says it serves no lunch as one knows a respectable lunch to be—it's open only at night. In Makati, ambulant stores park in front of factories and office buildings. They sell cigarettes and hard candy, soft drinks and buns, and then magically waft, at noon, the smell of cooking. You can have mami, sotanghon, pancit, for a few centavos, with a cup of rice and the inevitable patis or toyo. Everything's informal, come in your undershirt, which the men do, streaked with oil and


grease, their faces smudged from working beneath car engines. They talk calmly of an impending strike. Of course, around the supermart areas of Makati, you get the antiseptic restaurants, gleaming pressure cookers, and steaming boilers—glamorized hash houses, really—rich upholstery, neon lights, a slice of hauteur, and a peck of disdain, served with your iced tea and your tuna sandwich. One has often wondered how people can stand being herded down the aisle and along the railing, clutching tray and balancing silver, paying for lukewarm soup and wilted salad, and that ultimate in the American way of life, a small glass of tomato juice. T H E SALE IS regular staple for the city's hoi polloi. The Maranaw shopping center in Makati is clearly for the haves; so are Aguinaldo's overadvertised bargains where blouses are marked down from P95 to a "cheap" P65; Rustan's is where you don't go if you don't mint your own money. Good Earth has acquired class ambitions, with a new escalator; at Scoty's and Berg's on the Escolta, the mannequins one remembers from two decades ago carry the same dull look, and how long will Assanda's (Manila) display those impractical lace gloves? Carriedo in Quiapo is a jungle of sidewalk vendors selling hosiery, handkerchiefs, and herbs. The shoe stores blare out their bargains in rubbers, flats, heels, casuals, sneakers, boots, and you escape from the din into a refreshment parlor only to run into a waitress who tries to sell you next draw's winning ticket. The great leveler is, however, still Central Market. More than Divisoria with its maze of small streets and its sudden fires, Central Market stands for the hoi polloi's efforts to beat the economic system. Food prices tend to rise seasonally and then are pegged at a certain level; transportation costs are dictated by forces outside of one's control, but in the world of ready mades, you have a fighting chance at Central Market. Divisoria is the Mecca of the wholesaler, the woman with a cottage industry or a gift: shop, the American who has heard about it from other Americans who've heard about it from society friends who've gone slumming and given it a French name—Rue Divisoire (?). Central Market is quite different. It has fewer labyrinths, it's more accessible, it's cleaner, and the process of haggling is really a casual game (they're casual, and you try your best to be, too). At


Divisoria, you tend to be overlooked if you dont carry a big bag stuffed with paper bills, but not so at Central Market. Everyone's fair game. In many stores at Central Market, it's caveat emptor: no receipts are issued, with one excuse or another being given; if a dress turns out a bad fit, you observe certain rules—to return it first hour in the morning is bad luck for the vendor. If the correct one is a size bigger or carries an extra frill, you should be ready to shell out some more or end up without dress, without money, without dignity. Still, with just P30—about the cost of two lace handkerchiefs in expensive shops—you can go home with something for everyone. The trick is to look the stallholder in the eye till she begins to shift her own; and imply she's lying by cutting her quoted price less than half. It's like a wrestling bout where you probe each other for weak spots. If she seems adamant, you walk away, not too far or too fast—when she calls, pique in her voice, "How many dozens are you buying?" you can be forgiven for your feeling of triumph. One used to feel guilty about this, imagining how much privation one inflicted on the storeowner until, a sale consummated, I slunk away like a thief and stood waiting for a bus. My adversary appeared a few feet away and stepped into a chauffeured car. At the opposite end lies Baclaran, to where the women flock on Wednesdays to importune the Virgin, to eat fried chicken or lechon, to meet a lover, or to snag bargains off the sidewalk. The dresses come from Pasig, the slips are from Taytay, the pants from Tanay, the shoes and step-ins from Marikina. Everything is pell-mell and harum-scarum, but if you keep your head, dodge the maniacal buses, slap the pickpockets away, and endure the flies and the stink, what you bring away for three pesos will be worth it. THREE PESOS IS what the little woman spends at the beauty parlor in a week. Mani is a peso; pedi is a peso and fifty, and, of course, you tip, or on your next visit you feel a distinct chill in the air. A facial is P7 at most places; PI6 in Malate. A hot oil costs a standard P5; a body massage is anywhere from P8 to PI5, plus P4 for a steam bath. Depending on her budget, the wage-earning female may forego all the others, but the mani-pedi is a weekly must. The cult of the home service is spreading but it will never replace the parlor. I have a friend who is "done" by most everyone who must do her, at home. The manicurist comes once a week; so does the masseuse who pinchhits as


a facial specialist, and she has trained a maid to give her a hot oil. She saves, and she likes to think, half of what it would cost her at the beauty parlor. Our arguments on this point have always ended in a stalemate for I have insisted that she denies herself what no one can calculate in terms of money; what the beauty parlor is for, for all women past thirty; what it gives that is sensual, furry and velvet when, dressed in her loosest, she surrenders her aging carcass to the ministers of the faith and she is slapped, pounded, smeared, pulled, rinsed, combed, and pinned into what is at its very heart only an illusion—of youth, beauty, desirability, perfection. One s wrinkles are temporarily layered into oblivion; the extra chin hides beneath innumerable creams; the white hair is dyed, but the illusion—as illusion—is real enough, and women will die for that, I think. The imprisoned flesh may burst its stays; the cream, run; the dye, fade; but the illusion endures, kept alive each week by the parlor rug that sinks beneath her feet as she hurries through the door, the murmuring girl who sweeps her into a darkened, cooled, music-filled cubicle where, stripped, she embraces a couch, while Frank Sinatra begs her stay as sweet as ever and the attendant exclaims at her youthfulness, locking firmly into place the final link of her forgivable deception, in the most frankly carnal of all carnal loves, self. Let no man delude himself into thinking she does it for him ... Manilas movies have never been more crowded—The Dirty Dozen lasted a long time and everybody rediscovered Lee Marvin. Sidewalks teem with people, going nowhere and doing nothing. Diploma mills record an unbelievable boom in enrollment, and at least one growing university in town is taking away as many teachers as it can, all, strangely, from one source: another university in Intramuros advertised as "nationalistic." Nationalism apparently stops short of decent wages. The students come from all over, the Visayan with his execrable accent, the Ilocano and his new arrogance, the Pampango, the Bicolano, the Tagalog, cramped in Basic Com courses and introduced to the fascination of the second language technique, stumbling from one subject to another, learning nothing worthwhile and finishing, not with knowledge, but a degree. As crowded as the schools and moviehouses are the supermarkets, one especially billed as "the largest in the Far East." The largest supermarket in the Far East is also the most disorganized, like Quinta in Quiapo, but without the mud. You cant get a polite reply from anyone. The girls all act as if they


had a vault full of jewels at home; the boys, one sugar plantation each. In the narrow aisles, the carts are always running into each other and one customer, hefty in bell bottoms, undecided between lettuce and eggplant, can hold up traffic indefinitely. But its goods are, as advertised, the cheapest, and for once, in this country, the patronage is predominantly, and properly, Filipino. Here, one is spared the sight of the foreigner stocking up on caviar and dogfood while ones compatriots gather around the Namarco shelves. Elsewhere, Mrs. Thoroughbred from the American Embassy strides down the supermarket aisles in jodhpurs, her horse waiting patiently at some gilt-edged tying post, and she points with her riding stick at the costly meats; in Asia's largest, however, shes outnumbered by the Asians and what Americans stray in are as callow and as raw as the next native, in their dirty rubber slippers, with their scraped knees and frayed Bermuda shorts. IN THE LUNETA, all colors blend—the brown and white and yellow of people; the green and blue and red of shrubs. Towards the sea, the great sward stretches, and the globes of light hang like huge pearls, are caught in the waters of the lake. People flow by, stop and eddy, break and whirl again. Across the pond, a band plays; a balloon breaks loose from some child's grasp and floats towards an early star. Here, the land lies flat and green, broken only by stone; there, it rises in a series of small hills that hide the curving tips of a pagoda. The doves come, cooing and beating their wings around a man, dressed in a tiget's suit, and giving away candy. The lovers try not to be conspicuous. A family spreads the contents of a bag—kropeck, juice, biscuits. One mother lies on a mat, unashamedly nursing her baby. On other mats, men and their wives, kicking their heels at the sky. The park guards watch when they can but soon grow weary and give up. The sky is like a canvas washed clean, gray along the edges, and you think, looking over the heads around you, how distant the heat of living is—tonight's dishes, tomorrow's bundy clock. Joy is a fitful moment, but better that than nothing.

T

HE SOUTH ROAD

stretches

544

kilometers to Legazpi,

516

if you stop in

Guinobatan, which I do, and it is breathless country all the way. Thrice I have traveled that route: twice with a friend; once, alone but for a driver, and each time the beauty of the region has stunned me. It is solid vegetation to the very tip, broken by towns and humble settlements, veritable walls of green hemming you on both sides: "So various!" my companion exclaims. She comes from the North and knows its dry and barren look, the look of punished earth, bleached and inhospitable, but here—I smile indulgently. I am used by now to people being overwhelmed by Bicol, the land, the women, the food, and the graciousness. The land is lush; drop a seed one day (we like to say) and it will give you shade the next morning. The women have been women a long, long time and have the business of womanness down pat; they're stronger than their men, but know enough not to show it, they work hard but are capable of being spoiled utterly; whatever they do, they like to do well. The food, of course, is hot. Pepper and coconut milk are two inevitable ingredients of many things eaten here, and there is nothing that isn't cooked with pepper and coconut milk. The classic dish is gabi leaves, smothered with pieces of pork, shrimps, or flaked fish, and simmered in coconut milk. And the small, deadly labuyo. A lot of restaurants serve this, but they don't quite get it. The Bicolano is a creature of instinct. He knows how much of what to put in, and when to do what. I am explaining all this to my friend, explaining our temperament through our cooking, but she is too engrossed in the scenery to listen. The scenery starts in Laguna, where you turn off at the fork that leads to Sto. 81


Tomas, Batangas, and Old Man Laurel, Jose P. himself, stands in the middle of a mini-park, cast in bronze, or so it looks, one hand held against the sky. The town after that is Alaminos and what we see in Alaminos previews the rest of the way. The sun barely clears the treetops, for we have left before dawn. I had my friend fetched from her home at 4 a.m., and brought to mine, and we sit in the kitchen, drinking lukewarm coffee, anticipating the freedom ahead. I have sneaked out my things before anyone wakes up to wonder about my assorted luggage: books, a thesaurus, a typewriter, a transistor radio, a portable TV. Shortly before we board the car, I turn to look at the house. The sky is clearing up, streaks of orange and red shoot up over the roof but the trees in the yard stay dark. Inside, my family sleeps, though my husband has struggled out of bed to put in a chivalrous appearance and bid us goodbye. Alaminos is stirring to life when we get there an hour later. Smoke rises from piles of dead leaves under slender lanzones trees. Schoolchildren are on the roadside, waiting for rides to school. Their uniforms are crisp, ^their hair still dripping from their morning bath. We trail hordes of high school students in their PMT uniforms, dragging wooden rifles, women going off to market, and men hauling copra to town in trucks and carts. We will have breakfast in Lucatan, a barrio of Sariaya, at a small, clean restaurant where they serve good food without too much ceremony: fried rice, chocolate, the works. Hang your diet! I tell her, we dont get to run away like this often, and we smoke and talk a bit before setting out again. The driver chafes, however. He gets up, circles the car, kicks at his tires—he wants to be off, but we have a moment we both want to hold a litde longer. We linger at the table with the checkered cloth. It overlooks a drop in the ground and there are coconut and lanzones groves around. I want to tell her something I feel, as though so soon out of Manila, I have already reached where I am going. She guesses it, because she holds my gaze and says, Its the release, you know, the escape, its good for the soul. You dont know till youve left how much you wanted to go. Her eyeglasses are thicker than mine, but they dont hide her charm. She has a very mobile face and you can read everything she feels—annoyance, joy, boredoom, sufferance. Twenty years weve known each other, and we have sat at how many tables like this, the leavings of a meal between us, talking. There is something restful about talk like this, like pulling in at a

South Road •> 83

wayside station and getting a drink of cold water. I have learned many things from her, especially acceptance. Accept! she cries, when I recount something rueful that has happened. Ac-cept! She breaks the word in two offering it in her open palm, like pieces of the Host at Mass; yet, strangely, she has no religion, except people and life. She is not sure if she believes in God; she snorts at the idea of an after-life; she has not gone to church for as long as she can remember, except for weddings and deaths; her circumstances are comfortable but she has worked hard all her life; her children are grown and flown away; she has a grandson who will die in four years. "Die," she says now, in Lucatan, Sariaya, touching her mouth as she says it, studying with her gaze the smoke rings she blows. When the time comes, she will go where the boy lives with his mother, abroad, and pick him up so he can die in her arms. I like the look of Quezon—the towns are clean. All the old houses have wide gardens and fruit trees in the backyards that I glimpse. The stores are like the stores of my youth—opening out into the street with the goods spilling on the widewalk, and you could be a child again, coming into town from faraway, with your parents, on a Sunday, to buy your supplies, choking on that rich array of dolls and candies. The huge ancestral homes brood by the road, their windows boarded up against the return of loved ones, the look of utter waiting unmistakable Then, after Pagbilao, the road crosses over to the other side of the peninsula, and for several towns, or until Gumaca, we will run close to the sea, Lamon Bay, just outside the car window. We follow the sea, or does the sea follow us? It is a clear day, not too warm, and when we make a turn, it seems as though we are going to plunge into the waters where a fleet of boats gaily decked out, buntings flying in the wind, tells us there is a regatta. There are islands in the distance wrapped in a light blue mist. We begin the steep climb up the notorious "M." Viajeros call this Bitukang Manok, but it is really Quezon Memorial Park: twenty minutes of treacherous turns that approximate the convolutions of a chickens entrails. Inside the park, its perpetual twilight, dark and cool, with a continuous drizzle that mists up your windshield and dampens the road. The sky is visible through the branches of the old trees; sunlight filters through the leaves. A light fog precedes us by five meters—awed is what I am. Dumbstruck.


It is sheer forest, a cascade of huge leaves, trunks interweaving overhead to form a dome; I hear the motors of vehicles ahead of us, groaning—the route tests man and machine, all right. In some places, we spot metal skeletons of vehicles that have plummeted down ravines, cargo trucks mostly, now stripped of everything except their ribs. We pick up the sea again as we ascend, but after Gumaca and Lopez, the sea slides in the distance, visible to us only from mountaintops, above the coconut trees that fill the vastness on either side. It is a long haul from Lopez to Labo, the first significant town in Camarines Norte. We have passed the Negrito camp, and Tulay na Lupa, but until the railroad, the South Road takes us away from Ragay in Camarines Sur, from which—someone educates us later—you draw two lines, if you wish, to the right, toward Basud in Camarines Norte, then again to the left, Tagkawayan in Quezon, if you want to know the points of the triangle where the NPA operates today. Daet is the capital of Camarines Norte and of Daet all I remember is the Sweden Ice Cream House and Restaurant, just before the market, where we cannot rush the cook. The serving girls are a lively bunch, all quite candid about their Chinese employer, whom they gossip about, and rather informal, throwing themselves down beside you while you make up your mind. We suffer a flat tire seven kilometers outside Naga. This is flat country now; the mountains are not below but around us. While the driver looks around for a tubeless tire in Naga City, we repair to the Trece Martires park, my friend and I, and eat peanuts. I marvel at how far the South Road has taken me. At dawn today, I was in my kitchen. Several hours later, I am in a public park in Naga, miles away, watching my friend cross the street to buy a paper. We are only an hour-and-a-half from Ligao, and after that only a half-hour from Legazpi. In the years before the South Road, I took the plane, and before the plane, the railroad, sixteen hours of rocking inside a train and swallowing my heart whenever the bridges we crossed swayed. When I first came to Ligao, nearly thirty years ago, it was for the classic reason that most young girls leave the city, a broken heart. A young boy had tossed me over for someone else and I took to bed, swearing I would never get up again, until it was time to be carried to my grave. But when you're not quite twenty, its difficult to die. My father seized upon my pallor to pack me off to the province where I lived for nearly two years in a house with three spinsters, all sisters. For my broken heart, they plied me with plenty of

South Road •> 85

warm milk, tucking herbs under my pillow at night. There was in the house a strong sense of family which guarded against anything that threatened the aunts' dreams for their wards: an education, however humble; a respectable livelihood; loyalty to one another. They were teachers and merchants and I lived amidst the clutter of lesson plans and bales of ready-made clothes; votive candles, the drone of night prayers, and many times, just being together, in the kitchen where the dogs nuzzled the pots and pans, or on the porch, at the foot of the family matriarch, already eighty when I arrived, endlessly rocking herself back and forth, singing a forgotten song. Everything else was sacrificed for this sense of family, everything—a suitor who did not quite measure up, or a job that would take you far away. A few of the girls rebelled and married who they fancied, but the road back to favor was long and difficult. It would be years before the erring one could come up the old house, years before you could be invited in again, and even then, reconciliation was not certain or complete. But the prospect of being ostracized was real. You might reason that if you had the man you thought you loved and three meals a day, what was there to fear? But it meant being set adrift without any ties; set adrift with no sense of beginning, no hearth to warm your hands at, nothing. One of the sisters, the one dearest to me, was just past thirty when I met her, still pretty. Sometimes, she spoke wistfully of an innocent interlude with a man, younger than she, up in the mountains where they had evacuated during the war. I could not imagine that it could have been anything torrid and sweeping, only a man who had made her feel good and alive, bringing the flush to her cheeks when their hands brushed along the trail of the evacuation camp. He left after Liberation, no glance backward, just a frightened boy caught by the war in alien country and helped to survive by the generosity of a woman who had fancied something else, but was too shy and too proper to pursue it. Afterwards, she stopped talking of that interlude altogether, resigned to the care of her old parents and her sisters, and except for a giveaway gesture, that of bringing hand to cheek, she never thought of him again. It is partly for her that I make this trip for there is news she is ill and bedridden. She is sixty, and no longer teaching; she keeps a small store, lives on a miserable government pension, and is given to fainting spells because of a bad heart and high blood pressure.


We cover the distance between Naga and Ligao, passing Iriga, Bato, Polangui, and Oas. A mountain on our left dogs our speeding car and my friend insists that I name it. I cant tell if its Isarog or Masaraga, but it isn't Mayon. How can I tell? she asks. Because when you see Mayon, your heart stops beating, I say. Thirty years ago, nursing my misery, I took this road, back and forth, on buses that ran between Naga, at one end, and Legazpi, at the other. I took so many rides that I could tick off the towns in my sleep—Guinobatan, Camalig, Daraga, Albay—knew exactly when one poblacion had ended and another, begun; guessed what sight awaited me when the bus rounded this bend or that, a schoolhouse on a hill, a clump of fruit trees, giant ferns waving their fronds, looking like prehistoric growths. Thirty years ago, I jumped on a bus, assaulted by the bitter memory of a boy whose plighted word had meant nothing, remembering the times he had passed me by in the city without recognition. I pay my fare and ride aimlessly to Legazpi, and then wander around the dingy bazaars, the taste of wormwood in my mouth, suffocating from the smell of old goods, to peer at the cheap wares beneath the glass tops. I walk to the wharf and watch the boats pulling away, marking the trail leading up to the hovels on top—and wonder, wonder if there is anyone as wretched as I in the world. Riding back, pursued by the inscrutable volcano, I tell myself, that I will live. When I reach home, the blind matriarch of the house rocks in the porch. It is twilight. "Who are you?" she calls, stopping me at the foot of the stairs. Though I know that she knows me, I say, "I am a suitor, come for your hand," and the answer sends her cackling with laughter, baring her ancient gums. When I bend to kiss her hand, she holds my face instead, and her skin feels like parchment on my cheeks. She peers at me closely with her sightless eyes, passing her fingers lightly over my face. On her lips, my pet name reverberates with an echo that recalls the ancient, ruined chimney in whose shadow my father was born. I pass on into the kitchen and there at the table, supper spread, gathered around a gas light, sit the virgin sisters, awaiting me. While we eat, we talk, but they ask carefully about my feelings. I can almost taste their love for one another but I am outside that circle, though they regard me with deep affection. I am free to escape the unspoken bond and there will be no retribution; for I am bound, but not too tightly bound.

South Road •> 87

I get well; at least, I think I do, and I return briefly to the city where I see the boy who has broken my heart, and nothing happens. There is no pain, only some ruefulness, and when my favorite aunt learns of this, she says, "Then you're not coming back to stay?" I am standing in front of her, in a checkered blue dress, in high heels, with stockings, my hair piled high, a touch of color on my cheeks. I have returned impulsively, I have a modest job in Manila, proofreading, but I keep returning to Albay for a week or two, and I am not sure why. I think I am trying to make up my mind because I am sleeping badly again. The small house with the porch that has a pomelo tree growing beside it, has a hold on me I cannot shake off. I will be safe here, all my life, I know, if I stay. I will be loved here, too. And I will never break my heart again. I am twenty at last, and I realize I don t want to be safe. I am grateful for their love, their glasses of warm milk, and the nightly harvest of herbs, but having broken my heart once, I am quite ready to break it again. "No," I say softly, and lean against a sack of rice. In this bedroom, there is always a sack of rice, as there is always a lighted candle at the altar in the other bedroom, and in the kitchen, someone is blowing at the fire, someone cooking, someone bound and safe, and warmed in the circle of their enduring care. It is thus I have returned and each year, they are older and the house, emptier. I get all the news. Someone has just had a heart attack. Someone has just broken a hip, someone has just turned amnesiac. There used to be such in this house, I say aloud, a great to-do about clothes and jewelry and visitors; the smell of cooking filling the air; an unending fuss over suman and dulces and cakes, children, neighbors, and dogs; and now only emptiness. Upstairs in the bedrooms, crocheted coverlets are spread on beds that no one sleeps on. It is late afternoon when we finally reach Ligao. My aunt weeps when she sees me. "You've come," she says evenly, then bursts into soft weeping. I take her in my arms. It is a gaunt and wasted body, and I rock it gently, murmuring comfort. She is the child now; I am the grown-up. Her tears mix with her sweat. I touch the graying head, full of contusions from her sudden fainting spells. "Don't leave me," she spells. "Don't leave me," she whispers, and I say, "No," though I will ride away in the morning. I look for the girl love brushed by on a mountain top during the war, and something glimmers faintly in her eyes, and then it is gone, and I am holding an old woman in


my arms. I look at our reflection in the mirror, our arms locked around each other. She is sitting up in bed and it seems odd that I cannot recognize myself staring back at me. She is the child, I am the grown-up. Later, after supper, my friend who has traveled this distance with me, asks what hour in the morning we shall leave. I say nothing. I pull out the dead matriarchs rocking chair and proceed to sway gently in it. Out on the porch, with the pomelo tree releasing a fragrance in the air, and evening closing in, I hum a forgotten song, and sit there, waiting for the ghost of someone young, someone bitter and lost and betrayed, to come home from her bus ride to Legazpi.

W

a plane, $25 million dollars worth of expertly crafted steel and a hundred miles of vital wiring and countless precision instruments bobbing sensitively on the flight deck, but we don't know when we say good-bye—the perfunctory good-byes of people who have all said the correct things in public and touched elbows for a week, but really know nothing about one another—that our DC-10 will figure in a sad-funny drama with the American Civil Aeronautics Board. This brand new plane makes one flight to Manila where it is blessed, returns to San Francisco and loads balikbayan and basketball players, and flies its cargo back home. The second trip is not so fortunate because by then American fair play has been sufficiently roused and the beautiful silver butterfly with the wings made in Canada and the intricate fuselage worked on in brilliantly programmed schedules by teams of Negro and Chicano and white American labor (paid their wages by computers and fed by mobile food wagons that circle the McDonnell Douglas field), this plane is sold to us by American business, and then impounded by American politics. The US CAB will not grant it permission to fly over American soil and it stands in ignominy in the San Francisco InternationalAirport. It is not the first time we will be conned by America and it will not be the last. Meanwhile, that is all in the future, and my present is concerned with rushing through an early dinner to catch A Little Night Music across the street from Century Plaza. The curtains will rise promptly at 8 p.m. You can fault this huge country for many paradoxes: Vietnam and the American Red Cross, Billy Graham and Timothy Leary, Jackie Onassis who now uses satin bedsheets on the bed she shares with Ari, and the eternal flame she E HAVE LAUNCHED

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once sobbingly lighted for John Kennedy—but you cant accuse America of tardiness. The pulp sheets announce that Mrs. Onassis is pregnant and will deliver in November. Until then she will swim in the Caribbean in this newest nonething, the string bathing suit, of which, the tabloids say, she has picked up several dozen. But whether or not a hundred paparazzi fall into the ocean trying to photograph her with their telephoto lens for the benefit of countless fantasy-hungry American women, the opening bars of the overture of A Little Night Music will float promptly at 8. You can bet on that. I am choking on something the Century Plaza chef calls Philippine teriyaki, five bits of expensively burnt meat, each the size of an Ayds candy. The meat has given up the ghost with some struggle and now lies drowning in sauce, but the girl who waits on me is sweet and simple and does not sport the brightly false eyelashes and macabre mascara that the other waitresses do. As my visit progresses, however, I am more and more convinced that the last frontier of American good manners is California and not the eastern seaboard. You have only to apply the restaurant test. Service is prompt and cheerful and intelligent, in the west, and this more than takes off the sting from the prohibitive prices. But as you move east, toward Washington, and finally New York, you learn to categorize the American waiters snarl: "Okay, lady, what'll it be? Nope, no breakfast. Past 11. You gotta order lunch now, ysee. An after three, its dinner you gotta have." But the ultimate is being approached halfway through your meal and told bluntly: "Hey, lady, I'm knocking off soon, y see, and I wanna my tip now!" and between choking on your omelette and fumbling for some change, you offer some coins, which he sweeps into his palm, and counts critically. Then he says: "Sure you don wanna make a phone call with this?" is a high mark for this non-beginners visit, a most satisfying counterpoint for the abrasions a tourist suffers. There will be many such counterpoints, you can be sure, for America after all is not populated by 200 million waiters all sneering that you make a phone call with your tip. I take the underpass to the ABC Entertainment Center across the street and follow the crowd where we wait for the usher to remove the tasselled rope blocking the lobby. BUT JEAN SIMMONS

A Little Night Music • 91

I look around and wonder if this is what those glossy magazines call the theater crowd, the ones that photographers take such classy pictures of, of supple-bodied women in furs, waited on by men in tuxes who jump up to light their Virginia Slims and bring them their Dewars: those creatures of Madison Avenue held out as enviable examples of fine American living, the ones about whom I'm always wondering if they're real, but only when I'm reading of them in my old bed in Paranaque, and I can tell, when the wind shifts slightly from my kitchen, that I have forgotten to bathe my dogs again. Now, plunked in the middle of such a crowd, all chattering brightly about how well dear Jean will hold, if she will hold at all, against Glynis (Johns) who's playing the same role in New York at the same time, I realize how ordinary they look. The gloss isn't there at close range. The women are huge, big-boned, leathery-skinned, their smiles too taut, their laughter too high, and it isn't until I'm ready to leave for home a month later that I realize I have not seen one beautiful white American woman. I will see many pretty white American women, but the only really beautiful woman I see on this trip is a Negro, black as the night, materializing suddenly one table away at the Carvery Restaurant of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D. C. I see her before my children do and it is the expression on my face that causes my son and my daughter to turn and rivet their eyes on her. It is not possible to describe her, now, several weeks later, only to close one's eyes and recall her face, dark against the dark wall, the forehead and the eyes and the nose and the mouth and the chin blending perfectly into this apparition sitting there quietly and proudly, cupping her face in her hands. The play, A Little Night Music, is a dull musicale about liaisons. The songs are lackluster, I don't know any of the actors and actresses, except for Jean Simmons. I recall vaguely reading somewhere that she had taken briefly to drinking when the good roles stopped coming her way and her husband left her alone often, occupied with his directorial jobs. Her last movie, Say Hello to Yesterday, of the genre of 40 Carats, had not been too successful. When however Jean Simmons sweeps into view, it is clear she is no hasbeen. One hesitates to say "well-preserved" for the word connotes injections of formaldehyde, and there is no preservative wafting from the woman in the red gown who dances and sings before us. She is slim, she is fair, her eyes are dark and fiery, her black hair sets off the shape of her face, the neckline of her gown plunges dangerously, and why not?


She is, says the evenings program, way past forty, but that cleavage is real and breathtaking, and there is a line to her jaw, or is it her mouth? or her jaw and her mouth and her cheek bones all together that convey what eludes me maddeningly where I sit three rows away, center, in a stuffed seat I have paid $16 good dollars for (and had the grace not to charge PAL). There is something bemused in her expression as she pirouettes and prances, a sardonic quality, not steel-sardonic, but tender-sardonic, very strong about her. When she sits on a settee, waiting for lovers who do not understand, or are untrue, or are late, or do not come, and she bends that magnificent neck and touches in oh-so-throat-catching a gesture the back of her hair, lonely but not vanquished, abandoned but undefeated, my soul rises instinctively to meet her anguish and I suddenly understand why life and the world have lasted so long.

have two choices. I can go straight down Roxas Boulevard and turn left on EDSA, right by Heritage Hotel, with its wide expanse of glass windows, affording me a glimpse of the luxury within. Or I can turn left much earlier, by the Ospital ng Maynila, into Quirino Avenue, and turn right again on South Superhighway, which quickly becomes President Quirino Avenue. Once past the Magallanes interchange, I can almost smell home, and once there and the black old gate has swung open, two dogs will be happy to see me, mongrels really, a furry creature that used to be snow white but is now a dirty brown, and a black-and-white spotted Qne. We got both pets through the woman who cooks our lunch in the office. They used to be different in the beginning, but having been inoculated, injected, vaccinated with everything, from anti-rabies to distemper, including being dewormed (which is more than can be said of the humans in the house), they've turned into snappy, lively, sharp-toothed pets, growling at everything and trying out their canines. Whoever leaves his slippers outside the door will regret it the next day. The garbage can is overturned, its contents littered every morning in the backyard. The doormat is shredded to pieces. And the garden! The animals left the chrysanthemums alone when these were in pots but once transplanted, they were completely at the animals' mercy. They tore up the garden completely, fearing that the plants encroached on their play area. We used to have birds too, a parrot and a mynah, but the parrot flew away and the mynah pined and died. Better than birds and dogs and certainly more precious are the grandchildren. Two are living in the house. There's a seventeen-year-old girl who has been studying World War II for the last several weeks now and I see among her papers long paragraphs HOMEWARD BOUND, I

93


on Poland, Dunkirk, and the blitzkrieg. The grandson is a little like the puppies. Hes fifteen, in the third year, he likes to play basketball and forgets to come home, and he looks unconcerned while his mother washes his dirty, smelly rubber shoes. I am teaching him table manners, how to hold his spoon and fork, when to use the table knife, how much food to put on his plate. He is also learning the art of conversation. The word "mannerism" came up at supper one evening and I thought to test him by asking what it meant, and he said, "Habit." I thought of a word that sounded like mannerism, and I asked, "And aneurysm, what is it?" Back came his reply, "Not a habit." Well, they're both home and that's good. The papers are full of accidents and kidnappings. The other members of the household are responsible adults about whom I don't worry unduly. I reach my room with light enough outside to spot the friendly sparrows perched on my neighbor's antenna. They bade me good-bye this morning and there they are, at 6 p.m., caressing each other's beak. The neighbor's cat is on my bodega roof, looking for her kittens which I had asked someone to pick up and throw away somewhere far away because they kept me awake with their meowing. The mother espies me peeping through my window and gives one last forlorn cry before it disappears. Then I remember that another birth, but human this time, impends. My trusted help got married last May, back in her hometown in Tarlac. She brought back pictures of the occasion, herself in white, the groom in barong. They butchered a whole cow. When she returned, I asked her not to get enceinte right away and she promised, but her husband came on several weekends and slept over, and before I knew it she was cooking adobong kangkong although she knew that I hated it. She fixed me with her doe eyes and said simply, "I have this yen." She's making arrangements for a sister to replace her. Then there is my mail, not much, but what there is of it is welcome. Carlos Angeles has written to say he still can't place some lines of a poem I want him to identify but he has enclosed a poem he has written for my dead husband and his friend. Alex Hufana is winging home from L.A., in fact may even be back in Ilocos Norte as I write this. Tim Montes of Silliman U wants a short story for a book they're planning to honor Ed Tiempo's memory with. Edith Tiempo has written, too, a moving letter.

The Remains of the Day • 95

My daughter who stayed with me three months after her fathers death has returned to San Francisco and has sent me a postcard describing her homecoming: "Picture what I came home to—kitchen counters cluttered with empty soda cans and grocery bags. The oven stuffed with empty juice boxes. The girls room like a war zone. Old newspapers piled on the floor. Sleeping bags and blankets tucked away in a corner of the family room where they'd been camping on weekends. Dirty clothes on the garage floor. Clean clothes needing ironing piled high on a night table. Dust and cobwebs everywhere, at sangkatutak na iba pang kalat, and then tell me, should I stop crying now?" Another relative in Switzerland married to a parsimonious Swiss, has decided finally to leave her husband since he wont give her any money, not even for the children's needs. When they eat out, she writes, they split the bill evenly. "All he will allow the children is soup and crackers." There is another letter in my handbag, given to me before I left the office this afternoon. This young lawyer who has known my youngest daughter for the last ten years wants to marry her and asks for my blessing. I like the man; in fact I like him more than I do my youngest daughter, and of course, I will give my blessing. Bereaved only in July, I have once again suffered a good friend's death, the family lawyer, who lay comatose for eight months after his first heart attack. Left with a brood of five, he raised them all by himself, including the youngest boy who was only seventeen days old when his wife, twenty years ago, left him for the lure of America. His daughter, a slip of a girl, calls and cries for comfort. "What shall we do? She's a complete stranger to us." She misses her father so, she hates her mother. 1 offer some of Edith's words. "And best of all comforts is the fact that heaven is even nearer and made more real because we have our loved one there ..." As is my wont, when the day is dying, I turn to my little ritual. I light a candle before my husband's picture, but today, I prop beside it a small photo of my dead friend and another of my husband's dead parents and, praying quietly, I commend them all to the care of The One.

M

other of ten, Kerima Polotan was married to Juan C. Tuvera. She was educated in public schools before the war and earned an AB from Arellano University in 1953. Her other books—The Hand of the Enemy (a novel), Stories (short fiction), and Adventures in a Forgotten Country and Author's Choice (essays)—have also been published by the UP Press.

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