The Distance to Andromeda

and Other Stories

GREGORIO C. BRILLANTES

University of the Philippines Press

Quezon City

Contents

Preface ix

The Years 3

The Young Man 19

Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro 29

The Exiles 41

My Cousin Ramon 47

The Radio and the Green Meadows 55

The Girl Elena 65

Blue Piano 71

Lost 81

The Distance to Andromeda 91

The Last December 105

A Wilderness 113

The Beautiful Gerrls 123

A Wind Over the Earth 133

The Mountains 143

Sunday 153

The Rice Fields 163

The Sound of Distant Thunder 169

The Rain 177

The Living and the Dead 189

The Strangers 203

What Shall We Do When We All Go Out ? 211

The Conquerors 219

The World of the Moon 227

The Light and Shadow of Leaves 235

Afterword 251
Preface
"WHY DO you write?" the girl asked suddenly. The author
was seventeen or eighteen and had written some fiction,
including the earliest piece in this collection. I suppose a
lady was bound to ask him that sooner or later, as he liked
hanging around them though not strictly for literary or
artistic reasons. Anyway, the question startled him, as she
was a cheerful, laughing kind of girl, so unlike the
melancholy poetess he adored that year; and the way she
asked it, serious all of a sudden, in the middle of a party yet,
in the middle of a dance with her, as a matter of fact, really
surprised him. Now if she had waited a few more years to
ask her earnest question, I think he might have given her a
brighter, more satisfying, more quotable answer than the
one he managed to mumble, about the need to see one's
name in print.

Her name was Mercedes; Ditas, everyone called her; a

student at the Assumption Convent, then on Herran and
Dakota and neighbor to the college he attended. He had
gone to her coming-out party, a more elegant affair than the
usual barn dances of those days, complete with orchestra
and uniformed waiters and lanterns over the lawn. It
seemed she had read a story he had written for his college
quarterly: a tor-mented piece, dreadful in more ways than
one, that his Jesuit professors might have decried as the
work of a budding Jansenist untouched by the happy
Catholic wisdom of Chesterton and Belloc. True enough,
along with his crew cut and a modest crop of acne, he
cultivated a species of literary despair, fashionable then
among apprentice fictionists no less than their established
elders; but this apparently didn't prevent him from having a
good time at parties and dancing with Assumption girls. A
devout daughter of Mother Esperanza, the girl Ditas might
have been prompted by some anxiety for his salvation.

They were dancing to a slow sentimental tune, Sinatra or

Tony Bennett, it must have been, background music for that
placid, faraway time; and then, unexpectedly, she asked
him why he wrote, the concern shining in her clear alert
eyes. She seemed to strain forward as she waited for his
brilliant, magnificent, tremendous, unforgettable answer.

He made his vague, forgettable reply. The anticipation faded

from her eyes. They talked of inconsequential things. She
laughed prettily, made a funny face, her brisk happy self
again. The music stopped and he walked her back to her
seat.

They met and talked a few more times, rather by chance,

without so much as a hint of the question she had asked on
the night of her birthday. She married a classmate of his, a
pious, studious fellow who took up law, management and
poker. A few years later she was dead.

Wealth, status, intensive care units, the prayers of nuns:

they were to no avail. I guess it happens all the time: men
lost at sea, children trapped in burning apartments, women
dying in childbirth. A famous theolo-gian whose books she
must have read in school put it very nicely: the twisted
threads, seemingly without any pattern of meaning, behind
God's glorious tapestry.

When he read the obit, he remembered the way she looked

that night she asked her sudden question, the concern
shining in her young eyes. He didn't think of her again after
that, not until many years later, when somebody, a guy who
had known her, or a friend of a friend of hers, called her to
mind, in a bar or nightclub or maybe by the pool at his
compadre's place on a Sunday morning, with their wives
and the kids splashing around in the bright sun. For some
reason, this time, the memory of Ditas stayed awhile with
him. I imagine it was one of those curious things writers are
wont to do, recalling some tiny or trivial incident other
people would never bother about and maybe hoping it will
lead to something or other.

Through the day or the space of an evening, he

remembered her again, and the night of her party. He
realized she had been the first ever to a$k him why he
wrote; and reflecting on this, he began to think of her as
though she had been real and unreal at the same time,
something like an archetype, a symbol. It was as though she
assumed, in his short story writer's mind, a life not unlike
the existence of the woman who lost the borrowed necklace
of fake pearls, or the old carriage driver who had only his
horse to talk to, or the young man who brought home a wife
to Nagrebcan. By some process that, I am told, critics can
ana-lyze and explain, he recreated and transformed her, as
it were, so that she would stand still and listen, she would
not go away forever after the dance and he might begin at
last to answer her question.

He thought, then, in the dim bar or the summer morning by

the pool, of what he should have said in answer. He owed
her that much, he felt, for her wish to understand, when
they were both young, that which was deepest and most
important in his life. The answer, he knew, was tied up
somehow with the town in Tarlac where he was born, and
the acacias beside the house where he grew up, the sounds
that wind and fain made in them. In that house, its rooms
suffused with a clear white light in his memory, he learned
that words, combinations of them, could unlock the doors to
fancy and fable: the strange lands visited by Gulliver, Lord
Greystoke shipwrecked on the African shore. His mother had
a drugstore in Camiling when he was a boy, and through its
mostrador, a glass display case like an aquarium, he loved
to watch the refracted traffic of carromatas and buses, and
all sorts of people coming by, prominent and humble folk
with their aches, anxieties and doctor's prescriptions, and
kin and friends with news or stories to tell.

One morning a woman lay down on the pavement in front of

the farmacia} weeping and begging to be given some
poison until a policeman came and led her away. Beside the
plaza was the church, with the eye of God in a blue triangle
painted crudely on a canvas screen near the door. A block
from the church was the high school that had been the
house built by his grandfather. The summer he was thirteen
he opened a cabinet in the ancient house and uncovered a
hoard of magazines from the 1930s, brittle, brownish copies
of the Free Press and Graphic containing the first stories of
Manuel Arguilla and Bienvenido N. Santos, C.V Pedroche and
D. Paulo Dizon. Perhaps it was in the same year that he
found Maupassant and Maugham in an uncle's bookcase,
not long before a friend gave him a stack of Liberation-era
paper-backs: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Saroyan. His
father's copy of the Free Press arrived each week, and
always the short story on page 12, illustrated with the
pensive or haunted Filipino faces that only Esmeraldo Z.
Izon could draw, fascinated him, spoke to him more com-
pellingly than the pronouncements of politicians, reports on
the state of the nation, rumors of war in this or another
country...

The acacia trees, the house of his boyhood, the drugstore,

the magazines in the cabinet, and the sense, gradually
growing, in the boarding-house where he first lived in the
city, of time passing, time lost irrevocably: these and related
things he could have told her, to account for the stories in
this collection, these early fictions of a young man whose
passion it was to dream and write them. It all added up, he
was aware, to less than the answer he owed her; but to say
more, as he once tried to do in a pompous paper he had felt
obliged to deliver at a sympo-sium, laden with pedantic
jargon and quotations from Ecclesiastes, Dostoevsky, T.S.
Eliot, Rizal, et al., was to be less than true and honest, and
unworthy of her. To say more would be to falsify the reasons
for the writing of these stories about boys in haunted fevers
of growing up, and young girls dreaming in old houses, and
families being unhappy in different ways that have to do
with faith, love, time and death; stories with rain in them,
and dust, and moon-flecked shadows of leaves. To try and
sum it all up with a precise logic and judge it by the
categories of some system or creed would be to distort and
betray a world of voices, faces, rooms, streets, rivers, fields,
mountains, stars, silences, distances, grief, joy, anger,
tenderness: people, places and things that once formed the
greater part of what he knew of life and living and the
writing of stories.

What he meant, what he wished to tell her all along, which

is in-tended as well for those who might wonder how these
stories came to be, had been defined, I believe, by the
literary critic and structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes:
that fiction, like life, is "ultimately unquantifiable" and
therefore "one writes it with one's desire." The author's
desirej the shape of it during the years he wrote these
stories, is evident enough in this collection. His concerns
would later change, would become, as I should know, less
subjective and more ironic, more political, perhaps even
more religious and metaphysical.

As for these collected stories, now — two of them I think you

can call, hmm, first-rate (only one, and with qualifications,
according to the fastidious; but let that go). In the opinion of
perceptive friends whose critical faculties have not been
impaired by their beer drinking, five stories are quite good,
perhaps a few others are good enough to invite more than
one reading. The rest are no doubt less than memo-rable,
but even the most dismal specimens of the lot are not
without some redeeming value or attraction, as material for
the footnotes of, say, the cultural historian, or as examples
of how not to write short stories, which the writers'
workshop fellow can study to his profit.

The same assiduous fellow may likewise find it instructive to

know that the present edition contains five previously
uncollected stories:

"My Cousin Ramon" (the author's first story in a national

magazine, published under a slightly different title in the
Free Press, in 1953),

"The Radio and the Green Meadows," "The Girl Elena," "The
Mountains" and "The Sound of Distant Thunder." For one
reason or another, the author decided against using them
the first time around, but he has since realized, with middle-
aged contrition, that regardless of their faults they belong to
the family and have every right to attend the reunion.

Besides, they too should be able to provide some of those

footnotes, some valuable data, including the remembrances
of themes past. Like the radiation from the receding stars of
a galaxy, to allude to the epi-taph of the title story, their
faint, wavering light, a flicker of relevance, if you will, could
still register on somebody's spectograph despite the
intervening time and distance.

More defined and persistent, it would seem, than wisps of

remote light is the author's recollection of the kind notices
that Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, Ricaredo Demetillo, Alejandro
Roces, Leonard Casper and Fr. Miguel A. Bernad, S.J., wrote
when The Distance to Andromeda made its first appearance
in 1962. Modesty as well as limitations of space inhibit him
from quoting whole paragraphs of those reviews, even as he
is reminded that such gratifying judgments are not for all
time. Critical opinions change with age and wisdom, as do
literary pas-sions; but never his gratitude, he now solemnly
announces, for the encouragement he received from the
above-mentioned authorities, and in even greater measure
from Teodoro M. Locsin, who as Free Press literary editor
first published most of these stories, and N.V.M.

Gonzalez, incomparable fictionist and friend to many a

beginning writer, whose idea it was to put out the original
Benipayo Press edition.

On the whole then, a first collection with its singular

credentials, you might say, its own unique rewards. . . Still,
as I read through these stories once more — these stories
which are now to me both familiar and strange, like old
friends whom one has not seen for a long time —

I found myself wishing their youthful author had written

fiction of a different texture and temper. Would that he had
written stories of a larger desire and design, wiser and more
resonant, more worthy of invoking the art of Chekhov and
Cheever, Gonzalez and Joaquin; and then I too remembered
that these were written a good many years ago, and that
they are thus a record of a young man's passage through a
particular time — when girls like Ditas were eighteen, asking
their sudden questions amid music and the voices
unmindful of the dark outside, the indiscriminate and
implacable future.

G R E G O R I O C . BRILLANTES

A postscript that's maybe another story:

This preface was written back in 1980 for the National
Bookstore edition — 20 years after the book first came out
under the auspices of Bookmark-Benipayo Press.

A long time ago, and in another solar system far, far away,
it seems, instead of the same old house in Quezon City:
writing about the girl Ditas and her question and how these
stories came to be. . . Light years away, if you thought of all
the intervening years as falling, sparking and then dwindling
away into the dark void of space-time and so on — as the
young man of our preface might have imagined, watching
the flight of the starry night and visiting other worlds in
fancy and marveling at such revelations as Arthur Clarke
made, in his foreword to 2001: A Space Odyssey, that a
hundred billion human beings have walked on Earth since
the dawn of time, which is "an interesting number, for by a
curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred
billion suns m the local universe, the Milky Way. So that for
every man who has ever lived, in this universe there shines
a star. .

But as the same youth grown old has since learned, as most
of us Earth-bound folk learn soon enough, one doesn't have
to invoke such mind-bending numbers and fantastic reaches
to know what time does to transform itself and space and all
that both contain, the past and the future, people and
places and distances and things as numerous as Clarke's
count of the stars.

All one needs to do, really, is go for a walk.

Take a stroll, if you can still manage that in the congested

streets of the city, in a place like Ermita (crowded with
shops and stories, among other things). Which was what I
did, a month or so before I sat down to write this postscript
— walked down Padre Faura and Adriatico (formerly Dakota)
to Pedro Gil (Herran of old) and then through the shopping
mall there swarming with what seemed like three million
human beings, most of them younger than Ditas at her
coming-out party and the college boy who didn't know how
to answer her question: a clamorous, voracious multitude
riding the escalators to and fro and not waiting for any
Michelangelo, only for quick bargains and fast foods and
maybe the latest video, in this enormous shrine to business
and pleasure where once there were college buildings,
chapels, dormitories, playing fields, acacia trees, lots of
grass and leafshade, weeds, too, even cogon along isolated
stretches of sidewalk.

You can go for a walk, too, around the plaza in Camiling, and
see how crowds and commerce have taken over many of
the old places and things. As in most other towns, the old
trees are gone, the dusty air reeks of diesel pollution,
concrete appears to be the dominant reality and situation.
Practically all of the once grass-carpeted plaza has been
cemented over for various establishments, including what
looks like a permanent tiangge. The bandstand like a
carousel at rest in the center of the square was demolished
years ago, to give way to a stage for pop concerts and
fashion shows. Around that vanished glorieta, formal
couples had waltzed and tangoed to the music of the
Lingasin Orchestra; and a boy could go running for the sheer
joy of it, hopping from bench to bench, or roller-skating till
nightfall, when the lampposts were lit, not too bright among
the trees to blot out the first stars.

All is not lost, of course, even if that implacable future has

come, is here.

You may still retrieve some stories, at least, from departed

times and lost places. Or memories of stories and about how
they were written and why, for heaven's sake, they would
only reflect and not change a world.

The persistence of fiction, memory and desire for what's

written and meant to i>e read, not on techno-monitors but
on the printed page

— from all reports, some people still write stories, and quite
a few others still read them in the old way, one phrase or
sentence after another, line by line, turning the pages, in
books and magazines. And almost astoundingly, like an
invention by Ray Bradbury, bookstores of the tried kind still
do business, even thrive, in the shopping malls, in the
gridlocked metropolis, in the wild, wired world of digital
distrac-tions and a thousand bytes per person per second.

What all this adds up to is, I guess, a kind of faith and

communion that, although a besieged minority, is neither
fugitive nor underground, but working and building,
guarding and celebrating the written word in the light.
Something like that, I believe; and among the most faithful
and vigilant of this creative creed I know of three: Cristina
Pantoja-Hidalgo and Gemino H. Abad of the U.P. Creative
Writing Center, and Laura Samson, director of the University
of the Philippines Press.

To them and their offices I owe this third printing of The

Distance to Andromeda (and the saving of_these stories
probably from some structuralist shredder or postmodernist
dustbin), for which I am deeply grateful.

May their generous tribe increase and their good works

flourish, even in the cyber-malls.

G.C.B.

Quezon City
November 1999

The Distance to Andromeda

and Other Stories

The Years

THE DE LEON residence on Makabulos Street in Tarlac was a

large two-story house built in the early 1930s, with a cupola
set like a crown on the roof, the arrow of its weather vane
visible from the plaza; under the pyramid of the main gable
was a round window of varicol-ored glass, like an emblem of
security; and the eaves were of a crafts-manship unique in
the town, angular and fringed with sheet-iron flower
designs. In a block of newer if less distinguished houses, it
appeared to have retained from the years before the war a
sense of that era —

anyway, the genteel, complacent independence of the

landed gentry, for Chabeng de Leon had inherited a
sugarcane hacienda, and her husband had acquired,
through a quickly learned business acumen, a string of
ricelands in the barrios around the town.

In the hard pebbled yard that surrounded the house stood a

variety of fruit trees, branches interlocking; from a distance,
say, from the public high school grounds that ran along the
other side of the street, the leaves blended with the green
paint of the house, looking cool and shadowed on the
warmest summer day, cold and shadowed in the months of
the long rains. A path led from a side gate and around the
house to Carlos de Leon's law office on the ground floor of
the eastern wing. He kept a jeep and an Oldsmobile in an
open shed in the yard (for some reason, a garage had not
been built into the house); the enclosing fence was massive
adobe topped with spearheads of broken glass.

Before the front door was a wide apron of ornamented tiles,

white and black, that the servants had to scrub daily into a
perfect luster; there was the face of the house, Chabeng de
Leon said, the very first thing that any visitor would notice
and admire. Immediately behind the twin sliding doors was
a parlor not much used for anything then except as a sort of
club lounge for the de Leon boy and his friends, during
school vacations. The rest of the first floor was the law office
and a couple of unoccupied rooms, and a high-ceilinged hall,
with a billiard table that Carlos de Leon had long neglected,
according to him, because of too much work. He was a
member of the provincial board, a Rotarian; and his law
practice took him often to Manila and, if he happened to be
in the mood, to a swank seaside night club where the
manager called him by his first name.

From the front parlor, a broad curve of stairs, the banisters

darkly polished from years of many passing hands,
ascended to the sala; a chandelier that had been the pride
of Chabeng de Leon's father's house descended from a
cream-paneled sky. The bedrooms opened on three sides
into the living room; a huge Amorsolo of Pagsanjan Falls
hung above the piano and the debutante portrait of Alice,
the de Leon daughter. The furniture was narra, ancient and
sturdy; here and there a chro-mium upholstered seat,
Chabeng de Leon's concession to post-war modernity. A
radio-phonograph and a telephone table flanked Carlos de
Leon's favorite chair, an old broad-armed rocker; when he
sat there on evenings, after supper, enjoying his cigar, he
sometimes found himself gazing up at the Sacred Heart on
the opposite wall, troubled by an anxiety, a kind of regret
like a shadow left from his poor and bitter youth. Had he by
any chance hurt someone this day? Was there an important
duty he had shirked or forgotten? He would return to his
Time magazine with a mental shrug, the feeling dismissed
for the night, his mind again a lawyer's mind, cool and
efficient and precise, following a political crisis in another
country; while outside the windows the leaves brushed
against each other and the night-sounds filtered into the
room: the remote bark of dogs, the distant departing
whistles of the trains.

Now ON the morning of December 28 of that year, Chabeng

de Leon's birthday, the main gate, unbolted only when
somebody had to drive through, was wide open to the
street; the tiles of the front door shone like a mirror. An
array of potted palms had been placed about the stairway
landing; and the leaves had been swept cleanly off the yard,
so that the flat pale earth showed strewn with pebbles as in
a dry riverbed. Behind the house, smoke rose from vats
tended by the farm-tenants who had come at dawn to
butcher and boil and season the festive meat. Through the
morning the servant girls bustled about in the kitchen,
lorded over by a bald, incredibly fat cook Chabeng de Leon
had commissioned for the day. The houseboy, Anselmo,
rehusked the sala, already slippery from yesterday's wax;
for the Senora, on her way out to early Mass, had told him
to work on it again, and there was no arguing with the
Senora; and the boy sweated in the cool morning and made
a hopping dance up and down the floor, up and down, until
the Christmas tree lay reflected in its polish, and there was
another job to do, an errand to run for the cook, a table to
bring up from downstairs.

The party was going to be a buffet dinner, with dancing for

the young people, and also for the old who were young at
heart, explained Manoling, who had gone around town with
the invitations a few days before his mother's birthday.
Chabeng de Leon had planned it to be a small party, just
close relatives, and their friends in town; a get-together,
really, for it had been a long time since their last gathering
in the house, the silver wedding anniversary, three years
ago. And it was also for the children, really, she said; as it
was, Alice and Manoling preferred to stay in the city; they
had chosen to spend even the last October vacation there,
and they weren't wholly to blame either; life in Tarlac could
be very dull, she confided rather querulously to her friends
in the Catholic Women's Club. It was only at Christmastime
that the family could get together, and that wasn't long
enough, she felt, for her to get acquainted with her children
again; the days seemed to go much faster during the
season, hurrying toward the new year; true, there were all
the summer months, but they insisted on going up to
Baguio with their Tia Remy, and the evening rains there
weren't exactly the right thing for her chronic head colds.
Trining Aquino, her closest friend (they had been classmates
at Holy Ghost), was most sympathetic, coming over after
Mass with the day's first gift, a book on how to be happy, by
Fulton Sheen. By two in the afternoon, everything was in
order: the stairs had a fresh scrubbed look, the new beige
curtains looked just right for the living room, the records
that Alice had brought home were stacked on the radio-
phonograph; and three mahjongg tables were clicking busily
by the high front windows, open to the trees and the street.

Chabeng de Leon was forty-nine; although quite plumpish

now, she could glow with a measure of youthfulness; she
had an animated manner of talking, with quick little
gestures and expressive squeals when she was excited.
That morning upon waking up, she had felt a quickening, a
nervous delight tingling at the back of her neck; imagine,
like a young girl, she thought, and she had to laugh a little
deprecating laugh. But when she rose from her bed, the
happy flush was gone, a hollow was in its place, as if it had
been only the remnant of a dream she had had before
waking; and she was worried and melancholy again, in the
grey early morning darkness. Carlos de Leon was still
snoring, despite the clatter behind the house, an arm thrust
stiffly out of the mosquito net; the exposed hand seemed to
her suddenly pathetic and vulnerable, and with tenderness
she adjusted the net back over it. She wondered if she
should rouse him for Mass; but he needs his rest, he has
that convention in San Fernando to address today, she
decided, recalling the hour he had come home, the tired
thoughtful film in his eyes that she had observed of late. As
she dressed, her mind caught in a groove of prayer: now
and at the hour of our death, . . She must not think of that
today; on other days, yes, but not today, she instructed
herself; there were other things that demanded her
attention. The party, the food, the guests; there were people
to fetch from Camiling, Manoling would have to drive, the
chauffeur's wife had to pick this week to have a miscarriage;
please Lord don't make it rain. . .

The morning had been without sun, and a wind had made
her shiver as she walked to church, two blocks down and
across the plaza, with Alice and Marilu, a niece who was
spending the holidays with them.

But the depression in her breast had lifted during Mass; a

miracle of grace, of that she was certain; and now in the
afternoon she glanced up at a patch of sky through the
leaves and was heartened to see the pearled overcast had
blown away. Between visits to the kitchen she lingered
among the mahjongg tables (no, she laughed, she wasn't
playing today: she was hostess and had no right to win all
their money); and she joined in the general gossip and her
eyes twinkled and she was happy and when one of the
maids informed her guiltily that the dog had escaped with a
slab of ham, she was only slightly annoyed, she didn't flare
up at all.

ALICE HEARD her mother laughing and was glad for her; it
was something she had missed, she thought, for a long,
long time. Her cousin Marilu fussed about the bedroom,
looking for an appropriate brooch, a misplaced earring,
treating her to a continuous monologue; but she hardly
listened, and she sat on her bed, finished with her dressing,
waiting for some cue before she could bring herself to
appear in the living room.

She didn't much like parties — honest now, she didn't; as a

matter of fact, they succeeded only in confusing her, and
she was bored with it all, the silly dances and the absurd
music and those horrid jokes that passed for wit; and she
wished for a sign, a blaze of flame in the night, to decide her
future, the vocation that was meant for her. If only she could
tell Mama — but they could no longer talk the way they
used to, when she was in high school and she could simply
tell her just anything. If only — but a suspicion came
between them, a holding back —

of course she was to blame, not Mama, Alice admitted to

herself. It was the being away too long, the series of loves
she had managed to keep secret from her mother, the other
places, the years. And it was not easy to discuss this thing
about Eddie and the strange deep voices that said go away,
live a life of sacrifice and silence, far away, in the hidden
valley, where God will speak to you all the day long, and the
night. Love was the name for a multitude of things, she
realized miserably: it was a broken, bleeding face above the
altars of the world, promising a bliss that time didn't destroy
but fulfilled; it was also an always remembered face crying
with sad desire and frustration against your face, in a pine-
fragrant night. . . .

"Don't you ever listen?" Marilu said.

Alice turned to her cousin, seated before the dresser,

correcting her lipstick; and she wished she were like her,
tomboyish and casual, untouched so far by the anguish of
any passion.

"I asked you, is Eddie coming?" Marilu said to the mirror.

"I'm beginning to fall for him too, do you mind?"

"You can have him," Alice said.

"Just kidding. Tell me, Alice, you asked him to come, didn't
you?"

"He called up," Alice said. "Somebody told him about the
party."

"That's what I like about him. Irrepressible. Man of action.

Following you all the way to Tarlae, staying in town with
friends — my, the guy's crazy about you."

Alice smiled waveringly. "He's crazy all right," she said.

"He's okay, as far as I'm concerned," Marilu said.

"You don't know him," Alice said, "you don't know Eddie." To
be alone with him. . .

". .. he loves you," Marilu said. "It's written all over him, and
I can tell a faker when I see one. And Eddie's the genuine
article. That necklace he gave you for Christmas, you ought
to wear it naman, it'll break his heart if you don't. My hair
okay? What's holding that zipper, it's stuck, there, thanks,
darling. You know, Eddie's a different sort — de-pendable,
that's what I'd call him. Unlike that guy from Ateneo — the
one with the funny crew cut — what's his name now? Romy,
that's it

— oh Alice, I'm so sorry, really I am, for awhile .I forgot he

was an old flame, tell me you forgive me."

"That's ancient history," Alice said, "over and done with."

"The heart breaks and the million pieces go on beating,

strong as ever," Marilu said. "Mine's made of asbestos.
There was this fellow from Basa — have I already told you
about this one? Squadron leader or something, a big shot.
Cute na cute, but when I was through with him he wasn't
worth the price of his tin wings. Are you going back to
Manila for New Year's Eve? We could do the clubs again, like
last year, I'll never forget that night. We had a flat right in
the middle of Taft, what a way to start off the year, and this
George Martinez. . ."

With a blue whirl of skirt, Alice stood up and went to the

window; the afternoon sun glimmered in the trees. Manoling
was driving out in the jeep; and the scream of the tires
turning sharply on the asphalt street startled her heart into
a rapid pounding.

"He shouldn't be driving like that," she said.

"Who shouldn't be driving?"

"Manoling," Alice said.

"That brother of yours, I can't figure him out," Marilu said.

T H E HIGHWAY to Camiling had been completed that year,

and Manoling imagined the fresh yellow lane-marker a
power shaft that hurled the jeep forward like a shell over the
harvested fields and the bare mounded hills. With Pepe
Santos sitting beside him, he pressed down steadily on the
gas, undaunted by the curves, the tires burning on the road.
His hands firm-knuckled about the wheel, the easy weight of
his foot conquering the miles ruthlessly, he was for the
duration of the trip supreme, indestructible; the freedom of
flight was a delicious surge in his blood; he was on a
journey, brief though it was, and he had a destination.

Pepe Santos clung to the windshield frame of the rocketing

jeep and pretended unconcern as they bypassed buses with
a whoosh of speed. They reached Camiling in a record
twenty-two minutes; his uncle and aunt were ready and
waiting for him. He drove back without enthusiasm, a
violence sullen within him; his eyes were focused on the
brown hills and the horizon of the slow unspooling road;
there was no need to watch the area instantly ahead, there
was no more thrill, driving in a jeep with his aunt and uncle,
and he felt insipid and vaguely ridiculous. The sun was cool
upon the stubble fields.

"How are your studies, Manoling?" his uncle said.

"I guess I'll get by, Tio." He added: "I'm trying my best, Tio."

"You can take over your father's practice, he's getting on in

years,"

his aunt said.

"Law's a fine course," his uncle said, "there's always room

for good lawyers, huh, Manoling?"

"Yes, Tio." He was being polite, pronouncing his replies with

care; he couldn't be casual with them; he saw them only
once or twice a year.
"Is Pepe here the son of Adeling Santos?" his aunt said. "Are
you, Pepe?"

"Yes, Mrs.," Pepe Santos said.

"So she has a young man now," his aunt said. "You and
Manoling must get around a lot." She chuckled indulgently.
"Take care you don't get hooked before you finish college.
Girls are on the look-out for fine boys like you two."

"Yes, yes, ma'am," Pepe Santos said.

A car was backing out from the yard when they arrived at
the house, and his aunt and uncle alighted in the street. His
mother was at an upstairs window and waved for them to
come on right up; his aunt called out happy birthday,
Chabeng, and dragged her husband after her. Manoling
swung the jeep back into the parking shed; the Olds was
nowhere around; his father hadn't come home for lunch. He
thought his father the most sought-after guest speaker in
town; eloquent, humorous and grave; he had to give it to his
old man.

He and Pepe sat in the jeep, smoking, and they heard the
guests in the house, laughing and talking, the slam and
rattle of the ivory cubes, in the cool darkening afternoon.
The phonograph began to play; rich food odors wafted down
to them from the kitchen; guests came in through the gate
and went up the house, Mayor Cabrera, and Dr.

Concepcion, and Mr. Macapinlac, and then a flock of girls

escorted by a straggle of young men. Manoling saw A1 and
Tony, but he preferred to stay where he was; later on he
might go up through the kitchen and take a shower and
maybe dance if there was a girl worth the effort.
The girls in town, so prim and proper: you can't even hold
their hands.

How different they are from Naty; and with unexpected

clarity he had a picture of the girl he had dated in the city,
the eyes languorous, the lips parted to receive him. She
worked in a flower shop on Dakota Street, near Herran; a
thin intense girl who kept asking if he truly loved her.
Please, darling, please tell me the truth, you know how I
love you. But he must never see her again; he had promised
the priest at the last retreat not to see her ever again; she
was an occasion of sin, the priest had said, a somber, hawk-
nosed Jesuit who had hesitated, staring at him piercingly
through the grille, before giving him absolution.

"Play basketball tomorrow?" Pepe asked.

"Sure," Manoling said.

"With Tony, and Al, and Bert, we can take on any team those
Don Bosco guys can whip up. We'll teach that bunch a thing
or two."

"Sure thing," he said.

"There isn't much else a fellow can do in this town, is

there?" Pepe said. "Basketball can get corny. Hey, how
about a drive down Angeles tonight? Bert's been raving
about a hostess he's found down there. A real classy
mestiza. How about it, huh, your folks won't miss you."

"No1. No," he said, and across his mind flitted an image of

the woman, anonymous in the dim dirty forlorn twilight of a
bar. "You and your lousy ideas." He gripped the wheel, as if
he wanted to twist it off, force it into another shape.
"What's eating you?" said Pepe. "Aah, you in the Legion of
Mary or something?"

"Shut up," Manoling said.

The music from the house tugged at him with the subtlety of
a sensual temptation. A breeze fanned their cigarette smoke
away, and he smelled the clean dryness of the yard and the
thick overhanging leaves.

"Want to go hunting?" he asked.

"Dames?"

"You got nothing in your fool head but dames. I mean real
hunting.

Wild pigeon and duck, out in Mayantoc. Do you a lot of good

to be out there for a change."

"Now that's a bright idea," Pepe said.

"I'll get us a couple of twenty-two's. Maybe you can borrow

your brother-in-law's shotgun. It'll be fine this time of year."

"Better than nothing," Pepe said. "When do we go?"

"Day after tomorrow," Manoling said. "Monday." He hailed

the houseboy going down the kitchen steps to come over.
"Anselmo —

bring us two beers, will you? And make it fast!"

They drank from the wet frosted bottles; the sun had set
and it was very cool .now under the trees. The beer warmed
Manoling's chest and glowed off his face, and he lit a fresh
cigarette; he slouched farther down in the canvas seat and
looked up at the lighted windows of the sala, the
phonograph playing "White Christmas," and there was Alice
dancing with her latest young man; there'll be another one
pretty soon, he mused, and what does Alice have anyway,
she's no Ava Gardner. He chain-smoked with Pepe Santos, in
the jeep, and a sleepy laziness spread through him; he could
stay there until morning, and they can have their dance and
their yakety-yak, pardon me, but I'm sitting this one out,
thank you. In a haze of beer and cigarettes, he imagined the
day after tomorrow: in the clean chill of dawn he and Pepe
crossed the river to the swamps west of the town; and there
was a mist curling over the reeds, and the birds arched
whitely, so beautifully in the pearled light before the sun.
The rifle solid and accurate in his hands, he was a hunter
among the hills, away from Naty and the woman in Angeles
and all the whores in the world, the sweat running down his
chest and arms, strong and pure with thirst and hunger in
the warm clean sun, under the solitary sky. . .

"I'm going up," Pepe said. "How about you?"

"Later," Manoling said. "You go on ahead." It was fine, in the

shed, better than being up there, in the house; you had to
be polite and say all sorts of fancy things you didn't mean in
the first place and maybe have to dance with a girl who held
you off in a slow-drag. He watched Pepe disappear around
the house; and he sat there in the abrupt twilight and
wanted another beer. He would have to drive his aunt and
uncle back tonight; then he could be alone, driving back,
and speed, he thought, the wind rushing by like floodwaters,
faster, headlights corrl-ing toward him, on the wrong lane
uncaringly he flung himself toward the splintering crash. . .

The headlights flashed past him, into the shed. His father
parked the car beside the jeep, gunning the motor before he
switched off the engine.
"Is that you, Manoling?"

"Yes, Papa."

"Why aren't you up there?" His father picked up his coat

from the automobile and put it on.

"It's— it's good, just being here," Manoling said. He could

hear his father breathing hard; he hadn't driven for some
time; in the half-light, his hair greyish, he seemed very old
and tired. The stranger who was his father. . .

"What's that you're drinking?"

"Beer," Manoling said.

"No hard stuff now. And c'mon up, it's your mother's
birthday."

"Yes, Pa," Manoling said.

CARLOS DE LEON buttoned up his coat and brushed the

invisible dust off his sleeves as he stepped into the front
parlor. A trio of young men jerked up into a serious good
evening; he nodded to them per-functorily and halted at the
foot of the stairway to regain his breath, and the sounds of
the party cascaded down to him, the phonograph's tango,
the simultaneous voices and laughter. There goes
Chabeng's small party — some friends, and close relatives;
the whole town's taken over the house.

He held on to the banister post, warm and uncomfortable

from his trip (but it had been a distinct pleasure to drive
again), until his breathing was normal; he repaired the knot
of his tie and emerged into the wide bright sala, and he was
saying hello in his professionally vigorous manner and
shaking hands with Father Panlilio and Mayor Cabrera and
Dr.

Concepcion. Chabeng was busy encouraging her guests

toward the dining room; he kissed her on the cheek to make
up for being late; he had an impossible time, he apologized,
escaping from those people in San Fernando. Alice was in
earnest conversation with a young man; he had not met
him; looked like a decent chap, though, but you never can
tell.

He waved a general greeting around the sala and joined

Mayor Cabrera's circle by the Christmas tree.

Somebody handed him a glass of whiskey-soda; the iced

drink trailed a warmth down his throat. The men argued
around him, and Dr.

Concepcion was asking, did he think there was real danger

of global war in that Israel incident?

"I don't think so," Carlos de Leon said. "It'll simmer down.
The world can't afford another war."

"The dictators desire war, but never the people, the

common people," Mayor Cabrera said.

"Wars have their beginnings in the soul," said Father Panlilio.

"True, Father," Carlos de Leon said, "very true." He

remembered a phrase from one of his speeches: "We have
need of the bread of peace." It pleased him to be able to say
it again, and he took a satisfied swallow of his drink.

"I was reading this article the other day/' said Dr.
Concepcion,
"about the fall-out in an atomic war. Nobody's going to live
through it."

"That's just too bad," Atty. Borja said with intrusive

animation.

"Let's forget these wars, tonight's no time for that kind of

talk, eh, gentlemen? A toast to Chabeng!" and he arrested
her in her flutter across the room, raised his glass in an
exaggerated salute. "Many happy returns, Chabeng, good
luck, good health!" he declaimed, tipsy and teasing.

"Thank you, Sebio, thank you. Father — Mayor — you

haven't eaten! I didn't — Carlos, take care of them, will
you?" and she was in the midst of another group, earrings
glinting, chubby hands describing quick eager gestures.

The phonograph stopped. The guests crowded about the

buffet tables; they assaulted the stuffed turkeys, the lechon,
the fried chicken and the mayonnaised fish, the array of
dishes that the fat imported cook had prepared for them; a
woman shrilled in mock-indignant protest: " Dios mio,
Chabeng! All these calories — and pity also my weight,"

and after the older folks came Alice and her coterie, the tall
tight-lipped young man, and Marilu and the girls in their red
and blue and green ballerinas, giggling, balanced expertly
on their high heels. Carlos de Leon asked Pepe Santos,
chewing away intently in a corner, to go down and get
Manoling. "Tell him it's an order," he said, affecting a rough
grim tone; what's the matter with that boy, maybe he had
another spat with his mother; and he carried his plate to the
Mayor's company by the Christmas tree.

"I haven't given up the projects," Mayor Cabrera was saying.

"But we need more donations from you people."
"Carlos here can cover any deficit," Atty Borja said.

"I think he should," Mayor Cabrera said. "After all, he

ordered his tenants to vote for me. At least that's what he
says."

"This Almazan in the council," Dr. Concepcion said. "He'll do

all he can to block you. He and that Galang."

"I can handle them/' Mayor Cabrera said.

Atty. Borja asked: "Father, are you in favor of the Church

getting involved in politics?"

"The Church has her duties," Father Panlilio said. "The voter
is also a member of the Church, don't forget that."

Atty. Borja said the Church should be above politics; it was a

complicated business, they all agreed. Carlos de Leon
deposited his plate on a shelf and accepted somebody's
offer of a cigarette; he had run out of cigars. He inhaled a
thick drag of smoke, and a dot of pain sprang in his heart
without warning.

He winced, releasing the smoke, more from surprise than

from the stab of pain; it happened to others; it couldn't be
happening to him.

They weren't looking at him; Father Panlilio was talking

about the duties of the Church. He stood still, took a wary
breath, and the dot lengthened into a bar in his chest. But
he willed his face not to betray anything; no one looked at
him; he must not collapse, here, in the sala, before all these
people; it would be a scandal, a terrible loss of dignity.

"Excuse me," he said and his mind, like a detached judge,

noted the naturalness in his voice, the hand dropping the
cigarette on an ashtray.

Must not create a scene, here: suddenly it was as though

nothing else mattered. He made his way across the sala, his
hands sweating coldly; he fixed a smile on his face; the pain
seared his chest, the hot heavy bar of pain. He reached his
bedroom door, opened it, closed it to the sala, leaned on the
wood, and was baffled and angry at the pain.

But his mind, as though removed somewhere and viewing

his pre-dicament with telescopic eyes, spoke to him calmly,
evenly: do not panic, this will pass. What was one to do? Lie
down, rest, lighten the load of the suffering heart... Bearing
the huge burden of his pain, he moved to the bed; the floor
see-sawed beneath him; he sat on the spread; his hands
were cold, so cold and trembling, and he held them before
him and saw them trembling at the bottom of a whirlpool
and they were intolerably sad to him. He would not lie down,
he would not be horizontal and utterly helpless; he would
drown; and he pushed the pillows up against the headboard
and sank reclining on them. And his feet were cold, and he
looked at his shoes on the quilt, his feet freezing in them, a
long way from him, not parts of his body any more.

The door was receding into a distance, and he himself was

drifting away in waves of darkness, gasping, and powerless
against the tide. On the far shore were the lights and the
voices, fading, Dr. Concepcion, Father Panlilio, far away.
Soundlessly he called for his wife, and Alice, and Manoling,
why don't you come up to the house, my son, why do you sit
there alone in the dark?

He was lonely in the pain-infested, darkening, swaying sea;

he began to pray the Act of Contrition. "... and I dread the
loss of heaven..."
He could not remember the rest of the words, and he said
the Our Father, over and over; and he saw dim figures
approaching, and they cried out to him, "Help us!" and he
was rent by a sorrowful longing to help them, but he could
not, he was in pain. The figures became his wife and Alice
and Manoling, and a host of others he did not recognize, a
number of them barefoot and in rags, advancing with the
full force of their poverty, mortality and helplessness, as
though he were a priest and the world were doomed, and he
could not help them because he was lost in his own agony.
He felt himself going away from their overwhelming
pleading need, from his body and its tearing flame, flying
through a swirling darkness into another colder darkness.

He wandered in a country of night, in the depths of a sea,

with only a flickering consciousness left with which he
groped his way. Once in the deep night he heard fragments
of dance music, and a Christmas song, muted and holy,
coming to him from hundreds of years ago; and dimly, as in
a fevered dream, Alice's broken whispering, and a man's
cruel laughter. And even as he searched for his life in the
alien land, he believed that he was dead. So this is how it is
to die outside grace: the tiredness, the seeking, the cold,
and the night forever...

But he did not die that night, that year. He returned from his
farawayness, and opened his eyes to the room, the shaded
lamp, the door, the walls of the familiar house. The pain was
gone, and with an inner ear he listened to his heart
throbbing, weak and exhausted but still pumping the living
blood. He lay still, propped against the pillows; it was only
after a while that he was aware of the absence of the party
noise. A wind passed with a dry whirring sound in the trees,
and from somewhere down the street, a faint chorus of
carolers floated into the room. How long had he lain there?
It seemed no one had missed him; they must have thought
him merely asleep, indifferent, unharmed.

Chabeng must be in the kitchen, supervising the maids,

tidying up, unable to postpone the task for daylight. Had he
loved her once deeply, long ago? It was quarter past one by
the clock on the dresser.

Breathing, tasting the humble tang of his being alive, he

remained on the bed and listened to the December wind
and the late carolers singing joy to the world, the Lord had
come. The wind's passage became the farewell of the year
coming to an end; it sighed over the roof, pointing the arrow
of the weather vane westward with the ending season; it
carried away all the days and the nights now past like
leaves.

Three more days, and it would be another year; and it was

as though he could hear on the wind the regretful tolling,
and then the brave exultant pealing of the bells on New
Year's Eve, awaited but somehow already a memory.

Chabeng de Leon opened the door. "They were looking for

you -"

But instantly she saw how strange and broken he looked

from his anguished journey, how remote and alone. Their
eyes met, and a chill of knowledge trembled between them.
"Carlos," she said, and "God, oh dear God," as her husband
tried to speak but no words came, his mouth able only to
form a dumb strained gasp; and she moved toward him with
a fear as deep and overwhelming as love.

The Young Man

EVERYONE IS smiling in the photograph: his father and
mother, his sisters Lisa and Belen, and the other girls in the
row of chairs, and the young men seated on the floor,
smiling into the present through the pale yellowish tone of
years in the high-ceilinged sala of the house in Tarlac.

Directly behind the group is a broad Christmas tree topped

by a star. The picture is framed, on one side, by the profile
of an upright piano, its keyboard uncovered, and by a tall
window, on the left, with horizontal grilles (he remembers
the feel of loose flaked rust on his boy-fingers); beyond is
the dark glimmer of a garden. He wonders now if the white
stone angel is still there, brooding under the peaceful trees.

His father sits casually in his de kilo coat, his expression

amused and tolerant (he was probably thinking: Ah, these
young people, they must have a party, complete with
photographer), still strong and hale, with a doctor's solid
reassuring voice, smiling at the Christmas Eve and a few
more seasons safe from the gradual evil blankness of mind
that he himself, for all his skill, would not be able to cure nor
charm away.

His mother is wearing a flower-printed balintawak dress, a

small plump woman with a proud, alert face. The girls look
into the camera (perhaps Mr. Palaganas' battered tripod)
with a kind of tense, bright eagerness against the
illuminating flash that accents their youngness, eighteen
and nineteen and twenty-one. The boys sit on the floor in
diverse attitudes: his brother Pepe leaning back toward the
girls in mock-mis-chief, his uncle Carlos grinning stiffly, one
among them with a fat, surprised stare, another half-
sprawled and seemingly asleep and dreaming deliciously,
and the young man Nito in the middle of their disorderly
row, deliberate and poised and obviously the tallest, his
smile faint and solemn, neat in a white coat, gazing, it
would seem, into something that the rest could not be
aware of or desire to understand.

It is Nito who becomes the center of the picture; he alone is

in full view, hands and shoulders and legs revealed without
infringement, as if by design. His white suit gives an
impression of individual cleanness; the other young men in
contrast appear vague and tangled and a trifle shabby. He
holds, as it were, the other people together; his presence
has inspired a spontaneous unity; it is as if he, as much as
the Christmas party, were the occasion for the picture. Nito
alone in the party seems to desire one's total attention, to
speak something vital and serious, a knowledge that he has
learned with some pain.

Because he was only a boy often, he must have been

upstairs when the picture was taken, a late hour certainly,
listening on the threshold of sleep to the music and the talk
and laughter. From the stairs, he had watched the dancing
through the banisters: the girls and the young men waltzing
and tangoing tirelessly to the Victrola and shuffling through
the boogie and fox-trot numbers with expressive little cries
when Nito played the piano. Looking down on the sala, the
couples whirling against the tile gleam of the floor, he soon
grew sleepy and went to bed, hopeful that in the morning,
he would find the bicycle under the Christmas tree, his
father's gift. He had by then ceased to believe in Santa
Claus, not without an emptiness, as he would lose faith in
the inevitable successive myths; but that would be a long
time yet, and he was only a boy sleeping after a long day's
play. He woke up once and heard them singing "Joy to the
World," their chorus sounding distant through the dark and
the blankets of sleep. With a child's pure, transcendent
vision, he sensed the December sky above the town, the
enormous clusters of stars burning coldly, their light falling
like the softest powder of snow, he imagined, like the
whiteness in the cards his sisters sent to their friends, falling
in silence on the roof and the trees, on the plaza and the
church and all the houses, raining down upon the town
through the vast Christmas night while he lay warmly in the
dark and listened to the singing and the year moving closer
to its end.

A WAR and a time of manhood later, he discovers the

picture in his sister's home: he has come to spend
Christmas with Lisa and Berting and the children. After the
first pleasurable recognition, he finds himself wondering at
Nito's grave quietness in the photograph; he remembers
him as an unusually jocular fellow, laughing easily, his eyes
twinkling, and he walked about with a certain slight
swagger, as though he had not a care in the world. The faint
smile, the pained, brooding gaze might have been part of
Nito's act, the humorist striking a wry pose for the
photographer; but he would have looked more natural had
he leaned back teasingly toward the girls, like Pepe, and
pretended to pinch their legs. But perhaps, in that
photographed moment, when there had been a lull in the
dancing, had Nito felt a premonition of some dark fate. . .

He dismisses the fancy in a rush of loyalty to the young

man, recalling the party in his father's house, the dancing
and the laughter, and Nito bent exaggeratedly over the
piano keys, his shoulders bobbing to the bright swinging
beat of music that he alone could make.

Nito was his brother's friend; they were classmates in law

school.

Pepe would come home with him on Sundays, once or twice

a month, and they would take the first trip back to the city
early the next morning. He came from some place in the
South; at first, everybody had thought his accent atrociously
funny, but he spoke with a vigor, a kind of authority that
cancelled this possible shortcoming, and he had a warm
teasing brand of humor. His father and mother liked Nito the
first time Pepe brought him home that year; there was that
quality about him, a positive innocence that no malice could
ever soil; he was the sort who would not pay much attention
to any form of despair.

Pepe called him Gus, but to the rest o£the family, he

became Nito, short for Agustinito, which was his real
nickname, he said. He was a young man with many
enthusiasms: basketball, tennis, jazz, novels; he was an
amateur magician, a good dancer, a passable mechanic; he
made the old family car run again when it got stuck in the
driveway. On those weekends he came home with Pepe, and
during that Christmas he spent with the family, and the two
weeks of the following summer, he transformed the house
into a brighter place: conversation sparkled at table;
everyday affairs took on a brisk energy; in the evenings,
there always seemed to be a party in the living room, even
if it was only Lisa and Belen or Mr. Macapinlac's daughters
from next door prevailing upon the guest to play the piano
or entertain them with his comic stories.

He remembers one such evening, Lisa's birthday in the

last»week of the young man's stay in the summer. Nito
stood in the sala, tall among the girls, laughing his easy
laugh under the mellow globes of light; he was talking in his
rapid characteristic way, nodding his head for emphasis,
certain of himself, at ease; he would find his destiny, joy and
comfort and success in life, immune from anguish and
defeat. His humor was not trivial; it was the complement of
his optimism; the future held only the best of the brightest
things. The girls, perhaps sensing this, were drawn to him as
to an imperishable dream: they were all secure in his
company. He danced with all the girls but concentrated on
Lisa later in the evening, the swagger barely perceptible in
his movements, bending low to whisper in Lisa's ear, the tall
laughing young man who would never be defeated. He, the
small young brother, watched them with the
encouragement of an accomplice, admiring Nito's
handsome confidence, his tall and easy manner.

But on the night before Nito left that summer, conversation

was subdued, even his father's booming laugh had a hollow
ring in it somehow. Nito's departure, announced with his
usual banter (Tomorrow, you'll finally get rid of me and have
some quiet around the house), broke the spell he had woven
with his presence; the family felt the threat of loneliness.
Because there was a moon, they went for a walk across the
town, he and Nito and Pepe, his sisters and a cousin,
strolling about in the plaza for the sake of being out in the
high waning moonlight. Nito still teased the girls and tried a
couple of his fantastic jokes, but he received little response;
when they sat on the steps of the kiosko, no one had much
to say. Wind passed over the trees and the church and the
high school washed pale in the moonlight; abruptly it was
late in the night, and going back through the town (the main
street clean and empty and plunging straight infinitely
beyond the moonlight), there was nothing else to say. The
girls walked bunched slowly together, as if for the warmth of
a secret, while he and Nito and Pepe followed behind, their
steps whispering loud in the quiet hour. The last he saw of
Nito, the young man was in the sala with Lisa and Pepe
(before the grilled window in the photograph); the three
stood there, facing the garden and the statue of the angel
and the trees in the April night.

He woke up late in the morning; Nito was gone, the day

empty and silent with his absence. The rains came, and he
was in the sixth grade; Pepe had gone back to his classes in
the city. The war began and although it did not strike the
town, its pain and loss invaded their lives: Pepe did not
return (he was free not to go, his mother said, dazed and
murmuring and old suddenly); when the soldiers were
released from Capas, his father volunteered the ground floor
for a relocation center; the men waited beneath the trees in
the yard, pale and sickly, and sullen as exiles in a foreign
country.

One afternoon in the city, long after the war, riding a bus
through Quiapo, he thought he saw Nito in the pedestrian-
crowd; but the hurrying figure turned out to be someone
else, a boy with a crew-cut and not as tall. Prompted by an
impulse like a kind of nostalgia, he asked classmates from
the South if they knew Nito's family; they had never met
him, nor heard of the name. In a night club once,
celebrating New Year's Eve with his girl and their friends, he
thought he heard Nito's chuckling laugh, the unabashed
accents of his voice, but the lights were dim and the faces
blurred and the memory discarded swiftly in the moment's
boisterous happiness.

Now he wonders whatever has happened to the young man

Nito, why he had never written nor visited again. Perhaps,
he had died in the war, like Pepe. Or he had survived the
universal ruin, treating it as no more than a ridiculous
fantasy, to be dismissed with the flick of a wrist; the attitude
is not improbable. Perhaps, Nito had married since then; he
is somewhere here in the city, laughing his easy laugh,
teasing a wife as joyful and irrepressible, joking with his
children, and going through life with that slight swagger and
drawing to himself, like a magician, all the good things, the
bright and shining things.

He looks once more at the young man in the photograph,

the tragic smile so out of context with the warm, buoyant
image that he has treasured. The faces smile at him on a
Christmas Eve in Tarlac, in the year of Nito and Pepe and the
dancing and the bicycle shining its chro-mium miracle under
the Christmas tree. Nito presides in the center of the group,
wanting to tell him something. . .

Lisa comes into the room and he closes the picture-album.

He sits back and lights a cigarette, words and images
forming in his mind, breaking up and fading away like
smoke. His sister leans out the window, peering into the
evening street below, and calls out her youngest boy's
name; she gives up after the third try, and settles down on
the sofa beside him. The heat of the kitchen glistens on her
face as she sags against the cushions with a loud sigh.

"Want me to look for him?"

"He'll tire soon enough and come home. Give me a

cigarette."

He lights one for her, noting the globules of sweat on her

nose, the loose strands of hair pasted on her brow. She
smokes furiously, exhaling thick streams of smoke toward
the low stained ceiling. She squashes the half-finished
cigarette in the ashtray and muttering something about the
maid, drags herself back to the kitchen, her slippers
flapping across the floor.

She comes back after the interval of another cigarette,

passing a comb through her hair; her stout oval face is oily
and impassive, long unexposed to wind and sun. She
returns to her place on the sofa, reaches out for the radio
and catches the last bars of a Christmas carol. She shuts it
off in the middle of the succeeding commercial and resumes
combing her hair, knotting it tight in a bun.

"What's taking them so long?"

"A traffic jam, I suppose," he answers. "You know how it is
this time of year."

"He shouldn't have brought the girls along. All that dust and
hurry downtown."

Her son bounces up from the stairs, a thin sprightly boy with
large bright eyes, ducking into the bedroom before his
mother could begin to scold him. She gestures a weary
circle with the comb: "I'd rather have half-a-dozen girls. Any
time. Boys — it's different with boys. They are so — I don't
know — impossible."

"Have you heard from Belen?"

"No. Why?"

"I was thinking. . . We should get together one Christmas. . .

"

"She has her family."

"Wouldn't it be fine. . . It's been a long time, Lisa - "

"If we had the old place in the province. . ."

"I've been looking over the pictures."

"Pictures?" She slaps at a mosquito on her arm.

"The photographs, in that album."

"Those are very old ones."

"Lisa, you remember Nito?"

"Nito?" Her face remains dull, unfocused. "Who's Nito?"

"The tall fellow." He feels suddenly in the room, like an
accusation against them both, all the years that she has not
heard the name. "Pepe's friend — the guy who used to

"Oh, Nito/' and for the flicker of a moment a light seems to

shine over the tired indifferent eyes. "But that was so long
ago."

"That Christmas Eve he spent with us. . ." He grows

conscious of his homelessness; he thinks of his rented room
above an alley in Quiapo, the anonymous job in the
government bureau. What have I done with my life? (The
boy watching the dancing through the banister.. .) "There
was a party — in the sala —"

"Yes?" absently while she tries to relate this evening to the

night of her laughing slender girlness; a thirtyish woman not
quite familiar with remembrance. "Was there a dance?"

"Yes, there was. You danced most of the time with him,
remember? He was quite a fellow, Nito."

"I guess he was."

But Berting and her daughters are coming up the apartment

stairs.

Her husband struggles into the room with a pine cutting, the
girls talking all at once.

"Here, Papa, we must put it here, near the window."

"No, it'll look better here, under the mirror, Papa."

Berting pauses in the middle of the room, the pine branch

held in both hands, as if he does not know what to do with
it. Finally he drops it on the table, dabbing at his sweat with
a balled handkerchief. "I hate riding on those crowded
buses," Berting informs him. "We wasted a whole hour in a
traffic jam."

"I told you to buy it last week," says Lisa.

"Where will we put the tree, Mama, where?"

"There, by the window of course."

"Mama, I saw the prettiest doll in a store downtown. You'll

get it for me, please, Mama?"

Her little boy has joined them in the room, and he is tugging
at Lisa's arm: "And a pistol for me, huh, Mama?"

His mother keeps nodding but she is not listening; she is

frowning at the sparse lusterless needles of the pine branch.
With a resigned shrug, she plants the branch in the draped
kerosene can she has prepared earlier in the day; it looks
shorter and wilted, now that it is vertical.

The children bring out a box of ornaments, and with little

piping shouts of energy and delight, proceed to load the
tree with tinsel ribbons and cardboard bells and tinfoil stars.
Lisa stands back without comment, like a stern, loveless
teacher waiting to point out the first mistake; his brother-in-
law lingers in the doorway to the bedroom, looking dusty
and exhausted, fanning himself with a folded newspaper. It
is Nena, the eldest (she looks most like Lisa when a young
girl), who directs the job; she is bright-eyed and eager as
she flits about the tree: "Give me the big star, we'll put it on
top. There, ayan, how beautiful!"

He smiles encouragingly at the child Nena, standing on a

chair and fastening the topmost star with such a glowing of
joy and certitude, urging her on in his heart (so young, so
unmindful of time); and he thinks of Lisa and Belen in
another December, the girls and the young men dancing in
the gleaming sala in Tarlac; and Nito tall and laughing and
unconquerable, going forth to his destiny with his casual
swaggering stride, the young man whom everyone loved,
Pepe's best friend, solemn and brooding forever (the dark
knowledge in his eyes), in the photograph taken on the
Christmas Eve he was ten and a boy safe in his father's
house, listening to the voices downstairs singing along the
warm, familiar boundary of sleep, while he dreamed only of
the morning's surprise and the starlight falling in silence,
softly, upon the town.

Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro

FROM THE upstairs veranda, Dr. Lazaro had a view of stars,

the country darkness, the lights on the distant highway at
the edge of town.

The phonograph in the sala played Chopin — like a vast

sorrow con-trolled, made familiar, he had been wont to
think. But as he sat there, his lean frame in the habitual
slack repose he took after supper, and stared at the plains
of night that had evoked gentle images and even a kind of
peace (in the end, sweet and invincible oblivion), Dr. Lazaro
remembered nothing, his mind lay untouched by any
conscious thought, he was scarcely aware of the April heat;
the patterns of music fell around him and dissolved swiftly,
uncomprehended. It was as though indifference were an
infection that had entered his blood; it was everywhere in
his body. In the scattered light from the sala his angular face
had a dusty, wasted quality; only his eyes contained life. He
could have remained there all evening, unmoving, and
buried, as it were, in a strange half-sleep, had his wife not
come to tell him he was wanted on the phone.

Gradually his mind stirred, focused; as he rose from the

chair he recognized the somber passage in the sonata that,
curiously, made him think of ancient monuments, faded
stone walls, a greyness. The brain filed away an image, an
arrangement of sounds released it. . . He switched off the
phonograph, suppressed an impatient quiver in his throat as
he reached for the phone: everyone had a claim on his time.

He thought: why not the younger ones for a change? He had

spent a long day at the provincial hospital.

The man was calling from a service station outside the town
— the station after the agricultural high school, and before
the San Miguel bridge, the man added rather needlessly in a
voice at once frantic yet oddly subdued and courteous. Dr.
Lazaro had heard it countless times, in the corridors of the
hospital, in waiting rooms: the perpetual awkward misery.
He was Pedro Esteban, the brother of the doctor's tenant in
Nambalan, said the voice, trying to make itself less sudden
and remote.

But the connection was faulty, there was a humming in the

wires, as though darkness had added to the distance
between the house in the town and the station beyond the
summer fields. Dr. Lazaro could barely catch the severed
phrases. The man's week-old child had a high fever, a bluish
skin; its mouth would not open to suckle. They could not
take the baby to the poblacion, they would not dare move it;
its body turned rigid when touched. If the doctor would
consent to come at so late an hour, Esteban would wait for
him at the station. If the doctor would be so kind. . .
Tetanus of the new-born: that was elementary, and most
likely it was also hopeless, a waste of time. Dr. Lazaro said
yes, he would be there; he had committed himself to that
answer, long ago; duty had taken the place of an exhausted
compassion. The carelessness of the poor, the infected
blankets, the toxin moving toward the heart: they were
casual scribbled items of a clinical report. But outside the
grilled windows, the night suddenly seemed alive and
waiting. He had no choice left now but action: it was the
only certitude — he sometimes reminded himself — even if
it should prove futile, before the descent into nothingness.

His wife looked up from her needles and twine, under the
shaded lamp of the bedroom; she had finished the pullover
for the grandchild in Baguio and had begun work, he noted,
on another of those altar vestments for the parish church.
Religion and her grandchild certainly kept her busy. . . She
looked at him, not so much to inquire as to be spoken to: a
large and placid woman.

"I shouldn't have let the driver go home so early," Dr. Lazaro
said.

"They had to wait till now to call. . . The child's probably

dead. .

"Ben can drive for you."

"I hardly see that boy around the house. He seems to be on

vacation both from home and school."

"He's downstairs," his wife said.

Dr. Lazaro put on a fresh shirt, buttoned it with tense abrupt

motions. "I thought he'd gone out again. . . Who's that girl
he's been seeing? . . . It's not just warm, it's hot. You
should've stayed on in Baguio... There's disease, suffering,
death, because Adam ate the apple.

They must have an answer to everything. . ." He paused at

the door, as though for the echo of his words.

Mrs. Lazaro had resumed her knitting; in the circle of yellow

light, her head bowed, she seemed absorbed in some
contemplative prayer.

But her silences had ceased to disturb him, like the plaster
saints she kept in the room, in their cases of glass, or that
air she wore of conspiracy, when she left with Ben for Mass
in the mornings. Dr. Lazaro would ramble about miracle
drugs, politics, music, the common sense of his unbelief;
unrelated things strung together in a monologue; he posed
questions, supplied his own answers; and she would merely
nod, with an occasional "Yes?" and "Is that so?" and
something like a shadow of anxiety in her gaze.

He hurried down the curving stairs, under the votive lamps

of the Sacred Heart. Ben lay sprawled on the sofa, in the
front parlor, engrossed in a book, one leg propped against
the back cushions. "Come along, we're going somewhere,"
Dr. Lazaro said, and went into the clinic for his medical bag.
He added a vial of penstrep, an ampule of caffeine to the
satchel's contents; rechecked the bag before closing it; the
catgut would last just one more patient. One can only cure,
and know nothing beyond one's work... There had been the
man, today, in the hospital: the cancer pain no longer
helped by the doses of mor-phine; the patient's eyes
flickering their despair in the eroded face. Dr.

Lazaro brushed aside the stray vision as he strode out of the

white-washed room; he was back in his element, among
syringes, steel instruments, quick decisions, and it gave him
a sort of blunt energy.

"I'll drive, Pa?" Ben followed him through the kitchen, where
the maids were ironing the week's wash, gossiping, and out
to the yard, the dimness of the single bulb under the eaves.
The boy pushed back the folding doors of the garage and
slid behind the wheel.

"Somebody's waiting at the gas station near San Miguel. You

know the place?"

"Sure," Ben said.

The engine sputtered briefly and stopped. "Battery's weak,"

Dr.

Lazaro said. "Try it without the lights," and he smelled the

gasoline overflow as the old Pontiac finally lurched around
the house and through the trellised gate, its front beams
sweeping over the dry dusty street.

BUT HE'S all right, Dr. Lazaro thought as they swung

smoothly into the main avenue of the town, past the church
and the plaza, the kiosko bare for once in a season of
fiestas, the lamp-posts shining on the quiet square. They did
not speak; he could sense his son's concentration on the
road, and he noted, with a tentative amusement, the
intense way the boy sat behind the wheel, his eagerness to
be of help. They passed the drab frame-houses behind the
marketplace, and the capitol building on its landscaped hill,
the gears shifting easily as they went over the rail tracks
that crossed the last asphalted section of the main street.

Then the road was pebbled and uneven, the car bucking
slightly; and they were speeding between open fields, a
succession of narrow wooden bridges breaking the
crunching drive of the wheels. Dr. Lazaro gazed at the wide
darkness around them, the shapes of trees and bushes
hurling toward them and sliding away, and he saw the stars,
nearer now, they seemed, moving with the car. He thought
of light years, black space, infinite distances; in the
unmeasured universe, man's life flared briefly and was
gone, traceless in the void. He turned away from the
emptiness. He said: "You seem to have had a lot of practice,
Ben."

"A lot of what, Pa?"

"The way you drive. Very professional."

In the glow of the dashboard lights, the boy's face relaxed,

smiled.

"Tio Cesar let me use his car, in Manila. On special

occasions."

"No reckless driving now/' Dr. Lazaro said. "Some fellows

think it's smart. Gives them a thrill. Don't be like that."

"No, I won't, Pa. I just like to drive and go places, that's all."

Dr. Lazaro watched the young face intent on the road, a

cowlick over the forehead, the small curve of the nose, his
own face before he left to study in another country, a young
student full of illusions, a lifetime ago; long before the loss
of faith, God turning abstract, unknowable, and everywhere,
it seemed to him, those senseless accidents of pain. He felt
a need to define unspoken things, to come closer somehow
to the last of his sons; one of these days, before the boy's
vacation was over, they might go on a picnic together, a trip
to the farm; a special day for the two of them — father and
son, as well as friends. In the two years Ben had been away
in college, they had written a few brief, almost formal letters
to each other: your money is on the way, these are the best
years, make the most of them. . .

Time was moving toward them, was swirling around and

rushing away, and it seemed Dr. Lazaro could almost hear
its hollow receding roar; and discovering his son's profile
against the flowing darkness, he had a thirst to speak. He
could not find what it was he had meant to say.

The agricultural school buildings came up in the headlights

and glided back into blurred shapes behind a fence.

"What was that book you were reading, Ben?"

"A biography," the boy said.

"Statesman? Scientist maybe?"

"It's about a guy who became a Trappist monk."

"That your summer reading?" Dr. Lazaro asked with a small

laugh, half mockery, half affection. "You're getting to be a
regular saint, like your mother."

"It's an interesting book," Ben said.

"I can imagine. . He dropped the bantering tone. "I suppose

you'll go on to medicine after your A.B.?"

"I don't know yet, Pa."

Tiny moths like blown bits of paper flew toward the

windshield and funneled away above them. "You don't have
to be a country doctor like me, Ben. You could build up a
good practice in the city. Specialize in cancer, maybe, or
neuro-surgery, and join a good hospital." It was like trying to
recall some rare happiness, in the car, in the shifting
darkness.

"I've been thinking about it," Ben said. "It's a vocation, a

great one.

Being able to really help people, I mean."

"You've done well in math, haven't you?"

"Well enough, I guess," Ben said.

"Engineering is a fine course too," Dr. Lazaro said. "There'll

be lots of room for engineers. Far too many lawyers and
salesmen. Now if your brother — " He closed his eyes,
erasing the slashed wrists, part of the future dead in a
boarding-house room, the landlady whimpering,

"He was such a nice boy, Doctor, your son. . ." Sorrow lay in
ambush among the years.

"I have all summer to think about it," Ben said.

"There's no hurry," Dr. Lazaro said. What was it he had

wanted to say? Something about knowing each other, about
sharing; no, it was not that at all. . .

THE STATION appeared as they coasted down the incline of

a low hill, its fluorescent lights the only brightness on the
plain before them, on the road that led farther into deeper
darkness. A freight truck was taking on a load of gasoline as
they drove up the concrete apron and stopped beside the
station shed.

A short barefoot man in a patchwork shirt shuffled forward

to meet them. "I am Esteban, Doctor," the man said, his
voice faint and hoarse, almost inaudible, and he bowed
slightly with a careful politeness. He stood blinking, looking
up at the doctor, who had taken his bag and flashlight from
the car. In the windless space, Dr. Lazaro could hear
Esteban's labored breathing, the clank of the metal nozzle
as the attendant replaced it in the pump. The men in the
truck stared at them curiously.

Esteban said, pointing at the darkness beyond the road: "We

will have to go through those fields, Doctor, then cross the
river." The apology for yet one more imposition was a
wounded look in his eyes. He added, in his subdued voice:
"It's not very far. . ." Ben had spoken to the attendants and
was locking the car.

The truck rumbled and moved ponderously onto the road,

its throb strong and then fading into the warm night
stillness.

"Lead the way," Dr. Lazaro said, handing Esteban the

flashlight.

They crossed the road, to a cleft in the embankment that

bordered the fields. Dr. Lazaro was sweating now in the dry
heat; following the swinging ball of the flashlight beam,
surrounded by the stifling night, he felt he was being
dragged, helplessly, toward some huge and complicated
error, a meaningless ceremony. Somewhere to his left rose a
flapping of wings, a bird cried among unseen leaves; they
walked swiftly, and there was only the sound of the silence,
the constant whir of crickets, and the whisper of their feet
on the path between the stubble fields.

With the boy close behind him, Dr. Lazaro followed Esteban
down a clay slope to the slap and ripple of water in the
darkness The flashlight showed a banca drawn up at the
river's edge; Esteban waded waist-deep into the water,
holding the boat steady as Dr. Lazaro and Ben stepped on
board. In the darkness, with the opposite bank like the far
rise of an island, Dr. Lazaro had a moment's tremor of fear
as the boat slid out over the black waters; below prowled
the deadly currents; to drown here in the depths of night. . .
But it took less than a minute to cross the river. "We're here,
Doctor," Esteban said, and they padded up a stretch of sand
to a clump of trees; a dog started to bark, the shadows of a
kerosene lamp wavered at a window.

Unsteady on the steep ladder, Dr. Lazaro entered the cave

of Esteban's hut. The single room contained the odors he
often encoun-tered but had remained alien to, stirring an
impersonal disgust: the sourish decay, the smells of the
unaired sick. An old man greeted him, lisping incoherently; a
woman, the grandmother, sat crouched in a corner, beneath
a framed print of the Mother of Perpetual Help; a boy, about
ten, slept on, sprawled on a mat. Esteban's wife, pale and
thin, lay on the floor with the sick child beside her.
Motionless, its tiny blue-tinged face drawn away from its
chest in a fixed wrinkled grimace, the infant seemed to be
straining to express some terrible ancient wisdom.

Dr. Lazaro made a cursory check — skin dry turning cold;

breathing shallow; heartbeat fast and irregular. And in that
moment, only the child existed before him; only the child
and his own mind probing now like a hard gleaming
instrument; how strange that it should still live, his mind
said, as it considered the spark that persisted within the
rigid and tortured body. He was alone with the child, his
whole being focused on it, in those intense minutes shaped
into a habit now by so many similar instances: his
physician's knowledge trying to keep the heart beating, to
revive an ebbing life and somehow make it rise again.
Dr. Lazaro removed the blankets that bundled the child and
in-jected a whole ampule to check the tonic spasms, the
needle piercing neatly into the sparse flesh. He broke
another ampule, with deft precise movements, and emptied
the syringe, while the infant lay stiff as wood beneath his
hands. He wiped off the sweat running into his eyes, then
holding the rigid body with one hand, he tried to draw air
into the faltering lungs, pressing and releasing the chest;
but even as he worked to rescue the child, the bluish color
of its face began to turn grey Dr. Lazaro rose from his crouch
on the floor, a cramped ache in his shoulders, his mouth dry.
The lamplight glistened on his pale hollow face as he
confronted the room again, the stale heat, the poverty.
Esteban met his gaze; all their eyes were upon him, Ben at
the door, the old man, the woman in the corner, and
Esteban's wife, in the trembling shadows.

Esteban said: "Doctor. .

He shook his head, and replaced the syringe case in his bag,
slowly and deliberately, and fastened the clasp. There was a
murmuring behind him, a rustle across the bamboo floor,
and when he turned, Ben was kneeling beside the child. And
he watched, with a tired detached surprise, the boy pour a
trickle of water from a coconut shell on the infant's brow. He
caught the words half-whispered in the warm quietness: ". . .
in the name of the Father . . . Son . . . the Holy Spirit. . ."

The shadows flapped on the walls, the lamplight quivering

before it settled into a slender flame. By the river dogs were
barking. Dr.

Lazaro glanced at his watch; it was close to midnight. Ben

stood over the child, the coconut shell in his hands, as
though wondering what next to do with it, until he saw his
father nod for them to go.
"Doctor, tell us—" Esteban clutched at his arm.

"I did everything," Dr. Lazaro said. "It's too late —" He
gestured vaguely, with a dull resentment; by some implicit
relationship, he was also responsible, for the misery in the
room, the hopelessness. "There's nothing more I can do,
Esteban," he said. He thought with a flick of anger: Soon the
child will be out of it, you ought to be grateful. Esteban's
wife began to cry, a weak smothered gasping, and the old
woman was comforting her — "It is the will of God, my
daughter . . . "

In the yard, Esteban pressed carefully folded bills into the

doctor's hand; the limp, tattered feel of the money was part
of the futile journey. "I know this is not enough, Doctor,"
Esteban said. "As you can see, we are very poor . . . I shall
bring you fruit, chickens, someday. . ."

A late moon had risen, edging over the tops of the trees,
and in the faint wash of its light, Esteban guided them back
to the boat. A glimmering rippled on the surface of the
water as they paddled across; the white moonlight spread in
the sky, and a sudden wind sprang rain-like and was lost in
the trees massed on the riverbank.

"I cannot thank you enough, Doctor," Esteban said. "You

have been very kind to come this far, at this hour."

They stood on the clay bank, in the moon-shadows beside

the gleaming water. Dr. Lazaro said: "You better go back
now, Esteban. We can find the way back to the road. The
trail is just over there, isn't it?" He wanted to be rid of the
man, to be away from the shy humble voice, the prolonged
wretchedness.

"I shall be grateful always, Doctor," Esteban said. "And to

your son, too. God go with you." He was a faceless voice
withdrawing in the shadows, a cipher in the shabby crowds
that came to town on market days.

"Let's go, Ben," Dr. Lazaro said.

They took the path back across the fields; around them the
moonlight had transformed the landscape, revealing a
gentle, more familiar dimension, a luminous haze upon the
trees stirring with a growing wind; and the heat of the night
had passed, a coolness was falling from the deep sky.
Unhurried, his pace no more than a casual stroll, Dr. Lazaro
felt the oppression of the night begin to lift from him; an
emotionless calm returned to his mind. The sparrow does
not fall without the Father's leave, he mused at the sky, but
it falls just the same. But to what end are the sufferings of a
child? The crickets chirped peacefully in the moon-pale
darkness beneath the trees.

"You baptized the child, didn't you, Ben?"

"Yes, Pa." The boy kept in step beside him.

He used to believe in it, too, the power of the Holy Spirit

washing away original sin, the purified soul made heir of
heaven. He could still remember fragments of his boyhood
faith, as one might remember an improbable and long-
discarded dream.

"Lay baptism, isn't that the name for it?"

"Yes," Ben said. "I asked the father. The baby hadn't been
baptized." He added as they came to the embankment that
separated the fields from the road: "They were waiting for it
to get well."

A fine gesture; it proved the boy had presence of mind,

convic-tions, but what else? The world will teach him his
greatest lessons.

THE STATION had closed, with only the canopy light and the
globed neon sign left burning. A steady wind was blowing
now across the fields, the moonlit plains.

He saw Ben stifle a yawn. "I'll do the driving," Dr. Lazaro

said.

His eyes were not what they used to be, and he drove
leaning forward, his hands tight on the wheel. He began to
sweat again, and the empty road and the lateness and the
memory of Esteban and of the child dying before morning in
the cramped lamplit room fused into a tired melancholy. He
started to think of his other son, the one whom he had lost.

He said, seeking conversation, "If other people carried on

like you, Ben, the priests would run out of business."

The boy sat beside him, his face averted, not answering.

"Now, you'll have an angel praying for you in heaven," Dr.

Lazaro said, teasing, trying to create an easy mood between
them. "What if you hadn't baptized the baby and it died?
What would happen to it then?"

"It won't see God/' Ben said.

"But isn't that unfair?" It was like a riddle, trivial but

diverting.

"Just because —"

"Maybe God has another remedy" Ben said. "I don't know
But the Church says — "
He could sense the boy groping for the tremendous
answers. "The Church teaches, the Church says. . ." God:
Christ: the communion of saints: Dr. Lazaro found himself
wondering again at the world of novenas and candles,
where bread and wine became the flesh and blood of the
Lord, and a woman bathed in light appeared before children,
and mortal men spoke of eternal life, the vision of God, the
body's resur-rection at the end of time. It was like a country
from which he was barred; no matter — the customs, the
geography didn't appeal to him.

But in the car suddenly, driving through the night, he was

aware of an obscure disappointment, a subtle pressure
around his heart, as though he had been deprived of a
certain joy . . .

A bus roared around a hill toward them, its lights blinding

him, and he pulled to the side of the road, braking
involuntarily as a billow of dust swept over the car. He had
not closed the window on his side, and the flung dust
poured in, the thick brittle powder almost choking him,
making him cough, his eyes smarting, before he could shield
his face with his hands. In the headlights the dust sifted
down and when the air was clear again, Dr. Lazaro,
swallowing a taste of earth, of darkness, maneuvered the
car back onto the road, his arms numb and exhausted. He
drove the last half mile to town in silence, his mind
registering nothing but the grit of dust in his mouth and the
empty road unwinding swiftly before him.

They reached the sleeping town, the desolate streets, the

plaza empty in the moonlight, and the huddled shapes of
houses, the old houses that Dr. Lazaro had always known.
How many nights had he driven home like this through the
quiet town, with a man's life ended behind him, or a child
crying newly risen from the womb; and a sense of constant
motion, of change, of the days moving swiftly toward an
immense revelation touched him once more, briefly, and
still he could not find the words. He turned the last corner,
then steered the car down the graveled driveway to the
garage, while Ben closed the gate.

Dr. Lazaro sat there a moment, in the stillness, resting his

eyes, conscious of the measured beating of his heart, and
breathing a scent of dust that lingered on his clothes, his
skin, before he finally went around the tower of the water-
tank to the front yard where Ben stood waiting.

With unaccustomed tenderness, he placed a hand on Ben's

shoulder as they turned toward the cement-walled house.
They had gone on a trip; they had come home safely
together. He felt closer to the boy than he had ever been in
years.

"Sorry for keeping you up this late," Dr. Lazaro said.

"It's all right, Pa."

"Some night, huh, Ben? What you did back in that barrio —"
there was just the slightest patronage in his tone — "your
mother willjove to hear about it."

He shook the boy beside him gently. "Reverend Father Ben

Lazaro."

The impulse of uncertain humor — it was part of the

comradeship. He chuckled drowsily: "Father Lazaro, what
must I do to gain eternal life?"

As he slid the door open on the vault of darkness, the

familiar depths of the house, it came to Dr. Lazaro faintly in
the late night that for certain things, like love, there was
only so much time. But the glimmer was lost instantly,
buried in the mist of indifference and sleep rising now in his
brain.

The Exiles

WHILE AFTERNOON slanted across the town, drawing

westward with it the daylight from the acacia trees and the
dry land, he was in a dream a young man again in his
father's country With a vengeance — his long absence had
oppressed him like an enemy — he explored the streets and
byways of the ancient metropolis, driven by a fierce hunger
to see, to know in his heart forever, the entire sweep of his
father's city from mountainside to seashore: the texture of
the tile-roofed houses, the sounds of traffic on the
boulevards; the quality of evening and sunlight on the
terraced palaces, the statues of the noble conquerors.

A giant, he moved through the city with swift gliding strides,

still young and audacious, unparalyzed. Look1, he cried in
wonder at the miracle of his limbs: I can walk again, and I
shall go everywhere] The cathedral bells of Our Lady of
Victory soared into the bright sky and scattered in flakes of
light, and beyond the city, he saw the tall mountains
crowned with snow Children played in a vast garden, their
laughter miraculous and deathless among the silver
fountains, the stone angels. A young girl, nameless but her
face dearly familiar, waved to him from a balcony. The
King's Guards rode down the central boulevard of the city,
plumed helmets shining, the white horses magnificent and
graceful. The friends of his youth came forward to welcome
him, and they addressed him in his father's language, and
he wept that they should still remember him, a stranger
from a distant country In one blinding moment of joy, he
seemed to contain within him the whole substance of his
father's city, before he found himself suddenly awake,
gasping like an exhausted swimmer from the deep tides of
his dream.

It was late in the afternoon: a spray of yellow light flickered

on the ceiling. His mind gradually focused on the room and
the tone of day; a dull, thick strangeness hovered about
him; his mouth was dry from the exhaustion of his dream.
He heard the clamor of voices below the window: the
boarders would be sitting around on the veranda, waiting for
supper.

The sound of the voices confirmed the reality of the room,

the fact of his identity outside the dream. Instinctively, he
waited, as if in ambush, for the usual searing pain to assault
his heart; but the pain remained in its hiding place, discreet,
biding its time. He relaxed»against the pillows and allowed
himself to recall the spirit of his dream: the power of his
limbs, the bells falling through the luminous sky.

Even as he lay still, a flight of images whirled in his brain,

glittering and disorganized as a covey of surprised,
incredibly plumaged birds.

The children played in the immense garden. The King's

Guards rode proudly in the sun. The mountains were
crowned with snow. He could not concentrate on a single
image; his hands on his chest groped with a frantic
impatience. He whispered his son's name; he wished Manuel
were in the room with him: in revealing his dream, now, he
would capture a vision, subdue it and hold it in his hands,
actual and credible as the prison of his bed, this room, that
bureau mirror which held his old and ruined face.

The filtered light disappeared from the ceiling; the evening

would flood the dry pebbled street outside, flowing most
darkly under the trees. He imagined Manuel walking through
the dusk of the town, head bent, abstracted, alone. With a
listless fear, he thought of the last of his sons: how that boy
loves to be alone. Tonight he must speak to him, tell him
about his dream: the lost country. The son will know how
deeply the father loves him: they would be of one spirit and
blood. He began to rehearse what he would tell him,
pronouncing the words soundlessly and with reverence, as if
they were a prayer. You must go there, Manuel. Your home is
there. You belong there, my son. . .

On the veranda below his window, someone's voice rose

above the conversation, dominating it without warning,
suave and lecturing: that would be Mr. Hernando, the
municipal clerk. He had never liked the man: he thought him
vain and unscrupulous; he judged a person according to the
loudness of his speech. But Amanda said it was impossible
to be particular with boarders. The voice continued and as
he listened it magnified monstrously, filling the room and his
mind and encircling his thoughts, pressing them back into
the void from which they sprang; he pushed the memory of
his dream against it, the body of his confused intermingling
visions.

When his daughter opened the door and switched on the

light, his face was contorted as if in pain, his eyes staring
unseeingly as he struggled against everything that would
overwhelm his dream.

SHE REMAINED standing by the door, her hand still on the

switch, watching her father's tortured face with a careful but
unfeeling curiosity; she was like a doctor studying the
climax of a strange and hopeless disease. Is he dead at last?
she asked herself, aware, though only flittingly, of the
meaning in her question; in her father's presence, she would
not acknowledge secrets, even in her mind: it was a kind of
filial loyalty.

Her father's eyes lost their pained glaze and turned upon
her with a semblance of tenderness.

He has lived one more day, she thought objectively and

proceeded at once through the routine movements of
ministering to him: she filled the glass from the pitcher,
counted out three capsules from the cardboard box,
rearranged the sheets about the stiff lifeless legs. She
opened the western window; above the trees the evening
was violet in the sky.

"Amanda."

"Yes, Papa?" She regarded him without emotion, as a nurse

might look at someone else's father, consigned to a hospital
room.

"Where is Manuel?"

"He went out early this afternoon."

"There is something I wish to tell him."

"I suppose he is now in church, conversing with the saints."

"Why do you speak that way of your brother?"

"But that is'what he does, Papa, talk to the saints. He goes

to Mass every day. He wants to be a priest."

Something glinted in his eyes, and he smiled to himself. For

a while, he did not speak. She regarded her father's
wrinkled, amused expression: another symptom of his
prolonged illness; a childishness, an idi-ocy that will soon
understand nothing. . .

"Tell him as soon as he arrives to come up and see me."

"Yes, Papa."

"Amanda."

She stood beside the bed, with neither hate nor love. Years
ago, when her mother died, she had started on the journey
to separate herself from him: she had gone too far now to
return. As she waited for her father to speak again, the
Angelus rang from the Dominican church on the hill beyond
the plaza; another day was ending, one more date crossed
out on the calendar . . .

"I had a dream, Amanda."

"You had a dream, Papa?"

"I was young again. I was back in the old country. I was
young again in the city of your grandfather."

She hesitated between the bed and the opened door; she
sensed something akin to sympathy prowling outside the
boundaries of her indifference. He is dying and therefore he
must conjure up dreams. . .

Her father was looking above and beyond her, staring again
at some private vision but no longer anguishedly; his face
seemed to grow soft with the light of what he saw. Silence
entered the room, like shyness.

She surveyed the room out of habit: the poster bed, the
high carved chairs, the dusty bas-relief of the Sacred Heart,
the framed lithograph of the Virgin of Lourdes; her father
was still safe from any violence.

In the unlighted hallway, she paused by a window and

breathed deeply and her mind became free, active,
unsuppressed again; she faced herself, sharply aware of the
beating of her heart. She heard the clink of plates and silver
as the boarders sat down to an early supper; she ought to
join the maid and assist at the table; but she decided to stay
in the dark and think, alone. A new strength trembled in her
arms: she was free to do anything she wanted, even impose
her will on others.

She was mistress of herself . . .

In the dark, standing between her father's room and the

stairwell, she felt she was no longer a loveless woman: she
stood poised on the edge of a beautiful adventure.
Somewhere beyond this house, this town, complete
happiness awaited her passionately. Her hands would lose
their roughness and their twisted veins: they would grow
gentle with love and tenderness, for the man who loved her.
..

But when she heard the familiar laugh, the loud confident
voice rise above the other voices downstairs, the bright
elation, the hopeful-ness drained from her abruptly. A sob
caught in her throat like a splinter of ice. Does he really love
me? Does he boast of the kisses I have given him? But I am
so tired, she thought; tired of this house and the boarders,
the kitchen and the marketing; a father who refuses to die
and a brother who talks of faith and sacrifice, love and the
peace of Christ and the glory of heaven: a brother who
wants to be a priest. The voice reached for her in the dark
and she shuddered with hatred and longing.
A carromata rattled by on the street outside, swinging its
lamp through the tunnel of trees, the horse-shoes metallic
against the pebbles.

She looked down on the yard, the heavy network of leaves,

the gate: the town surrounded her, dry and windless in the
twilight, haunted by death and time. For a long moment,
she stood by the window, aware of a hard receding core of
inarticulate longing, until a calmness almost like peace
returned to her heart. Tonight I must know the truth of his
love: tonight I will know. Her resolution finally moved her
from her place in the dark, and she descended the stairs
slowly, her face already composed into the benign
detachment of a woman sure of herself.

Remembering that her father had asked for Manuel, she

wondered if her brother had come home.

My Cousin Ramon

MANONG RAMON, my cousin, was the poet, the dreamer, in

our family I remember now his deep-set eyes, his quiet
voice, his thin and restless hands. He started to write when I
was a boy, and Father was still alive, and we lived in our old
house, on Rizal Street, in Camiling, in the province of Tarlac.
That was many years ago, and Manong Ramon is dead.

During my boyhood, we lived in a number of houses. When

Father was made supervising teacher, we followed him to a
succession of towns, to La Paz and Gerona and Concepcion.
We always lived in a rented house to be with him. They were
small, drab, dark brown houses, with galvanized-iron roofs
and front-yards of hard, cracked earth that Mother tried
vainly to make into flower-gardens.
But it is the old house in Camiling that I think of now,
remembering Manong Ramon. My grandfather built it some
years before the beginning of the century, arid we were all
born there, Luis, our eldest, Pilar, Teresing, and I; we grew
up, spent our childhood there. It was a large house, with an
entresuelo where a broken calesin, a relic of my
grandfather's youth, reposed in the cool shadows. From the
windows of the sala one had a view of the plaza and the
kiosko, and the crumbling steps of the azotea went down to
the river that flowed behind the house. There was a huge
acacia growing beside the house; in the night the wind
murmured like a spirit seeking rest and solace among the
leaves.

It was in this house where Manong Ramon began to write.

He came to live with us when his parents died. Father had
retired from his teaching job and we had returned to the old
town. Manong Ramon must have been eighteen then, if not
younger. I was in the sixth grade in the elementary school. I
often noticed him seated at Father's desk through the
evening, writing furiously, filling the pages of notebooks
with words, his face serious and tense in the lamplight. He
reminded me of Padre Gabriel, the parish priest, seated
there at Father's desk, writing, as though the sorrows of the
world were pressing down on his frail shoulders. I would
watch him from across the sala, wanting to talk to him, to
touch him and ask him about the things he wrote. But I
would only watch his pale, unsmiling face; I felt it wrong to
disturb him; it would have been like talking in church, during
the Mass. What did he write about? I would ask myself
wonderingly. What did the words say? I felt as though I were
being deprived of a beautiful vision that Manong Ramon
alone could see, in that time and life long ago.

I remember how I used to wonder why Manong Ramon was

so quiet, so distant as to be almost like a passing stranger,
not playing and laughing with us like my brother, Luis. Luis
and I and the boys in the neighborhood went swimming in
the river, we flew our kites in the December wind, we
hunted grasshoppers in the fields and waved to the people
on the trains. The rains fell and the grass in the plaza turned
green, then faded in the summer sun, but it seemed
Manong Ramon just sat at Father's desk in the sala, writing,
looking like Padre Gabriel in the lamplight.

That was years ago, before Father died and Mother leased
the house, but the memory of Manong Ramon writing in the
faraway time of boyhood is clear and sharp, the face and
the room discernible to the heart's eye, like a treasured
picture in a family album.

Time passed like leaves falling, the river flowed in silence in

the sun. Manong Luis went to work in America; after a year,
his letters from California stopped coming. Manang Pilar left
with her husband to live in San Fernando, Pampanga. In my
second year of high school, Manong Ramon left for the city,
and soon he was married, and the girl's name was Fe.

As YOU grow to manhood, you too must go away, must

leave the house where you were born. The departure for
other towns, other cities, is as much a part of growing up as
the change in the voice, the secret beginning of wisdom and
the tug of dreams.

So one day I climbed aboard the train for the city, to live
there with an uncle and study in the university. It was early
June and raining and I looked out of the train-window at the
countryside sweeping by, cold and grey in the rain. I was
seventeen, and lonely, and not a little afraid. Father was
dead. Mother had leased the house and she and Teresing,
our youngest, had gone to live with Manang Pilar in San
Fernando. Luis had long since left, Manong Ramon had
gone, the family was gone, and I was riding on a train to the
city, seventeen, leaving behind the house of childhood, the
acacias and the river, the kites in the December skies, the
high school from which I had graduated, the familiar streets,
the games in the moonlight, the flowers of May. Before me
was the city where Manong Ramon had gone, the city of rain
and dust, the rumble of traffic, strange rooms, and
aloneness in the hurrying, remorseless crowds.

My uncle's house was in the Santa Cruz district, on a street

four blocks off Avenida Rizal. When I first saw it through the
drizzling rain, I was reminded of the houses we had lived in,
during the years Father was a teacher. It was wooden and
unpainted, with a cramped front-porch facing the narrow,
unpaved street.

In the night, my first night in the city, in the room I shared

with my cousins, I lay awake in the darkness, tired but
unsleeping, and I thought of the years, how swift and
irrevocable their passage, and I remembered the old house
and the town, the acacias and the river, and the time when
we were all together, Father and Mother, my brothers and
sisters, and Manong Ramon. If I could only write like Manong
Ramon, I thought with longing, I would write about all these
things, the old town and the house and the years we were
all together. I remembered my cousin writing in the
lamplight, writing about things I was then too young to
understand. When I slept at last, I dreamed I was lost in the
depths of the city, and I wakened to the sound of the rain
falling.

I remember the afternoon I went to see Manong Ramon in

Sampaloc, in the city. It was a Sunday; the skies were dark
with unfallen rain, the storm had not yet blown away, and
there was a chill in the air.
Around me were the sights and the sounds of the strange
city: people hurrying, amplified phonograph music, the
accents of a new dialect, the roar of traffic, stores, buildings,
houses. I felt alone and friendless, seventeen, going to see
Manong Ramon in Sampaloc, in the city. The jeepney
splashed through the rain-puddles of the unfamiliar streets.

At first I thought I would never find Manong Ramon's

address.

From the rotonda, I walked up the narrow street, looking at

the numbers on the doors of the identical accesorias. I
walked up to the end of the street, then back again on the
other side, and when at last I recognized the number on the
nondescript door, I felt like a boy who had found his way out
of a dark and tangled forest.

A broad, stern-faced woman, probably the landlady, opened

the door. I asked for Manong Ramon, and grumbling
indifferently, she told me to proceed upstairs.

Manong Ramon and Manang Fe were glad to see me.

Manang Fe, whose round face and pensive smile reminded
me of Mila del Sol, was carrying their baby; she was again
big with child. I had not seen them since the time they came
home for Father's funeral. Manong Ramon gripped my
shoulders in welcome, asking me questions, telling me how
tall I had grown, that I was a man now. We sat in the parlor
that was also the dining room, and I saw that the walls were
stained by the rains. A statuette of the Blessed Virgin,
draped with a garland of withered sampaguitas, stood on a
shelf in a corner, above a table piled with books. Outside the
window there was a view of rusty house-tops, elec-trie wires
and street lights, and beyond the roofs rose the tall square
structure of an ice plant. We talked about the town, about
Mother and Teresing living with Manang Pilar in San
Fernando, and about Manong Ramon's clerical job at the
census bureau, their son who was a year and a half, my
classes at the University, and it was like talking to one's
brother and sister, familiar and loving, sitting there in the
room in Sampaloc, in the city

How the years have changed Manong Ramon, my heart

said. His face is sunken, and there are dark circles around
his eyes.

LATER, WHEN Manang Fe had left the room with the child, I
told Manong Ramon about my remembering the old house
and the town and the years when we were all together, and
how I longed to write about the memory of things gone.

Manong Ramon tapped his cigarette out, carefully, in an

ashtray and then he looked at me, and that look I will long
remember. It was a look that was at once proud, sad and
joyful, and in it was the goodness and greatness of his soul,
and I remembered again, in that room in Sampaloc, how he
had reminded me of Padre Gabriel, writing in the lamplight,
in the house that my grandfather built, in the years long
ago.

"Remember this always, Pepe," Manong Ramon said. "It is

not easy, it is hard to be a writer."

"Yes, I know," I said.

"But it is a full life, the life of a writer," Manong Ramon said.

"It is a life of the heart and spirit."

He is a great writer, this cousin of mine who speaks and

writes beautifully, I thought, and I felt warm with love and
pride for Manong Ramon, his face pale and sunken, talking
to me in the room in Sampaloc, in the city. And I felt again
the urge to write moving like a cry deep in my heart. And a
longing stirred within me, a reaching out for the beauty of
life, and I felt I could possess it forever if I could only put it
in words.

Now Manong Ramon was coughing suddenly, and he went

to the window. I stood there beside him, looking out on the
street and the children sailing their paper boats on the
canal. We did not speak for a long moment, my cousin and I,
standing at the window, watching the children playing. The
skies were darker now, above the rusty house-tops and the
tall, rectangular structure of the ice plant.

"It is going to rain," Manong Ramon said.

I thought of the days when I was a boy playing in the rain. I

had laughed and jumped and run in the warm summer
rains, long ago.

"I am going to write a story about our town," Manong

Ramon said.

"It will be a beautiful story," I said, remembering our town.

"I remember many things about our town," Manong Ramon

said.

"Yes, there are many things to remember," I said.

"I have written many things. Poems and stories. But perhaps
this will be the only good story I will ever write," Manong
Ramon said, his face turned away, looking at the dark sky
above the roofs and the ice plant.

"It will be a great and unforgettable story," I said.

"I will write down all the things that I remember," Manong
Ramon said. "The acacias, the whistle of the trains at night,
the moonlight in the plaza. The arrivals and departures, our
lives in the house that Grandfather built, our love for one
another, Pilar playing the songs we loved on the piano.
Many things. The best and most precious things."

They were the things that I remembered, too, in my

loneliness in the city, and I listened to my cousin with love
and wonder and I thought I understood then why the beauty
and the joy of life were always inter-mixed with sadness.

"Yes, Pepe, I remember our town — " Manong Ramon

coughed.

His thin hands gripped the window sill, as though he were

struggling for breath.

"You must not work too hard," I said.

"I am all right," Manong Ramon said. "It is those cigarettes.

The smoke irritates my throat."

"You must rest, Manong," I said.

Manong Ramon turned to me, his smile tired but his eyes
shining.

"Do not worry about me, Pepe," he said.

Manang Fe came into the room, the child asleep in the

cradle of her arms.

"I will go now, Manang," I said.

"You must stay for supper, Pepe," Manang Fe said. "You

might get caught in the rain."

"Thank you, Manang," I said, "but I have to be going now.

Tia Meding expects me home for supper."
"You will come again soon, Pepe?" Manang Fe said.

"Yes, Manang, I will."

"Come here as often as you wish," Manong Ramon said.

"This, too, is your home."

"Thank you, Manong," I said.

"When you come again, I will cook pinakbet for you,"

Manang Fe said. The baby stirred in her arms, and she
started to dance the child back to sleep.

"I will go now, Manang," I said.

"Give our regards to Tio Celso and Tia Meding," Manang Fe

said.

"Yes, Manang," I said.

"God go with you, Pepe," she said.

Manong Ramon followed me down the stairs and out to the

sidewalk. It was early dusk, and the rain was coming.

The street lights were on. The children had gone, and the
street was quiet in the early dark. Manong Ramon placed a
hand on my shoulder. I could hear the ragged sound of his
breathing. "Be brave, Pepe,"

Manong Ramon said. "Be good."

"Yes, Manong," I said.

I walked away down the street, my heart heavy with

loneliness, and I thought of Manong Ramon and all the
things he had said to me.
I heard again his tired voice speaking, telling me about truth
and beauty, hope and courage and the life of the spirit, the
life of a writer.

I hurried to the street corner and stood there, waiting for a

jeepney, with the rain coming, thinking about many things. I
thought of Manong Ramon, writing of beautiful things in a
room with the walls stained by the rains, in Sampaloc, in the
city. I remembered again all the years, the life that was
gone, Father and Mother, Manong Luis, and Pilar and
Teresing, Manong Ramon writing in the lamplight, looking
like Padre Gabriel, his face seeming to reflect the tragedy of
the world. I remembered the house my grandfather built,
with the calesin in the entresuelo and the acacia in the yard
and the steps from the azotea going down to the river. I
thought of time passing, flowing like a river, carrying away
what was best and most precious to men on the earth, and I
felt a kind of anger, a still nameless protest, beginning to
beat in my heart. I looked at the houses on the street, the
lights shining in the early twilight of the city. Behind those
dead walls, I thought, men and women lived, suffered and
rejoiced, and I knew then that people everywhere were the
same, in Tarlac, in the city, in all the towns and cities of the
world.

Tonight, I said in my heart to the darkening street and the

approaching rain, I too will write, with fury, anger and
tenderness.

The Radio and the Green Meadows

THE FRIDAY crowd swarmed and jostled about Jorge

Magalang as he stood in Quiapo, a tall, spare man in his late
twenties. A woman bumped into him, grimaced attractively,
anonymous, in a hurry; the heat erased her perfume from
the dusty, clamorous air. Through the swirling crowd
struggled a balloon-peddler, his bright, multi-colored wares
as incongruous as flowers in the hot afternoon.

The sticky summer heat clung to Jorge's face and neck. He

walked toward Calle Azcarraga, slowing down now and then
to examine a display window, or glance at an idling bus,
postponing his going home. No need to rush: the radio
program, "Starlight Symphony," was at 7:15, and it was not
even half past five. There had been a time when he hurried
home after the day's work at the office: he was newly
married then, proud with a new and exciting importance:
tomorrow, there would come the raise in salary, the
appointment to a higher position in the Bureau, the
beginning of a better life, the honesty of dreams. But he had
remained the same undistinguished clerk, bent over ledgers
of dead sums in a neon-lighted room of typewriters and
resigned, mask-like faces.

He passed by a movie-theater: a double-program was

showing, featuring a technicolor musical. Two years ago, he
and Alma used to ride down to the Luneta after a movie,
and in the park they would sit on a bench, and talk
whisperingly, tenderly, conscious of the new life breathing
within her. They would stay there long after the sun had set
and the wind blew in from the sea. He saw his face reflected
in the trans-parent glass of a store-window, thin and sweaty
in the afternoon glare.

"Magalang! George Magalang!" The voice was loud,

exultant. Jorge turned around to face the man as a fat hand
slapped him resoundingly on the back. "George, it's me,
Tony!"
"Tony1. Hello!" Jorge was smiling now, shaking hands with
the man named Tony, who kept patting him on the shoulder
and blinking his bespectacled eyes in disbelief and delight.

"Long-time-no-see, George," Tony said. He had the round,

florid face of a man who enjoyed his food and drink; his
paunch bulged through the double-breasted coat which was
stained dark with sweat. "Where've you been hiding
yourself? I've been looking all over the country for you."

"It's great to see you again," Jorge said.

"Same here, George, same here," Tony said, still shaking

hands.

The accent was on the George, and Jorge warmed at being

called thus: not since college had he been addressed by the
nickname.

"You look fine, George," Tony said. "Yes, it's been a long
time.

Married?" He beamed good-naturely, his puffy cheeks

shining with sweat. Jorge nodded yes, he was married.
"George, you lucky sonovabitch. How many kids?"

"One. A boy."

"Congratulations! Well, well, how does it feel to be a

father?"

"Fine," Jorge said. "And you — still the bachelor of the old
days?"

"You said it, George," Tony said. "I'll wait till I'm forty. Life
begins at sixty-nine" — he laughed throatily — "but I envy
you, George."
"What happened to you and Zeny?" Jorge said, trying to
match Tony's light banter.

"Sexy Zeny?" Tony's stout, florid face frowned with a mock

effort to remember, then relaxed in a flabby smile. "She's
had two or three husbands. A great believer in marriage, all
right. Whew, but it's warm.

Going some place? Doing anything?"

"I've just left the office, and I was — "

"Let's have a Coke or something," Tony said. He pulled Jorge

toward a restaurant. "This calls for a celebration, eh,
George? It's been a long time. C'mon."

They entered the restaurant with its warm moist smell of

stale pancit and caked grease. Tony ordered pineapple cake
and two Cokes

— with plenty of ice, Miss, it's so warm today. "Too warm for
a whiskey-and-soda, eh, George?" he said to Jorge, taking
off his coat. Under the coat he was wearing a bright-yellow
Hawaiian shirt.

Tony leaned across the ketchup-splattered table, intimate

and friendly. "How's life treating you, George?"

"The usual ups and downs," Jorge said.

"You are an elevator operator? Really, where you working,

George?"

Jorge told him, a vague hopelessness inflecting his words,

but only for an instant. "How's the profession?" he asked,
slowly pouring the Coke into the glass half-filled with ice-
cubes.
"It's OK," Tony said. "You should've gone on with your law,
George.

But you are no liar, George. I bet you won't tell a lie, white
or gray or whatever, to save your life." He chuckled at this
lighthearted verdict, his face with the plastic-rimmed
glasses likable and friendly.

They drank Cokes and munched on the jellyish cake. Jorge

listened while Tony talked of their days in college, Nick,
Eddie, Bertito, Manolo's jeep, how we used to bum around
on weekends, remember, George? Tony mentioned names
and places, and suddenly Jorge found himself wanting to tell
his friend of moments he remembered now...

That night at the beach, Tony, when you bought a bottle of

rum, and got tipsy enough to stand on the sea-wall and
orate on love and women, not caring about the years to
come, only the now and the here mattered then, the being
alive, the night sown with stars. And yes, Tony, the times we
spent at Bertito's place, the spacious, tile-roofed house that
was home on Sunday mornings. And the songs of that year
(when I left the class to shift to commerce because father
had died), the songs about the best things in life being free,
and a tree in the meadow (and beyond, the sea). How we
loved to sing then, Tony, you and I and Nick and the gang,
going home from a dance at two in the morning, with Plaza
Lawton and Quiapo empty and quiet beneath the lampposts,
and each of us carrying in his heart the image of a girl
dearly loved...Jorge felt his shirt wet on his back. He wiped
at the sweat on his face with an olive-drab handkerchief.

"You remember Lugay, don't you, George?" Tony was saying.

"Joe Lugay?"

"Joe Lugay. Yes, I remember — "

"He's making a lot of dough at the Import Control. We better
look him up someday, eh, George?" Tony smiled, exuding
good humor, easy friendliness, his face shining with sweat.
"That was a class." He grunted reminiscently. "A class of
crazy characters. Remember how Diaz used to mimic
Garcia's lisp? And Dacanay. Dacanay and his racing:forms,
remember?"

"Yes," Jorge said.

"You remember Castillo, George? We went on a binge once,

going to all the bars along Harrison." Tony laughed,
remembering the night he and Castillo went to all the bars
on Harrison Street, in Pasay. He forked the last of the cake
into his mouth, chewing while he continued, "I wonder if
Castillo's still around, the crazy sonovabitch." He offered
George cigarettes from a silver-plated lighter-case.

Jorge drew deeply on the cigarette, the smoke tight and

hard, hurting his throat... Tony, I remember the afternoons
after class, when we sat in the college store, watching the
girls go by, thinking where in the world was the good, quiet
girl we were going to marry, not saying it, talking instead of
rough, ungentle things, swaggering with our male-ness. I
remember Remedios, Tony, and the night she quarreled with
Nick, at our class party, and the way she looked when she
went out on the porch, and we were there, you and I. How
pale and tragic she looked, how fragile and hurt, and seeing
her like that I thought I was in love with her. And I remember
Linda. She was good and beautiful, with traces of brown in
her hair. You remember her place in San Juan; don't you,
Tony? The bungalow painted white and green, with the trees
in the garden, remember? She and Nick would take turns at
the piano, or we would just sit around on the porch, kidding
around, feeling at home. Then Eddie fell in love with her,
and somehow, after that, things changed, no more casual
talk and laughter...

Tony paid for the refreshments, and the two men stepped
out into the waning afternoon. The sun was a receding blaze
behind the buildings across Plaza Miranda. The crowd
pushed and swarmed on the sidewalk; the traffic roared,
ponderous and deadly.

"Well, well, I'll have to run along now, George." Tony handed
Jorge a card from his billfold. Printed beneath Tony's name
was an address on the Escolta. "My uncle's office. I work
with the old man, you know.

Drop in sometime, eh, George? Any time at all."

"Sure, I will," Jorge%said. "Thanks for the treat, Tony."

"Best regards to the Mrs. and the boy," Tony said. He shook
Jorge's hand vigorously, full of friendliness, a stout, healthy
optimism. The late sun cast diagonals of light across the
corrugated-iron sides of the buildings. The traffic
policeman's whistle cut shrilly through the almost palpable
heat. "Well, well, I'll be seeing your George," Tony said.

"So long," Jorge said.

He watched Tony disappear in the crowd, a lawyer, bright

and alert, going places. He hesitated for a moment, not
knowing where to go, then he walked on to Calle Azcarraga.
He thought of the past, the many dreams and the
expectancy; his heart beat with his remembering. Nick and
Eddie and Bertito, friends in the boisterous company that
was: where were they now? You meet a friend from another
time, and for a short while, your lives shake hands on a
common ground of remembrance, and then so long,
goodbye, and you must go your way, alone.
On Calle Azcarraga, he boarded a jeepney. There was hardly
room for him in the sagging vehicle. He sat squeezed
between an old man and a girl who eyed him irritably when
his hand accidentally brushed hers as the jeepney lurched
forward.

FROM SANTA Mesa Boulevard, Jorge walked the two blocks

to his home. A group of boys were gathered in the darkening
street, and Jorge paused to watch them, attracted by their
noise. There was the thin, fair-skinned boy, his white shirt
contrasting with the tattered, colorless attire of the others
who had formed a ring around him, shouting, "He won't fight
Caloy! He doesn't know how to fight1. " Jorge looked on,
feeling sorry for the boy, who seemed ready to cry; he felt
relieved when the boys at last made way for their victim.
The boy ran into an accesoria, the derisive shouts following
him: "Coward! He won't fight!

He doesn't know how to fight!"

Jorge climbed the stairs. Alma opened the door. She was
small, her head barely reaching his chin. Her hair, which she
used to wear long, was rolled into a graceless, untidy bun.
Jorge followed her into the combination sala-dining room,
searching in his mind for things to tell her, wanting her to
laugh and smile. He touched her arm, but she moved on,
heedlessly, to the table where she had been sewing a dress
for the baby. She looked tired and pale, Jorge thought,
watching her cut a strip of cloth, while dusk mingled with
the light of the electric bulb hanging from the ceiling.

He went into the bedroom, and with a towel rubbed the

sticky sweat from his body. His year-old son slept on in his
crib, unmindful of the sounds of twilight in the city. He stood
over the crib, smiling down at his son; bending low, he
passed a finger across the child's brow, and thought of the
dreams that came with a baby's tranquil sleep. Maybe an
angel whispering a fairy tale... He put on a fresh undershirt
and tiptoed out of the room.

He sat down in his favorite chair, beside the small table

radio, and lighted a cigarette. He thought of Tony and their
meeting in Quiapo, the remembering, so long, goodbye.

"I met an old friend today," he said. "A classmate in

college."

Alma looked up from the dress she was making, a sign that
yes, she was listening. But her face showed no interest, only
her dull acceptance of the role of wife to a man who every
so often remembered the past.

"We talked for a while, there in Quiapo. You know, the old
days, our classmates. He's quite a talker. I hadn't seen him
for three years...

no, almost four years."

"Yes?" Alma said, snapping a thread with her teeth, the one
word muffled in the cloth. She fumbled among the strips of
cloth for the pair of scissors. "What's his name?"

Her query encouraged him: if he could only tell her the

things he wanted to tell Tony, if she would only listen and
understand: the night at the beach, the city at two o'clock in
the morning, the joyful comradeship of youth. "Tony
Jimenez," he said. "We used to call him El Abogado in class.
With his glasses, his portfolio, his stout build — he looked
like a big-time lawyer even then." He chuckled half-
heartedly.

"He's much stouter now." He felt Alma's awakened interest,

her lev$l eyes upon him.
"What does El Abogado do now?" she asked.

"He's now an honest-to-goodness lawyer," he said. "He has

an office on the Escolta. His uncle's law office actually."

"How's your friend's law practice?" Her voice was flat and
expressionless, but her eyes, Jorge sensed rather than saw
it, had taken on a strange, hard glint.

"Well, he didn't say exactly. I guess he's making good."

"Your friend makes enough money, doesn't he?" she said,

her voice assuming now the unmistakable shade of irony. He
knew what it meant, a warning that any moment now she
might vent on him the hurt and frustration and loneliness of
their life together.

"I don't know," he said uncertainly.

Alma was watching him closely, and he felt coming, over the
old guilt, the knowledge that he was responsible for the
gracelessness, the absence of beauty, in their life together.
He regretted having mentioned Tony at all: he had glowed,
briefly, with the thought of sharing his nostalgia with her.

"Your friend's a success, isn't he?" Alma said.

She turned her attention to the dress she was sewing. The
scissors clicked in the silence between them. He watched
her, unspeaking too, numb with the guilty emptiness such
as follows a quarrel. In the pale yellow light, he noted again
how tired and weak she looked; tenderness fluttered its
wings against his guilt. He wanted now to banish the waiting
and the longing of their lives with one whispered word, to
reassure her that someday — The cigarette burned his
fingers, and he rubbed it out in the ashtray. He switched on
the radio. Maraccas beat time to a rhumba; in a few more
minutes, the program of semi-classical music would go on
the air, poignant and exquisite with memory and desire.

Alma cleared the table of the strips of cloth. "I'm going down
to Qui Ma's," she said. Jorge watched her walk across the
room, heard her going down the stairs. He wondered how
much they owed the Chinese storekeeper. He thought of
Mrs. Buenviaje, the landlady who lived next door. The rent
was due next week. Suppose he sold the radio — never,
never, he promised himself silently.

Over the radio the 7:15 chime tinkled like a silver bell. He
sat in his deep rattan chair, and waited for the music.
"Ladies and gentlemen, good evening," the announcer said.
"Night has fallen all over the world, and once again, we
bring you your Starlight Symphony, a quarter hour of the
world's great melodies to suit your evening mood..."

Beneath the tender baritone, Debussy's Claire de Lime

flowed softly like a star-lit river of remembered dreams.

Jorge sat listening to the music, feeling the emptiness and

the guilt and the hurt rising and going away, feeling a
sadness with the music inside him. He felt the night over the
city, and he knew how far away he was from the
consummation of dreams, the end of all desire. The music
came as though from a great distance (where, O where?),
then increasing in volume until it seemed to fill the room to
bursting. He closed his eyes, and once more he saw with his
heart a vision of the green meadows, and beyond, veiled in
mist, wrere the pine trees and the white and blue house by
the sea...

The baby was crying in the bedroom. Jorge toned down the
radio.
He went to the bedroom and lifted the crying child from his
crib.

He carried the child to the radio, trying to soothe him,

pointing out the illuminated dial, playing a game, while the
music sighed and grew pensive. The child stopped crying;
he reached out for the radio with his tiny fingers. A chorus
of girl-voices began to sing. A tremulous fear touched
Jorge's heart. This child, his son, will dream the same
dreams of romance and glory, and in his youth, he will shout
defiance at the world, proudly, and then there will come a
time when youth has gone, and reality is a ledger of dead
sums and Quiapo on a Friday afternoon; perhaps then, he
too will dream of green meadows and the sea beyond, and
he will be lonely. "You must grow up and live the beautiful
life," he said to the child. He held his son fiercely, against
his breast, as though to shield him from the world and its
tortured seeking. The child gasped for breath, struggled in
his arms, began to cry again, and he eased his tight hold on
him. "My son," he said, stroking the damp, thin growth of
hair, trying to stop his crying.

Alma came up the stairs with a can of sardines. She dropped

the oval can on the table and took the child from him.
"There, baby, yes, Mother is here," she cooed, but the child
continued his frenzied bawl-ing. She looked up at Jorge, the
hard glint in her eyes scolding him for having made the
baby cry. Jorge switched off the radio, and began to set the
table for supper, while Alma rocked the crying child in her
arms.

The Girl Elena

SINING AND her family have moved to Santa Maria/' Elena
said.

"How about Luming and Nena?" he asked.

"I see them now and then," Elena said. "Carding. . ." she
began.

"Yes, I know," he said. "Peping wrote to me."

"Sometimes I cannot believe that he is dead," she said, an

abrupt fierce sorrow in her voice.

Her face was soft and lovely in the lamplight.

"It was October," she said, her voice growing small and
hesitant.

She paused, almost as if she doubted his right to know. "The

banca was washed ashore. . . But they did not find him.
They never found him."

He looked at her over the lamp on the table between them.

Her eyes were shining with something like the beginning of
tears in the lamplight.

He turned to the evening outside the window, disturbed by

her grief. Through the coconut grove he saw the sea and the
dark shapes of the fishing boats and beyond, the horizon in
the last light of the afterglow.

He listened to the beat of the surf. It was a sound that he

had not heard, it seemed, for a very long time. The rhythm
of the sea, once so familiar, so much a part of life like his
own breathing, had become strange to him.

"Remember the nights we sat on the pier, Elen?" he asked.

"Yes," Elena said.

"We went out often that summer/' he said. "You and Nena,
and Sining. Peping and Noel. Carding. We would walk as far
as Nagsabong and then come back and sit on the pier in the
moonlight. We sang all the songs we knew and we talked of
many things."

"Yes, I remember," Elena said.

"It seems like it was only yesterday."

"Two years is a long time, Fred," she said.

He thought of Carding, lost in the sea. They had laughed

together, teasing the girls, walking by the sea. But outside
of the companionship of their group, they had not been
close. They had been like strangers, somehow, to each
other.

He wished now that he and Carding had been closer friends.

But he felt only a vague regret, as though he were too tired
from the day's journey for the strain of sorrow.

"Tell me some more about the city," said Elena.

"I missed you and all our friends," he said.

"But you have your own friends in the city."

"Yes," he said. A swift blur of images passed through his

mind, the girls, the parties, the identical faces. "But I missed
you. I kept writing to you."

The palm fronds rustled outside in the wind from the sea.
The flame of the lamp trembled within the fragile glass, and
as he watched it became bright and still.
"Why did you stop writing, Elen?"

"I have never been good at letter-writing," she said.

"I wanted so much to know how you were, how things were
between us."

"There were things I could not write to you," she said.

"You know that I have always loved you, Elen," he said.

She held his gaze, her eyes reflecting the light, full of
unspoken things. Her lips opened to speak to him. But she
was silent, and then she turned to the window, to the
evening and the sea.

The lamplight glowed on her cheek, on the long hair

combed away from her forehead and tied with a ribbon. At
once, with a quickening of his heart, he felt her withdrawal,
her going away from him.

Now that she would not look at him, her face turned
sideways from him, she seemed more precious than ever to
him, unutterably pure and lovely.

He knew then that it was over. She had ceased to love him,
if she had ever loved him. It was gone, finished. He knew,
and yet something baffled him. He could not say what it was
exactly, but he felt it like a shadow, a third presence in the
room with them.

"Remember the night we graduated, Elen?"

"We were so young," she said. "We did not know certain
things.

We were like children."

"We were happy," he said. "What has happened, Elen?"

"Fred," she said, "there are things that are too difficult for
one to explain."

"Tell me things have not changed."

"There is some other girl for you to love," she said.

"No," he said. "There is only you."

"It cannot be. Fred, it must not be."

"Why do you say that, Elen?"

She passed her hand over her brow and traced a wave in
her hair.

She was sad and cool and distant in the lamplight.

"Fred," she said, "there are things I cannot speak to you.

Things that are —"

"What things, Elen?"

"Someday," she said, "you will not even think of coming

here any-more, here among these houses."

"I do not understand," he said.

He was growing resentful, angry with his inability to grasp

the truth of her words. A thought began to form in his mind.
He leaned forward, gripping the edge of the table, searching
her face, lovely and forlorn in the lamplight.

He waited, and slowly her eyes, wide and shining, moved

into the fullness of the light. He looked into her eyes,
shining with deep, secret, silent things, like the sea on a
moonlit night, even as her face seemed to waver through a
wall of glass.

Then he knew that she loved another, she loved this other
with a sorrow and a tenderness truer and stronger than
death, and the knowledge came to him in a dark swift rush
so deep and certain and compel-ling that it stifled his anger.

He sat back in the chair, the tension flowing out of his

hands. Her withdrawal, her going away had reached its limit,
become final and complete. He could go on asking,
pleading, and she would only gaze at him, her eyes
sorrowful and shining with her secrets, untouchable and
faraway.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to go, but he remained

seated, very still. He could no longer see the sea beyond the
coconut grove, but he heard the rush of the waves, stronger
in the darkness. .

She asked him about his trip. Nothing extraordinary

happened on the boat, he said. How about his studies in
Manila? Law is a fascinat-ing course. Yes, perhaps later he
would go into politics, like his father.

How did she find work with her sister-in-law? I like sewing
dresses, she said.

He inquired about her parents. Her mother was busy in the

kitchen.

Her father was out at sea, and he would come back with the
other men at dawn.

She hoped he would have a pleasant vacation. She spoke to

him in her gentle quiet voice, her lips forming the words
carefully. She was polite and distant, a young girl, sitting
with her hands clasped on her lap, her face soft in the
lamplight.

He rose to leave, stepping carefully on the loose slats of the

bamboo floor. She accompanied him to the ladder, carrying
the lamp. She was small beside him and she seemed to
move in an atmosphere of her own, defined by the lamp in
her hand.

At the top of the ladder he stopped to face her, his heart

burdened with many unsaid things. He heard the sea, and
the wind high in the coconut fronds. As he stood before her,
he had an instant vision of her moving away from his touch,
hurt and wordless. All his hopes changed then into a single
wish, a longing to walk with her by the sea, to know again
the sea with her.

"Fred," she said.

Her eyes were soft and shining in the lamplight.

"Pray for Carding," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"Thank you very much for the gift. And thank you for
coming, Fred."

The ladder creaked and wobbled as he descended, and he

had to pause to keep his balance.

"We are poor," she said.

He looked up at her, puzzled by the tone of her remark.

"Good night, Elen."

"Goodbye, Fred," she said.

He crossed the yard, the lamp throwing his shadow before
him, and found the break in the fence. He glanced back,
drawn by an impulse of love. Elena stood in the door of the
hut, above the ladder, holding the lamp in her hand. The
light shone on her face. He had gone past the fence, beyond
the reach of the light, and he stood in the darkness, and
gazed at her face. He did not move, but his whole being
yearned for the radiance of the light. She was faraway and
beloved beyond words and he had lost her, and her face
seemed to shine with its own light in the surrounding
darkness.

Finally she disappeared into the house and the night was
dark around him.

Through the coconut grove in the darkness, he walked away

from the house, away from the sea and the sound of the
sea. Carding is dead, he thought, and nothing, nothing is the
same. He stopped in the middle of the grove to check his
direction for he could not see the trail. Dogs barked at him
from a cluster of nipa huts. Figures appeared at a window
and watched him pass.

He came out of the grove and he saw that it was a clear

night, full of stars. The car was parked on the road. The
chauffeur sprang up alertly as he approached and opened
the door for him.

"You found your friend, Senorito? I was beginning to worry, it

can get very dark out there. . ."

He said nothing, settling back in the car, and it seemed that

by keeping still he could hear, even here on the road, the
heartbeat of the sea.

"Shall we go, Senorito?"

"Yes, of course," he said.

He was tired. He wondered indifferently if his father's

guests, the governor and his party, had gone. The car sped
down the road to his father's house on the opposite side of
town, and he saw the stars moving through the trees with
the motion of the car, and he thought of Elena, young and
pure and lovely, walking with him, their hands clasped, on
the shoreline of the evening sea.

Blue Piano

RIDING IN the taxicab through the late and empty streets,

he felt suddenly as though he had been riding all his life to
nowhere; he saw the lights of the city through a dull,
unfocused sadness, and he thought: You need a drink, Joe,
old boy, you need Rony's piano an$

Paeng's special wit to tide you over, but most of all you
need a drink, a real stiff one, because tonight you are
getting lousy with memories, and that's bad, an old young
man lousy with memories.

He got off a full two blocks from the club in Ermita because
he wanted the walk; it was a good night for walking; after
the roar of the presses and the smell of ink and dust, the
wind was cool and clean on his face and it was a clear night.
He passed a house aglow with the lights of a party; he heard
laughter, the rich innocent sound of young girls laughing.
The other houses along the street were quiet in the clear
night, shaded lamps shining through curtained upstairs
windows; and with a kind of detached yet melancholy
wonder, he thought of the men and the women in the silent
houses: the tenderness of lovers, the subdued
conversations, and the faces of those asleep, childlike and
peaceful, free of the tensions of choice, the haggardness of
victory or defeat.

Rony was playing "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" when he

entered the dim blue room of the club. It looked like a slack
night; a few couples were dancing; Paeng was mixing a
drink for a white-haired man leaning over the bar. Paeng
saw him at once, and waved a greeting, the usual three
fingers and an O which said: GUid to see you're still alive
and kicking. He returned the sign; it was more than a
greeting; it was also a hopeful ritual known only among men
that said: We're all in this together, old man; whether this
was bad luck or good fortune or life itself, or just a night
lousy with memories.

Doc HERE has been telling me about some pet theory of his,
Paeng said. Doctor, meet an old friend. Joe, the great editor-
in-chief.

How do you do, the white-haired man said. He regarded Joe

solemnly through his plastic-framed glasses before he shook
hands. Paeng and I are neighbors, he said as if in apology,
as though he had to explain why he was there, an old man,
drinking.

What'll it be, Joe? Paeng said.

The usual, Joe said.

Doc, Paeng said, pouring Scotch into a jigger, you better tell
Joe here about this theory of yours. The guy's a poet, and he
knoWs more about that nighttime stuff than I do.

You write poetry? the doctor asked Joe, He was a solemn-

looking old man with a polite, careful manner of speech.
No, not any more, Joe said. Gave it up when I turned
sixteen.

I see, the doctor said. Yes, I understand. Poetry magnifies all

the hidden terrors of life.

Paeng winked at Joe, and Joe smiled and decided it wouldn't

do anybody any harm to kid along. Yes, that was it, Joe said.
In fact, I wanted to kill myself. Poets usually end up killing
themselves. But I'm a born coward, I guess. Couldn't stand
the sight of blood.

Don't let that worry you too much, boy, the doctor said. We
are all cowards. We try not to show it, but we are all afraid.

That's what Doc's been telling me, Paeng said, pushing Joe
his drink. Deep inside we're all scared, and there's nothing
we can do about it, nothing at all, isn't that right, Doc?

Yes, the doctor nodded. There's nothing we can do about it.

Our actions — our actions are irrevocably predetermined.
Predetermined by our fears. Do you follow me, young man?
he turned to Joe.

Joe nodded. He drank some of the whiskey; the drink went

down smoothly and then gave a soft warm loving kick, and
he thought: I hope the stuff crowds out the lousy memories,
I hope it'll chase everything out for good.

There's nothing we can do about it, but to go on living — or

rather, existing, the doctor said. He emptied his glass and
asked for another drink; his lips began to quiver and Joe
thought the man had had more than he could take, but
when he spoke again, his voice was steady, grave and
polite. We are haunted by a vast army of fears, the doctor
said. And we are powerless before this grim inescapable
host. We have no will to resist, not even the will to die.
Paeng winked again, but Joe didn't wink back, or smile. Rony
was playing an old blues tune; when he noticed Joe at the
bar, he waved a salute, and went on playing; the slow,
melancholy notes seemed to carry away the solemn words
of the doctor beyond the dim room of the bar, into the night
of the world outside.

SOMEDAY, HE'LL come along, the girl sang. The man I love .
..

Rony played in and out of the song, ad-libbing, soft in the

background. The girl sang as though she meant every word
of the song, as though it were the song of her life. She was a
slender girl, pretty in a subdued friendly way, thought Joe,
smiling now, and for the moment, he forgot the old doctor
beside him, listening only to the girl's song.

The girl made a shy little bow, and stepped back into the
shadows behind the piano, followed by a brief rustle of
clapping. Rony picked it up from where she left off, jazzing it
this time with his characteristic flourishes, and the men and
their dates got up to dance.

She's okay, Joe said.

Linda, Paeng said. She'll do. Julie quit last week. Ran away
with her law student, didn't you know that?

No, Joe said. Paeng, I'd like to meet her.

Down, boy, Paeng said in mock alarm. Not so fast.

Somebody's not going to like it.

Come again?

She's private property or something, Paeng said. Old tired

million-aire businessman with a big black Cadillac. You know.
You better lay off, Joe.

What do you know, Joe said.

You know why I am here instead of someplace else, young

man?

the doctor said. Because I hate to go to sleep. Do you have

terrible dreams, young man?

Sometimes, Joe said. But I won't call them terrible dreams,

though.

Just plain lousy dreams.

Every night, the doctor said, I have these terrible dreams.

He peered at Joe through his glasses; his lips quivered, but
his voice remained even, polite, almost passive. In my
dreams, it's night always, the doctor said. The night goes on
and on, forever. And you hear things like -

like waves breaking on the shore, and people like children

crying to one another in a forest.

A foursome rose from their table and called out goodbye to

Paeng.

Paeng came out from behind the bar and saw them to the
door. See you next week, one of the women said. Stay
sober, one of the men said. They went out into the street
and Paeng came back to his place behind the bar.

It's nighttime for everyone in the world, the doctor said. The
night goes on and on, forever.

Joe thought it was funny, an old man dreaming of night

never ending.
He caught Paeng's knowing smile, and then it wasn't so
funny any more; he knew it for a sad thing, although it could
well be funny, too, and he remained silent and finished his
whiskey and listened to Rony playing.

The girl Linda came out from the shadows and sang: Can't
help loving that man of mine. . .

Joe felt the dull sadness stir anew within him, pushing
through the pleasant warmth of his drink. Suddenly he was
sorry for Linda, as though he had known her all his life and
was familiar with the things that tore at her heart. But that's
strictly for the birds, he thought. For all I know she's hard as
nails, and as sharp, too, and she's forgotten how it is to cry.

Rony got up from the piano and came over to the bar for
beer.

Hello, Doc, Rony said. Hi, Joe. How come you're late this
time, Joe?

We put in an extra ten pages in the magazine, Joe said.

Big deal, hey? Here's to you, Rony said. He raised his glass
in a quick toast and drank thirstily. Ah, but that was good,
he said, the beer foam like a shaggy mustache before he
wiped it off. Paeng, if you don't mind, I'll have another. That
is, if you don't mind.

I think I'll get me another piano-man, Paeng said.

Let's go meet Linda, Joe said.

Sure, Rony said. Sure, Joe, old man. C'mon and meet her.

Don't say I didn't warn you, Paeng said.

He's old enough to take care of himself, Rony said.

They found Linda at a table behind a row of palms, hidden

by the piano. She glanced up as if startled as Joe and Rony
came up to her; Joe met her eyes, large and questioning, a
young girl's eyes. She stood up uncertainly, fingering the
locket on her breast; she was smaller than Joe had thought,
barely reaching up to his shoulders.

Linda, this is Joe, Rony said. An old friend.

Hello, she said.

Joe's a great guy, Rony said. You'll get along fine.

Please sit down, she said.

You two get acquainted while I go finish Paeng's beer, Rony

said.

SOMEBODY CALLED out from a table, Hey Rony, how about

Baby Won't You Please Come Home? and Rony began to play
the old number extra-slow, and Joe thought: Listen to that
left hand chording on the bass, listen to that right going
high and clear, and you know you got the genuine article,
the real McCoy. The music melted into the blue dusk of the
bar, and then Rony began to play it ragtime, fast and happy,
but the tune retained its lonesomeness, somehow. Rony,
you are okay, Joe thought, and he was sure Rony wasn't the
kind of guy who worried about being scared and could
dream of night going on and on, even if he wanted to.

He lit a cigarette; the warmth of the whiskey was now a

numbness in his temples, but the sadness hadn't gone
away. He talked to the girl across the table from him, about
the town she said she came from, and the brother and sister
she had to help send through school, and the places where
she had worked. And all the time they talked he wanted to
tell her something true and luminous, something
magnificent and joyful; it was on the tip of his tongue,
thickly, waiting for articulation, but he couldn't say it, he
didn't know how.

I like the way you sang those songs, he said. Nice style. Cool
and smooth.

Thank you, she said. Then after a pause: Do you come here
often?

Once in a while, he said. But now, I'll be coming more often.

To hear you sing. To see you.

You shouldn't say things like that, she said.

Why? Why shouldn't I come around just to see you?

She looked at hirn steadily, and he felt the tightening in her,

the watchfulness. She fingered her locket and then she
turned away, not answering him.

Why shouldn't I? he repeated. Can't a friend come arouncl to

look you up, Linda?

She made as if to go, half-rising from her chair, but he made

her sit down again with a fast grip of her wrist. She pulled
her hand away with a sharp indrawn breath. You are drunk,
she said.

No, I'm not drunk. Not yet anyway. And call me Joe. Now
let's hear you say it. Joe.

Joe, she said.

Yes, that's better, he said, thinking of the businessman, the
bastard, hating him, wanting to beat up his old lecherous
face; he saw her riding in the Cadillac, small and lost in the
wide upholstered interior of the car, and he thought: Cut it
out now, you dope, or it'll spoil everything for you.

She was looking at her watch, bringing it close to her face in

the blue dimness. Joe, she said, you better go on back to the
bar.

He sat unmoving, holding himself still, the smoke of his

cigarette curling away between them.

Joe, I — Please go on back. She got up from the chair, and

this time he didn't hold her back; the troubled plea in her
expression had changed into something hard and defiant
that glinted in her eyes, even in the blue twilight.

Sure, he said. I understand. The blurred melancholy focused

into a sharp point of anger, and he caught his breath, and
he wanted to break something, the table, the ashtray, the
defiance in her eyes; but the anger faded swiftly, and then
he was neither angry nor sad, but tired and hopeless. Sure,
he said, I know about it, too. Papa's waiting for his little
chick. Or is he coming around to take her home? I
understand, he said, the words coming from the weariness
within him. I like to ride around in Cadillacs myself.

You don't understand, she said, softly, swiftly. I know what

I'm doing. I'm not dumb. I know what —

Sure, he said.

Nobody pushed me into it, she said. I go along with anybody

J

please.
Yes, sure, he said. The free will business. We choose, we
decide, we're responsible. . . You don't have to explain,
really.

Please go now, Joe, she said. Please leave me now.

He brushed past the palms and the piano and went back to
the bar. Paeng looked at him, shaking his head, frowning.
The doctor sat hunched over his glass. Rony joined them at
the bar and asked Paeng for another beer.

T H E DOCTOR roused himself from his stupor and cleared

his throat.

Gentlemen, I presume all of you are married?

Rony here's married, I think, Paeng said. But I don't know

about Joe here. Legally, I mean. Maybe occasionally.

Ha-ha, Joe said.

Joe, my boy, the doctor said, if you aren't married, don't

ever be so foolish as to try it. I was married, once. She was a
beautiful, artistic woman. She was a ballet-dancer before we
got married. When I was a medical intern at PGH. A long
time ago. I was then what you'd call a patron of the arts, a
lover of grace and beauty. She painted, too. She covered all
the walls with her canvases, and she could paint only one
thing. Eyes. Fish-eyes. Our house was full offish-eyes.

I can imagine, Doc, Rony said.

You should have seen her just before she died, the doctor
said. A coarse, bloated, selfish woman with a genius for
cruelty. She died while playing mahjongg. Heart disease,
and cirrhosis of the liver. Couldn't save her, for all my
medical skills. Don't ever get married, Joe, my boy.
They are all alike. Coarse and cruel, especially the ones who
paint and dance ballet.

It'll have to be more than that to scare him, Doc, Paeng said.

I have a theory, the doctor said. It's nighttime for everyone

in the world. And the night —

We heard that one before, Doc, Paeng said.

The night never ends, the doctor continued. When we die,

jt's the same endless night, only it's colder and darker and
lonelier, and you don't hear the waves any more, and the
people crying in the forest.

The door opened and a short thin man in a chauffeur's

uniform entered the dim blue room.

She's ovei" there, Paeng said, nodding in the direction of the

piano.

Timidly, the man in the chauffeur's uniform shuffled across

the narrow dance floor toward Linda's table behind the
palms; he reap-peared with Linda behind him, a white wrap
about her shoulders. I'll be seeing you, people, she said,
smiling brightly. Joe watched her follow the short thin man
out of the door. He felt neither angry nor sad; they were
strangers; she knew what she was doing, she could take
care of herself; what she did had nothing to do with him,
nothing at all. He finished his drink, while the two waiters
began to upend the chairs on the vacant tables.

Time to be shoving off, Joe said. He paid for his drinks.

Paeng returned a couple of the bills.

Last one's on the house, Paeng said,,

Thanks, Joe said.

The doctor got off his stool, staggering slightly, searching all
his pockets before he found enough to pay for his share. It's
been a pleasant evening, gentlemen, he announced,
gesturing at the bar with a wide sweep of his hand. Pleasant
enough to be a dot of light in the night, if I may say so
myself. He shook hands with Paeng and Joe and Rony.

Well, a good evening to you all — or is it good morning?

Doesn't make any difference, really. I enjoyed the privilege
of your intelligent company, gentlemen. Goodbye. We shall
meet again.

I'll see you, Paeng, Joe said. Coming along, Rony?

I'm feeling groggy, Rony said. I'll hang around for a while.

Stay sober, Joe, Paeng said. Don't dream of the night and
the waves and the crying in the forest. No variety. That kind
of crap will bore you to death.

Sure, I won't, Joe said, smiling.

So long, Joe, Rony said.

Joe and the old doctor went out the door together; they
stood on the sidewalk, under the neon sign of the club. Joe
thought the doctor looked sick in the pale green and yellow
of the neon glow, in the cool dawn air.

I live a block up the street, the doctor said, pointing

unsteadily, his glasses tilted on his nose, ready to fall off.
Joe decided he wasn't only sick; he looked very old and
defeated, and had no business staying up all night, drinking.
Going my way, young man?
I'm going back down the street, Joe said.

So long then, the doctor said. Don't forget what I've been
telling you. Don't worry too much about being afraid. That's
the way things are. Our actions are predetermined by our
fears, and there's nothing one can do about it. Well, so long,
young man.

Goodbye, Joe said.

The doctor lurched away down the sidewalk, away from the
green-yellow light. Joe watched him go, wondering if he
should see the doctor home, safely. The old boy's used to it,
he decided, and turned around to go his own way.

It was getting light; rising from the shadows he saw the

outlines of rooftops against the pearl-grey sky. His mind, his
eyes were clear; he felt strong and fresh in spite of the
drinks, as if he had just wakened from a quiet sleep to find
the dawn around him. The houses were still along the street;
he passed the scene of the party, and he remembered the
rich warm sound of the young girls laughing. Other things
came back, faces and voices of departed love, but he met
them on the peaceful street without remorse, recognizing
them with clear, level eyes; they passed by, fading away
like ghosts reluctant to touch and wound him.

It's Rony's piano, he thought, and Paeng's whiskey, and

walking down this street, now, in this hour of the earth's
turning toward the sun. It was all these things put together,
including Linda singing, and the doctor talking about his
dead wife and the night never ending, and Paeng winking at
him.

An all-night restaurant stood on the corner where he would

wait for his ride. He decided to have a cup of coffee. He
strode toward the lighted door, thankful for the cool clean
dawn, the quiet street, his wakefulness, his need for coffee.
He began thinking of the new girl in the newspaper office, a
tall slender girl called Remy who could type eighty words a
minute. She had clear laughing eyes, a nose that crinkled
easily, and a tendency to mispronounce her p's because she
came from Pampanga, where they said the women can
really cook. One of these days he was going to ask her for a
date. Yes sir, it was about time he stopped remembering too
many lost things and started afresh somewhere. Maybe she
painted, or danced ballet, too, like the doctor's wife; but that
shouldn't make any difference at all. The hell with the
doctor: he was crazy, of course, besides being drunk, and
maybe he wasn't even a doctor, in the first place. It was
good to be walking down the clean quiet street, thinking of
the girl Remy with, possibly, love, walking toward the
lighted door and the warm strong coffee, in the grey hour of
dawn that was almost morning.

Lost

IN THE EARLY dusk, it was raining again, the cold misty rain
of the mountains, making him think of the first day when
they had driven up the winding road through the rain and
the skies had cleared when they reached the city, with the
west burning redly like a wound. She leaned quietly against
him, sitting on the divan, and together they watched the
rain through the French windows, the rain falling on the
terrace and the pines along the street and the park beyond.
His lips touched her hair, he breathed her fragrance, and he
recalled the flowers, the sampaguitas and roses at her
aunt's home in San Juan, how almost intolerably sweet their
scent in evenings after rain; her shy and frightened eyes
after he had kissed her for the first time in the garden dark
and still with the bloom of flowers after rain. . .
"Fred. . ." She said his name carefully, as though she were
not used to it: her voice was small, a young girl's
whispering.

"The rain makes you remember things," she said.

He did not speak, holding her close, tracing with a finger the
curve of her ear, thinking yes, so many sad and happy
things.

"There is — a sound in the rain," she said. "A kind of singing.

..

Tell me, what things does it make you remember?"

"The house in San Juan," he said. "The garden. The light in

your window, the trees, the way the street looked at night. .
."

"Tell me more/' she said.

"You in a white dress/' he said. "A ribbon in your hair, the

first time I saw you."

"I remember that, too/' she said. "You came with Dito and
Romy."

"There were the afternoons I came to see you," he said. "At

the college, and later on at Tia Deling's place. The sala, the
portraits on the walls . . . You coming down the stairs in an
evening gown. And the time I told you I loved you and you
would not look at me and when you did you looked at me
straight and long."

Even now in the room with her, he could not recall the
moment without a slight start of guilt: before he felt the
deepest tenderness, he had imagined he could defile her as
he had the others. Did she know that then? Now? The
knowledge of his deceit cast a shadow across his mind; and
so long as he was aware of it, it marred the spell of rain and
memory in the room.

His tone vague and uneasy, he said, "What things do you r e

mem-

ber?"

"Oh, I can't possibly tell all," she said, "there are so many . .
."

He waited and in their silence the rain fell on the pines and
the grass in the park and on the lagoon and blurred the
shapes of the mountains. His guilt seemed to fade away like
blown smoke into the growing darkness, and the sound of
the rain became again the peaceful background of their
remembering.

She stirred and sighed in his arms. "I remember one day in
school,"

she said, "the time I was an interna. It was raining and the
wind had stripped the acacias of their leaves. We didn't
have classes and I sat by the window most of the day, trying
to write a story for the school magazine. I remember Sister
Lucila walking across the campus after the rain, in the
afternoon, with the leaves yellow and green on the ground.
Everything looked bare and lonely."

He listened to her slow half-whisper, close yet distant

because of the sound of the rain, and tried also to imagine
the leafless trees and the nun crossing the ground strewn
with leaves; but he could not summon the image, although
he thought he was familiar with the details of the scene, and
instead saw her in her white school uniform, playing
Rachmaninoff, her young flushed face turned to him for
approval.

"For a year I stayed with my cousins in Malolos," she said. "I

was twelve. We played games in the moonlight. The games
of children.

They had a wide yard with plenty of trees, caimito and

avocado. I remember I couldn't sleep after we had played. I
sat in bed and looked at the trees and I seemed to be
waiting for something . . . Voices . . . I don't know . . . "

That was after your parents died, Laura, he thought,

suddenly wanting to know, to feel, as he was sure she now
felt, the measure of her remembered loss. And with sudden
clarity, he heard her aunt telling him about the highway
accident that had killed her parents (while they sat on the
porch, waiting for her, the evening light the unutterable
ghost of time around them): she was an only child, and for a
long time she wouldn't speak to anyone in her grief, her
mother was that way too, my sister, Fred, she felt things
deeply and carried them in her heart away from the sight of
men. The woman's story had touched in him some
wellspring of love and compassion so that when Laura
finally came, his scattered longings had distilled and
become a pain.

"I don't know," she said, "but that year I seemed to be

waiting.

There was something. Something that was so near you

could feel it."

"Yes, and it was so real -— and it was also — like a dream."

"You have felt it, too?"

"Yes," he said.

"Not the way it was with me," she said. "A man is different.
There are things — I mean, people can't know and feel the
same things really. No matter how much they ..." He sensed
a melancholy strain in her words; he fingered the fine
strands of her hair and thought of how she had lain wakeful
in the nights, waiting for voices from the moonlit darkness,
a young girl with the same eyes and curve of nose and
forehead and shape of face, in a time gone forever. He had
never seen the house in Malolos, an old house probably,
with its own patterns of light and shadow, and voices of
wind and rain and loneliness. Where was I that year? I was
seventeen, alone in the city for the first time, and in the
boarding-house at night I listened to the whistle of the trains
and the distant hum of cars and the jukebox down the street
playing the songs about a stranger in a crowded room and
laughter that one could never quite recall. We were three in
the room and we joked and smoked a lot and once I fought
with Roy and we talked restlessly about women in the dark,
tense with rebellion against God, and you were years away,
Laura . . . Suddenly he was conscious of the vast and
complex mystery by which they had come to one another
through all the accidents of their lives, two persons, distinct
and apart: he felt an awed humility, as though in a state of
grace, he had been favored with a vision. The rain fell
steadily and it was evening in the room, and outside, the
wind lashed at the panes. They did not speak now but
listened to many voices deeper and lonelier than the rain's.

THEY WENT to Mass in the morning, purposely leaving

behind the car to count the steps going up the Cathedral.
Happy, almost breathless, they paused at the top of the
cemented stairs for a view of the city. The mountains
sparkled in the sunrise and the wind, cool as ever, was the
breathing of the pines and the rain-wet earth.
Inside the church a huge Christ hung dying above the altar.
The singing of the nuns (the cool living waters flowing
forever . . .) accented the eternity of the Sacrifice. Sunlight
streamed through a stained-glass window and gilded the
plaster robe of a saint he had forgotten. He glanced
sidewise at her, saw the page of her missal: prayers for the
souls of the dead. He thought of death. He had not died, he
was alive; here I am, my God, in this year, in this season . . .

After the Mass they came across a family whom Laura knew,
the women cooing and wishing them happiness as they
drove away in a black sedan. On the street below, three
friends from college days pounced upon them with hearty
greetings. He found the chance meeting rather
disconcerting: he had not seen thern since graduation, and
for an awkward second, he could not remember the names
of the two with Max. It was all in the papers, Max said, and
he kidded Laura about how brave a girl she was, putting up
with a character like Fred.

They posed for Eddie's camera, and all the while Max kept
ribbing him to "hold her closer, Fred, ol' man," and Laura
smiled uncertainly at his roguish humor. With profuse
handshakes, the trio left them before the restaurant where
he and Laura had their meals, three young men striding off
to their destinies. During breakfast he remembered that
once he had brought Max's brother along for a double-date
(after the dancing, they had gone to a seaside resort in
Paranaque): the brief, cynical affair brought to mind the
other faces; and he frowned at himself with a doubtful
uneasiness.

They drove out to a park, on the outer limits of the city: only
a stoutish couple and their children were there, for the
vacationing crowds had gone with the end of April. The sun
shone in a porcelain sky, although the mountains beyond
the crests across the valley were veiled in fog and rain. She
threw some coins for the native children on the slope below
the kiosk, and he told her laughingly she'd better start
saving; and wistfully, unmindful of his jest, she wondered if
the children were happy. He took several snapshots of her,
and he could not help thinking how tender her loveliness,
how young and pure, as he framed her in the camera, her
hair trembling in the wind, her profile against the mountains
and the immense sky. But the listlessness that had begun at
breakfast gnawed subtly at his heart: years ago, a girl had
stood where she was standing now, with the same
mountains looming darkly in that cold night: I was not yet
twenty: a long time ago, he answered himself. They had
been a group of six in the car, fearful and bold in their
conspiracy and with a fierce and tragic desperation, he had
clung to the girl whom he hardly knew, knowing he would
never be young in innocence again. It was part of the blind
groping for love, or simply a devilish trick of memory, he
reassured himself, helping Laura up the curving steps back
to the car. The ground was wet and slippery with brown pine
needles.

It was not yet noon, so they went to the park near the hotel.
He asked her if she wanted to go boating and she said no,
not now, this afternoon if it doesn't rain, it's late already. It
was warm in the sun, though moist and cool where they sat
in the shade, her hand restful in his. Through his sunglasses
the city appeared in a strange, remote light, a dimension
not of the present. The wind stirred the young pine above
their bench and the purr of motorbikes and a boat skimming
the length of the wide rectangular lagoon and the calling of
boys and the conversation of people walking by blended
into a haze of murmuring in his ears, and he relaxed in a
kind of drowsiness that was at the same time sharply
wakeful. Cloud-shadows drifted across the park, over the
houses on the hillsides, presaging rain. He noticed the
names carved on the bench, the names of strangers: Bert,
Mely, Inday, Joe loves Citas: the letters faded on the soft,
crumbling wood. Helplessly, he found names and faces
insinuating themselves into his brooding mood: Forget
them, live this moment, here, now. Against his will (why
must I remember?) his consciousness touched upon the
time he was twenty, when furious storms had torn at his
soul and he had ached for a meaning, an answer to his
unrest. He had walked the night streets with his friends,
half-drunk and defiant at life and the world, and searching
for an ideal of grace and beauty; and always in his dreams
he had been haunted by a nameless grief.

"Look, Fred, the boy . . . " He was glad she had spoken,
unaware of his secret thoughts. Her hand moved in his
hand, warmly, like a small bird.

The boy toddled between his parents, proudly displaying a

tooth in a wide grin, facing the sun. His little feet struggled
bravely in his wavering walk as mother and father held on
to his arms and kept his balance on either side.

He heard her exclaim softly: "Isn't he a beautiful child!"

He watched the progress of parents and child down the

shaded pathway, feeling her watching with him, holding her
breath against the child's falling and hurting himself,
thinking perhaps of the miracle of birth and life.

"He's one year old/' she said.

"I guess so/' he said.

"A year/' she said. "One year."

"He'll be climbing trees pretty soon."

"You were a big family/' she said.

"Yes, we were many children."

"You were very happy/' she said with a muted intensity.

"When you were young."

"We were five boys. We went swimming together." Now in

memory he saw the bend in the river, with the bamboos
arching over the deep green water, the streets of the town
and their silence in the evenings, the plaza and the ancient
church and the sprawling house where he lived his boyhood.
Before the war and the ugliness and the fire, and my brother
Cesar's death in the prison camp.

"I haven't seen the town in years," he said.

"Let's go there," she said. "Someday."

"Someday," he said.

The sunlight had faded without his knowing, and it had

grown grey and chill again. The wind was moist on his face
and he looked up to see a rain-cloud break over the skyline.

"Let's go," he said, "before it rains."

LATE IN the afternoon they braved the rain to go to a movie,

which she particularly wanted to see at one of the theaters.
They had quite a time, ducking from store to store, because
the wind drove the rain against the buildings, and it pleased
him to hear her laugh at their little adventure, and he did
not mind at all the young men staring at her.

They almost missed the beginning of the show. It was easy

to find seats in the sparse, companionable crowd; they
watched the story of love move on the screen, tragic with its
overtones of departure and sacrifice in a country one
sometimes saw in dreams. Leaning against the curve of his
chest and arm, she wiped tears from her eyes.

"I cry easily," she said. r

He said nothing; he did not know what to say. (I am here,

weep on my shoulder, I'll wipe away your tears.) In the cool
pale light from the screen, he thought she looked younger,
small and delicate of figure, her face softer, the young girl
he had never known.

A fine, almost imperceptible drizzle fell through the evening

air as they came out of the theater. The wet black incline of
the street and the tops of parked automobiles reflected the
red-blue-green of neon-signs. Unhurriedly, they went down
the rain-drenched sidewalk, under the dripping canvas
awnings, idly peering into store windows. Before a souvenir
shop they paused to examine a collection of carvings,
ashtrays and book-ends which, he noted morbidly to his
amusement, looked like shrunken human heads. In a
bookstore, she bought a magazine and stationery. He told
her to go on look over the books while he would take less
than a minute to cross the street for a tin of pipe tobacco.

He stepped into the street, the droplets of rain tiny fingers

of ice on his face. He put up the collar of his jacket. A roar as
of a low plane approaching quivered in the air. He had
reached the opposite sidewalk when the blasting, sputtering
racket rushed down the street, and he turned just in time to
see the motorcycle skid and slam against the parked car on
the other side of the street and knock down the woman and
crash into the plate glass window of the department store.
There were no screams, no shouts after-the shattering
instant, only the motorcycle backfiring like a machine gun
as it hung crazily by a wheel in the splintered glass. He
could not see the rider: the woman lay broken and
motionless on the wet asphalt, in the drizzling rain. Then as
if by signal, a concerted shouting swept the electric air, a
policeman shrilled his whistle. Laura: her name cried in him:
Laura. She was standing on the sidewalk with an expression
of fear and entreaty; in the spreading confusion, with the
people rushing to the scene of blood, she was utterly alone,
isolated and abandoned. He crossed the street to her and
held her in his arms; she hid her face against his chest; she
was trembling. He said, "Let's go now, Laura, it's ovef, I'm
here, Laura," smelling the gasoline and the burned rubber,
seeing the crowd thickening about the fatal strip of
sidewalk, two shops away.

As they rounded the corner to the hotel, he heard the

approaching wail of an ambulance coming over the hill. He
helped her up the steps, took the key from the desk clerk,
and in the room at last, he saw how pale and distraught she
was. He brought her a glass of water; her hand shook so
that he had to hold it for her: it occurred to him suddenly
that she had seen the motorcycle riding down the woman
before it flung itself against the glass window. She sat on
the bed, pale, gazing out at the lights of the houses on the
dark hillsides.

"Laura," he said.

"It was terrible," she said faintly. "That woman — she wasn't
killed

— she's going to live — ?"

"Yes," he said and believed himself in spite of what he had

seen.

"How do you feel now?"

"I'm all right," she said and turned to him in silence and he
held her against all the pain in the world. He felt that she
was never nearer to him than now; and his heart beat with
the mystery of two persons coming together at a moment in
time, the complex, inexpressible web of all their days upon
the earth. He longed to know everything she had ever seen
and felt and dreamed, everything that had made her fearful
and happy, all the places, the rooms, the faces and voices,
the features of land and sky, the days and nights of her life.
But he could only hold her closer as though her nearness
would still the cry in his own soul.

IN THE night he awoke, not gradually, but abruptly, with a

clear and sharp perception as though he had not been
sleeping. He lay there, for how long he did not know,
listening to the infinitesimal dripping of water somewhere
outside the window, and the rise and fall of her breathing
beside him. In his mind he saw the city outside: the cold still
darkness, the damp trees, the weathered houses on the
ancient hills. He shivered, feeling the cold air of night enter
the room, bringing a yearn-ing for the sound of a voice, the
warm caress of harfds. In the ambigu-ous dark (the street-
lights shimmered duskily on the drapes), her face on the
pillow was a woman-child's face, a stranger's face. She
stirred in her sleep; her lips moved and he thought she
whispered someone's name. He touched her face lightly, the
dreaming stranger-face.

The week was coming to an end, and they would return to

Manila and the apartment, and he would go back to the old
schedules and the dusty, sweltering streets. For the first
time since they came, he was struck by the swiftness of the
days passing; everything had gone by so fast: the church in
the early morning, the priest's consecrating words, and the
guests and the happy wishes, Laura beautiful in white, the
ascending winding road and the rain falling through the
nights. What had he lost? What would he never find? Lying
in the dark, he knew he would remember the days of this
week, all the words spoken, the gestures, the backgrounds;
he saw Laura standing alone on the sidewalk, while the
woman lay on the wet asphalt, and the drizzling rain fell,
and the motorcycle sputtered its dying roar. Fragments of
his past began to thrust themselves into his unresisting
mind. The things he sought and would never find, because
they were known only to another soul, belonged only to
another life, in other times and places . . . He was thinking
of the night he had drunk more than he could take at a
party and he had wakened alone to a room littered with
cigarette-butts and empty bottles and confetti, when he felt
her hand and heard her say his name, softly, in the dark;
and he turned to her searchingly, ardently, and with
compassion and tenderness.

The Distance to Andromeda

The sun is a star, one among approximately a hundred

billion stars that compose the Milky Way, a galaxy a hundred
thousand light years in diameter. A light year is the distance
light travels in one year, at a speed of 186,000 miles a
second. There are probably a million galaxies within the
range of the most powerful telescopes, each star system
containing billions of suns. The nearest galaxy, Andromeda,
is more than a million light years away.

THE BOY Ben, thirteen years old, sits tense and wide-eyed
before the screen of the theater, in the town in Tarlac. His
heart thumps in awe and excitement, and his hands are
balled into unconscious fists, as the spaceship burns its
blue-flamed journey through the night of the universe that is
forever silent with a high metallic hum.
Enclosed in time within the rocket, the ship itself surrounded
by timelessness, which is in turn framed by the boundaries
of the cinema screen, the last men and women and children
of Earth watch the aster-oids, the streams of cosmic dust,
the barren planets drift past the portholes like luminous
flowers at once beautiful and monstrous, floating in the
ocean of space. The travelers search the night for another
world of air and greenness, remembering the end of Earth,
the Final War, the flickering radioactive fires upon the
lifeless continents. Beyond the dead seas of Mars, and
beyond the ice-bound tomb of Neptune, past the orbit of
Pluto and out into the black immeasurable depths, the
rocket flashes onward, through years of space and time: a
moving speck among the untwinkling stars, propelled by the
flame of its engines and a certain destiny. A sun looms up
from the blackness, more golden and more gentle than the
star they have always known; and as a globe of shining
water and green-shadowed land appears through the
viewports, they break out into jubilant cries and dazed
whispers of thanks to God.

Cradled by a final blast of power, the spacecraft lands on a

meadow: a quiet moment before the airlocks open, a sigh of
wind in the nearby trees. The survivors of Earth climb down
onto the grass, and the filmed prophecy ends with them
gathered as on a pilgrimage beneath the vertical cylinder of
their rocket, looking out across the plain to the hills green in
the light of the new sun.

The curtains close the window of the screen and an

amplified phonograph scratches out a tired rhumba: there is
a brief scramble for vacated seats, the usual reluctant
shuffling toward the exits after a show. Ben thinks of staying
for one more screening, but his friend Pepe has stood up to
leave, waving to him from the aisle; besides, the picture is
rather long, and he would be late for supper. He would come
back tomorrow, anyway; he had saved enough for a month
of weekend movies.

He and Pepe go up the aisle, stepping on brittle peanut

shells and candy tinfoil: in the diffuse light, the audience
waits for the lovely and terrible dream. They make way for
Mr. Rodriguez and Dr. Concepcion coming in through the
door, and they come upon his cousin Teddy at the ticket-
booth. Good show? Ben nods half-absently, not quite
released from the influence of the dream.

It is early evening in the town: night has fallen upon half of

Earth.

The main street is busy and bright with the lights of the
evening: horse-drawn calesas jingle by and the jeepneys,
bound for the neighboring town, belch their dusty gasoline
smell into the warm air. The two boys linger before the
moviehouse and look up at the photo stills tacked on the
display board: the nuclear-bombed cities, New York and
Paris and London, where no man would ever breathe and
walk again; tomorrow's spaceship, flaming meteor-like in the
night of space; the faces of the last people, brave before the
vast and unexplored night.

Ben looks up at the pictures, and he feels again, deep in a

silence within him, like the vibration of invisible wires, the
hum of the universe, the movement of planets and stars. He
turns to his friend in a kind of impatience, his eyes bright,
his chest tightening: he begins to speak, but the hum and
the movement cannot be uttered. C'mon, Ben, says Pepe,
and they cross the street away from the sound and glare of
the theater, through the small belling tinkle of the calesas
and the warm gasoline dust, while the strangeness within
him strains almost like a pain for utterance.
T H E Y SAUNTER down the main street in the manner of
boys who have no immediate reason for hurry, lazy-legged
and curious-eyed. It is Saturday evening, and there are
more than the ordinary number of pedestrians on the street;
his father would not be home till after eight, and supper
would be delayed for him. They pause to examine the
window display of the Victory Bazaar, arranged around an
air-rifle, smooth-stacked and steel-blue-barreled: he
wonders how long it would take to save for the gun's price.

A bus has just arrived at the terminal shed in front of the

Vilmar Cafe, and the passengers are coming out into the
street with the luggage and the fatigue of their journey. A
man carrying a sleeping child counts his bags on the steel-
matting floor of the station: a tall beautiful woman shakes
loose her long hair, and an old man is blinking at the lights
of the town. Above the general clamor, the hot oil exhaust
of the trucks, there is a sense of countless miles of road, of
distances reached or still untraveled. Even as the newly-
arrived brush the dust off their clothes, another bus is set to
roll out of the shed, packed with people going away and
going home.

Dr. Martinez stands by the door of his wife's drugstore and

Ben and Pepe say good evening, and the doctor says hello
there, boys, laughing his baritone, indulgent laugh. A jeep
parks before the Plaza Cool Spot and two boys and three
girls get off and crowd about the counter: Ben hears one of
the boys ordering chocolate ice-cream, and the girls teasing,
Ay, is that all? They come to the plaza: children are roller-
skating around the bandstand, and the stars are clear in the
sudden night over the town.

The two boys get up on a bench and sit on the backrest and
watch the skating children. In the white light of the neon
lamps, the continuous rumbling sound of the skates rises
and falls with the quality of the cemented rink: now hollow
and receding, now full and ascending, going around,
seemingly unending. Tito comes by and joins them atop the
bench; they talk of a swim in San Miguel tomorrow morning;
they agree to meet here, at the kiosko, after the nine o'clock
Mass. After a few random topics, from basketball to the new
swept-winged jets that passed over the town during the
day, the talk shifts to the movie Ben and Pepe have just
seen. Tito does not go for that kind of picture, so fantastic,
he says, so untrue to life. Better the war movies, and the
Westerns, and any film with sharks or alligators.

With every second the night deepens in the sky. As though

in obe-dience to some secret signal, Ben looks up at the
stars. The Southern Cross hangs in the meridian: the half-
man and half-horse in Centaurus rides over the acacias, and
the Milky Way is a pale misted river divid-ing the sky. The
stars are faraway suns . . . The strangeness stirs in silence
within him: the unknowable words die stillborn in his mind,
and the boy joins in the casual joking conversation, while
the rumble of the skates rises and falls, around and around,
as if forever, and the stars swing across the sky.

I wonder if there are people on Mars — like in the comics . . .

If there are any, says Tito, they'd look like Mr. Guzman.

Just because he flunked you in Algebra.

Do you think people will ever get to the moon?

Aah, nobody's going to land on the moon; says Tito, there's

no air up there.

They'll bring their oxygen in the rocketship.

Moon, rocketship, Mars — what kind of crazy talk is that?

All right, says Pepe, tell us about that love letter you sent
Marita.

Letter? Marita? I didn't write her any letter, says Tito. Who
told you I did?

The girls in class were passing it around yesterday, didn't

you know that?

The three boys hoot and shake with laughter: Tito loses his
balance and falls exaggeratedly on the grass and pretends
to pass out cold from the shock of the news. Ben and Pepe
tickle him to life, and they wrestle on the grass: an old man
and two women strolling by peer at them frowningly, and
suddenly shy, they rise from their mock struggle, weak with
laughter. By a common impulse, habitual with the young,
bewildering to the grown-up, they race across the plaza to
where the main street curves before the church, and they sit
panting on the low guard of the culvert, warm and happy
from their running.

W I T H COMIC farewells, the three boys part ways, Ben

walks home alone, back across the plaza, past the skaters
and the lampposts of the kiosko, the border of trees and the
town hall. The empty house on Romulo Street stares at him
through a veil of vines, like a sick old woman abandoned by
her children. The electric plant by the river thunders
compressedly as he goes by, the massive dynamos
producing heat and light: it is as though he were discovering
the power of the machines for the first time, quivering in the
air, trembling underground.

On the bridge, he stops to gaze up at the sky: the far edge

of the river, without trees or houses, planes into a horizon;
the stars seem to rise from the dark of the land and the
water.
He stands alone on the bridge, and he is suddenly lonely,
the vast humming turning within him, waiting: for a streak
of blue flame, a signal-flare among the stars. Where and
why . . . Thousands of years away by the speed of light, the
other worlds . . . He recalls the view of the heavens through
the portholes of the rocket, and the photographs of the
galaxies, the whirlpooled suns in the book his father gave
him one Christmas. The spaceship, an atom wandering in
the outer reaches of unknown space: to be lost and lonely
forever in the starry night. . .

He feels very tiny, only a boy, shrinking, helpless, standing

between the dark river and the lights in the sky.

A calesa clip-clops over the bridge, startling him, and he

shivers in the warm evening and walks more briskly now,
swinging his arms. His father might have come home early
after all, and now they would be waiting for him: his father
and mother and his aunt, his sister and brother and his
brother's wife: the faces and the voices of his home.

The street is familiar with the lights of the houses: here the
trellised gates, the mail-boxes, the sprinkled grass. Mr.
Macapinlac is reading a newspaper on his front porch. A dog
is barking, someone is calling out a name. He catches a
whiff of cooking from a kitchen, the scent of crushed
pepper, the sputter of lard, and he wonders what Pining has
prepared for supper. He passes by a group saying goodbye,
good night at a gate: the throbbing of a car going down the
street, a blend of voices talking, and Mrs. Aquino, their next-
door neighbor, sweeping leaves into a smouldering pile, the
smoke curling faintly up into the windless evening.

His father is not yet home. His mother and aunt rock slightly
in the roofed swing in the front yard, and his sister Luz and
Chitong, her fiance, lean on their elbows over the veranda
rail, sharing their endless secrets. He kisses his mother's
hand, and his Tia Dora's: his aunt is relating something, with
gasps of amusement, and she offers him her fat hand limply.
He hops up the steps, and Chitong turns around to say hello,
Ben, how was the movie?

Okay, he replies, and opens the screen door with a nudge of

his shoulder, after the style of a government agent crashing
into a gangster's hideout: but the make-believe, even for tlje
boy, dissolves abruptly before the benign portraits of his
grandparents, the upright piano, the pedestaled plants. In
the alcove under the stairs, his brother Pol, stripped to the
waist and sweating, writes at his father's desk piled high
with law books: the smoke from his pipe is blue and fragrant
under the shaded lamp.

He dribbles an imaginary basketball toward the kitchen,

skidding on the floor, feints and jack-knifes a neat shot
through the door. His sister-in-law Remy is giving her baby
his supper of porridge from a cup. The child gurgles a
vigorous greeting at the boy, and Remy laughs at the
wonder bf her son's knowing, the infant-accents of his
language.

The kitchen is bright and intimate with its rich cooking

smells: Pining bustles about the old Mayon stove, and the
girl with the pigtails smiles her crooked-toothed smile from
the lithographed calendar on the wall.

You want to tell Uncle Ben something? says Remy. You want
to talk to him, ah, Baby?

Ben brings his eyes close to the child's, as though to

hypnotize him, and Baby spews a glob of gruel on his face.
Ay, Baby, that's no-o-o good, says Remy, and Ben, howling
in humorous outrage, stumbles to the sink to wash his face.
You do that again and I'll give you a whack.

Oh no, you don't, says Remy. Only Mama can give you a
spanking, not even Papa, isn't that right, Baby?

The child blubbers a wet, unintelligible answer, and Remy,

pleased, rewards him with a loud kiss, there. Ben opens the
refrigerator for a drink of ice-cold water: he feels warmer
now inside the house, and he gulps the water down thirstily.

Hold, you drink and drink, says Pining, and it's almost time
for supper.

You went to the cine, Ben? asks Remy.

About the Third World War. A rocketship got away and

landed on another planet. There are thousands of them, but
you have to find the right one, with trees and rivers and all.
Like on Earth . . .

That picture Pol and I saw last week, that was beautiful.
What a love story . . . It made me cry, really.

Love, says Ben, sniffing disgustedly, love.

You just wait till you're a few years older. Tell him, Baby, tell
him to wait and see.

But Baby is at the moment fascinated by the cat, perched

proudly on a ledge by the stove: they examine each other
over the table, the child and the cat, until Pining shoos it
away with her ladle, and Baby expresses his protest in a
long piercing wail.

Ben goes down the back steps and around the water-tank to
the front yard. A breeze touches the santol tree and is gone
and the evening is as warm as ever. From the house across
the street come the simple dancing piano notes of a child's
waltz. He lies down flat on his back on the grass, beside the
swing: the stars seem brighter now, nearer, as he looks up
at the zenith, pillowing his head in his hands.

Baby's crying, says his mother.

He wanted to play with the cat, but Pining drove it away.

Oh, I thought something... Ben, don't lie down there like

that, you'll dirty your clothes.

The grass is clean, Ma.

Let him be, says Tia Dora, he's big enough to know what's
good for him. Now, as I was saying, her nephew quit school
and married this girl from Laguna . . .

T H E LITTLE piano music, the voices of his mother and aunt

talking in the dusky light from the porch lap at him
comfortingly as warm tides of a sea: he is safe, lying floating
in the cove of home, and he can gaze at the stars now with
more assurance, without loneliness. Close to the front eaves
of the house, he spots the individual gleam of Mars: he
thinks of the canals pictured in the book, crisscrossing the
face of the planet: the polar ice and the red deserts, the
green maps of vegeta-tion. Do they also train their
telescopes Earth-ward, those beings on Mars? In their sky,
Earth, with the sun reflected on its clouds and seas, must
shine brighter than Venus . . . The wheeling hum descends
upon him, trembles tightly within him: now it is like the echo
of a name he cannot remember, the name of Someone wRo
might have known him ages before he was born. He, lying
on the grass, in front of his father's house, looking up at the
stars: and the stars shining down their ancient light on him
and the house and the town . . .
The boy hears the approaching purr of his father's car, and
in an instant, he is up on his feet and running to open the
driveway gate. The headlights turn toward the garage,
enormous eyes sweeping over him, dazzling him pleasantly.
His father races the Chevy as he drives in, tires crunching
on the gravel: the sweetish gasoline odor drifts across the
yard, a good warm smell to the boy: it is of the same order
as the smoke of his father's cigar and his brother's pipe, or
of blue-yellow mornings of sun after a long rain.

He takes the briefcase from his father: the simple act is also
a ceremony between father and son, implicit with perfect
affection. His father and mother go up the front steps
together, their arms about each other's waist: his father has
just made one of his clever remarks, and his mother is
laughing: he is a huge, jocose, smiling man. Luz tries to take
her father's hand, but he is too fast for her, tracing a quick,
humorous benediction in the air.

Good evening, sir, says Chitong.

Hello, Chitong, how are you?

Fine, sir, thank you.

Well... Tell your father we'll be working together on that

irrigation project in San Miguel. I got the word today.

Yes, I'll tell him.

Luz here treating you right?

Yes, sir, she's — she's very good, I mean, she —

Well... You'll have to excuse me now. I've been on the road

all day.
I was just leaving, sir.

Stay for supper, Chitong.

Thank you, ma'am, but I have to go now. Good evening, sir,

ma'am.

See you, Ben.

'Bye, Chitong.

Good night.

Luz walks Chitong to the gate, and the bo f and his father
and mother go into the house. His father rolls up his sleeves
and flexes his arms tiredly, standing tall in the sala: he has
been away all week on a construction job in La Union, and
Ben smiles his gladness. He settles down in his favorite
chair, and Ben brings him his slippers, and the family is
gathered about the chair: the lights seem brighter now, the
voices more loving, the faces all smiling.

Say, where's my little friend?

Already sleeping, says Remy.

I brought something for the rascal.

What is it, Pa? asks Pol.

A dump truck, with a trailer. Here, I got it in Dagupan.

Ay, another toy, says Remy. He'll only throw it around, like
the others.

That's what these things are for. Open them up, see what
makes them tick. He'll grow up to be a first class engineer.
Like his grandfather — the best engineer in the province of
Tarlac.

Hear, hear, says his mother.

You're one against so many thousands, Ma... Ben, you still in

school?

Sure, Papa.

The Cine Oriente, that's what he means, says Luz. Ben

never misses class there.

That's not true, only on weekends. This film that's showing

now, you should see it, Papa. The hydrogen bombs burned
up everything, the cities and all the air.

Don't let them put a scare into you now, says his father. The
world's going to last a long while yet.

A few got away, in a spaceship. It's like in the book, the one
you gave me, only the stars had lots of colors, green, and
red, and blue, is that right, Pa^a?

Well, now, I don't know. Green and blue stars would be a

pretty sight, though.

There is something else the boy wants to say and know at

last: a name perhaps, and a searching: he bites his lip,
blinking his eyes, and for the briefest moment, there in the
living room, he is aware of the silent vibrating hum inside
him and far away. . . somewhere, moving across the world. .
. When his father comes back downstairs from his shower,
Tia Dora and Luz have set the table: the table cloth is crisply
fresh for the occasion of the homecoming, and the aroma of
Pining's cooking reminds Ben that he is hungry. They sit
down at the circular table, his family: his mother says grace,
and Pining brings in the rice smoking off the stove, timed for
the start of supper, and the way his father likes it.

Here, Ben, take the heart and liver. Vitamins.

Thanks, Papa.

How's the case going, Pol?

The guy's lawyers came up with something new. But we'll

get around it.

You will. But don't let it land you in jail now.

Are you finished with the job up north, Alfredo?

I'll have to go back Monday.

We're invited to a wedding Tuesday. Seniong's daughter.

That's just too bad. Remind me to call him tomorrow.

By the way, Father Panlilio has been asking about you. He

wants to talk to you about the fund drive. For the parochial
school.

I'll see him tomorrow, after Mass.

Papa, I wish I could come with you Monday.

School will be over pretty socm. What do you say we go

fishing?

Oh boy1. That would be fine. Papa, I saw an air-rifle

downtown, just this evening. You'll get it for me, huh, Papa?

We'll see. Maybe this summer we can do some hunting too.

Isn't that dangerous, now? There's enough shooting going
on in the world as it is.

Nothing to worry about, Ma, says his father. The birds aren't
going to shoot back.

Pass the dessert to your father, Ben, says Tia Dora.

Pining, says his father, patting his stomach, you're the best
cook in the province of Tarlac.

The best engineer, says his mother, the best cook...

And the best lawyer, says Pol, winking. You ask Remy here.

You'll do for an ambulance-chaser. But Luz has another

fellow for the title, ah, Luz?

Ay, ay, Chitong —

Ben, you watch out, warns his sister.

And Ma, says his father, you're the best wife and mother in
the whole world. He smiles at her, his large gentle hand on
her shoulder.

He leans back and lights a cigar. Let's sit on the porch, shall
we? It's warm in here.

THE BOY follows his father and mother to the porch: his
father switches off the overhead bulb, and in the soft-toned
light, the night is lucid and palpable around the house, the
stars sprayed distinctly above the rooftops. Nimble, cowboy-
like, Ben straddles the rail: he is on a white stallion,
galloping across a starlit prairie, flying. He rests back
against the corner-post and glances about him, waiting.
An upstairs window in the next house is a moon captured in
a net of santol leaves. A group passes by, chattering,
wooden shoes scuffing, rustling away gradually down the
street.

His father and mother sit together on the sofa, talking

gently: Remy and Pol come to the veranda and Ben listens
to their voices, near and familiar in the night. The coal of his
father's cigar, tracing slow arcs in the pale darkness,
reminds the boy of the time the power failed in their section
of the town and they had supper by candlelight, and he had
thought the shadows alive and friendly, only a magic spell
removed from speech.

The street is quiet now but for the faint crooning of a radio
somewhere down the block, and a cricket stitching its tiny
whir upon the warm restful breathing of Earth. From the far
edge of town blow the last whistles of a train: now the
travelers would be looking out their lighted windows,
watching the receding glow of the town, and then only the
night and the stars over the summerrfields.

He catches the streak of a shooting star from the corner of

his eye.

Instantly his waiting becomes a sharp alertness: he holds

his breath, and the strangeness comes into him once more,
the echo of an endless vibration. But it is no longer an
abstract ache straining for the relief of words: it speaks
within him, in a language full of silence, becoming one with
his breathing, his being, and the night, and the turning of
Earth: incomprehensible, a wordless thought, an unthought-
of Word: like the unseen presence of One who loves him
infinitely and tenderly. The fear has gone, the lonely
helpless shrinking he felt on the bridge, walking home: love
surrounds him, and no evil can touch him here, in his
father's house.

With confident imagination, he sees a vision of Earth, whole

and entire, the globe revolving on its axis, journeying
around the sun, through October and December and the
months of the summertime. Earth: he pronounces the word
to himself, as if to savor its taste upon his tongue.

Third planet from the sun. . . Asia, and Europe, and America,
westward. . . the cities and the towns and the villages, and
all the people, millions of them, living now on Earth. . . And
all the stars in the sky. . . .

Someday, far away from this night in this town, his boyhood
the remotest of remembrances and dreams, he may feel
this vibration again, this hum like the echo of an eternal
name: then he may come to understand a portion of the
mystery at last, although humanly unutterable: revealing, in
time, not the terror of the universe, but its purpose and
glory. But that would still be years away from this night,
perhaps a whole lifetime and more; perhaps, through his
most grievous fault, never. Now the boy looks up at the
lights of the encircling night: the constellations of the
southern sky, the mists of the Milky Way, and beyond,
unseen, the galaxies ablaze with their myriad suns: while
Earth moves like a ship through space and night toward
dawn and morning, and his father and mother and Remy
and Pol talk gently in the soft darkness, and Luz is helping
Pining with the dishes, and Tia Dora is in the living room
reading her interminable serials, and Baby is sleeping a w

child's untroubled sleep, and the street and the houses are
quiet now in the peaceful night.

It's getting late, Ben.

Early Mass tomorrow.

Go up to bed now, son, a growing boy needs his sleep.

His father is home, all of them are safe and home in the
night, in the long summer of the year. Tomorrow, Sunday,
they will go to Mass, all of them together. Then, he will go
swimming with Tito and Pepe in San Miguel, in the clear
wide morning, and in the afternoon, he will see the film
again, perhaps with his father: the ruined, poisoned
countries of man, and the new world, the hills green in the
light of another sun.

The Last December

AFTER MASS at San Agustin, and breakfast, we started out

on the trip, Papa driving the car, Mario and I in the front
seat, and Mama and the girls in the back. The morning was
cool, the sun pale yellow on the tiled roofs and the stone
walls of Intramuros. Bells from the many churches rang in
the December air; they told of God and the priests and the
nuns, the shining altars, and the coming of Christmas, and
with these things, I thought of Grandfather, and the town in
Laguna.

The familiar sights, the botanical gardens and the trees and
the houses and the buildings looked fresh and new in the
sunrise; I guess things were that way when you were young,
and a trip to the provinces was the great adventure, stirring
in your boy's heart something magnificent and wonderful.

It was the first Sunday of December; the radios had begun

playing the old Christmas songs, and the bazaars on the
Escolta and Avenida Rizal were already decorated with
Santa Clauses and paper cherry blossoms and cotton snow.
There was the usual traffic of calesas and taxicabs and
streetcars on Taft Avenue; somehow everybody seemed to
be going someplace where there was warmth and love. The
sun slanted across the U.P. campus, touching with gold the
acacias along Isaac Peral.

We drove south down Dewey Boulevard, Mama calling our

attention to the flame trees, how beautiful they were in
bloom. Mario pointed out the warships and the army
transports in the Bay, and Angela said she'd like to be on a
ship, and Papa said she ought to marry a sailor instead of
that boy from La Salle who smoked too many cigarettes,
and we laughed because my sister was only sixteen and we
loved to tease her, and Celia said it wasn't Eddie at all but
that good-looking chinito who was Mario's best friend.

We were going to Laguna for Grandfather's birthday. Tio

Alfredo had written, asking us all to come for a celebration,
a family gathering, primarily for Lolo, of course, but also for
Tony, he said, for having just passed the bar, and for Ate
Nena and Cuya Ben, who had gotten married in October.
Mama said for sure there was going to be a dance, Tio
Alfredo loved dancing, how he could tango and waltz, he
was graceful as when he and Mama were students at the
University, and he used to win prizes at the summer dances
in their province.

Papa drove leisurely down the highway leading out of the

city; the day was beautiful, the sky deep blue, the sun bright
and the wind blowing into the car fresh and cool with the
smells of the earth and the harvest fields. We talked about
haphazard things, about trading in the car, and the coming
vacation, and the New Year, Papa laughing the loudest at his
own jokes. I thought of the watch Papa had promised for
Christmas, and the Christmas tree in the sala, and the
evenings when the folks next door, Mr. Padilla and his wife,
and Teresa and Joe, would come over for the singing, with
my sister Celia playing the piano. Mario said since there was
no radio he'd supply the music, and he began to sing

"Maria Elena," dedicating it to Mama and all the girls in the

world he said he loved. Celia said he'd better stop his
groaning before the clouds on the horizon spread all over
the sky and it started raining, spoiling Grandfather's
birthday; but Mario went on with the song, and Mama said
thank you, he could pass for Bing Crosby and nobody would
know the difference.

Mario was twenty-one, a law sophomore at the Ateneo — I

was in third year of high school — and he had won the silver
medal in the annual oratorical contest. He resembled Papa,
and he had Papa's casual, optimistic manner; people said I
took after Mama. I had her features, although I was going to
be as tall as Papa, perhaps even taller than Mario.

Papa slowed down when he met a convoy of army trucks.

The trucks had their headlights on as they roared by
carrying American soldiers and trailing artillery pieces, 105's
I think they were. I counted twenty-one trucks in all; they
rushed by like monstrous insects with eyes gleaming
balefully in the sunlight. I remembered the newsreel I had
seen with Papa showing London burning beneath the
searchlights, and the tanks rolling across the deserts of
Libya, and I thought, if war should come, I too would like to
be a soldier. We got to talking about the war, about the
practice air raids and the blackouts and the bomb-shelters,
and Papa said there wasn't going to be any war because
America was the strongest nation in the world, and so long
as we were with her we were going to be all right. Then the
girls started talking about Christmas again, and Papa said
he was going to give Mama a cook for a gift, not just an
ordinary cook but someone as good as Mama — Juliana had
left us when her father died — and Papa asked the girls
what they'd like to have, and Mario said they'd been praying
to get Errol Flynn, and the girls said Mario was very much
like Papa indeed, he was downright corny.

About ten we came to the part of the highway bordered by

acacias.

The tunnel of shade was almost a mile long; after the

railroad crossing the road made an abrupt turn, and
suddenly there was the cemetery of the town. We visited
Grandmother's grave; she had died in 1938. The dried
remains of wreaths from All Saints' Day lay on the white
tombs. In the silence the rumble of a train was like a heart
beating deep in the earth. We drove on to the town, past the
first nipa houses and the puto stores, through the main
street with the shops and the theater and the calesas and
the buses. Across the bridge the road dipped down to the
plaza; I guess that was where you got the best view of the
town — there was the church and the kiosko and the
playground, and the presidencia and the elementary school
like the old buildings in Intramuros; and the old part of the
tov/n on the other side, with the mountains in the
background, and you knew that between the town and the
mountains was the lake.

LOLO'S HOUSE stood in the old part of town, the part of

town where the old houses were, the trees and the narrow,
cobbled streets. It was another world, safe and precious; the
old house made you remember things like laughter and
singing one night when you were a child. The sunlight
streamed through the trees and fell among the dead leaves
on the dark loamy earth of the yard. There was a porch with
potted plants along the stairs. In the sala were the portraits
of another time, the antique furniture, the bookcases with
the Spanish volumes, the piano.

There was an orchard behind the house, and beyond the

wall you could see the fields and the blue line of the lake.

That day the house seemed to have wakened from a sleep

full of dreams. Everybody had come, all right, except Tia
Pilar, who had to stay behind, Tio Carlos said, because the
baby had a cold. The cousins were there, Rose and Linda,
Manolo and Lito and Raul. Grandfather looked older and
thinner than when I had seen him last, and I thought I saw a
kind of blankness in his eyes, even when he was talking to
us.

At dinner he sat at the head of the table, not talking much

but merely nodding at the general conversation. We had
pochero and lechon and arroz a la valenciana. A large tray
overflowed with apples and grapes.

Tia Agueda had baked a cake for Lolo, and Tio Jorge said
she'should have made one big enough to hold seventy-six
candles, and Papa said this one was perfect, it could hold
twenty-one candles and Lolo was as strong as any strapping
lad going to his first love; but Lolo seemed not to have
heard, he just sat there with the blank look in his eyes.

Ate Nena and Cuya Ben sat at the other end, and Papa
kidded them about being so much in love they might die of
starvation, and Tia Agueda shushed Papa, saying Papa was
no better when he married Mama, he kept following her
around with the eyes of a sick cow. The folks asked Tony
when he was going to settle down now that he had passed
the bar, and Tony said pretty soon, although he was in no
great hurry, and it seemed the girl wasn't hurrying, either.
Papa and Tio Alfredo and Tio Carlos wound up talking about
President Quezon and politics, and the rice harvest, that it
had been surprisingly abundant.

Mama and Tia Agueda and Tia Nita talked about the house
Ate Nena and Cuya Ben were going to have in Ermita, and
the Christmas package drive Mama was vice-chairman of in
our neighborhood back in the city. Lito and I talked about
the last basketball season, and Rose and Linda and my
sisters whispered over some secret thing, and Mario and
Manolo and Raul argued among themselves. We tarried long
after dinner, talking about a lot of things. Outside the
window, the leaves moved in a cool breeze.

The afternoon was long and we sat on the porch, playing

Chinese checkers and telling stories. The old folks remained
in the sala with Grandfather. Then Tio Alfredo came and said
the piano was waiting for somebody to play it, there was
going to be a party tonight, he had invited the town's young
people and we'd do well to polish those dance steps. Manolo
played boogie and rhumba tunes, and Lito and I who weren't
dancing watched Mario and Raul dance with the girls. Raul
and Mario knew a lot of fancy steps, and I saw Lolo smiling
at the dancers, nodding his head, the blank look gone for
the moment. Tia Nita said she liked the old dances better,
the boogie and the conga were much too strenuous for
limbs like hers. Papa said too bad Tia Pilar hadn't come, she
could reduce just by dancing with broncos like Mario and
Raul. Tio Alfredo asked Manolo for a waltz, and he danced
with Mama, and Papa danced with Tia Agueda, and we
clapped and cheered as they went around the sala to the
strains of "The Blue Danube."

Before sundown Mario drove us down to the lake. The folks

stayed behind in the house. We sat on a tree trunk lying on
the shore. Celia said it'd be beautiful to have a home right
on the shore and be able to see all the sunsets across the
lake. Raul told us about the time he and Manolo had gone
hunting ducks out on the lake; they'd drift close to the birds,
lying flat on the camouflaged raft, and then the fellows on
the other side would start shooting, and he and Manolo
would bring down dozens as the birds flew right over them.
Rose said she couldn't stand the sound of guns, she'd die
just to have a gun pointed at her.

Mario said he'd like to go swimming in the morning, we had

no classes the next day and we were staying on till the
afternoon. Linda said it'd be wonderful to have an evening
picnic on the shore. We'd build a bonfire, she said, and have
a barbecue. Mario said we'd do that the next time we came,
and Rose asked how about Christmas Eve, and Celia and
Angela said they weren't so sure about that since we had
always spent Christmases at home with Papa and Mama.
The sun went down behind the mountains far across the
lake. The calm surface of the lake mirrored the redness of
the sky.

We returned to the house in time for the Angelus. Tio

Alfredo said there wasn't going to be any dance, he had just
learned about the blackout from a policeman making the
rounds. The electricity had been cut off, and we had supper
by candlelight. Papa said he enjoyed blackouts, they made
him feel dashing and amorous, and Tio Carlos asked Papa if
there had been any blackouts when he was courting Mama.
Tia Agueda said Papa almost had a permanent one, when
Lolo threatened to throw him out of the house, and Papa
said that wasn't true, he and Lolo had always been the best
of friends, we could ask Lolo now and find out.

Lolo just sat there at the head of the table, his eyes
lusterless, the flickering shadows deepening the hollows of
his face.
We sat on the porch, in the dark house, Mario and Manolo
and Raul and the girls. Ate Nena and Cuya Ben sat together
in the swing. We could hear the old folks in the sala; in the
dark their voices sounded strange and faraway. It occurred
to me suddenly that Lolo might fall and hurt himself in the
darkness; then I realized it was such a foolish fear, since he
was with Papa and Mama and the others. Not a wink of light
appeared in the night, except for a few stars and a waning
moon caught in the branches of the trees. I remembered a
time when we were younger, and we used to play games
there among the trees on moonlit nights.

I don't know who started it, but soon they were talking
about love.

Love, Mario said, was the most powerful, the most beautiful
thing in the world. Without love, he said, the world would be
a truly miserable place to live in. He asked Cuya Ben if he
was right, and Cuya Ben said, sure, love was the most
beautiful thing in the world.

Linda asked Mario who was the girl who made him say such
inspired things, and Mario said she was from Iloilo, and she
was studying at St. Theresa's. He was going to finish law, he
said, then grow a mustache like Cuya Ben, and marry her.
Rose said she wasn't so sure about that, boys were so fickle;
and Celia asked if Rose was talking from experience. Linda
said she had heard about Celia and Johnny; and Celia said
that was an old, old story, so why bothe^ bringing it up.
Tony came to the porch, and the girls asked him when he
was going to take the plunge; and Tony said if everything
went right, he'd be following Ate Nena and Cuya Ben by
June of 1942.

The girls asked Ate Nena what true love was, and Ate Nena
said she knew, only she could not find the right words to
describe it, perhaps love was meant to be that way, it was
something one only felt and didn't fully understand. I
thought of Angie, who lived a block away from our place, on
Calle Beaterio. She wrote poetry for her school magazine,
and she spoke softly, and had gentle ways; I liked being with
her, listening to her read the poems of Rupert Brooke, and I
wondered if that was love. It felt good and peaceful to be
sitting there on the porch steps in the darkness, listening to
my brother and sisters and cousins talking; at the same
time I felt a loneliness. Somebody said come on, let's sing,
and we sang "South of the Border" and "I'll Pray for You,"

and other songs of that year. We sang "Silent Night"

because Christmas was just three weeks away, and also
"God Bless America" and

"Philippines, My Philippines," there on the porch, in the

darkness.

Mama came to tell us to go to bed, it was late and we had to

go to Mass in the morning.

I couldn't sleep just yet and Mario and I talked for a while.
The windows were wide open, and the few stars were clear
and low in the sky. The house s.eemed to breathe in the
darkness. From far off I heard the wail of a train. I told Mario
about Angie, it seemed all right to tell him then, with just
the two of us in the darkness. Mario said I was too young to
be worrying about it, there was going to be plenty of time,
in the years ahead. I felt close to my brother when he spoke
that way, he seemed so wise and strong and good. Before I
dropped off to sleep I remembered what Ate Nena had said
about love, and I felt a quiet happiness, knowing that
someday I'd find it, and it would be good and beautiful. The
wind rose in the trees and it was like the sound of the sea.
THE NEXT day was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
The church was packed full, the people kneeling in the aisles
and in the doorways. The priest delivered a brief sermon
about the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, how it had
made possibl&mankind's redemp-tion from sin. All of us
went to Communion, and I felt we were all one in Christ,
Lolo and Papa and Mama, my brother and sisters,
everybody. I liked the singing of the choir — it made me long
for things so numerous that I couldn't name them, and it
was a strong clean kind of longing.

The morning was bright, cool, the sky deep blue like
yesterday. We had thick hot chocolate for breakfast, and
puto and fried rice and longaniza and scrambled eggs. It
was Monday and we had no classes, and Mario said it'd be a
real holiday indeed if we all went down to the lake for a
swim and a picnic, and Tio Alfredo gave out with a hooray,
he happened to know a good spot along the shore complete
with soft green grass and shade trees, and Tia Agueda said
she'd start making the sandwiches right away. That was
when Manolo came rushing into the dining room, and Tio
Jorge asked what was all the excitement about, and Manolo
said that war had broken out, and Tia Agueda told him to
stop joking and finish breakfast, we were going down to the
lake for a picnic. Manolo said he had heard it over the radio;
he was tuning in some dance music, and then there it was,
the news-flash about the war.

We left the table and gathered about the radio in the sala. I
heard the words "Japanese" and "Pearl Harbor" and
"bombing" and I looked at Papa, and there was that grim
expression on his face, and with a shiver I knew that t-he
war had come. The voice switched off and the regular
program continued, a medley of Latin-American music. Lolo
came slowly across the room toward us, asking what was
the matter, what had happened? Tio Alfredo guided Lolo to
a chair, telling him that war had started, and Lolo just
nodded tiredly, the blank look in his eyes. Mario said
something about his ROTC unit. I looked around the room, at
Papa and Mama, and my aunts and uncles, my sisters and
my cousins. They were staring at the radio, at the wavering
leaf patterns the sun cast on the floor. Cuya Ben walked
over to Ate Nena and they looked at each other, not saying
anything. We must leave right away, Papa said, but nobody
answered him, and we all stood there in the sala, in the old
house, Lolo in the chair, the blank look in his eyes, the radio
playing a soft rhumba, the.sunlight Light over the world, and
I heard the screen door slamming in the empty kitchen, and
the wind in the trees like the sound of rain.

A Wilderness

AGAIN DAVID heard the voices in the hot afternoon: Nardo

and his

-wife in their constant quarreling. He slammed the book

shut: the brief illusion (Rima, half-bird half-woman, flitting
through the magical forest) dissolved into the brown stained
walls, the emptiness of Sunday. Fely's voice stabbed from
the other room: I hate you, how I hate you; and finally the
muffled sobs and David imagined Nardo stroking his wife's
arms trembling all the more in disgust at his ineffectual
touch.

Just this noon, at lunch, Nardo, his mouth twisting in

sarcasm, had inquired about his studies; and David had
barely checked the impulse to throw the soup in his cousin's
face.
He could not see the sky from where he sat, by the barred
window.

Across the yard where Pedro was sweeping the scattered

leaves, a balete tree towered twistedly over the adobe
fence, blocking a view of the street. The city traffic quivered
from beyond the high walls. The hands of the alarm clock
pointed to three: time remained at right angles, motionless,
and as vacant as this morning and yesterday and all the
other days when he had lain on the canopied bed, absenting
himself from his law classes with a melancholy satisfaction,
reading haphazardly through a pile of torn magazines,
thinking of Angela saying, "I'll always love you," sleeping
through vague unconnected dreams, only to wake up to the
humid heat and the voices quarreling, and his aunt calling
him a useless fool, sin verguenza, you ought to go back to
Naga and farm your father's land . . .

He listened to Fely's soft crying, the scratching of Pedro's

broom against the cracked earth. He flicked off the globules
of sweat from his arm, and began to think of cool things,
tranquil rain and the dark shade of trees. In his mind now he
walked deliberately into a morning sea, into the green silent
depths, and the waters closed above him remotely and
murmured peace. To escape from this accursed place
forever, and go away to where the mountains are blue and
clean with sunrise, and the wind silver with bells . . . He rose
from the chair and threw the novel onto the disarray of
books on the table. He gazed about him, his fevered eyes
finding nothing on which to rest in the cluttered room, and
wished this hour were a wall he could break with bleeding
hands.

Nothing to do but step out, see Angela perhaps: he had not

visited her for two weeks now. Time for another movie. . .
He could not stay another minute in the room; he would go
mad. The picture of himself screaming, violent and lunatic,
fascinated him like a curiously glittering image (how his
aunt would shriek her final despair1.), and he smiled at his
pale thin face in the aparador mirror. Then hurriedly, almost
in a kind of panic, he dressed, combed his hair, pausing for
a second to finger the slight growth of beard on his face.

In the living room his aunt sat rigid, her eyes closed,
seemingly asleep among the ancient furniture, beneath the
cobwebbed chandelier and the framed photograph of her
wedding, her dead husband forever bald and supercilious.
She was a frail, white-haired woman, her fair skin wrinkled
in minute, fish-like scales. At the sound of his cowboy boots
crossing the hall, her eyes flashed open, her hands rustling
the newspaper in her lap.

"Where are you going?"

He stood on the first step of the stairway, gripping tight the

knob of the rail-post. His aunt stared at him unwaveringly,
and he felt her contempt press against him like the thick,
windless day. A bar of sun burned on the velvet drapes of
the piano. »

"Downtown," he said.

"What time are you coming back? Will you have supper? Or
will you be gone the whole night? What foolishness. . ."

"I don't know," he said, and his voice was louder than he
had in-tended. "How should I know?"

With sudden energy she struggled from her seat, pushing

away against the carved arms of the chair. David thought
she would crumble to the floor, but presently she was
standing erect, her eyes ablaze, her crippled foot half-
showing beneath the billows of her black skirts.
"How dare you speak to me like that!" She strained forward,
tot-tered dangerously, clutched at the chair for support.
"You insolent good-for-nothing. . . Your father will hear about
this. I've had enough of your insolence, your disrespect—"

He did not wait for her to finish. He ran down the stairs, his
heart thudding in hate and bewilderment, and the sun in the
courtyard exploded in his eyes, blurring redly as he fled to
the gate.

IN THE cafe he watched the long-bladed fans whirling

suspended from the ceiling, futile against the dense air. The
jukebox blared and the fans went round and round,
endlessly. The bright heat shone on the sidewalk, glinted in
the mirror behind the counter. He gulped the last of his beer
and felt a new surge of sweat. The blatant music sighed
away, and the clatter of the street showered into the
restaurant, mingling with the clash of plates and glassware,
and the gruff tone of a man saying, "Come now, be friendly,
ah, I'll buy all your tickets, the whole booklet, ah . . ."

"Please, let me go," the girl said. The scene somehow made
him think of Angela.

He could not see the man, only a fat hairy arm extended
from the booth in front of him, holding back the girl and her
sheaf of sweepstakes tickets. She was perhaps fifteen,
pretty and slender, and she wore a white ribbon in her hair.
Laughing, the man released her finally, and she hurried out
of the cafe into the hot roar, of the street.

The jukebox started up again, and David paid for his drink
and crossed the street to the second-run theater. After the
afternoon glare, the darkness of the theater was like soft
cool hands touching him. He groped for a seat while the
melodramatic voice of the newsreel recounted the courage
of soldiers scaling one more hill under mortar-fire. In India,
thousands wailed in the dry spell of famine. In Italy, a train
wreck sprawled in the bottom of a gully, and the flawless
voice counted off the wounded and the dead.

Then the main technicolored feature began at last on the

screen.

The hero of the dream was tall, strong, handsome, and the
woman he loved was exquisitely lovely. He was an artist, a
composer, and in the springtime city (the trees bloomed
above the golden avenues), he created for the most
beautiful woman the songs of their love. They walked in the
blue dusk of a river, embraced in sweet pain on a terrace
that overlooked the city shining with jeweled lights. David
seemed to feel something inside him stir and quicken,
pushing up like a seedling through layers of time and
sadness.

Now the man was lonely because she had left him, and he
plodded through the winter streets, haggard and unshaven.
Where had she gone?

What island rising from an emerald sea? Suddenly it was

spring, and the woman returned with the first green of the
trees, penitent and wistful and as lovely as ever. The music
reached a crescendo; they sang a duet that told of all love
since the beginning of time, under many-colored twinkling
stars.

The lights came on, and syncopated music beat through the
stale air bluish with cigarette smoke. The man beside him
cleared his throat and spat on the floor, and David shrank
back from the flop of phlegm.

He struggled from the crowded seats and went up the aisle

littered with peanut shells and candy foil. In the dim light,
the faces were identical, waiting impassively for the
splendor, the enchantment of foreign dreams.

Already it was evening in the city. A woman in a striped

dress caught David's eye with a challenging stare, and
remembering the ugliness of a rented room, the bed that
had borne the weight of so much loneliness, he turned
away, half-running through the jeepney traffic. The neon
signs blinked their electric messages atop the buildings: Buy
this Soap, Drink this Gin! The heat of the afternoon lingered
like a persistent memory over the streets of Quiapo; he saw
lightning flicker beyond the river; tonight it may rain at last,
and he would listen in the cooling dark to the rain.

In the crowd of late strollers, in the plaza before the church,

he looked small and insignificant, with a sense of being lost
and friendless, and his quick feverish eyes seemed to
search for the reason of his being there. The church doors
were still open: he did not know any more if he still
believed, he had not gone to Mass for such a long time . . .
He would not go back yet, his aunt would be waiting with
her hateful questions, why, why? But yes, he should see
Angela: he felt a vague tenderness at the remembrance of
her love. He crossed the Boulevard and hailed a bus for
Pasay.

ANGELA'S MOTHER met him on the porch, her face oily in

the light of the yellow bulb swarming with gnats; the flower
prints of her dress were faded smudges like dirt. She
addressed him familiarly in her rasping voice, "Come in,
David, how are you, David," her laugh masculine, her teeth
large and protruding. "Angela's inside, she's been waiting
for you, did you quarrel, what happened, tell me."

"Nothing," he said.
She came closer, examining him anxiously. She moved as if
to touch him, and anger flared in his chest. "You're so pale,
here let me look at you, you've been ill, David?"

"No," he said. The night was stifling, and he heard thunder.

Angela's mother giggled, brushing at his arm. She raised her

voice:

"Angela, David is here!" She added, turning to him: "She's

been so moody lately, hardly touches her food, it's your
fault you know that,"

frowning in humorous reproach.

He stepped into the cramped parlor, ignoring her, and she

returned to her rocking chair on the porch. With a cigarette,
the tension in his body eased somewhat, and he looked idly
about the room. The varnish of the furniture had chipped
and faded; dust had settled darkly on the paper roses in the
tin vase on the table under a framed priiit of a New England
autumn scene: a desire to throw the picture and the
artificial flowers out of the window twitched in his hands.
But he only sat down on the sofa, avoiding the part where
the rattan was torn, and smoked, blowing rings at the faded
curtains.

Angela appeared from behind the curtains, and he saw that

she had cut her hair into a mannish crown, an incongruous
frame for her oval face. She halted before his astonished
stare, patting an imaginary wave of hair in place. She said,
uncertainly: "David, how are you ..."

He remained seated, staring at her. She attempted a smile;

it was a stranger's smile: how strange and funny everything
seemed about her, suddenly. She had worn her hair long,
smooth as corn-silk, and hp used to comb his fingers
through its fullness.

She asked, "You like it, David? Don't you think it's nice? It's
the latest style, and besides, it's been so warm ..."

The resentment that had flared before her mother

smouldered within him. Angela took both his hands, and sat
down close to him; but he felt no stir of affection, and then
he knew with a dull and wretched certainty that he no
longer loved her, that he would never come to this house
again.

The insects fluttered about the fluorescent tube on the wall.

Outside on the wooden porch he heard her mother calling
out to someone in the street and laughing. He couldn't think
of anything to say, except that it was so warm and it should
rain.

"David," Angela said, kneading his shoulder gently, "I've

missed you. How cruel of you, I thought I'd never see you
again."

He stared at the floor, studying the whorls in the wooden

planks, and the ants that had lost their wings, crawling
among the dusty cracks.

His body jerked abruptly with a soundless chuckle.

"What is it, David? What are you thinking?"

"Those ants," he said. "They don't know where they're

going, just running around, look at them."

"David," she said after a while, "Rosie's having her birthday

party next Saturday. We'll go, won't we? Tita and Virgie and
the others are all going —"
"Maybe," he said.

Now she spoke in the little pouting voice he had once

thought was so very like her, dear and fragile: "Don't say
maybe, say were going. . .

You didn't come last Sunday. And through the week, I waited
and waited, but you didn't come. Darling, why?"

The endearment sounded odd and ridiculous, like a

mispronounced word. "There were things I had to do," he
said.

"We used to go out every weekend," she said. "Everything

was happy and wonderful — I wish —"

"I'm listening."

"I keep wishing things would turn bright and happy again,
like before. I mean, you've changed —"

An insect darted under his collar, and he crushed it in his

fingers.

He started another cigarette, his hands unsteady, the smoke

savorless.

"David, tell me, what's troubling you? You look worried and
angry Your eyes — how red they are. Maybe you shouldn't
study too hard.

Darling, are you angry with me for cutting my hair? It'll grow
again.

Don't look at me like that, please."

Why had he corrie? He did not have to come all the way
here to find out that his love was dead. It was so funny, his
coming tonight, everything was flat and colorless and dead.
The bitterness, the strange anger pulsed through him, and
when he closed his eyes, he saw a hot glittering darkness.

"I must go now," he said.

"Please, David —- we haven't even talked —"

She followed him to the porch, past her mother gawking in

her chair, hurried after him down the steps to the
galvanized-iron gate overgrown with vines. *

"David, please, wait," she said.

He stopped at the gate, under the dark foliage of the vines;

her plea held him captive for a moment with all the strength
of her love.

The street-light cast the leaf-shadows on her face; in the

half-dark she was again the girl with the long hair and the
childlike eyes whom he loved. But the anger and despair
clogged his brain, and when she came closer, he caught her
in a single violent lock of his hands, and he was kissing her,
wanting to hurt her, to break her; and as suddenly, he
withdrew, his hands dropping limply, and he strode away
down the street, his throat tight with a soundless crying.

THE HOUSE was in darkness, except for a single lamp in his

aunt's room. The old man, Pedro, opened the door for him.
He staggered through the dark house to his room, groped
for the switch; the bulb swung on its cord, the shadows see-
sawing on the walls. Weakly, he dropped on the rumpled
bed, and reached for the book he had been reading. The
words blurred, ran together, faded from the page, and he
struggled after the bird-woman Rima through the green
mansions, the magical forest.
His eyes smarted from the strain. Lightning sparked through
the window grilles, thunder crashed above the house.
Angela saying, "Everything was happy and wonderful,"
Angela with the shadows of leaves across her face. He
thought he heard Fely crying in the other room; it was only
the wind springing to life in the balete tree.

He turned to the wall, as though someone behind him had

whispered that he look there, and he saw the cockroach. It
sat there smugly, the largest he had ever seen, and even as
he stared, it seemed to grow, to fill the room with its
nauseous stench. Its red glittering eyes held him, mocking
his twisted, bitter emptiness. In a frenzy of hate he sprang
up and threw the book at the monstrous thing. But he
missed, and he screamed in his fury and disappointment;
and facing the wall, a spasm of trembling shook his body, a
huge pulse began to pound in his skull, making the floor, the
room, the house rock under his feet. . .

Outside the door David heard his aunt approach down the
corridor, her steel-braced foot dragging on the floor, calling
out his name, indignant and loveless. Crying, he flung
himself on the bed as the door opened, and he knew they
were there around him, his aunt and Nardo and Fely, but
now he did not care, he would never care. He heard them
muttering among themselves, and finally his aunt limping
away, the door closing. An image of his aunt's withered leg
flashed on in his mind, pathetic and grotesque, to be
replaced by pictures which swarmed into his brain now as in
a delirium, unbidden, mingling: Angela's mother laughing,
and Angela following him to the gate, and the woman in the
striped dress near the theater, the crowds in the tangled
streets, a giant cockroach, this room and this decaying
house; and sleep, his mind cried out to him, sleep, a voice
receding into a white empty distance; and suddenly he saw
the heroine of the movie singing of unending love while
stars rose swiftly in the sky. David lay rigid and motionless
on the bed, his eyes fixed on the wall where the cockroach
had been, and he was very quiet inside him, as still as a
wilderness of dead trees. For a long time he lay in his
trance, listening so intently to the woman's song that he did
not hear the sky breaking, the fragments crashing on the
roof like stones.

The Beautiful Gerrls

somewhere i have never travelled. . .

—e.e. cummings

THE ASPHALT road had cracked in dusty furrowed pieces and

the fields were yellow-brown from the long dry season; and
the sun burned through the canvas roof of the jeep with a
singular intensity, as though it had come down closer to the
earth, to haunt you like some terrible and flaming angel.

Your cousin Raul drove hunched over the wheel, staring

straight

^ihead and racing furiously over the shattered road.

"Where's the fire?" you said, and "His blasted heart, that's
what's on fire," Chito said, as Raul shot the jeep through a
one-lane bridge without cutting speed, the wooden planks
hollow-sounding and smooth and then the road abruptly
rough again.

"Take it easy, she hasn't gone away yet!" you cried out
above the jeep's splintered roaring; but he might as well
have been born deaf, and you saw how his thin large hands
gripped the wheel, tight and kind of angry.

There were three of you in the jeep, a loose rusting hulk that
ought to have been scrapped the day the war ended. It v/as
the second to the last day of May, in the full blaze of
afternoon, in the year of your wandering unrest, the
searching time between your boyishness and your
manhood. A cliff of cloud in the west shone white with sun;
the rest of the sky was clear as burnished metal.

For a week or so now, you had heard thunder low on the

horizon; a dark veil passed across the sunsets; in the
starless evenings you waited impatiently for the rain, as
though it were a woman who had promised to meet you and
now was late in coming. But if there was rain, it fell
elsewhere, beyond the mountains, out perhaps in the sea; if
you held yourself very still and inhaled carefully, you
seemed to catch the faint vapors of the distant rain.

Now in the brilliant day you were certain there was even no
far rain falling; the spirit of the sun overwhelmed the flat
empty fields. In your mind's eye the jeep was the apex of a
triangle of sound and dust moving through the spacious
day; and the wind that met your speed had come all the
way down to Tarlac from the northernmost tip of Luzon,
collecting the shimmering heat of the plains into a steady
fur-nace blowing.

Chito began to sing, in an absurd, mournful tenor, wringing

his hands, sighing; and you joined in, your duet
exaggeratedly out of tune, kidding Raul, and yourself too,
because the girl Remedios was leaving for Spain.

"Amor, amor," you sang wtth Chito, and "Pregunta a las

estrellas,"
you sang, gesturing at* the hot sky, the arid land, stomping
the tango rhythm on the jeep's rusted floor, while Raul
drove on toward your last visit with Remedios, his twenty-
year-old face taut with love and hope and despair: he would
have taken on the two of you had you not been his truest
friends, sharing the common adventure of being unwise and
young. A bus flung a cumulus of dust at the jeep and
snuffed out your singing; and you grew silent together, the
three of you, the wheels crunching on the uneven bed of the
road.

Far across the summer fields, the chimneys of the sugar

central spewed smoke into the wind. Her father should be
there; that was where he worked; and with an easy
sympathy you recalled his sick pale expression, like a stamp
of exile, a knowledge of dying away from his heart's country.
The girl Remedios: you smoked a tasteless cigarette and
thought of her. The house in San Miguel had grilled
windows; doves murmured in the vine-cool patio. In the sala
hung the portraits of the mustached grandfather, who had
come long ago, on horseback, it must have been, to
conquer a wilderness; the grandmother with the almond
Malayan eyes, solemn and fragile; Remedios' mother, who
died during the wrar, whose only daughter had inherited her
startling beauty.

Set in a gilt frame on the piano was a photograph you

coveted: the face of a young girl, in an old house.

REMEDIOS WAS beautiful; the loveliest in the province, of

that you were more than sure. You admired her — with
detachment, you would tell yourself, but not convincingly;
you would never get to know her well enough; at the most
she would consent to be only your casual friend. Chito, you
suspected, but perhaps you were mistaken, canje along for
the ride, and what he called the laughs; Raul loved her to
distraction.

This year she would not return to the convent school in

Manila; she was going away, with her aunt, to Madrid — to
study there, to live there, for how long, she could not say.
She would write, of course, she said; she would never forget
the three of you. The jeep hurtled past the barren fields and
three o'clock; and you wondered how long and deeply you
would miss her when she was gone. Only a little while, you
thought: even with the extravagance of the young, there
were remembrances you may not be able to afford.

Sparse clumps of cogon wilted on the nearby hills, but the

farther mountains were dark blue, a miracle of color in the
vast glare. Surrounded by the rainless land, you wished —
but the wish had no proximate object, no name for what it
desired. A shawled woman pounded rice beside a lopsided
hut, under the sun; heat waves wrinkled the road; crows
perched on a telegraph pole flapped away at your approach,
cawing their protest over the summer fields. The sun would
never leave the sky.

Then, with an astonishing clarity, there rose before you the

ancient stone houses of a town, a cobbled street, a fountain
in the center of the town, raining its shining water in the
green-gold shadows of trees. For some seconds, or perhaps
an entire minute, you were not in a bucking surplus jeep
with Chito and Raul, you stood under the trees of that plaza,
wherever in the world it might be, and you listened to the
rain of the fountain, and you looked at the old tile-roofed
houses, with the sunlight gentle upon them. You knew, also,
with a certitude perfect in that moment, that beyond the
town, hills bloomed sweetly and a blue mist drifted over
mountains forested with pine. . .
The dream, the soul's sudden vision, whatever it was, ended
as swiftly as it had come; the jeep emerged from a shaded
curve of the road to meet the full blast of the present day
The briefly vivid town —

where had you seen it before? whose voice had first shaped
it for you?

The experience of the illusion, the sense of place: how clear

it had been; how strange the workings of the heat-dazed
mind. . . It had chosen its moment and was gone, and you
could not speak of it; and vacantly, you stared at the truth
of the drab dusty houses as you finally drove into San
Miguel, the capitol park desolate in the untidy heat, the
crumbling statue of a long-dead general pointing his sword
at the sun.

After the sweating rocking drive, it was pleasant to feel the

even-ness of asphalt again, on the street where Remedios
lived, the acacias screening the bright day. Raul parked to
one side of the wooden gate.

Birds chirping hidden in the leafy branches seemed part of

the afternoon shadows shifting and blending upon the
house.

You FOLLOWED the maidservant down the driveway brittle

with fallen leaves, and across the courtyard, where the
doves murmured delicately among the vines. A formality
had settled upon you; you had come, the three of you
together, for the last time; Raul would come once more,
alone. You were so young; you could be as carefree as Chito,
but you had a feeling for ceremony, watchful and reserved.
You took your accustomed chairs in the sala; and you
counted the number of the entire summer's visits to this
house, the first with Chito's cousins, who were Remedios'
classmates in the city; there were also the dances in town,
the parties; she loved to dance, and you remembered the
scent of flowers in her hair. You looked at her photograph on
the piano, as though to memorize it against the years; at
the oil portraits on the walls, the dark shine of the floor, the
door which would open presently. Raul caught your eye and
he nodded, a salute or an acknowledgment, and you did not
speak, waiting for her in the sala of the old house.

And when she came at last into the room, and the three of
you stood up for her in spontaneous gallantry, it seemed
like seeing her for the first time; perhaps that was because
you knew it was for the last time. You marveled again at the
tallness of her, the beauty and the grace of her.

She opened and rustled a fan; her eyes turned to you in

greeting and they asked you a happy question; she was at
once the center of the room — of any room, you thought
with a rush of loyalty and admiration for her, familiar and
yet regal, somehow, in a way that belonged to her. A blue
dress, a white collar, and pendant earrings: out of your
secret devotion, you were already gathering the details that
would form a special memory.

You listened to the warm, somewhat husky tone of her

voice; she would miss you all, truly, she said; you were such
wonderful friends; sometimes — really, sometimes she
wished she were not going at all.

The journey by plane frightened her no little; the only

traveling she had done, if one could call it that, was around
the province, and the city, and once, as a child, to an island
in the South, with her father.

Imagine, she said, she was leaving for the other side of the
world, how strange life was, really; she had been thinking of
classes opening again in Manila, her old friends, how the
street in front of her dormitory near the colegio on Mendiola
easily flooded in the rains.

Chito, laughing and garrulous during your previous visits,

talked with a new seriousness; Raul smoked, added a word,
a phrase, and like you, listened more than talked. The
afternoon filtered dimly through the vines; calesas tinkled
their bells on the remote shaded street.

Dios mio, no, she would never dare go to a bullfight; ay, but
she could not stand the sight of blood; enough the songs,
the dances, the folk music, the green lingering twilights over
Madrid, a paseo in the park. Her passport and visa were
ready; her uncle had seen to that; God willing, she and her
Tia Isabel would leave on Saturday of next week. Raul would
be in the city by then; he would see her off at the airport;
how sweet of him, Remedios said.

Conversation faltered; the pauses multiplied; she asked,

what plans had you made for the year, were you going on a
trip, too? You would go back to the college in the city; June
marked the beginning of many things. She wondered how
Christmas would be, far away from home; the winters were
terribly cold, she had heard. You and Chito ar)d Raul must
not fail to write; she would be lonely. Yes, it had been a fine
summer; it was nice of you all to come and say goodbye.

Her aunt brought in a trayful of cake and frosted glasses;

vigorous and motherly, she settled down on the sofa with
her running phrases, what a warm summer, how was the
fiesta in Camiling, how was everything with all of you?
Remedios baked this cake; oh no, you must have some
more; what was the matter with you young men? Chito
recovered enough of his old self to recount one of his
standard jokes; Tia Isabel gasped in a fit of fat laughter; she
recovered and embarked on a lengthy description of her
Holy Year tour. The afternoon darkened and you heard
thunder and the doves fluttered softly at the windows; and
the rich musical names of towns and cities touched alive
your dream so swiftly gone in the blaze of sun on the broken
road.

Somewhere a clock chimed six; you rose to leave, fumbling

for the usual inadequate expressions, till you should meet
again, a safe and pleasant journey, goodbye. Remedios
went down the stairs with you and across the patio to the
gate. You and Chito shook her hand, soft and tight; her eyes
were almost on a level with yours (how tall and lovely she
was), the shy proud happy eyes that you knew were fated to
love someone else. Raul lingered at the gate with her; you
watched them from the jeep; he seemed to be telling her
something urgent and final. He held her hand; they stood
there together, in the dusky light beneath the acacia trees.
You thought of your dream: the fountain, the ancient town.
She must know of it; you must speak to her of it; and your
need for her deep quiet listening rose within you, strained,
receded; too late; you would never find her again. Nothing,
it was nothing, you told yourself, as you returned her wave
and Raul swung the jeep around the street. When you were
back on the highway out of town, you realized you were
holding yourself tense as against a blow; but it was nothing,
you kept telling yourself; you had been strangers to each
other and had never shared any dreams.

"Well. . Chito said. "That was quite a scene at the gate, eh,
Raul?
Like in the movies, eh?"

"You shut up," Raul said, but without heat, tiredly.

"You're going to see her again, I suppose?" Chito said. "Give

her my love, won't you? Vacation time's over, boys. Back to
the salt mines.

It's been fun, though, knowing the most beautiful —"

"You talk too much," you said.

"Now, look here —"

"Shut your big trap," Raul said.

"All right, all right, take it easy," said Chito.

THE DAY had ended without a sunset. Thunder volleyed

from the west, the sharp reverberant thunder of the late
May rains. Clouds possessed the sky, dark fog boiling over
the hills, approaching; and six or seven miles before Santa
Ignacia, the rain hit the jeep in a furious gale, the first
splashing drops streaking the dusty windshield. The
countryside blurred darkly, wind hurled the rain inside the
jeep, a warm rain that soaked through your clothes and
turned ice-cold on the skin. Raul flashed the headlights on,
his speed down almost to a crawl; and you shivered,
wanting a smoke, the jeep straining forward against the
violent rain, in the darkness that was more than twilight.

The fields exhaled the odors of released heat, cold soil and
leaves; in the lightning flashes, the landscape was alien and
abandoned; you felt submerged in the turbulent depths of a
sea. The rain maintained its pounding pace all the way to
Santa Ignacia; rain, you thought depressedly, hugging
yourself, to last a long year.
Raul braked before a restaurant near the public market. You
stumbled dripping into the small cafe; a jukebox slammed a
wild mambo against the poster-littered walls; a crowd hung
around a dice game.

The harassed waitress took your order of rum and Coca-

Cola; Raul divided the liquor into three equal glasses; the
jukebox blasted on, accompanied by the rain on the
unceilinged roof. The rum was fire pushing back the wret
chill from your shoulders; there was laughter around you,
and easy joking banter; and you were aware of a certain
kinship with everyone, the gamblers, the kibitzers, the men
drinking, stranded on this chance island: you were all
together against the evening's rain.

Raul drank thoughtfully, caught perhaps by some image he

had found floating in his glass. Chito sang with the jukebox,
beating time on the table, not drunk but not sober either,
nodding his head languidly; you wondered if you would have
to carry him home, if he too hid a private sorrow. You timed
your drink to last a couple of hours at the most; you
swallowed the rum with a conscious relish, not hurriedly,
grateful for the warmth, the shelter from the season's first
rain . . .

You walked down the cobbled street of the ancient town,

beneath the balconies of the white stone houses, in the
gentle sunlight. A guitar twanged somewhere, harsh and
infinitely tender, and behind a window a woman sang of the
sadness and the glory of man's pilgrimage on earth.

In a doorway a child watched you go by, and his boy-face

seemed familiar, but you could not remember his name. You
met an old man smiling at the sunlight, and you had known
him before, but his name too you could no longer recall. The
street inclined gradually toward the square, where the
fountain rained in the green-gold dusk of the trees, and
where the women walked in the flowing light, the tall proud
lovely women who would never die. You drank deeply of the
wine of the town, red as blood and cool on the tongue and
burning brightly into your heart; you were haunted by death
and you kissed the warm face of life.

Bells rang in a steepled tower, the circles of silver sound

expanding, flying over the tile-roofed houses, out beyond
the town, falling finally upon the flowering hills and falling
lost in the mist that moved over the mountains forested
with pine and as old as time . . .

The rain had gone. The gamblers had left, the men drinking,
the crowd. It was close to nine; home was still a quarter
hour's drive away.

Chito slouched in the back seat; you felt steady and alert
and Raul let you take the wheel.

T H E BLACK road shone cleanly ahead; now in the night it

seemed you had gone a long way, farther than the drive to
San Miguel. The thought of Remedios you carried with you
like a rare and expensive charm against any darkness. The
wind was clean, washed damp by the rain; three stars,
members of a constellation, gleamed above the stirring
fields.

"You'll see her again?" you asked Raul.

"Yes," he said.

"Wish her a happy trip again, for me," you said.

"Sure," he said.
"The beautiful gerrlsV' Chito said, and hiccuped. "I love
them all.

Every single one of them."

"You're drunk," you said.

"Ah, the beautiful gerrls!" Chito repeated, with a fierce

forlorn challenge, and then he laughed, softly. And you
laughed, too, at the way he rolled the word, at the summer
ending, at the rain. Raul laughed with you and Chito, and
then everything, it seemed, became all right, you accepted
the seasons of your youth, the departures, even the no-
returning; and when you reached Camiling and were driving
past the plaza with the lights around the kiosko gleaming in
the rain-dark trees, you saw in your heart the ancient town
again: the vision of the lovely, incomparable women who
would never die, and the mountains as deep as the faith of
youth and as old as time.

A Wind Over the Earth

Our knowledge, our prophecy, are only

glimpses of the truth. . . Now, we see

through a glass, darkly; then, we shall

see face to face.

— St. Paul to the Corinthians

IT WAS two O'clock in the afternoon when they drove over

the bridge and passed the signboard that said they were
now entering the Province of Tarlac, drive carefully, ten
persons have been killed here, on this rain-dark highway
slanting through the sudden angular hills. Then the road
was straight again, level and fading ahead into the October
horizon, where the rain was falling now, far away to the
west; but he didn't resume his former nervous speed, and
he breathed in the cool wind, and acknowledged his
tiredness after the long dry miles of sun-glare and the fear
that his father had died, was already dead, before they
could speak, before they could touch one another with a
final word.

"We'll be there in twenty minutes," he said.

He glanced at her beside him, and was grateful for the

reassuring pat of her hand. She sat rather stiffly, because of
the ripening swelling curve of her body; he wondered now,
with a new solicitude, if it would have been wiser to have
come alone, without her. The tires swished over the cement
road wet from the rain that had preceded them, and the
green-yellow fields of rice rushed by on either side of the
road, and the wind funneled into the car with the far
hollowness of strange voices.

From the highway approaching the town in a wide arc he

saw the tin-sheet roofs of houses among the trees, washed
sharp against the mountains of Luzon, in the white sunless
day; he felt no stir of recognition, only a resentful dread that
his father might not be able to speak to him. He felt there
was something his father had to tell him, something
tremendously important left unsaid through the years; but
even as they came into the town, driving under a sagging,
rain-soaked arch for the Blessed Virgin (for this was the
month of the rosary), past the first acacias and the coconut
trees, he didn't hurry. A dark nameless quality in the clear
air touched his heart; the almost palpable smell of earth and
leaves pressed against him. Somebody he didn't recognize
waved a greeting: perhaps a childhood playmate, he
thought; a friend in high school. . . The wind rustled the
trees over the cobbled streets and spattered collected rain-
drops on the windshield.

The gate was open and he maneuvered the Chevrolet into

the driveway. In the stillness after the last hum of the
engines, he waited for the outcries of mourning women; the
wind murmured in the trees around his father's house. He
helped Teresa out of the car, and together they stood on the
crushed gravel, waiting. A dog began to bark behind the
house. All the windows were closed against the wind; no one
came out to meet them. He guided her through the portico
and was about to try the door when his brother, Luis,
opened it. His brother was unshaven, and there were circles
around his eyes.

He and Teresa followed Luis into the sala, their steps

seeming loud in the high dim room.

"What happened?" he asked Luis.

"It's his heart. And complications. I can't say what exactly."

He thought there were people sitting in the enforced dusk of

the living room; the chairs were bare, inanimate. They went
up the stairs as the grandfather clock on the landing chimed
two-thirty, the musical tones melting liquidly into the
ancient wood of the walls.

He said, "But only last month, Mama wrote that he was

already well."

"Something did happen," his brother said. "You remember

Mr.
Ramos? The real estate and insurance man, Papa's long-
time friend?"

"What about him?"

"Papa almost killed him. With a revolver. They had a fight.

Something about money, and honor. . ."

A nurse emerged from the sick room as they ascended on to

the hallway; she brushed past them, carrying a basin
pungent with alcohol.

His mother met them at the door, calling his name as

though blindly.

He bent to kiss her wrinkled forehead; Teresa embraced her,

and for a moment, the women looked at each other,
pensively, before his mother led them all into the room.

The windows were closed and the room was thick with the
odors of illness and medicine; candles flamed before a
crucifix. In the uncertain light his father lay on the poster-
bed, breathing through his mouth, his chest rising, falling
slowly; his eyes, catching the candle-light, burned with a
silent fever.

"Papa," he said. "We're here, Teresa and I. It's me, Tony."

The eyes stared up into the canopy of the bed, burning

intensely.

He heard his father's slow exhalation, soft like a sigh.

"Papa," he said, "I'm Tony — your son, Tony. . ." His heart
began to pound thickly in his throat. "Papa. . ."
"He can't talk," Luis said. "He hasn't said a word since — the
stroke. Even before we brought him home — from the
hospital. . ."

He straightened up and looked down at his father, the wide

and rigid eyes, the slack mouth that couldn't speak; he
stood there, tensely, and remembered the old man's pride,
his passionate violence, and his vision blurred in tears. He
felt Teresa edge closer, holding on to his arm. The nurse
returned with a bespectacled man fumbling with a
stethoscope in a kind of bewilderment. *

"You GO and rest/' his mother said. "It's all right — I have
the nurse with me. You and Tony have come a long way."

"I'll stay with you, Mama," said Teresa.

"No," she said. "You're tired. You need to lie down. . ."

When they had left the room Dona Pilar sat down in the
rocking-chair beside the bed. The nurse rearranged the
bottles on the table.

The windowpanes quivered in their grooves, pushed by the

wind. She watched her husband fight for each breath of air.
It was a sight no longer strange and terrible to her; she
loved him, but she had also learned to care for the sick with
a deliberate and efficient hardness; one must be
courageous before the things one cannot change. But still
there were times when she was assailed by a loneliness, an
isolation of old age: one's husband becomes a stranger; the
children go away and find their loves and are no longer truly
one's own.

The candle-flames flickered despite the stillness in the roojn,

as if aware of the wind outside. She had been saying the
rosary when Teresa and Tony arrived; now she prayed the
remaining decade, the Crucifix-ion. She tried to compose
herself mentally. Think of the body supported by the nails
piercing the hands and feet, think of the thirst, the bleeding,
broken face of God-made-man. It was useless: she prayed
distractedly, harried by innumerable images. She thought of
Manuel, lost and unheard from in America: would he see in a
dream his father dying? Teresa will give birth in January.
Tony should be gentle with her. Manuel, Luis, Tony; and the
girls, Nena, and Perla, who was now a nun.

Now in the dimness Dona Pilar reclined in the chair and

closed her eyes. Tony and Teresa had come; she relaxed the
tension of her waiting. She heard the nurse go into the hall.
The wind outside seemed to be telling her: time lost, far
away. Gradually a weakness came upon her like a drifting
sleep. Then as in a dream she saw herself as a young girl,
long ago, dancing. She was flushed and tireless and
laughing, she was dancing to the waltzes that went on 2nd
on through the night, dancing around the kiosko of the plaza
under the bright streamers of a New Year's Eve with the
young men who called her Pili and begged for her love. For
they didn't know that she had already promised it to the
sullen young man who couldn't dance, and who watched her
jealously, dangerously, as she laughed and danced with all
the young men who were in love with her. And when the
dance was over and the tropical stars were pale in the sky,
the sullen young man wouldn't let her go home but carried
her into his car (the black, obsolescent Buick was
commandeered by the army in the last war), and he kissed
the outraged protests from her mouth and she wept as they
drove to Manila in the dawn-light, knowing more than ever
that she loved this violent young man who was to be her
husband, and years later, mayor of the town, then the
governor, the father of five children, the boys fearless and
impetuous like their father but unashamed of tenderness,
the girls beautiful with a fragile loveliness but honest and
capable with their hands, helping her in the kitchen when
her husband had guests for dinner (in 1939 President
Quezon himself, passing through on a country tour), or
playing for her on the piano in the high wide living room in
the summer evenings the waltzes she had danced to when
she was a young girl long ago, when she was the tireless
and laughing Pili of all the young men who were in love with
her, and oh so many long years yet before she was to
become the white-haired Dona Pilar struggling to Mass in
the grey cold mornings that chilled her brittle bones. . .

She roused herself with a start and trembled with the guilt
of her remembering, as if it were an unforgivable dereliction
of duty. The final echo of her dream's music disappeared
into the distance of an obscure landscape she could only
sense and not understand. It was dark in the room now; in
the town electricity was a luxury that came only after six
o'clock. Her heart was tired, drained, empty. The nurse
leaned against the foot-board of the bed, waiting.

The man on the bed stirred. The nurse sprang forward and
felt for his pulse. Dona Pilar lighted a candle. She peered at
her husband, the candle in her hand: his eyes moved at last
and met hers in a stare of speechless fear and entreaty.

She turned to the nurse. "Miss Corpus, please send for the
priest,"

she said, and her voice was steady and calm.

H E CAME to the house after the tolling of the Angelus. H e

was a tall young priest with a crew-cut and a shy smile and
he walked with a slight limp. He was the new co-adjutor of
the parish, his first assign-ment after the seminary: there
was a certain self-consciousness in his movements as he
donned his surplice in the diffuse light of candles and
electric bulb.

Dona Pilar said, "Father Santos, I'm afraid it is impossible for

him to confess. He cannot speak."

The priest massaged his chin, seemingly fingering the

defects of his shave. "It's all right," he said, and his voice
was surprisingly low and rounded. "He can make an act of
will." He placed a small silver case, the chrism, on the table,
before the crucifix and the candles.

He bent over Don Ricardo on the bed and blessed him with
the Sign of the Cross. "You are sorry for all your sins," he
began. "You are sorry for having offended God. . ." The eyes
burned with their mute terror. "Tell God you are sorry. I am a
priest . . . Make a sign," he pleaded. Sweat broke out on his
brow and glistened on his earnest, boyish face. "Tell God
you are deeply sorry . . . " He recited the Latin absolution
rapidly, as if to spare the others in the room the mystic
strangeness of the language.

After the Indulgentiam, the priest took the silver box from
the table and proceeded to anoint the man on the bed with
the consecrated oil. He finished the unction and knelt beside
the bed and read the concluding prayers, while sweat shone
on his face and a woman in the room cried softly and Don
Ricardo's eyes burned with a fearful silent fire.

In the hall a tangle of children, curious and subdued, gaped

at the priest. The son who was called Tony accompanied him
down the stairs, across the sala, to the door. For the first
time he realized the spacious-ness of the house, its history;
portraits of ancestors hung on the mellowed walls, and the
shell-windows were of an antique, unfamiliar design. He
would have liked to stay awhile and smoke and talk before
going back to the rectory, through the dark storm wind, but
Tony had opened the door for him. He retrieved his jacket
from the umbrella-stand.

"Who asked you to come, Father?"

"Your mother sent for me," the priest said, startled by the
question. He thought he detected a breath of whiskey on
the other man, but then he wasn't sure. "You are Tony,
aren't you?" he asked quietly, with a smile.

"Didn't you know that the slightest shock could kill him?
Didn't you know that, Father?"

"No," he said. "I came because —"

"It didn't do him any good, did it? He gave no sign. I guess
he didn't even know you were there."

"God is good and merciful."

The priest turned away from the slammed door and walked
through the gate and down the street, under the trees of the
evening. The wind was cold now and he wished he had a
heavier coat. From the earth rose the smell of rain and
decaying leaves. He stopped by a tree-trunk to light a
cigarette, inhaling the warm soothing smoke gratefully.

He walked under the tossing trees, and he remembered his

own father, dying long ago in drunkenness. How many of us
die, never knowing in this life the infinite love of God? How
many of us die in the shadow of hell, choked by our
contradictory hungers? He quickened his strides, limping
slightly; the streetlights stippled leaf-shadows on the wet
and glimmering street.
Above the plaza the skies had cleared in part, with a few
stars, sharp and brittle as glass. Mother of Christ, comforter
of the afflicted, intercede for us. . . The cold wind swept over
the town toward the mountains and the darkness beyond; it
lashed at the palms along the flagstone path across the
plaza and flapped the hem of his cassock about his trouser-
legs as he hurried on to the rectory, to a warm supper, and
afterwards, a book to read in his safe, well-lighted room.

T H E CLOCK in the stairwell struck the first hour of morning,

and Don Ricardo hadn't died, although his eyes were closed
now, and he breathed in weak, even puffs, only asleep, it
seemed, without pain.

They sat about the carved bed, Tony and his mother and
Luis, awaiting the perhaps forceful, awe-inspiring
transfiguration of death.

"I think he'll be like this for a long while yet," Luis said.
"What do you think, Tony?"

He unclenched his fingers then and stood up, scraping his

chair in a spasm of repugnance at the odors in the enclosed
air, his brother's harassed expression, the drag of the
night's waiting. At once he was contrite, avoiding his
mother's gaze. He thought of going out for a smoke,
hesitated, swallowed dryly, then went down the hall to
another bedroom.

Light through the lattices checkered the ceiling and part of a

wall with tiny, indistinct trapezoids. He found his cigarettes
in the pocket of a shirt draped on a chair, lit one, and
pushed open a window. The wind rushed in, moist and cold,
slapping his face, instantly filling the room and ballooning
the mosquito net. He shut the window, cursing.

"Tony. . ."
"Did I wake you up?"

"No," his wife said. "I haven't slept. . . Tony, is Papa —"

"No, nothing's happened. Now I wish that goddamned priest

would —"

"Please — please don't swear, Tony."

Teresa got up out of the mosquito net and sat on the edge of
the bed, beside him. Somewhere in the house a child began
to cry and complain, and he heard his sister Nena scold
sharply before the crying stopped and he could only hear
the wind. With his slipper he ground his cigarette out on the
floor. He thought, Vith an odd sympathy, of his work in the
city, the usual clutter of papers on his desk; the
monotonous clicking of typewriters around him. The wind
blew in lengthening waves through the trees. His father,
who beat his sons with an ivory cane, mercilessly. . .
Discipline1, he could hear his father shouting now down the
dark corridors of his memory: that, and the obsessions they
never shared, would be all that he would ever remember of
him, his father: he was dying, speechless forever, and they
would never know one another.

He reached for Teresa's hand, pulsing and warm, alive.

"Manuel and I used to sleep in this room," he said, recalling

his other brother, the rebellious one who had dared to defy
and strike their father; remembering the nights of boyhood
in this room, their conversations, the clarity of all their
impossible dreams.

A spell of memory and bitterness brooded in him like the

pain of a huge defeat. His father would die, his friends and
his enemies would come to pay their last respects; the
ruined body would be buried in*a ceremony befitting a
noble citizen, a former governor of the province; perhaps
with speeches even and a band, in the midday sun or in the
rain. The road to the cemetery would be muddy this time of
year, the season of the rains, littered with horse-dung, the
pigs wallowing in the black waters of the canals. The
unknown, unknowable end of this love and hate, this joy and
despair. . . He felt Teresa's hand, real and immediate,
stroking his tired shoulder, in the half-darkness, and she was
saying his name, over and over, "Tony, oh Tony," as if it
were a lament.

He pulled her blindly against him and held her tight in a

desolation of grief and anger, hiding his face in the thick
mass of her hair, twisting the swell of her body against him.
He called her name with an inward sobbing, seeking only
the living warmth of her body away and above the moment
now, away from the house and all other transient things.

But she fought to escape his grasp and she freed herself,
tearing the sleeve of her nightgown, and she backed away
against the wall.

"You — you don't have any respect. You are a beast1. You
are heartless. . ." f

The loud ferocity of her whispers surprised him, stunned him

like a blow. They stood facing each other, breathing hard in
the pale darkness.

"Is that all you ever —" She faltered. "Oh Tony," she said,
"why must you be this way? This night?"

Something confused and lonely and cruel in his heart

burned brightly for a moment, then crumbled into ash. "I'm
sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to — Teresa, I'm sorry. . ."
Luis was calling him. He remained standing still in his
numbness, before he turned about and walked to the other
room, unhurriedly, with the incredible slowness of the
motions in a dream, knowing already that his father was
dead. Teresa followed close after him, searching for him. His
mother was praying the Litany of the Dead, her voice small
and brave through the wind blowing in the vast skies of
dawn with the sound of mysterious wings; and he knelt, not
so much in sorrow for his father as for all the living and the
unborn.

The Mountains

HIS FATHER and mother had gone to spend the day at his
married sister's place in San Juan and the maid had not
come back from her week-end in the province and Ben was
alone in the house. In the morning he raked and burned the
leaves in the yard and he sat on the porch steps and
watched the blue smoke rising away to get lost in the trees.
The smoke made him think of the mist on the mountains far
to the north, the clean smell of the pines, the rain of the
afternoon coming down into the valleys cool in the midday
sun.

When the mound of leaves had burned flat to the ground, he

went down to the garage behind the house and drove the
jeep out into the shade of the trees. The leaf-shadows
played about him as he washed the carburetor and the air-
filter in a pan of gasoline, and the sweat rolled down his
face and he tasted its saltiness. He was through by noon
and he went to the kitchen and ate the left-over chicken
from the icebox. The house was quiet with only the
occasional whir of the refrigerator and the dry scratching of
the branches on the roof when there was a breeze.
He flicked on the radio in his room and found a program of
swing music, toned down low while he smoked in the deep
chair by the bed.

He thought of reading awhile and then sleeping off the

afternoon, but Tony was coming. It was the first week of the
sumfrier vacation. He sat smoking and listening to the
Benny Goodman jazz and was grateful for the hour of the
day, and the shade the trees made over the house, and
being alone, here in the room with the books on the shelves
he had built and the crucifix on the wall and the guns laid
out on the table.

After the cigarette, he sat down at the table and balanced

the Remington .22 in his hands, feeling its compact weight,
its smooth and accurate power. By this time tomorrow, he
would be stretched out under the trees along the river
beyond San Antonio, tired and happy after hunting all
morning in the sun. He began to disassemble the rifle,
whistling along with the music.

He wondered whether Raul and his brother would be free to

join him tomorrow. It was all right, going alone. But Raul was
good company during a hunt, a quiet guy, and a passable
shot himself. The last time they had gone on a shoot
together, they bagged thirteen wild pigeons between them,
aside from the ground quail. That was something, now.
There was some leading in the bore and he worked on it
with a wire brush.

He was oiling the cartridge chamber when he heard Tony's

car beeping from the street. He walked unhurriedly through
the house and down to the front yard to open the gate.

"Wake you up?" Tony said, driving into the yard.

"Nope," Ben said.

Tony parked his beat-up maroon Oldsmobile in a corner of
the yard and the two young men went up the house
together.

"Smell like a perfume counter," Ben said.

"Just a drop. Say, guy, you free this afternoon?"

"Depends. Beer session? Philosophical orgy? Catechetical

instruc —"

"This is serious business, guy. There's this girl I'd like you to
meet."

Tony made a long sucking sound with his lips and snapped
his fingers.

"Wonderful figure, wonderful sense of humor, wonderful —

aaah —

everything."

Ben laughed, sitting back at the table. Tony straddled a

chair, facing him, and they lighted up together. "New fjnd,
huh?" Ben said. "Why, Margie turn you down?"

"Got your signals crossed, guy," said Tony. "This girl's

Margie's cousin."

"Now the plot thickens. You going after the cousin too?"

"Aagh, cut that out. It's like this, Ben..." Tony leaned
forward, grasping the edge of the scarred table, and a
pleading look came into his eyes and seemed to tighten up
his soft, chubby face. "Margie won't step out unless Lilian —
the cousin — tags along and —"

"Now I'm beginning to see the light," Ben said.

"I need you for a double date," said Tony.

Ben was polishing the breech-block with a rag, holding it up

now and then, peering at it critically. "Got to get up real
early tomorrow,"

he said.

"It's for Tuesday next week," Tony said. "My birthday. We go

dancing at the Nile and then drive around and maybe park
in El Faro. Where no one'll bother us. I've checked the
calendar — it'll be almost full moon..."

"Many happy returns," Ben said.

"Thanks. Now this afternoon, we lay the groundwork, easy

and slow, you know. Lilian — the cousin — I told her about
you. Nice guy, I said. Solid character, a great believer in Fr.
Daniel Lord, S.J. That sort of thing. Promised to bring you
over this afternoon, check?"

"That's real friendly of you, running my life for me," Ben

said.

"That's just great."

"You'll like her, guy, I know you will. Real class. Looks like
Pier Angeli. Sweet and refined and — and loaded with
culture. Bay-tooven and Shakespeare and El Gray-co.
Dances the cha-cha like a queen, cool and cold sober. Right
down your alley, guy."

"I'm deeply touched by your solicitude," Ben said.

"You'll like her, guy," Tony said. "You'll click together the
instant you lay eyes on her."
Ben started putting the rifle together, working swiftly,
pausing only for a puff or two. He got up and turned off the
radio. Out in the street a car went by and in the house
beyond the ferfce, screened by the trees, a woman's shrill
voice was calling. A pattern of leaves trembled on the
window-sill, softly, like a reflection of water.

"Why don't you ask Mon?"

"That bum will just louse up things," Tony said.

"How about Freddie?"

"He doesn't know a waltz from a polka," Tony said. "Besides,

I've told Lilian —"

"Can't go on any cousin-dates with you," Ben said. "Got to

catch up on my reading. You know, in freshman year I didn't
think much of that fellow Chesterton. But now I think he was
on to something. He and Belloc —" He looked up from his
cigarette and met Tony's down-cast expression and was
instantly sorry. "Just kidding," he said, and cuffed his friend
on the shoulder. "Sure, I'll come along to meet your future
cousin-in-law. But maybe you can shelve the introductions
for now and tell Lily —"

"Lilian," Tony said.

"You tell Lilian we'll drop in Monday."

"But she's expecting us around six. Today. Listen, guy, will

you, I've got it all laid out, the timetable for this operation,
the details, the logistics, the softening-up barrage, the —"

"Flanking maneuvers. You'll make ROTC battalion

commander yet."
"Ben." Tony's voice caught on an anxious falsetto note, and
he cleared his throat. "Ben, I can't afford to foul it up. Not
this time. I mean, with Margie."

"OK, you got yourself a Man Friday," Ben said. "Or is it

Tuesday?

You can relax now, guy. I'll come along this p.m., OK?"

"You had me real worried there, chico," Tony said. "It's a

matter of life and death, you know."

"I know," Ben said. "Margie's a wonderful girl."

"The best in the world," said Tony.

"She reminds me of a girl I used to know," Ben said.

"No kidding now."

"Marianne."

"You never told me about her."

"She isn't around any more," Ben said.

"Married some creep from La Salle?"

"No/' Ben said. "Nothing like that. She went away."

"Marianne. She must have been real nice."

"Yup," Ben said. He tightened the barrel screw and returned

the rifle in its oilcloth sheath. He stood up and stretched and
flexed his arms downward, slowly. He decided to clean the
shotgun when he came back in the evening. There would be
time enough for that. He had all the time in the world. He
stripped down to his shorts and flung a towel about his
shoulders.

"We'll have to wait for the folks/' he said. "There's no one to

hold the fort but me."

"Why, they gone to the province?"

"Just visiting in San Juan," Ben said.

"What time are they coming back?"

"Four or five. Don't you worry now. Everything's going to be

OK."

He opened the shower full-blast, the water sharp and clean

against his face, and suddenly he remembered the last time
he had gone to San Antonio, swimming across the river with
Raul late in the afternoon, the water deep and green, and
how they had scrambled up the bank to race each other
across the sand warm from the day's sun. Tony had turned
on the radio and he heard a piano concerto through the loud
whoosh of the shower, and he wondered idly, indifferently,
about Margie's cousin, who was loaded with culture,
Beethoven and all that.

He came out of the bath, rubbing himself with the towel, the
blood rising warmly to his skin.

He lit a cigarette, savoring the taste of the smoke after the

shower.

It was fine, smoking after a brisk shower, or a swim, or when

one rested under the trees after walking across the fields
hot in the sun. The piano concerto rose to a climax, ending
abruptly.
"Lilian plays the piano too," Tony said. ,

"An artist, huh? You got me scared already. Care for a

Coke?"

Ben went out to the kitchen and came back with the Cokes.
He sat down on the bed and picked up his black-and-white
loafers from the row of boots ranged against the wall. The
classical program was over and now Harry James came on,
his trumpet cool and sonorous and precise. That was his
kind of music, something he could understand and whistle.
The long-haired people were fine and all that, but they sat
heavy on your shoulders and could give you a bad case of
migraine.

You didn't whistlfe Bach or Mozart, walking along in the

morning sun.

You needed a lot of fancy trimmings, including maybe a

tuxedo, for that sort of thing.

"Going up to Baguio?" Tony said.

"Maybe," Ben said.

"Margie's going," Tony said.

"And Lilian, and the second and third cousins, too, I

suppose."

"Yeah. I'll have to go up, too."

"Ah, in dreams begin responsibilities."

"Read that somewhere," said Tony.

"Delmore Schwartz," Ben said. "Ever read Graham Greene?"

"No. But I've seen the movies. The Third Man. Our Man in
Ha-vana."

"Read the novels. Fellow knows his business."

T i l do that," Tony said.

"There's a book here I began last night. By Thomas Merton."

"The fellow who became a monk?"

"Yup," Ben said. "Terrific book. I'll pass it on to you."

He was finished dressing and he sat by the window with his

Coke.

It was close to four now and the sun slanted goldenly

through the leaves.

"Your folks coming back this afternoon?" Tony said.

"Sit down and relax. They'll be coming any minute now,"

Ben said.

"Why don't you call up, just to make sure?"

"My sister doesn't have a phone," Ben said. "Take it easy."

"What do you plan to do this summer?"

"Hunt," Ben said. "And read, and sleep."

"All summer?"

"Well, I'll try to write some stuff."

"You used to write a lot, I recall."

"That sort of thing happens. Then it's gone and — I don't
know, maybe it was because — How about coming along
tomorrow? You can be my official gun-bearer and retriever.
Commission basis."

"No, thanks," Tony said. "I burn badly. A sensitive

sonovabitch like me. And you know I can't shoot. I'll just
scare the birds away."

"I see you go for another kind of game."

"Ha-ha," Tony said.

"You're getting to be a fat slob. Maybe you should try out for
the varsity next year."

"Basketball? I'll settle for the intramurals. Besides, Father

O'Casey and I aren't on very chummy terms."

"He's forgotten about last semester. Besides, the team's lost

Gaston and Campos, and he'll have to scrape the bottom of
the barrel to come up with a decent lineup next season.
Let's go out to the porch for some fresh air."

From the house next door came the sound of voices

laughing. Wind passed through the trees and the leaves
rippled brightly in the slanting sunlight. A good time of day.
No, apy time of day was good, he decided. Dawn, with the
headlights cutting through the greyness, and early morning,
with the sun coming up over the mountains, the sky turning
a deeper blue, and noon, under the trees, and finally, the
day going into the west, and suddenly the lights of the stars
in the sky. Any time of the day was good, and when it rained
you could stay out from it and feel warm watching it falling
darkly on the trees.

"I know you'll click," Tony said. "You and Lilian."

"What makes you so sure?"

"I just know, guy. It's in the cards."

"Your cards," Ben said. "I have my own pack. All jokers."

"Ben —"

"Yup?"

"What're you going to do after graduation?"

"Work/' he said. "O rare et labore. By the sweat of thy brow

—"

"How about getting hitched?"

"Well, a fellow's got to settle down and all that. But that's a
long way off yet."

"Was it you or some great thinker who said tempus always

fugits.. ."

"Here they are now," Ben said and sprinted down the steps
to swing the gate open for his father's Chevy.

"Good afternoon," Tony greeted Ben's parents as they got

out of the car.

"Hello there, Tony," Ben's father said. "Having a fine

summer?"

"Fine so far. . . I came over to fetch Ben. There's someone —

a girl I'd like him to meet."

"Let's hope she can cook, at least," Ben's mother said.

"He's been after me all afternoon," Ben said.

"You do that, Tony," Ben's father said. "Take him away from
his guns and books. Your friend's becoming a regular hermit.
Introduce him to the girls, Tony."

"It'll be a pleasure, sir," Tony said. "I promised this lady we'd
be coming —"

"OK, Casanova, let's get going," Ben said.

"On your way, you two," Ben's father said, laughing.

"Our best to your mother, Tony," Ben's mother said.

"Yes, ma'am, I won't forget, thank you."

"Good hunting," Ben's father called out to them as they got

in Tony's car.

They drove out through the gate and down the hard clay
street to the boulevard leading to the cemented highway
that ringed the city.

Tony bore down on the gas, and the wind knifed through the
wind-vents and made a hollow sound in Ben's ears, like a
thundering of surf.

The late sun was yellow-gold upon the houses and the sky
was clear and high, gradually losing color, and the windr
was not so warm now.

"You'll click/' Tony said. "Lilian's a great girl."

"Sure/' said Ben. "I can hear myself clicking already."

The whole setup was so familiar, he knew it like a movie he

had seen at least twice or a book he had read half a dozen
times and something in his heart recoiled from it. Languid,
spellbinding music, and dancing close and warm in a
crowded nightclub, and everybody trying hard to have a
good time, and then, after a few more dates perhaps, the
secret, measuring look in the girl's eyes and suddenly in a
silent compressed moment, the lipstick taste of her, the
blind ecstatic pull of two bodies, and then driving home late
in the night, late, the city looking abandoned under the
street-lights, and the strange voices within him, the
emptiness.

But you hold the cards. You always do, and you deal them
out any way you want. Anyway, Tony's date was still six
days off, six long days away, and in the meantime, there
was tomorrow. He thought of the ride through the dawn, the
jeep's windshield down and the cool win,d rushing past his
goggled face, and the mountains tall in the morning light.
Raul would be waiting for him in San Antonio, and they
would go across the fields to the swamps and the river. They
would hunt all morning and all afternoon under God's
immense sky, and there at the foot of the Zambales
mountains it would be almost like being with her again, and
loving her, remembering her promise that she would always
think of him, pray for him and ever be in love with him, truly
and forever, in the convent hidden among the far mountains
in the north, where rain came down in a mist to the blue
valleys cool in the midday sun.

"This Lilian's OK," Tony said, pushing in the knob of the

dashboard lighter.

"I heard you the first time, guy," said Ben.

Sunday
THE MORNING was cool pale blue before the sunrise. The
star was still in the west above the mountains and there was
a strip of mist on the trees that lined the road far across the
fields. Roosters crowed and answered one another, and the
sound of their crowing was pure and strong in the cool
morning.

Gently, Nana Sabel took the child asleep in a flannel blanket

from Ana's arms.

"I will take good care of him/' Nana Sabel said.

"We thank you deeply/' Ana said.

"We will leave you now, Nana/' said Juan.

"God go with you," Nana Sabel said.

The old woman went back to her house with the child,
stepping carefully over the fence of bamboo twigs. Juan
pushed the ladder up onto the floor of the hut, and Ana and
Soling and the boy Polon followed him through the sugar
cane patch to the trail on the high bank of the irrigation
ditch that was shallow now in the dry season, the water only
a tiny stream from the river. The dog came bounding after
them, barking, and Polon had to throw several earthen clods
at it before it stopped following them across the fields. The
grass that grew on the trail in scattered clumps was cool
under the feet, wet with dew, and the harvested fields were
wide and spreading in the brightening day, and the wind
was cool and clean.

As they reached the culvert on the road, Juan saw Lacay

Cadiong's truck coming, the dust rising away behind it and
blowing over the fields, still far off, going around a low hill,
making its second trip of the morning from Nagsabong and
Tibag. Polon began to wave his hat for it to come faster,
jumping about on the dirt road, and Soling told him to stop
acting like a madman, and Juan and Ana smiled at each
other. The bus, a converted weapons-carrier, ground to a
stop, and the dust billowed up into the bamboo trees.

Roding and two other young men, who were sitting in front
with the driver, got down and said good morning and
offered their seat to Juan and his family. They were from
Tibag and knew Soling and were very polite. Roding was
most solicitous, making sure that they were comfortable
before joining his companions in the rear of the truck, where
there was barely room among the bundles of firewood and
baskets of fruit and vegetables bound for the market in the
town.

The bus started with another clashing of gears and picked

up speed, and Juan felt its roar trembling through his body,
loud in his ears after the stillness of the morning. It was
better walking, he thought, and he saw himself on the road,
at dawn, the earth cool under his feet, the sky full of stars
moving with him, against the wind. Polon leaned forward
against the windshield, watching the road. The sun rose and
its light filled the country about the road, so that the trees
looked fresh and green, and the hills beyond the river were
dark green, and the mountains were clear and high, the
forests with purple streaks on the slopes facing the sun.

"I have not seen you for a long time, Manong," said Cardo,
the driver.

"We seldom go to town," Juan said.

"How is life, Manong?"

"It is good, thank the mercy of God," Juan said. "How is your
father, Cardo?"
"He is well also, Manong," Cardo said. "There is going to be
a parade in the town this morning. It is in honor of the Apo
Gobernador."

"Yes, I have heard," Juan said.

"I have never seen the Apo Gobernador," the boy Polon said.

"Now you will see him," Juan said. "We will hear him speak
in the plaza."

"He is a great man," Cardo said. "He will do many good

things for

"Will there be soldiers in the parade, Manong Cardo?" Polon

asked.

"Yes, there will be many soldiers with the governor."

"Ay, that will be fine," the boy said. "And after the parade,
Tatang, we will go to the cine? You promised, ah?"

"We must go to the church first," Ana said.

"Polon never prays," Soling said.

"But I do, also," the boy said. "I have prayed to God that
Tatang will take us to the cine. I prayed for a good harvest
too."

"All right then, I believe you," Soling said.

"Manang, I know whom you always pray for."

"Who? You tell me," Soling said.

"You will not get angry with me?"

"No, why should I? Tell me."

"Manong Roding," Polon said.

Soling pinched her cousin's ear. "You have such a big

mouth," she said, the color rising in her cheeks.

"But it is true, isn't it, Manang?" Polon said, rubbing his ear.

"Stop that now, Polon," said Ana.

"We ought to have left you behind," Soling said, "with Nana
Sabel to take care of the baby."

"You have a beautiful niece, ah, Manong Juan," Cardo said.

"You are only flattering me, Manong Cardo," Soling said, the
blush still warm on her face.

"No, I am not flattering you, Ading," Cardo said. "I speak the
truth, really."

They were coming into the town and the houses began, the
first nipa shacks clustered among the coconut trees, and
then the wooden houses, unpainted and pale from the dust
as the dirt road ended and the asphalt street began, smooth
and even under the truck. Two helmeted soldiers halted the
bus. The taller one, with a bayonet on his rifle, peered at the
passengers, met Juan's eyes, hesitated, then waved for
Cardo to move on. Polon licked his lips in excitement,
looking at his father, his eyes shining.

The truck curved into the main street and went up the
bridge, slow now, in a noisy traffic of calesas and jeepneys,
in the warm bright dusty sunlight, the jeepney before them
roaring out a grey cloud from its exhaust. The galvanized-
iron building of the rice mill on the opposite bank reflected
the sun, and the church on the hill above the houses stood
tall against the sky.

There were many people in the plaza, as though it were

already May and the fiesta had come. There was a band
playing in the kiosko, and a banner welcoming the governor
and his party in bright red letters fluttered between two
poles at the gate of the presidencia. Juan paid their fare,
counting out the tattered bills carefully, and they got off in
front of the market. The young man Roding joined them as
they went across the plaza toward the church.

"It is an important day in the town, Ama Juan," Roding said.

"The Apo Gobernador is coming," Juan said.

"Polon will want to see the parade, ah, Polon?"

"Yes, Manong," Polon said. "Are you going to Mass with us,
Manong?"

"Yes," Roding said. "How is your illness, Nana, are you well
now?"

"I do not have the headaches any more, thank the mercy of
God,"

said Ana.

"Let us hurry," Soling said, frowning.

"Yes, let us hurry," Ana said. "We are already late."

IT WAS cool and dim inside the church, cool as the shade of
a huge spreading tree, and the birds twittered faintly high in
the dome above the altar. Father Santos was in the pulpit
and he was speaking about the love of God who died on the
cross for all men. Soling and Ana, with their handkerchiefs
for veils, crossed themselves with holy water, and knelt in
the side aisle beneath the figures of the Eighth Station. Juan
and Roding knelt behind them. Juan held his hat in both
hands and listened to the priest, and peace touched his
heart. He felt himself emptied of everything but the peace
which needed only the sound of the priest talking and the
coolness of the church like that of the shade of a vast tree
and the feeling that Almighty God was inside the church,
now, in a manner closer and mdre real than in those
moments he felt His presence at night in the fields.

The priest came down from the pulpit and the choir sang,
and the Mass continued. Birds twittered about in the high
dome where the sun shone through the stained-glass
windows. A bell rang and the people in the pews went down
on their knees, and their kneeling rustled through the
church like leaves. Juan knelt too and there was a silence
and he heard in it the band playing down in the plaza.
Several bells began to ring and Juan prayed the Our Father,
the peace in his heart. The bells ceased and the people sat
back in the pews, and Juan and Roding stood up, but Soling
and Ana remained kneeling until the end of the Mass.

Ana bought a candle and had it lighted for the soul of her
father, and they went down the old stone steps to the plaza.
The band had left the kiosko and was now in front of the
presidencia, playing a martial tune.

Polon tugged at his father's arm, urging him to hurry, and

they made their way past the halo-halo stands and the dice
tables to the other side of the plaza, where the parade
would pass and they could watch it from under the acacia
trees away from the sun. They could see the parade forming
now on the main street, the flags flying above the crowd, a
squad of policemen on horseback, a jeep with an amplifier
blaring out direc-tions as it moved slowly up the street, the
band playing.

The mounted policemen led the parade, followed by the

band, and after them came long columns of high school
cadets, the boys carrying wooden rifles and the girls in their
blue and white uniforms swinging their hands smartly, and
then came the jeeps decorated with ribbons and flowers,
each with a girl looking pretty and cool in the sun. Two
jeeploads of soldiers preceded the governor's party, a file of
automobiles, and finally there was the governor himself,
standing in an open car, a huge red-faced man in barong
Tagalog, holding on to the windshield with one hand and
waving the other vigorously at the people cheering him.
Juan clapped, his heart beating fast as he watched the
governor pass by standing tall in the car, waving, a great
man of riches and power, his automobile trailed by another
jeep full of soldiers, the band up ahead playing a march, the
people shouting "Mabuhay!" and clapping, the dust rising
and settling back in the street. The parade disappeared
around the corner formed by the elementary school
building, the bass drum's throbbing growing faint, the
people gathering around the kiosko now to wait for the
governor's speech after the parade completed its course
around the town.

When the program began it was close to noon and hot in the
sun.

The governor sat in the kiosko with the mayor and the vice-
mayor and the chief of police and the girls who had ridden
in the decorated jeeps.

A little girl from the elementary school sang two songs and
a fat army major spoke of peace and order in the province.
Finally, after being introduced by the mayor, the governor
rose to speak and the people were cheering again and
clapping. He spoke in English, shouting passionately into the
microphone and almost knocking it down once when he
made a sweeping gesture. Juan recognized some of the
words, "re-public" and "progress" and "democracy." He
wished he knew the language and he felt disappointed and
unhappy and alone, standing in the sun at the outer edge of
the crowd. But he remained where he was out of respect for
the governor until the speech was over and it was pa$t
noon, and the mayor was shaking the governor's hand. The
men and the pretty girls were going down the steps of the
kiosko and through a passage in the crowd formed by the
soldiers and across the plaza to the banquet in the
elementary school building. Juan went back to where Ana,
Soling, Polon and Roding waited for him in the shadow of a
caimito tree.

"I have to leave you now," Roding said.

"You might as well come with us, Manong," Polon said.

"Yes, Roding, you come with us," Ana said.

"My companions are waiting for me, Nana," Roding said.

"We shall meet again in the truck. Soling, I will leave you
now."

"Yes, Manong," Soling said.

"He loves you very much, Manang," Polon said when the
young man had gone.

"You are always talking nonsense," Soling said.

"Tatang, Manong Roding bought sorbetes for us when you

were not here," Polon said.
"He kept asking for it and I did not have money," said Ana.

"Yes, Polon is without shame, really," said Soling.

"Manong Roding was only doing it for you, ah," Polon said
and jumped out of his cousin's reach. "He said he will be
coming with his friends next week to serenade you, hala."

"How wide your mouth is," Soling said.

They went to a bakery on the main street and ate

ensaymada, and each drank a bottle of ice-cold sarsaparilla.
It was pleasant in the store of the bakery, after the sun in
the plaza, and there were the warm fragrant odors of flour
and fresh baked bread and biscuits. While they ate sitting on
the bench by the door, the radio behind the counter played
brisk guitar music and a bus from the city arrived at the
terminal shed across the street, and they watched the
passengers coming out tiredly after their long trip and the
cocheros carrying their luggage to the calesas.

The Cine Elvie was showing a double feature, an American

film and a Tagalog picture with Gloria Romero. The American
film was on the screen when they entered the orchestra,
and there were people standing in the aisles, and the air
was thick and sour, and not all the electric fans were
working. They stood pressed against the sawali wall and
Polon kept tiptoeing and stretching his neck to see the
screen, but the film was soon over in a climax of gunfire and
men falling dead violently, and the lights came on and many
people in the seats got up to leave. Juan saw his cousin
Demetrio with his wife Maring in a row with empty seats and
he was happy to see them.

"So you have also come to town," Demetrio said.

"Yes," said'Juan. "It is an important day in the town."

"Yes, indeed," Demetrio said.

"Have you already found a carabao?" said Juan.

"Not yet," Demetrio said.

"Have you gone to look for one in Anoling?"

"No," Demetrio said, "but I plan to go there one of these

days. Oy, Soling, when are you getting married?"

"I have heard that you have many suitors, Soling," Maring
said.

"There is none, Tia," said Soling.

"It is time to start fattening the pigs, ah; Ana?" Maring said.
"You are going to have a wedding soon. Do not forget to
invite us in San Miguel, ah, Soling?"

"Yes, Tia," Soling said, "I will not forget you. But that will be
a long time yet."

"Ah, it will not be long now," Maring said.

The lights went out and the advertising slides flashed on the
screen, the names of the shops and restaurants of the town.
The Tagalog film began with a great deal of singing and
dancing and running about and joking, but after a while,
there was a great deal of crying, also, and painful and
beautiful words of love and going away, and it was very sad
and touching. The girl in the film would not smile nor laugh,
she could never be happy again because her love was dead,
and nobody in the world, neither father nor mother nor
friends, could ever make her smile again. But toward the
end, the girl discovered that she could love again, and her
laughter was full of joy and innocence, her eyes bright with
the faith that she would be happy forever.

They left the moviehouse in the middle of the other film as it

was already late, Demetrio and Maring coming out with
them. The sun was about to set in the mountains now,
beyond the town, the air cooling, the sunlight shining like
gold, softly, in the glass windows of the stores as they
walked to the paradahan in front of the market where the
trucks waited. Cardo was there with his bus, calling out the
names of the barrios on his route, that he was leaving very
soon, and he was not going to wait any longer. Demetrio
and Maring found a jeepney that was already leaving for
San Miguel. The sun set and it was twilight in the town and
the bell of the church rang the Angelus, and it seemed to
grow deeply quiet suddenly between the strokes of the bell.

THERE WERE fewer passengers now in Cardo's truck, and

there was more than enough room on the two benches.
Roding sat beside Soling and she kept her gaze on the
handkerchief she twisted in her hands, not looking at the
town in the twilight, the lights on in the stores, as the truck
went up the main street toward the bridge.

"Did you go to the cine?" Roding asked.

"Yes, Manong," Soling said.

"I wish I had gone, too," Roding said.

"What did you do, Manong?"

"We stayed in the plaza and listened to the serenata. They

played some beautiful songs."

As they went over the river, Juan saw the church high on the
hill in the last light of the day, the sky above it, without
clouds, clear in the afterglow. The church hung there above
the roofs of the town like a boat sailing in the sky, and his
mind went back to the coolness inside the church and the
voice of the priest talking about the love of God. They rolled
past the junction where the soldiers had put up a checkpoint
in the morning, and they were back on the dirt road, going
fast, the truck jarring, and he watched the dark shapes of
the coconut trees rushing away. The town was behind them
and it was open country, and the wind was cool and familiar
with the smells of sun-warmed earth and leaves cooling in
the evening.

Soling and Roding talked beside him and their voices were
shy and groping in the dark. It seemed to Juan that he had
traveled very far, a journey farther than the ten kilometers
to town, and he was glad they were going home now after
the long day. He saw the evening star above the dark
mountains, the star bright with a fresh clear light like a drop
of spring water, and it moved in the sky with the bus and it
was like a friend. He remembered Nana Sabel telling him
once long ago that it was the star of the Mother of God.

The truck stopped where they had boarded it in the

morning. He was counting out their fare by the glow of the
tail lights when Roding said that it was already paid for. The
young man would not accept the ten-centavo bills that Juan
tried to press into his hand.

"Please take it, Roding," Ana said.

"No, Nana," Roding said, going back into the bus.

"Thank you, Manong," Soling said.

"I will leave you now," Roding said.

"God reward you," Juan said.

"God go with you, Roding," said Ana.

They stood a moment on the road and looked at the red tail
lights fading away until they were gone, and the night was
still around them, and they heard the wind and the crickets
in the stillness. From the high bank of the ditch the stubble
fields were wide and pale under the moon coming almost to
its fullness. It would be full in three more nights, and Roding
would come with his friends and his guitar, and Juan thought
he would remind Ana, in case she forgot, to prepare a jar of
coconut sweets for the visitors. Polon ran on ahead and
across the fields to the grassy plot behind a wall of
marunggay trees to fetch the carabao he had tethered there
early in the morning.

The dog met them barking, running excitedly about Juan's

legs as he pulled down the ladder. Ana lighted the kerosene
lamp and washed the rice for supper, and Soling came back
from Nana Sabel's house with the baby. The child began to
cry as soon as he saw his mother, and Ana set the pot on
the stove and took the child in her arms.

"There," said Ana, "there, my son, we are home now, do not

cry any-more. Grow up fast and we will all go to the town
and see the parade and the cine, ah?" She gave him her
breast. "There, do not cry any more."

Soling was tending the stove, and the firelight shone in her
dreaming eyes. Juan went down to the yard and sat on the
sled and looked at his house, the light in the window and
the door. He smelled the earth and the leaves and heard the
chickens murmuring in the santol tree above him and the
dogs barking far away in the quiet of the night. The sky was
white with the moonlight and curving and round like the
dome of the church, and he remembered the coolness like
that of the shade of a great spreading tree and the sound of
the people kneeling like the rustling of leaves and the
feeling that God was watching over them.

He thought of the governor and the soldiers in the jeeps and

at the checkpoint. It would be some time before they could
go to town again, and he wondered whether they had spent
more than they could afford, as though they were rich
people. But it had been a good day, he thought, and they
had seen many things.

Polon came leading the carabao, and Juan tied the rope to
the santol tree. Ana was at the window with the child,
calling them to supper.

The Rice Fields

HE STAYED seventeen months in the veterans' hospital. He

was twenty-one, but he felt as though he had been an old
man long ago and had died in the war in the distant country.
Now he was alive again but the oldness remained, the dry
dark taste of his dying.

Early in December his mother and sister came from their

province to visit him. He saw them come into the ward, led
by the nurse, before their eyes found him, looking tired and
dusty from their long trip, and suddenly he was afraid his
mother would cry, as she had done at the pier, sobbing
brokenly. He kissed her hand and she said his name, not
looking once at his empty sleeve, and without a word,
brought out the rice cakes and the caimito and the santol
from the basket his sister carried. His sister talked to him
while his mother just sat there and listened to them. The
harvest had been good, his sister said. His brother had tried
a new planting method and there was going to be a second
crop.

When it was time to go, his mother touched his face and
said his name again and he kissed her hand. He watched
them pass down the ward, barefooted on the shiny tile floor,
his mother holding on to his sister's arm as though blind,
and his heart moved with love for them.

For a long while after they had gone, he lay looking at the
fruits his mother and sister had brought him. He ate one
Slowly, sucking its taste through clenched teeth and then
chewing the juicy meat carefully, and he thought of the
trees that had borne them, the trees that bordered the
creek on his father's land.

His sister's news of the good harvest kept repeating itself in

his mind and he saw very clearly the fields, pale green at
first with the transplanted seedlings, in June and July, the
cool rains falling, and his father coming home from the
fields in the night, his face glistening in the light of the
kerosene lamp, smelling of the rain and the wet earth.

The rice growing into September, dark green now, the grain-
pods beginning to turn yellow, the stalks swaying in the
wind. Then the time of the harvest, the fields yellow-orange
as egg-yolk in the sun, the women shawled, with rags tied
around their arms, swinging their scythes into the heavy
fields, the stacks rising in the cleared fields and mounding
softly like a young mother's breasts, and the smells of
iniroban and patupat cooking on the open fires in the fields
at night.

In February he was fitted with an artificial arm, with steel

hooks for fingers that he could control with the muscles of
his chest and shoulder. He learned how to put it on upon
awakening and how to unstrap it when he went to bed. One
night he dreamed that he was back in San Jose, and the
fields were heavy and yellow in the sun, the mountains cool
and blue in the distance in the sun, and he stood in the ripe
fields with his father and he smelled the rice grains and
touched them with the loving fingers of his right hand. His
father was telling him something, but he could not hear him,
although his father stood so near, and he began to cry. He
woke up in the night in the hospital, and his face was wet
from his crying in the dream. After an hour, he went back to
sleep, without dreams, until morning.

He sat in the shaded courtyard behind the main building

and looked up at the morning sky through the leaves, the
little clouds blowing high in the wind. He became thirsty,
looking up at the sky, and he went back into the ward and
drank three glassfuls of water, proud and humble all at once
that he could hold the glass quite steadily in the claws of his
artificial hand.

His brother came in May, before the time of the rains, and
together they rode home to the province in Northern Luzon.
He wore civilian clothes, his false arm concealed by the
buttoned sleeve, except for the steel hooks which he thrust
into his pocket when he noticed people staring in the bus
station. He sat by a window, leaning his body against the
wood of his arm, and he looked at the country spread away
from the hot dusty road, the stubble fields brown in the dry
season, but the hills green as he remembered them, the
mountains in the east blue as he remembered them, tinged
with violet at sundown and turning darker than the sky
when night came and they reached the town.

They had supper in a panciteria and hired a carromata for

San Jose.
He and his brother walked across the fields from the road
and the stars were many and clear in the night. He heard
the wind in the trees and his shoes rustling through the
stubble and somewhere a dog was barking faintly in the
silent land.

They went over a bridge of bamboo poles and he heard the

rush of water and smelled the wetness of earth in the dark.
They came to the well beside the trail that led to his father's
house. His brother pulled out the pail and held it for him as
he drank of the cool water. He almost laughed out loud in
his happiness, thinking of the morning before him, the sun
coming up over the fields, the leaves and the grass holding
the dew, the bright fields v/ide in the morning, waiting for
the rains. He felt certain now that he could guide a plow as
firmly with his left as he might have with his lost arm, and
he imagined the heart-shaped plowshare cleaving into the
earth, turning up the rich dark soil, forming a straight
furrow. He splashed the cool water on his face and he could
hardly wait to see his father's fields in the morning sun.

T H E NIGHT the battalion reached the port of the northern

country it had been cold and raining. They had lined up on
the dock in the rain and then marched in the dark to the
trucks. They rode in the trucks through the strange city and
the rain fell and all of them were quiet and no longer joking
as they had been on the shipvThe convoy stopped and the
rain was loud in the silence, and far off and low on the
horizon artillery flashed like lightning.

A jeep came by in the dark and somebody ordered the

trucks to move on, and the rain did not stop until morning
when they came to a valley. The sun broke through then and
he saw the fields, the paddies square pools of water like the
fields in San Jose in the time of planting.
The winter had already ended when they came to the alien
land but it was not yet summer and it rained almost every
day they stayed camped along the road through the valley.
They went across the fields over the paddies, past the
farmers planting rice, and up to the hills where they dug
connecting trenches in the soft loamy earth. When the days
were clear, they listened to the officers of the division they
had joined, sitting on their helmets in the cool sunlight, and
the planes passed high over the camp, tracing vapor trails
in the sky, on their way to the front up in the north, where
there was a belt of mountains across the middle of the land.

The rains went away at last and the days were dry and cool
and the rice a young boy's height when they broke camp
and drove away toward the front. The road went up and
around the hills and below were the ripening fields of the
valley, pale green and rippling in long waves in the sun.

They drove across a dusty plain where the fields were bare,
the earth on both sides of the road wrinkled with the dried
mud of the rains. The first sign of the enemy that he saw
was a blown-up tank with broad tracks and a red star
painted on its low rectangular turret, halted where it had
tried to go over a paddy. They went through empty
demolished towns and he saw dead oxen in the fields and
more burned-up tanks. On the third night, the men left the
trucks on the highway and crossed the sandy bed of a river
and on to another road to a range of sharp-sloped hills
where they dug in under the pines to await the tide of the
enemy that had suddenly out-flanked the line in the
mountains and was now coming down toward the capital
city on the plain.

They waited nine days in the hills, planting mines in the

fields below and stringing up multiple rows of barbed wire
and building deep bunkers of earth and pine trunks. On the
tenth day, the enemy began to shell the hills.

At midnight they came charging across the fields, a thick

swarm in the light of the flares, the mines and the mortars
blowing holes in the advancing horde, the artillery firing
from behind the hills cutting up the broken waves, the
machine guns finishing off the scattered few that reached
the barbed wire. The next night, they came again, rushing
over the dead bodies, and again in the next, but they never
got through the perimeter, and the only casualties were
caused by the shelling.

The days were clear and growing warm now with the
summer and the planes passed overhead to bomb the
supply lines of the enemy farther north. The sun shone
down on the dead that littered the fields and when the wind
turned toward the hills he smelled the stench of the plowed-
up fields.

One evening in the third week of their defense of the hills,

he was one of a patrol of ten men sent out to scout a
section of the river beyond a pine forest west of the hills.
There had been no fighting in the area and they went down
a dirt road and on to a stretch of unmined fields toward the
pine forest. In the night, the stars were sharp and close, and
he remembered the skies of his native land.

They had almost reached the fringe of the forest when a

machine gun opened up in front, the rapid ripping sound
followed by the crash of mortars. A bright white hotness
seared his right side and flung him down on the field.
Suddenly the night was silent and the wind blew away the
cordite fumes and he was lying alone in the dark.
He crawled away from the pine forest, his right arm numb
and trailing on the ground. He rolled over a paddy and fell
on his broken side and the pain began. He found a ditch and
lay there and he thought the faintness that came upon him
was the beginning of dying. Two men came by, dark against
the sky, and he lay very still, breathing without a sound
through his mouth and one of the men said something in
the language of the enemy and then he heard their voices
going away.

When he opened his eyes after what seemed to be a long

drugged sleep, it was afternoon and the blood had dried on
his shirt and his arm was limp and twisted, the pain burning
in his shoulder. The thirst ached in his throat and he lay
looking up at the sky, blue and remote, and the planes were
coming back, high in the sun.

He sat up carefully, straining on his left arm, and peered

over the edge of the ditch and he saw a member of the
patrol lying in the dark cracked field, his face a raw wound
dark with flies. Through the grass of the ditch, he watched
the dead man for a long while, feverish with pain and thirst
and hunger, and a loneliness came into him, and it was like
a voice crying for home, for water, for coolness. The
mountains rose far away beyond the pine forest and the
fields were empty except for the body of the soldier he
could not recognize and he wondered why they had not
planted rice, it was the harvest season now, a„nd the fields
were empty and dead.

Late in the afternoon shells began dropping on the pine

forest, passing high over him with thick rushing winds, and
he saw the trees break and fall in the shelling. He lay back
in the ditch, the earth trembling under him.
The shelling stopped at sundown and the forest smouldered
in the early dark. The stars appeared and blurred in his
eyes. He crawled out of the ditch, away from the ruined
forest, his face dragging on the sun-warmed earth, and for a
moment in his fever he believed that he was back on his
father's land in San Jose and he had but to walk a short way
and he would be home to drink the cool sweet water of the
well. He staggered to his feet, remembering his father's
fields and weeping with longing for them, stumbling and
then crawling again in the dark of the dry, unplanted fields
in the direction of the hills.

The Sound of Distant Thunder

ANDRES, IN the crowd, listened to the man speaking on the

platform. A leader of men, he said to himself. He has a
strong voice.. .

The man speaking to the crowd was lean and dark and wore
faded khaki pale as dust. He stood on the makeshift
platform in the bright, weed-grown field, beside the
camachile tree that gave little shade in the blunt sunlight,
speaking in his clear, resonant voice to the silent crowd
gathered about him, his eyes bright with a strange fever, a
dart-ing fire.

It was a motley crowd, the people gathered around the

platform, in the midday sun. They were farmers, from San
Luis and Sapang Maragul, and Malagu, in the hills;
fishermen from Masantol and Dinalupihan. The men had
long-bladed bolos sheathed at their hips and wide-brimmed
hats shielded their faces from the sun. There was a
sprinkling of women in black patadiong and striped tapiz,
their thin lips blood-red with buyo stains. They stood
patiently in the vertical sun, the men and the women
around the platform, listening to the man called Punzalan
speak.

Some fifteen men in khaki and maong paced about on the

fringes of the crowd, their carbines and the Garand rifles
held by the barrel over their shoulders or carried in the
crook of one arm, muzzles pointed downward. Their faces
were haggard, unshaven, and their eyes scanned the
horizon of the summer fields, their movements slow with a
careful somberness.

Andres listened to the man Punzalan speak, and a sensation

of being lost, of being carried away helplessly, came to him.
It was hot in the sun, outside of the sparse shade of the
camachile, and he could feel the sweat running down his
chest and back, and already his head was beginning to
throb from the incessant heat. He was aware of the dry reek
that rose from the sun-whipped ground, and he wished that
he were in the dusk of trees, cool in a shaded wind.

Punzalan raised his voice suddenly to an almost impossible

pitch, his voice shrill but unbroken. He was coming to the
end of his speech now and as he summed up what he had
said about the poverty of the people, the need to fight and
destroy a regime that exploited and oppressed the people,
he gestured furiously, shaking aloft a clenched fist and then
spreading wide his arms and turning his face to the hot and
silent sun above the almost leafless tree, and the ringing
sounds of the dialect tumbled out of his mouth like the
floodwaters of the Malapad River in the months of rain.

From the crowd rose sharp, impassioned applause. They

clapped and cheered and lifted their voices against the wide
glitter of the sky.
With a start, Andres realized that he was not joining in the
cheering, the clapping of hands. He began to clap, feeling
dazed and lost, as he watched Punzalan step down from the
bamboo platform and disappear in the crowd. He closed his
eyes to steady himself, and for a moment, he was alone in
the reddish darkness behind his closed eye-lids. He was
very thirsty and he thought again of the shade of trees, and
the cool sweet water of a well, somewhere beyond the
fields.

The clapping and shouting faded away and the crowd

started to break up. Andres stood there uncertainly and
then he saw Tatang Carding coming toward him with a smile
on his flushed, sweat-shining face.

"The last of the meetings is over," Tatang Carding said.

"Tomorrow night — " Andres began, uncertainly.

"Tomorrow night, we begin what has lon^ waited to be

done," Tatang Carding said. "Are you not glad the wait is
over, abeh?"

"Yes," Andres said. His voice sounded unfamiliar to him, like

the voice of a stranger, and suddenly, he was afraid his
neighbor had noticed the strangeness.

"We must believe in the Commander," Tatang Carding said,

gripping Andres' arm tightly and staring into his eyes. "We
must have faith in him, ne. He is our hope, our saviour."

Andres said nothing. He turned his face away from the

intense look in Tatang Carding's bloodshot eyes and gazed
at the mountains of Zambales to the west, their outlines
blurred in the shimmering haze.

The mountains, he thought, and beyond...

"We will gather in Malagu," said Tatang Carding. "The guns
are there, for us."

Andres saw Punzalan and his men walking away toward the
clumps of bamboo across the stubble field. Punzalan was
patting one of the men on the shoulder and gesturing with
his other hand.

"Have you ever fired a gun, Andres?" said Tatang Carding.

"No," Andres said. "No, I have not handled a gun." He

watched Tatang Carding's eldest son, Miguel, detach himself
from a group near the platform and walk with long, eager
strides to where he and Tatang Carding stood talking in the
sun.

"It is hot here," Miguel said, fanning himself with his hat.
"Let us go now."

THEY HAD lunch with Tatang Carding's cousins, in San Luis,

a short walk away. The sun was halfway down the western
sky when Andres, Tatang Carding and Miguel began the trek
home down the trail that lay like an interminable length of
abaca rope upon the brown, scorched land. Through tall
cogon grass and open fields rough with stubble, and past a
black stretch of sugar-cane land still smoking from a
clearing fire, the three men plodded on in the countryside
silence, the dead bamboo leaves on the dusty path rustling
beneath their unshod feet.

It was a windless day and the fields were dry and cracked in
the late summer. The time of the rains had not yet come,
and this was the season when the sun beat down from clear
skies and withered the talahib that grew on the banks of the
river and dried up the ditches and the carabao wallows and
killed the grass of the pasture lands.
"Andres, let us go to Santa Maria," Lucing had said, "we can
begin another life there," and Andres, remembering as he
walked through the hot dry day, grew weak and hollow with
the memory. He had answered her harshly: "Sleep now —
you are like a child," to hide his fear in sullen abruptness.
Then she had wept lying on the mat beside him, in the
darkness, and he was unable to sleep and even after the
first rooster of dawn had flapped its wings and crowed from
the tama-rind tree in the yard, he was still awake, listening
to the far-off barking of dogs, thinking of the man called
Punzalan and rice and death and the barrio of Santa Maria
beyond the mountains; remembering the shallow grave of
the teniente del barrio, and the unshaven men with the
restless eyes and the guns, remembering a multitude of
things —

for it was a long time ago, and in another land, it seemed,

when the young men strummed guitars in the harvest
moonlight, and the farmers and their wives and their
children went to the town for the fiesta in April and always,
there was palay in the granaries. The year's harvest had
been poor — the poorest since the big flood before the war,
the old men said — and the trucks of Joaquin Narciso had
driven away three months ago with the last of the palay,
2nd the rice bins now were empty. In the first week of May
he and Tatang Carding and some others from the barrio had
gone to town, to the house of Joaquin Narciso near the
plaza, to borrow grain — the hacendero was away in the
city, and it was the Senora who looked down from the
azotea while they stood around awkwardly in the driveway
and a police dog snarled at them from its cage beside the
cemented steps, and he recalled these now, the Senora
frowning down among her potted plants and the dog baring
its fangs through the iron bars, as he followed Tatang
Carding and Miguel down the dust-powdered trail.
When the three men reached the barrio, it was almost
sundown and the smell of heated earth hung in the still air.
The barrio was unstirring in a watchful silence. The women
and children stared at the three men as they passed, and
the dogs eyed them and growled but did not bark.

Andres had lifted a leg over the low bamboo-twig fence in

front of his hut when Tatang Carding said, "Andres — wait —
"

Andres stepped over the fence into his yard and turned
sideways and seemed to hear the mingled throb of the heat
and the silence.

"Tomorrow night, before the rising of the moon," Tatang

Carding said, his voice taut and hoarse. Miguel waited
behind the twigs of the fence, his lips an expressionless slit
on his thin face. "Tomorrow night,"

Tatang Carding said again.

When his neighbor said nothing more, Andres turned toward

the hut, and the weariness, the dread, came down on his
shoulders like the weight of an iron plow.

ANDRES STARED at the shadows of leaves that the sunlight

traced on the split-bamboo floor, vaguely aware of the
cradle suspended between two corner posts, where his
child, his first-born, lay sucking its infant's thumb and
whimpering. Tonight, he thought, before the rising of the
moon. . .

"You must not go," Lucing said. "Andres, you must not go
with them." She sat on the floor, her legs drawn to one side,
and as she spoke, she looked up at her husband and Andres
saw the fearful sorrow in her eyes.
He said nothing. He went to the window and the mottled
sunlight fell on his face. He breathed hard to ease the
tightness in his chest, and in his mind disordered thoughts
whirled like brown bamboo leaves in a flurry of wind.

"Andres —" Lucing said. "Andres, let us go away now."

He looked down at the hard, cracked earth of the yard,

where the afternoon shadows lay in their appointed places.
Santa Maria, where Lucing's kinfolk lived, away from this
place of death and dying, the trail across the fields and then
the concrete highway, safe now, far away.

And in his mind he saw again the grave of Maning Canlas

and the crowd around the platform and he closed his eyes,
to drive off the visions. I am a coward, he said in his heart,
and in his weakness, his impotent rage, he suddenly wanted
to cry and drive his fist against the bamboo sill and feel the
sharp tearing of his skin.

"I must go/' he said, turning around to face her, his lips
working, unable to focus his eyes. He clenched and
unclenched his hands. "I have to go with them. I want to
go."

"No1." she gasped. "No!" and she was on her feet suddenly
and she went to him and held on to him by the arms. "We
must go away, Andres.

For the child. For us. Why can't we go away? Why must you
go with them?"

He turned away because he could not bear to look into her

eyes. "I gave them my word," he said. "We have already
talked about it. There is nothing more — there is no more
time —"
"You are afraid1." she cried. "You are afraid to go away,
Andres!"

"Lucing —"

"Go away, then, go away!" she shrieked, beating her little

fists against his thick-muscled shoulders, the tears streaking
her pale, distorted face.

"Go away and never come back. The soldiers will shoot you
down like a dog. You are a fool, you are all crazy —"

Something tightened and snapped inside him and he struck

her on the face with the back of his hand. He lashed out at
the face of Punzalan and the faces of the unshaven men and
the face of Dona Fidela Narciso looking down from the
azotea, but it was Lucing's face that he had struck. The blow
sent her reeling back and she knocked against the cradle,
and the baby in a spasm of fright jerked up and tilted the
cradle and fell to the floor with a shrill cry.

Her shoulders shaking with her muted weeping, Lucing, on

the floor, lifted the screaming child in her arms. The child
began to sob weakly, losing its breath and gasping. A cut
across its brow began to bleed and the thin infant blood
etched lines on the tiny face and wet the sparse growth of
hair.

Andres stood over his wife and son, his face twisted in
anguish, the fear and confusion mingling with a searing
onrush of shame, and it seemed the world was hushed
deeply and forever but for the sobbing of the mother and
the gasping of the child.

"Dios pu, O Birhen Maria," Lucing sobbed, holding the child

close to her breast. "He is hurt. Do not die, my child."
The child heard its mother's voice and cried, Andres heard
the loud wailing, throaty and alive, and the sound seemed
to engulf the silence of the world, filling the vastness of it;
and love leapt up in his heart, cleansing him, absolving him
somehow, sweeping away all fear and the feeling wras so
sharp, so sudden, that it was like the burst of a powerful
wine inside him.

It was like the end of a terrible and numbing dream. He wras

upon one knee on the floor, beside her and the child, and he
felt the tightness ease in his body when he saw that the cut
on the child's brow was small and shallow; and the crying of
the child rang in his ears, loud, exultant and alive.

She looked at him through her tears, without anger now,

and she bit her lip and tried to hold back her sobs as though
weeping were a shame.

He touched her face, the tears on her young face. "You get
ready,"

he said. "We are leaving." He strode out of the room, feeling

strong, sure of himself, deathless with the strong wine of his
love. He half-ran to the carabao tethered beside the empty
chicken coop in the backyard.

As he led the animal toward the house, he heard the rumble

of distant thunder. He turned his gaze eastward and he saw
the dark clouds boiling down the slopes of Mt. Arayat. The
afternoon sun shone with a yellowish glare through the
abrupt overcast and he stood a moment in the yard and felt
the rising pressure of the wind that blew from the summer
fields with a threat of rain.

He worked rapidly, his hands swift with a new strength,

arranging the plow and the trunk and the baskets on the
sled, and while he worked, he could hear the child crying
and Lucing scurrying about: the house, picking up whatever
she could to bring on their journey. The carabao stood by,
twitching its tail against the flies and licking the liquid of its
nostrils.

He had hitched the carabao to the sled and he was patting

the jute sack in place over the animal's back, when he hfard
Tatang Carding calling to him over the fence.

He turned around, slowly, like a man caught in the thick

molten flood of a dream. He stood beside the carabao while
Tatang Carding and Miguel and a man he had never seen
before crossed over through a gap in the fence and walked
toward him across the yard.

"Where are you going, Andres?" Tatang Carding said. He

looked at the loaded sled, the carabao. "Answer me,
Andres," he said, and Andres saw the thick vein throbbing
on his neighbor's forehead. His heart thumped in his throat
and he could not swallow the spittle that seemed to have
welled up suddenly in his mouth.

"This is Binong," Tatang Carding said, nodding at the

stranger. "He was sent by the Commander to take us to the
camp."

The stranger, a fair-skinned youth with nervous, deep-set

eyes and hair worn thick and long over his ears, had a
Thompson submachine gun slung from his shoulder. Only his
eyes moved and he looked at Andres and said nothing.

"It is early," Andres said, and it was like the voice of

someone else.

"You said it would be tonight, before the rising of the

moon..."
"I know, I know," Tatang Carding said, softly. "But there has
been a change in plans. They are waiting for us across the
river. Come, let us go now."

"Yes, let us hurry before it rains," Miguel said.

The stranger, the young man they called Binong, blinked his
deep-set eyes at Andres and the sled and said nothing.

Lucing, who had heard the voices of the men in the yard,
looked out of the window. She stood there, holding a framed
picture of the Blessed Virgin upside down. Andres saw her
soundless, open-mouthed terror, and he wanted to tell her
that everything was going to be all right, but it was as
though the tight dryness in his throat had smothered his
voice forever, and then he saw himself sprawled on his back
in some abandoned field, his eyes staring sightlessly up into
the falling rain.

The Rain

SHE WAKENED slowly from the dream; the room was still
dark with the grey darkness of morning, and outside the rain
that had started in the night was still falling, only there was
no wind blowing through-it now, streaking the window panes
and lashing at the acacias on the lawn.

There was no wind now, and the rain fell with a whispering
sound.

She lay in the cold darkness and listened to the rain,

thinking of the dream. It had been a vague dream, with a
strange sadness and glory; awake now in the familiar room,
she recalled fragments of it, the sea in the moonlight, the
barren sweep of land. In the dream she had shivered
fearfully when she found herself in a world of silences; she
had laughed, too, running down a street bordered by
blossoming trees, the air resplendent with the singing and
the gold. She was in a meadow at the end of the dream,
hurrying to meet someone — someone she did not know,
when suddenly night rolled across the sky and in the
emptiness, she had wept at the remembrance of things lost.

She looked at the luminous dial of the clock on the dresser;

it was almost six o'clock. She lay for a while in the warm
bed, not wanting to get up, thinking of the dream. What a
strange dream, she thought, remembering the sadness and
the glory. Why did she dream it? What did it mean? The rain
fell softly in the early morning.

TODAY WAS the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, and

she walked to church with her father and mother and
brother Titong. The rain had ceased falling, but the sky
remained overcast and on the wet foliage of the acacias
that lined the street was spread a bluish mist like wood
smoke. The wind smelled of grass and leaves and asphalt
drenched with rain. The strangeness of the dream followed
her as she walked down the street, and she felt separated
from her parents and brother and the people going to Mass,
remote and untouchable in her loneliness.

In the church, even at the altar rail for Communion, where

before she used to feel a deep gladness in the knowledge
that she would possess God, she was aware of a melancholy
that swelled and receded within her like the organ music.
The voice of the white-haired priest saying the last prayers
came to her as from a great distance: "O God, our refuge
and our strength, look down in mercy on Thy people who cry
to Thee. . ." The choir sang the Salve Regina and the Voices
grew soft, it seemed, with the sadness of her dream.
Breakfast was long and unhurried. There was no class today,
for her and for Titong, who studied at the Ateneo. Her father
read the morning paper with his coffee, while her mother
said they should drive over to San Juan to see Amparing and
Ben and the baby, they were expecting them today. Titong
said he couldn't go, why, he had promised the fellows he'd
meet them today, and besides, Eddie was fetch-ing him
after lunch. Eddie would come to her cousin Nenuca's
birthday party on Sunday. Eddie, her brother's classmate,
was tall and serious and handsome. She looked at her
father, the hair graying at the temples, the kindly eyes
behind the rimless glasses; her mother, fragile and gentle of
voice and movement; her brother, a junior in college,
nineteen. She wanted to tell them her dream, but then
would they understand, would they not laugh and think her
silly? Of course, they would understand, they were her
family, she thought; but something else now urged her to
keep the dream to herself, to brood over and hold close, as
though it were a secret too precious yet for any sharing.

The sun shone whitely through the haze, and it hurt her
eyes to look at the sky She sat on the porch steps, feeling
the sadness, the strangeness of the dream. Who was he
whom she was hurrying to meet, across the meadow of the
dream? The wind was high in the trees, ruffling the wet
leaves, spraying accumulated raindrops on the roof.

From the house across the grilled fence tinkled a child's

piano lesson, the notes clear and deliberate in the clean
stillness of morning.

Once, she had been a child, too, doing finger-exercises on a

piano; how long ago was that time of make-believe and
fable? When they lived in her father's town, safe from the
war? She wished she were still a child, carefree and
unmindful of life's varied puzzles. The piano's tinkling tune
stopped abruptly, and in the soughing of the wind like the
sound of distant surf, she seemed to be listening — for
music in a forgotten garden? Why do I feel lost and alone?
Soon I shall be sixteen. . . I am Flora. . . This is my home. . .

BUT EARLY in the summer, it was not this vague melancholy

that had troubled her, but an intense restlessness
interspersed with spells of grief. In the summer, she had
wakened one night to strains of music floating from a house
in the neighborhood; and the wind moving the curtains in
the room had been like the warm breath of someone
intolerably near. She had remained awake in the darkness
for a long time, while the music out of the April night flowed
through her, touching something inside her. For the first
time, she became aware of the truth of her being upon the
earth, alive, her heart beating, and her body burned with a
sweet prescience of grief and joy. The music throbbed in the
warm night, nameless and familiar; and on an impulse, she
rose to stand at the open window. It was midnight; and in a
house somewhere, people were dancing, whispering of love
and desire, and the music cried in the heart of the summer
darkness.

The waking in the night was the beginning of a succession

of moods contrasting like shades of sun and dark. She lay
unsleeping in the summer heat, waiting for the longed-for
world she C£>uld not as yet touch or understand. Then the
waiting became a hard white fire of unrest and
bewilderment; she wanted now to twist things in her hands,
to run away from those who loved her, to be alone and to
grieve; and she would sit on the porch, in the hot summer
glare, sullen with her rebellion.

She grew thin from the fever that flickered in her dark,
grave eyes; but a furious energy blazed within her, finding
release at last during a month's stay in Baguio, in the
ceaseless bowling she played with her classmates and the
plunging speed of a scooter, the wind cool on her face. She
went to a dance in the mountain city; it was not a dance,
really, merely a gathering of her brother's friends. She did
not know any of the girls; and she felt nervous and awkward
at the party, sitting in a corner, not dancing, resentful of the
boys' attentions, wanting to be left alone, yet longing to be
held close in an embrace. Somebody had asked her for a
movie-date — she couldn't remember his name, but he said
he was from San Beda and she had refused crossly,
eryoying with a perverse satisfaction his hurt silence. At her
request, Titong brought her back to the hotel early; but she
did not sleep well that night, tossing in bed with a sick
frustration that she would not acknowledge. When she
returned to the city with her parents and her brother, the
rains had come with May; and she sat on the porch through
the long days, the restless bewilderment replaced now by a
loneliness, an awareness of her hurried growth, a sense of
loss.

T H E RAIN began falling again in the afternoon, pelting

noisily against the roof, then fading to a steady drizzle. She
was supposed to go to the College; this was a special day in
the school, and there was going to be a program in the
auditorium. She stood at the living room window, watching
the August rain abstractedly, wondering whether the other
girls were going to the program. Everything looked cold and
grey in the rain, the houses and the trees and the sky, and
in the room with her, she felt the presence of the dream.

"You ought to come, Flora," her mother s,aid, behind her.

"But Mama —" She twisted the tulle curtains in her white
slender hands.
"You haven't seen your sister for some time now/' her
mother said.

"She misses you so. Here, let me look at you. You look pale,
hija. Are you sick? Tell me."

"No, I'm not sick, but Mama, I cannot go, not now." She felt
miserable, seeing the disappointment on her mother's face.
She wanted to see her sister and the baby. But this dream —
how should I tell them?

This lonely day and the sadness and glory of her dream, and
rain, falling. Eddie was coming. Eddie, would he understand?
She kissed her mother on the cheek.

From the porch she watched the car disappear behind the
trees.

There was only the rain, gentler now, and sounds broken in
the wind, the slamming of a screen door, a radio playing.
She heard Titong stomping down the stairs, then going up
again. Standing alone on the porch, she thought of her
brother. Has he ever known loneliness, and at the same
time felt that somewhere there waited a purpose and a
magic?

Her brother was lean and wiry from basketball, talking of

movies and girls at table, his face frank and ready with
laughter. He has always been happy, she decided with a
querulous sigh.

She leaned on the porch rail and watched the rain. Acacia
leaves blown down by the wind lay scattered on the narrow
lawn. It is raining everywhere, she thought, and in her mind
she saw the makeshift huts she passed on her way to
school, the cardboard houses of the poor hugging the ruins
of Ermita, with the rain piercing the thatch roofs like spears.
They live there, she thought, capable of compassion now,
remembering the young men in undershirts and soiled khaki
who whistled at her from the barber shop on.the street to
school, while she walked on in pride and anger.

She saw Eddie push open the gate. He was tall, in a leather
jacket and a blue cap, walking in the fine rain, smiling up at
her.

At the foot of the porch steps, shielded now from the rain,
Eddie paused familiarly. "Hi, Flora," he said, and his voice
was low and rounded, the voice of a young man.

"Hello, Eddie," she said.

"Titong in?"

"C'mon up and I'll call him."

Upstairs she found her brother in his room, reading a

Graham Greene thriller. "Eddie's here," she said.

Titong sprang up and bounded to the head of the stairs. "Hi,

guy!"

Titong called out, peering over the banister at Eddie in the

living room.

"I gotta take a shower first, guy."

"Sure, take your time, guy," Eddie said.

Eddie was standing bent before the radio-phonograph when

she descended the stairs, looking over the titles of the
record albums stacked in their mahogany rack. He
straightened up at the sound of her slippered feet on the
stairs.
"Are they yours, Flora?" Eddie asked, indicating the records.

"Oh, they're Papa's," she said. She felt proud she had a
father who listened to Chopin and Tchaikovsky. "I go for the
popular ones. Bal-lads, Frank Sinatra."

"I like Sinatra too," Eddie said.

"He's my favorite crooner," she said.

Now that Eddie stood nearer, she noted again how tall he
was, taller than Titong even. He stood there, smiling at her.
He belonged to Titong's gang. Only last week, all of them,
except Luisito, who had entered the Jesuit seminary, were in
the house: Chito, Oscar, and Mike, who played for the
Varsity; George, who wrote undecipherable poems, and
Caloy with his terrible puns; and Eddie, who played the
piano, serious, smiling solemnly, the way he was smiling
now. That afternoon she had come home from class to find
them singing at the top of their voices, gathered around
Eddie at the piano.

Titong now was singing under the shower upstairs. She and
Eddie could hear him above the drizzling rain. "You'll have to
wait," she said.

"It takes him an hour to get dressed."

Eddie chuckled. "I'm in no hurry/' he said.

"Going to the movies?" she asked.

"No/' Eddie said. "We're seeing a girl. In Singalong."

She hesitated, then went over to the piano, thinking, who

could she be? Was Eddie in love with her? She lifted the lid
open and the keys were white and cold in the greyness that
was like dusk in the room.

"You play, Eddie," she said.

"Now, I —"
"Please," she said.

Eddie played "All the Things You Are," which everyone

seemed to be singing that year, and the song seemed to
blend with the rain and the greyness and the sadness and
the sounds broken in the wind. She thought of the girl in
Singalong. To be in love. . . She looked at Eddie and it was
as though she had seen his face before, long before she
came to know him.

"You play wonderfully," she said. "You play by ear, Eddie?"

"Yes," Eddie said.

"I wish I could play that way, too," she said.

The rain fell whisperingly over the house and the trees, over
the city.

"Eddie," she said, wanting to prolong the moment with him,

"what are you going to be? Doctor? Lawyer?"

Eddie stared at the keys, as though he had not heard, then

looked out the window at the rain falling.

"What are you going to be, Eddie?" she repeated.

The pale light outlined Eddie's face. He smiled, not looking

at her.

"Really, I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

"You don't know, Eddie? Why?" she almost whispered.

"I guess I'm just mixed up about things," Eddie said. "A lot of
things."
Now she felt a shy tenderness for him as she stood against
the side of the piano, her chin on her hand on the chintz-
draped top, looking at his face turned away from hers and
she thought, he.is lost and unhappy like me, but why?

"Eddie, why?" Her large dark eyes watched his averted face
unwaveringly. Her hands were now clenched around the
edge of the piano-top, and she held her breath as though by
it she could listen better and understand.

"Well, all the guys," he said, speaking slowly, "they're taking

law, commerce, pre-med. Titong's going to be a doctor, isn't
he?"

"Yes," she said. "He's taking Chemistry now."

"Luisito," Eddie said, "you remember him, Flora? He's going

to be a priest."

She listened to Eddie talking, feeling for him a tenderness.

The rain fell on the roof, on the lawn, and above the sound
of it, they could hear her brother singing.

"Yes, I know," she said.

"Luisito and I," Eddie said, "we used to see Father O'Hara
together. You know, talk things over. Then — I don't know —
it seemed I was not cut out for it. I just felt I wasn't being
called — thatls all —

but I still want to go away and do something different,

something wonderful —"

"Yes —" she said almost breathlessly.

"My father wants me to take law," Eddie said. He paused

uncertainly. "Mind if I smoke?"
She brought him an ashtray. He lighted up, and she noticed
the hair growing on the back of his hands.

"Shall I go on?"

"Please," she said. She found herself liking the cigarette-

smell, warm and intimate in the room.

"My father wants me to go on to law school," Eddie said.

"After my A.B." He chuckled wryly, shaking his head. "Big-
time lawyer and all that sort of thing."

"Eddie," she said, somehow feeling involved in his indecision

and bewilderment, feeling there was a bond between them
now because he was telling her these things, "what are you
going to do now?"

"You're lucky," Eddie said. "Going to the games tomorrow?

We're playing La Salle."

Titong pattered down the stairs, whistling, neat and clean,

putting on his leather jacket, going to see the girl in
Singalong.

Eddie rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. "You look

sharp, guy,"

he said.

"Who said I wasn't?" Titong said. "Let's shove off, Ed. And
Flora,"

he said to her, "tell Ma I'll be back for supper."

She followed them out to the porch. "See you at the party
Sunday," Eddie turned to her on the porch steps. He smiled
at her, and she smiled back. How serious his eyes were, how
deep and intense, and his voice, how strong and warm.
Eddie, who wanted to be a priest, who wanted now to go
away. . .

She watched Titong and Eddie walk down the street, in their
jackets, in the fine rain. They bent forward slightly against
the rain. They walked rapidly, as though they were in a
great hurry. On Taft Avenue, they would wait for their bus,
two young men in leather jackets standing in the gentle
rain.

Finally she left the porch. The living room was dark now and
she switched on the lights, the glow of the wall lamps
orange in the early twilight. From the kitchen came sounds
of the maid cooking. She sat on the sofa and laced her
hands together and watched the drizzling rain falling across
the light from the window. She thought of Eddie (how deep
and serious his eyes were), Eddie playing the piano and
telling her he wanted to go away.

She thought of many things, sitting alone in the wide room

with the rain falling. The picture of a girl she had come
across, accidentally, among her brother's books: To dearest
Titong — All my love, always and forever, Marilen. She must
be the girl they have gone to see. How is it really to love
and be loved? Eddie, has he ever been in love? Luisito, a
priest. Introibo ad altare Dei. . . I will go unto the altar of
God, Who giveth joy to my youth. . . Young men going to
war, dying alone high in the burning sky. The writer who
came one day to lecture in the auditorium, whose soul,
everyone said, one could see in his eyes. The soul of Eddie
in his eyes. The dance in Baguio. Her dream: who was he
who waited, in the meadow of the dream? Rain, August, and
then September, and this awareness within her, growing in
a deep silence like a flower opening. . .
The rain stopped falling. She went up to her room. She
looked at the image in the tall mirror of the dresser. The
large eyes stared back at her from the oval face. Would the
young men at Nenuca's party think her beautiful? She
thought of the dance, the young men in coat and tie, the
girls in their bright party dresses, the music, Eddie dancing
with her, holding her, and underneath it all, this strangeness
of the dream.

She wandered about the room, touching things, like

someone about to close the door for the last time, who must
memorize the feel and texture of the room, the
arrangement of the bed and the dresser, the embroidered
swan on the lampshade, the color of the walls. Beneath the
glass-top of her study table, she had placed some
photographs, and these she examined now, as though they
were a new discovery. There was a picture of her in grade
school, her hair done in twin braids, her legs scrawny. A
snapshot showed her posing stiffly with her aunt and
cousins — three, four years ago? She lifted the glass
carefully to get her sister Amparo's portrait. In the picture,
her sister held a bouquet, pretty in a gown of white,
eighteen. She remembered her sister's debut, the many
guests, the tables set on the lawn, the shining excitement.
How old was she then? She had watched the dancing,
feeling glad for her sister. When she turned eighteen, she
could have a party, too. She smiled at the subtle promise of
enchantment and delight.

She opened wide the window to let in the evening air, cool
and clean with the smell of leaves and grass and earth after
rain. And remembrances rose in her, an effortless flood: the
town in Negros where they had gone to escape the war, the
old plaza, a street of trees and morning, and her memory of
Baguio was of mist upon the mountainsides like evening
coming, and the fragrance of pine trees on the wind, and
houses cool and quiet in the lambent sun. What had she
dreamed last night? The sea, and someone — someone —
she tried again to remember the sequence of the dream,
but only its spirit remained, the sadness and the glory
creating this loneliness, making her feel alone yet close to
the murmurous evening, the streets, the lights twinkling
through the trees, the wet dark earth out of which green
things flowered and died. She stood at the window,
unmoving with the silence of the dream, gazing out into the
night, until the car swept into the driveway, the headlights
cutting through the dark, and she fled from the room toward
her parents because suddenly, the aloneness frightened her.

The Living and the Dead

THE SUN rose swiftly, its brightness spreading across the tile
roofs and the stucco walls and flowing into the rooms of the
magnificent houses. Bells floated somberly from the
Franciscan church on the hill beyond the trees. A procession
of automobiles cruised down the street: an old couple
reclined in a long-lined sedan, the tubercular man coughing
into a handkerchief, his morose wife glowering at the young
men gesticulating noisily on the sidewalk; in a maroon
Buick, a bureau official settled back contentedly in the
upholstered seat, engrossed in the Sunday adventures of
Superman. A group of girls crossed the street to the shade
of the acacia trees, their veils folded and gold-edged missals
in their slender hands; the young men paused in their
swaggering talk to watch the trim white legs below the
swaying skirts, their eyes malicious and arrogant with
desire. The girls made way for a cripple who hobbled along
on crutches, his attitude defiant, daring anyone to insult his
deformity. In the cemented driveway of the Romanos, the
family chauffeur polished the black Mercedes to a flawless
shine. Shadows wavered on the lawn &nd the blue-green
water of the swimming pool as the sun ascended the sky
and trembled there like a huge, dazzling eye.

Jose Romano stood at the window, facing the street, but he

did not see or think of these things. His attention seemed
transfixed on a certain point above the roofs, as though he
were examining a text printed in the sky. He was thinking of
the letter he had received and subse-quently burned last
night; deliberately he reviewed the merciless logic of the
sentences, the pages that bore the seal of the Republic.
When he first read the letter he had been shocked with
unbelief: the writer was an amiable person, pleasantly droll;
it was absurd to imagine him in the role of moral crusader,
whatever that meant. But in the light of day, Romano could
recall the letter with bitter acceptance; an upsurge of hate
for the rrian who had written it pounded in his chest and
glazed his eyes. I could kill him, he thought, shivering with
his passion, his heart beating rapidly. He remained before
the high arched window, staring at the sky, hands clenched
inside the lounging robe's silken pockets, fat but powerfully
built, with a pale, handsome face, and thick greying hair.
With a stifled moan, he relaxed his cold sweating hands and
rested them on the sill; he was without his glasses (had he
left the spectacles in the bathroom when he took the pills?);
beyond the boundary of the garden wall, the world faded
into a disjointed blur. Wearily, he turned around at the clash
of plates and his wife calling him to breakfast.

"I had a glass of orange juice," he said. The words grated

dryly like stones in his mouth. He became aware of a vague,
sour heaviness in his stomach: a symptom of ulcers? The
human body is so vulnerable. . .

" . . . and I hardly slept a wink last night," his wife Nita was
saying.
"All this fuss over Sylvia's party — it's beginning to tell on
my nerves.

Just imagine, last night we went to Joseling's to have some

frills on the dress altered or something, and at the last
minute I thought she was ready to throw the whole thing
away. But it's worth it, I tell you, Pepito.

When you see her in that gown you'll fall in love with her,
she's so lovely . . . " She buttered her toast as she chattered
at the glass-topped table, beneath an elaborately framed
Last Supper, in the rose-and-white dining room. She was in
black, her dress for church; a diamond brooch sparkled in
the cool morning light of the room. She shouldn't have
dressed up yet, he noted with dismal exasperation.

Nita Romano picked up the newspaper, glanced at the

headlines

— "It's the same thing every day, politics and murder" —

motioned to the maid-servant for more coffee, and sought
out the society page.

"Madre mia, they ruined her picture!" she cried out in

soprano disappointment. "It's all inky and spotted. Oh,
Pepito, look what they've done to it!" Then, with a delighted
cackle, she began to read in a singsong: . . daughter of
Director and Mrs. Romano will be presented to adult society
this evening —' "

"Isn't she up yet?" If she kept on reading like that he might

shout at her.

"I heard her singing," said Nita Romano. "Our baby's a

young lady now, Pepito. And this is her day, her biggest day.
I remember my own debut, it's like yesterday. Oh, but the
years come and go, they come and go. . ." She laughed in
deprecation of her nostalgia, dismissing it with a flutter of
mauve fingernails. She considered him soberly over her
coffee-cup. "You look different without your glasses. You look
so pale, like a — By the way I wish you'd talk to Chito. That
boy will be the death of me yet."

"What has he done this time?"

"As if you didn't'know. This —" Nita Romano waved her knife
—

"this Torres girl he's running around with. I was with

Chabeng Martinez yesterday and she told me all about the
family. This Helen is a tramp, a bastarda. And they go
dating, night-clubbing. Why, it's so ridiculous. . ."

"It will pass," he said. He wished his wife were less sharp of
eye, that she spoke without indignation or vehemence. "It's
nothing. I know Chito."

"You know Chito!" She had placed knife and fork on her
plate and had turned to face him, superior and mocking.
"Why, I think you haven't had a decent talk with him since
he was this high. You know Chito. And the way he drives
that car. His car. I'm sure once I smelled whiskey on his —"

Sylvia glided into the room, smiling cheerfully. "Good

morning, Papa, Mama." She traipsed over the sunlit patterns
of the floor to kiss her father on the cheek, bending a trifle
because she was taller in her high heels.

"Happy birthday, hija," said Romano, briefly patting her on

the back. His wife repeated the greeting with her usual
happy enthusiasm.

"I heard something about whiskey," Sylvia said.

"For your father's friends, tonight," said her mother.

"Oh, tonight..." She was rather thin, but her eyes were deep
and thick-lashed and betrayed a surprisingly sensuous
maturity. "Papa, I couldn't find you last night. Thank you for
the gift, it's super. But does it tell time?"

Romano chucked his daughter playfully on the chin; at once

he felt foolish and awkward. With an almost frantic
concentration, he tried to return the remark with something
as jocose and casual.

"You look just wonderful," Nita Romano was saying. "I

thought you'd wear the pique your sister sent you. But red
becomes you, really it does, Sylvia. Look, here's your picture
in the Journal —"

Sylvia took her seat at the table, frowned critically at her

disfigured photograph, her high spirits covering up any
possible dismay.

"Mama, are you sure we haven't left out any people? The
Cabreras —

I wonder if Manolo got the invitations. I'm afraid I forgot —

oh, but I'm so excited I could die1."

"Well, why don't you?" Chito leaned against the door jamb,
smoking. His pose was meant to be careless; but Romano,
with a sudden intuition, felt the tension in his son disturb
the atmosphere of the room.

"Smoking before breakfast," Nita Romano sighed resignedly.

Chito flicked the cigarette out the window and sat down,
leafing through the Sunday magazine as he sipped his
coffee. As though the presence of his son puzzled him,
Romano observed the sharp features, the crew-cut hair, the
strong bony fingers wrinkling the paper. Chito put down the
magazine and caught his father's eye and held it: an abrupt
chill slithered up Romano's spine as he willed himself to look
into his son's direct gaze. His wife and Sylvia kept on
talking, and laughing; he grew dizzy, and angry at his own
helplessness, he retreated to the window, shivering (I'm a
sick man), feeling his son looking at him, watching his
movements (with hate? does he know?). The room was cold:
now if he could stand in the sun. . .

The ringing of the telephone halted his wife's bubbling

speech.

"That's for me!" said Sylvia. Romano found himself straining

to listen.

"Thank you, thank you, Louie, it's so sweet of you." She

giggled, enjoying some flattery. "Please, please not now."
She sounded abruptly serious: there must be something
wrong, thought Romano. "Yes, tonight. Sure, tonight." She
rushed back to the table, her heels tap-tapping on the floor.
"It was Louie," she said. "Mama, it's nine! That's the last
Mass! Hurry, Mama, Chito!"

"Why so eager to hear Mass, Syl?" said Chito. "Afraid you'll

end up in hell?"

"Don't you talk like that. It's my birthday."

"So I've heard, but I'd rather stay home and grow fat in the
middle."

"Oh, you're impossible."

"Sylvia, there's a later one in Malate," said Nita Romano.

"You haven't eaten breakfast."
"But I promised to meet them there, my friends," said Sylvia
fret-fully, "and I'm not the least bit hungry. Chito —"

"Okay," Chito said, "let's go meet your fine-feathered

friends."

Jose Romano stood at the window, before the blur of trees

and houses, and saw his wife and son and daughter, as if
through a hazy pane of glass, emerge from the porte-
cochere and ride away in the gleaming car through the gate
with the white stone lions standing guard.

He pictured his wife in church, fanning herself furiously

while she recited her rosary to the Blessed Virgin. God did
not come down to the altars of priests in the form of bread
and wine, he decided with a mixture of reluctant satisfaction
and despair. He thought of Chito's college dean, Father
Emmanuel, intensely sincere, shaking hands warmly when
they met. From the Gothic spires pointing'to the sky bells
announced the hour of the Mass. He was annoyed to find
goose-pimples prickling his arms, crawling about his neck
like ants. What did Chito mean, his eyes piercing him,
hostile and questioning? His bewilderment added itself to
the weight of anguish clotted in his chest. Finally, he went
into the bedroom and closed the door and sat on the bed.
His face in the mirror was pale, waxen and lifeless. In the
baroque niche in the wall, a bloody Christ hung from a cross:
women need to pray, he commented irritably, avoiding the
God-Man, the timeless, terrible suffering and compassion.
For a while he sat there, with the sun slanting on the
Venetian blinds, remembering the letter, his heart beating
unevenly. He lay down on the quilted bedspread, thinking I'll
see Carmen today, imagining the secrecy of her apartment,
her embrace; for a moment, in a trance of lust, he was free
of his pain and trouble as he stared at the intricate
ornaments of the paneled ceiling.
"FATHER DAVID once gave a talk on the subject," Lilia
Montes said.

"But the trouble with these people," Cionie Enriquez said, "is
they're so ungrateful. Our maid — we've had her for years
— she was in rags when we took her in. Can you imagine,
she ran away with Tita's earrings —"

"Earrings?" Nita Romano arched her eyebrows, reaching for

a mahjongg tile. "Madre mia, how awful."

"You'd never have thought she'd do such a thing," Cionie

Enriquez said. "Which shows you simply can't trust these
people."

"Bunot todopong," Ada Serrano said. She lit a cigarette

before counting her win, exhaling smoke through crimson
lips. "I read something about Lulu in the papers. A party in
New York —"

"Miss her, Nita?" Lilia Montes said.

"The poor girl is homesick," Nita Romano said. "Anyway

she'll be home for the holidays. She's spoiling Sylvia,
sending her all those shoes and dresses. .

Three o'clock was comparatively cool on the terrace, for a

thick vine filtered the western sun, and a breeze fanned the
women. On the lawn, workmen strung lines of lanterns from
the acacias to the colon-nades supporting the terrace roof.
Nita Romano scrambled the mahjongg blocks, viewing with
mounting alarm the men tramping close to her border of
roses. She pushed up from her chair and, in spite of her
bulk, strode decisively down to the lawn. The three women
listened to her shrill abuse and continued the ivory clatter of
the tiles. When Nita Romano rejoined them, she was
breathing hard, and perspiration had sprouted on her finely-
modeled nose. "What idiots!" she said, gesturing at the lawn
and the men in denim and khaki. "Naku, the trouble you
have to go through just to give your daughter a decent
party. But I keep telling Pepito —"

"I haven't seen Sylvia," said Lilia Montes.

"Yes, where is she?" said Ada Serrano.

"She went out with her gang somewhere," Nita Romano

said. "They do get around, these children, now. The phone
rings and before you know it they're out to some dance in
Rizal or Quezon or some other place I haven't heard of. Por
favor, Mama," she mimicked the girl going to a dance in
Rizal, "Letty is going, Norma is going, everybody is going. .
." She made a distressed, sucking sound through her teeth,
shaking her head and rustling her Spanish fan.

"Who's visited Pura?" Ada Serrano said.

"She delivers so easily — like a cow," Nita Romano said.

"Oh, Nita, how could you?" Ada Serrano said.

"What's Pura going to do with twins?" Cionie Enriquez said.

"Hasn't she four already?"

"Chito playing this week, Nita?" Lilia Montes interrupted.

"Oh, that son of mine. He thinks of nothing but parties and

basketball. Just this morning I was telling Pepito he must put
an end —

Kang," and Nita Romano arranged her row of tiles with

ritualistic care.
T H R O U G H THE bougainvillea of the grilled fence he
glimpsed snatches of color and movement as he sat in the
parked car under the trees, brief pastel flashes of skirts, the
wink of jewelry and a woman's bare shoulders; above, the
leaves glowed darkly in the light of the lanterns; he heard
rich girlish laughter and a young man's witty protest; and
over it all, intimate and languid after the jarring mambo
rhythms, drifted an old tune, tracing slow tin-foil ribbons of
melody in the summer night. He was aware of Helen
watching him, waiting for him to speak with that imploring,
inarticulate expression which had always irritated him. With
an arm propped on the car-door, he sat stiff and
unspeaking, forcing himself to recognize the song until it
ended and another began, trying not to think of the previous
moments: No, I can't marry you, that's the last thing I'll do.
He snatched off his bow tie and unbuttoned his collar,
searching with his free hand for his case of cigarettes.

He sensed rather than saw in the lighter-flare the pleading

eyes glistening with tears. He finished the cigarette in a
smouldering rage, the smoke swirling in the subdued stray
light. Why don't you cry? he said to her in silence, why do
you sit there like a stuffed dummy, why don't you cry? He
heard somebody on the lawn: "Hey, Rody, over here, Mila's
here!" That was Alex, joking with the girls: suddenly he
hated his classmate, hated him and wanted to smash the
contemptuous mouth with his fists.

"Chito, I'm so afraid," Helen said.

He ignored her, lighting another cigarette, dragging the

smoke deep into his lungs. The orchestra played a tango
about a night of madness.

His tongue tasted raw and burned, and he thought he would

vomit.
"Chito," Helen said.

"Are you sure?" he asked once more. "How can you tell?" He
had raised his voice: there was no one nearby, only a
uniformed chauffeur slouched against the fender of the
second car in front of them. "Helen, are you sure?" he said,
more softly.

"Here, you can feel it, you can see for yourself." She spoke
with a forlorn, miserable triumph as though at last she had
discovered the truth of her complex sorrow.

How naive, how stupid. . . The bitterness curdling in him.

"Look, you're just imagining things."

After the interval of a cigarette, in their silence, she began

to cry, almost without sound, not crying into her hands as
he had expected, but sitting straight and tense in her
evening dress, in the car under the trees. The cross on her
breast glinted dully in the shadowed light. He was sweating,
and he took off his coat and flung it into the back-seat while
she cried softly beside him.

The music stopped, trailed by clapping and feminine

exclamations of delight. Rough male voices began to sing
"Happy Birthday to you.. ."

but broke off, discouraged, in the middle of the song.

Immediately, the orchestra sailed into a waltz; and the
elegant waves of music washed into the murmurous talk
and the laughter.

"Let's go in there and dance," he said.

"No," she said, "please don't leave me here, please, Chito."

He said under his breath: "Damn you, damn everything."

"Yes, Chito?"

"Nothing," he said.

She said timidly, "You can ask your father for money."

He did not reply, but lit another cigarette, studying the

perspec-tive of automobiles lined up on the street. The next
car was a convertible; an old model but sleek as a jaguar;
the lucky sonofabitch. The reckless night rides, the fury of
love. He grasped the steering wheel, wondering how it
would feel to crash into a solid wall at a hundred miles per
hour: he winced at the vision of the crumpled wreckage.

Papa hates me. He despises me. The way he looked at me

this morning. But I'll be damned if I care. . .

"Try to get money," Helen said. "Get money from your

father."

"I can't. I've told you I can't. . . Mama, perhaps. . ."

"My friend knows the doctor in Binondo."

"Yes, I know, you've told me that but. . . Helen. . . "

"Chito, I can't go on like this."

She laid her head on his shoulder and he shuddered with an

impulse to push her away, but instead passed his fingers
caressingly through the fragrant mass of her hair. He was
tired, bereft of strength, the uncaring spark gone, and
desolation and grief flooded his being, carrying with it the
ruins of all his desires. Not phrasing the ache into words, he
longed for another life, unburdened and simple, away from
the red tile-roofed house and his father and mother and
sister, the dances, the celebrating crowds and the
automobiles and the cemented streets. What have I done?
Why did I do it? Self-pity beset his soul: the world is cruel;
and God, I'm alone, alone. . . Beyond the fence, the guests
began to gather about the dinner tables set on the lawn,
and the laughing voices said "Maribel" and "Tessie" and "Hi
there, Mon," while saxo-phones and a trumpet interwove
skeins of troubling music under the overhanging trees.

"It's so warm here, let's drive down to the Bay," he said,

starting the car. There on the peaceful shore, with the wind
and the moon and the sky, he would think of what to do.
They drove past the long line of automobiles, and he did not
glance through the gate with the sculp-tured lions at the
lawn swarming with people in the lambent glow of the red
and green and yellow lanterns.

JOSE ROMANO looked down on the deserted lawn as one

looks down the sheer altitude of a precipice: in the
moonlight, the ground below seemed remote, insubstantial,
an illusion of transient mist. A distorted full moon floated in
the swimming pool. The trees were dark hills under a
hushed luminous sea. In the perfect silence, Romano
listened to his own breathing. He had tried to stay in the
background through-out the party, remaining on the
unobtrusive fringes of conversation (Nita's guest list
included some prominent politicians), stalking desul-torily
through the house, failing to find distraction in the festive
panorama from an upstairs window. After his wife had
prodded him to dance with Sylvia, with everybody
applauding, and he had posed with Nita and his daughter for
the photographers, fye had retired unnoticed to the bar; his
heart had begun to pound violently after a shot of whiskey
and he had given up the idea of drinking to soothe his
nerves, so that now he felt a queer soberness, a tranquil
clarity of sight, expectant and pensive, as he stood at the
moonlit window. Tomorrow, any day, everyone will know. His
name, his picture in the papers: Director Jose Romano, ex-
judge, ex-governor, ex-representative. Fifty thousand pesos
in each envelope, a hundred thousand in every cardboard
box.

The one-eyed man who delivered the last bundle of money,

would he testify before the board of inquiry? The accused
shall be presumed innocent until the contrary is proved. The
thoughts passed through his mind almost with a solemn
relief, as though he were recalling a misfor-tune that no
longer had the power to hurt him. He saw a star twinkling
above the twin spires of the church rising beyond the trees.
A dog barked somewhere, the sound alien and primitive in
the suburban night.

Behind him the room was dark because he had put out the
lights: chance passers-by would not see him at the window.
Only the moon shed light from the vast sky. Once he had
been young, whistling home from a dance, proud of his love
and his chivalry, the same moon resplendent on the lost
street of his past. Automatically he rejected the nostalgia:
what did one know of the world at twenty? What had
prompted him to switch off the lights and stand here like a
fool and look at the moon? Romano took a step backward;
but suddenly, he felt small and helpless and incomplete and
infinitely lonely; a passionate, sorrowful current wrenched
him to the window, drew him upward to the shining sky.

As his heart pounded heavily, unevenly, the formless fear

that had haunted him down the nights and the days (after
the hypnosis of love, in Carmen's room, in the sleepless
hours) coagulated in his mind: he knew that soon he was
going to die. There are as many ways of dying as there are
modes of life. A man leaps from a ten-story window and
splatters his brains on the pavement. Or one sinks drowsily
into oblivion, his body ravaged by disease, while a priest
chants a farewell in Latin. It would be easy to swallow a vial
of poison, the liquid like a sweet, glittering fire in the veins
before the swift and final darkness. Man disintegrates into
nothingness, in the void from which no traveler has
returned. . .

The sky had absorbed all sounds, even the premonition of

wind.

God, if He exists at all, is too far away, like a sun whose light
does not reach the earth. He is not the God of the medieval
churches and the mad saints that fanatic men proclaim from
the pulpits. The God of heaven and hell, the judge of the
living and the dead. What is the religion of the dead? The
opium of the crowds in Quiapo. O Mother of God, save us
from damnation forever. A woman clothed with the sun, and
the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve
stars.

Enough, enough of this superstitious nonsense! But his mind

refused to escape the onslaught of thoughts as though it
were separate from his body, an entity outside his control.

The moon, a cool and tender globe, shone in the sky. He saw
clouds whirling around the moon, a cosmic storm that did
not touch the calm, brilliant circle: for a moment it was as if
he were suspended bodily in outer space. With the
sensation his shoulders shook: I'm sick, he thought, really
sick. Then his heart ceased beating, and terror stabbed his
throat; but after a second, it resumed its palpitation and his
hands clutched at the window sill as he breathed in gasps,
shivering, his mouth opened toward the moonlit air and the
shining sky. He shut his eyes and his legs dissolved beneath
him and he was falling and he saw a sea of red flame in the
darkness. He was on his knees, his heart a gigantic bronze
bell clangoring (in the sky! look! run!), thundering through
the vast and moonlit night. . .

Light burst in the room, in the silent house. With a start,

Romano rose to his feet, sucking air in rasping gasps.

His wife stood at the far end of the living room. She seemed
to be peering at the chandeliers as she massaged cream on
her face; she had not seen him: he felt an odd shy
gratefulness. For what seemed a long moment, he eyed her
warily while his heart eased to a jerky, slower beat. When
she noticed him at the window, she changed her blank
expression and approached with a kind of eagerness.
Romano saw how unlovely she was, her hair awry and her
body, liberated from its corset, ludicrous under the opal
nightgown.

"I couldn't sleep myself," Nita Romano said. "It's so warm,

not even a breeze blowing. It's about time we moved to
Baguio." She passed him to contemplate the sky, rubbing
cream on her flabby cheeks. "What a lovely moon, Pepito,
how full and round, just the one for Sylvia's party. Like — like
a bright silver coin. . . Has Chito come in?" She talked with
her back to him. "That boy, I wonder where he could be at
this hour, it's three o'clock. I didn't see him dancing. . . I
wish you'd have that talk with him, really. . . But the
Secretary didn't come. I wonder. . . Do you suppose he had
another engagement, huh, Pepito?"

"I don't know," he said, making an effort to conceal the

quaver of his voice.

"A grand success just the same. Sylvia couldn't be happier.

Did you notice anything particular in the way she danced
with that del Mundo boy? Citang Ibanez was telling me what
a beautiful pair —"
"I'm going to bed," he said. He was not shivering any more,
but now shafts of pain drilled into his temples. He thought: I
must rest, I must sleep. His face was pale and waxen, like a
dead man's face.

Jose Romano left his wife to her gossip and her cleansing
cream and shuffled uncertainly across the room, among the
carved narra furniture, past the stairwell and the portrait of
the Sacred Heart, the golf trophies and the impressionist
paintings and the shelves of books. He staggered into the
bedroom. He did not switch on the light. Moonlight breathed
in the room, moved on the floor, the wall, on the figure of
the Crucified Christ. He stood there in the room, his heart
pounding jerkily, the pain twisting in his brain, staring at the
sky through the window, at the sky radiant with the light of
the Virgin's moon, a light that was the sun's reflected glory,
shining on the houses of the living and the resting places of
the dead.

The Strangers

NIGHT IN the city, she thought, comes too quickly. One

moment the afternoon is a bright splash across the sides of
buildings, and the dust of traffic rises thickly, warmly in the
streets; you window-shop, stop at a cafe for Coke and
pineapple cake, and watch through the plate glass the
shoes rushing by on the sidewalk — all kinds of shoes:
scuffed brown and polished black, flat and high-heeled,
sneak-ers and brogans: you watch them go by, each pair
individual and unique, hurrying to destinies of joy or sorrow
or uncaring; and then evening is upon the city, and you walk
under frames of neon light, from Rizal Avenue to your bus in
Quiapo, a night like any other in an extended sequence: the
ride home, your aunt's apartment on a one-way street, and
Tony waiting, the same car, the same Tony, bemustached
and smiling.

He had called during the lunch-break: he never failed to

phone her at least once every day — like a conscientious
businessman chasing a contract, she thought, now,
approaching the church at the end of Carriedo Street; like
her boss, Mr. Anderson, deliberate, right on the dot. His
voice, casual yet challenging: "Baby, there's a new combo
at the 54 Club — cool music, terrific atmosphere. I'll be tied
up till six-thirty. Pick you up around seven, okay?" The youag
man who was so sure of himself, the smug arrogant young
man — but she had kept the resentment out of her "Yes,
that'll be fine" — she had gone out with him so many nights,
she felt she had forfeited any right to refuse.

But it could be love, she smiled wryly, passing through the

stranger-swarms, recalling the innumerable dates, the habit
of kisses, the acts of love; and all of a sudden she was alone
and tired, her high heels uncertain on the uneven
pavement. Once it hadn't been so hard to recognize the
image in the heart: a pure happy anguish, a kinship with
glory, and let the whole world go its own mediocre way: not
yet this defeated shrinking, as though without warning, the
earth would disintegrate beneath her and she would fall into
darkness.

As she passed the side-dpor of the church and heard the

strong massed voices begin to sing, she had a sharp
remembrance of a young girl in white, herself, a long time
ago, it seemed, offering Maytime flowers to the Blessed
Virgin, in an ancient church, in a distant town between
mountains and a sea.

It was her loneliness in the city's evening, and also the

memory, and the hymn to the Mother of God that halted her
in the middle of the asphalt plaza, before the abruptly
massive church. From where she stood, a tall woman jostled
by anonymous shoulders, she could see the high altar,
golden with candle-light, a long way deep inside the church,
beyond the packed assembly chanting praise and love for a
woman most pure, most holy Above her in the plaza the
neon signs flickered in the warm swift evening.

A child-beggar whined up at her; she winced before the wet

hare-lip as she thrust a crumpled bill at the claw-like hand. A
melancholy pushed her into the crowd on the patio, the
surging voices pulled her forward.

A rustle of kneeling fluttered through the warm hugeness of

the church, and she found herself in the center aisle just
within the entrance, and felt the hard, unaccustomed floor
against her knees. A sculp-tured saint, vaguely familiar in a
niche, stared at her: who was he? what was his name? She
had seen the same pose and expression before, somewhere:
but she retained only a sense of the place, obscure like a
childhood dream.

The woman beside her prayed the novena with a fat

sorrowful face, and she noticed the frayed devotional dress,
bursting at the seams from the woman's bulk and poverty. A
man coughed behind her; a baby began to whimper, the
father in a faded shirt scolding tenderly.

She had an impulse to rise and flee, escape from these

strangers, this grieving woman and this coughing man and
that whimpering child, the misery that surrounded her and
cried Mother ever help us1. But she was discouraged by the
solid throng that now blocked the door, and she turned her
gaze to the altar, an island shining with a temptation of
peace.
Small bells tinkled; a hush descended upon them like a giant
wing.

She tried to pray: the words had no life in her mind, phrases
that com-municated nothing to no one. But even as she
erased them in a single brush of annoyance, she saw the
priest, so far away at the end of the aisle, raise the
monstrance like a sun; and a shock of almost unbearable
sadness pierced her breast, and tears filmed her eyes. She
blinked, confused, and with fresh vision she saw in clear
outline the ornaments of the altar, the portrait of the
Blessed Mother, the desolation of the Black Nazarene, the
powerful pillars that supported the gigantic dome.

They stood up; the man behind her coughed and sang; the
woman beside her swayed her head to the ebb and flow of
the singing, for the while released from the tragedies of her
life: perhaps a barong-barong crumbling into an estero, a
drunkard of a son consorting with whores.

Then it was over, the Blessed Sacrament returned to the

tabernacle; the crowd fanned out to the broad thoroughfare
and the sweepstakes vendors and the overloaded buses.
But she felt faint and she sat down in the last pew, near the
saint whose name she had forgotten.

The honk and rumble of traffic vibrated remotely into the

church.

A mist of incense and candle-smoke hung above the

dimmed altar.

Penitents flanked a confessional; she could see a white

cassock under the violet curtain, and she imagined the
priest's face, an old wise patient face, listening to the recital
of sins. How long has it been since your last confession?
Years ago, Father, help me to remember, Father . . .
The sins of the flesh, of pride, of despair. The absolving
hand behind the grille: go in peace, your sins are forgiven;
and the line moving another step toward grace and another
step away from the nothingness of hell. She had a longing
to unburden herself and receive a blessing; but she was no
longer sure whether she still believed in this machinery of
penance, learned from forgotten nuns in a convent school. I
am so mixed up, so tired. . . Give me time. . .

She examined her painted fingernails in her lap, blood-red,

taper-ing, yet precise on the typewriter. Tony said she had
lovely hands: she knew how to take care of them, that was
why. They all said she was lovely and precious, all the glib-
tongued young men. . . She had tears in her eyes at the
Benediction — funny, that was the first time she'd felt like
that: when her father died, she had cried, yes, but more
from a dull oppressive mourning than anything else, he had
been ill so long.

Never before this sudden unphysical pain — as if she had

been assailed by a vast, forever inexpressible regret. . .
That's what you get, going into churches, she thought
wearily, sitting in the pew, waiting for the faintness to leave
her.

A fragile white-haired man said his rosary beside her, and

she watched the clicking beads held in the trembling hands.
She had a rosary once, of colored glass, with a silver crucifix
— how had she lost that one, now? Oh yes, that drive to
Tagaytay, with Myrna and Helen and Romy — and Tony —
not this Tony now but another Tony — there was always a
fellow around with that name, come to think of it. She had
left her bag in the car, it was only for a while, and when she
came back — they had been taking pictures — the bag was
gone, anyway she; didn't have much cash in it, thank
goodness. But the rosary. . . Next payday, she'd get another
one, she told herself; maybe, her luck would change. She
wondered if Tony knew how to pray the rosary — no, not
him, she decided, not that kind of guy. . .

She took a deep breath, genuflected weakly and crossed

herself at the font and emerged into Quezon Boulevard. A
sudden ache pulsed in her head. Maybe, I have a cold
coming, she thought; the heat, the crowd. . . She shook a
strand of hair from her brow, and joined the thick shabby
rigodon of pedestrians crossing the avenue, wrinkling her
finely modeled nose against the gasoline odors of the
jeepneys. She was just on time to catch her bus as the
policeman blew a final whistle.

A man settled down in her row, gave her a bold scrutiny —

who did he think he was, Rock Hudson? — and she edged
away pressed against the window ledge and watched the
people hurrying, hurrying on the shattered sidewalks. The
bus lumbered by a theater, the tubed neon fluid of its
marquee reflecting redly on the pavement. She had known a
fellow once who insisted on going to double features
because Sweetheart, we can stay longer and you know how
it is and well. . .

The last time she saw him — a couple of months ago, was
it? — he was coming out of a moviehouse with a giggling
girl in a tight absurd dress.

In the evenings of the city, love walked the streets — all

kinds of love, she mused, thinking of the bars and the cheap
hotels, seeing a couple pause before a shop-window, the
man's hand possessive around the woman's shoulders. First
the casual dates, the strangeness, the trying to know about
each other; all the ceremonies of love, at once complicated
and simple: I love you and you love me and we are together.
Always. . . She grimaced at the word: everything ended, and
love died young. . .

Her headache remained: she would ignore it — it was only

the heat. The bus braked for a red light on the corner of
Azcarraga; passengers filled the seats, stood clinging to the
overhead bar. A family —

parents and three children — squeezed toward the rear: the

wife clutched a leather-covered Perpetual Help booklet,
dark-stained from years of faith and hope. The bus would
take them back to the cramped rented house in one of the
housing projects in the suburbs, where the children would
quarrel over supper, and the mother would look at them in
resignation — or bitterness, because she could not
understand her life away from the hymns and the more than
life-sized Christ hanging in perpetual agony on the cross,
and the golden sun of the Blessed Sacrament, rising among
clouds of incense at the benediction. . .

The depression she had experienced upon entering the

church came back to her, in the bus; but tonight she could
not help observing the man holding on to the bar with one
hand, bravely carrying his packages and his battered
portfolio with the other; the thin wrinkled woman with the
scapular; the young man with the threadbare collar and the
disheveled hair. The bus picked up speed and a wind flipped
away the stale scent of human sweat, and she could look
out the window at the lights of the city rushing by in the
warm evening.

IT WAS almost eight when she alighted from the bus and
walked the block to her aunt's apartment in Kamuning. She
barely avoided a puddle and she smelled a garbage can
overturned by a growling pack of dogs.
Tony would make his usual joke about women being never
on time. So what? — and she had reasons, too. A radio was
broadcasting the novena in Baclaran, the prayers, the nasal
accents of the officiating priest following her down the
evening street: "The compassion of Our Lord, my dear
brethren, the love of Mother Mary for us poor banished
children of Eve. .

A few stars hung in the sky: why was it that in the city there
were only a few stars in the night? In the town by the sea,
she had once tried to count them: but there had been so
many and she was only a child and could not count beyond
a hundred. She smiled at the child she had been, trying to
number the myriad stars. "Mother of Christ, Mother of
Christ," sang the radio in one of the houses on the narrow
street.

The maroon convertible was parked in the apartment-house

driveway, and even as she stood hesitant before the door
she heard Tony's deep-toned laughter in the living room,
and her aunt's soprano of approval. They get along fine,
those two, she thought, kneading the ache in her temples,
wondering if there were any aspirin in the house.

"Hello, Princess," Tony said, not bothering to get up from his

chair.

"You're late."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"It's eight, Baby. What kept you?"

"The novena," she said.

"But Linda, you haven't been going —" her aunt began.
"This time I did," she said.

"I was here seven sharp," Tony said. He was looking at her,
puzzled, his lips pursed, rubbing his mustache, half-teasing.
"I didn't know you'd be going to this — this novena. I
could've picked you up there."

"Picked me up there," she said, and she was suddenly angry

and she had a headache and she was very tired. "Can't you
for goodness sake stop talking to me like that? Pick me up,"
she mimicked and flopped down on the sofa and leaned
back with a sigh against the cushions.

"Excuse me, Tony," her aunt said, slippers slapping away

into the kitchen.

He was smiling, head cocked to one side, twirling his

ignition-key chain by a finger. He wore a tie with a pink coral
design; his cuff-links glinted; his white shoes were spotless.
"Well, Baby, let's get going." He reached for her hand,
caressed it, traced a slow line up her arm, smiling. "Tony —
Tony, I don't feel like it tonight," she said.

"But I thought —" The chain was a pendulum, suspended

from a nicotine-brown finger. He exhaled a loud impatient
breath, and the key went round and round again. "But,
Baby, you said it was okay . ."

"Don't Baby me," she said.

"All right, all right, Baby — I mean Linda." A shrewd,

reassuring twinkle came into his eyes. "What's eating you
anyway? C'mon, we'll take in a movie first before we go to
the Club. A musical to cheer you up, okay?"

"I have a headache," she said.

"That's a new one," he said. "A made-to-order headache.
How can I believe —"

"You don't believe," she said. The night outside the windows
was restless and warm, and the firewall of the neighboring
house was streaked by many seasons of rain. "You don't
believe in anything," she said. Believe: it was a new and
beautiful word, and she uttered it softly, in her mind,
through the dull pain.

He edged closer to her, andput an arm around her shoulder.

"Look, Linda — let's drive down to the Bay, huh? The fresh
air — it'll make you feel better. How about it, Baby?"

It was as if she had made up her mind long ago. "No," she
said, shaking her head. The pain in her head shifted like a
lead ball.

"What have I done?" Tony said. "Are you angry with me?"

She was tired; she wanted to be left alone. "Tony —"

"What is it? Tell me."

"Tony, I can't go tonight. I can't any more."

Her aunt pattered back to them, plump and solicitous.

"Linda, what's the matter with you?"

"Why do you say you can't go any more?" Tony asked. His
fingers massaged her shoulder. "Why do you say that?"

Their bewilderment tempted her to try to explain. "I feel sick

—"

she began, but it was too vast and complex for words. And
even if she could say it all, she knew they would not
understand, they were strangers and they would never
understand the sadness that had drawn her into the singing
crowd in the church and the spear that had flown from the
altar, piercing her as the priest elevated the Body of Christ
encased in a golden sun. She sat limply on the sofa, tired
and without peace, her head throbbing, wishing she could
stop thinking of the grieving woman with the frayed dress
and the old man with the rosary and all the poor and lonely
pilgrims in the churches of the world; wishing she could
forget the girl she had once been, offering white flowers to
the Mother of God, in a town between the mountains and
the sea.

What Shall We Do

When We All Go Out?

THE YEAR was first of all the strangeness of a new town, a

railroad station on a day in June, with the rain falling and the
steam breath of the train engine blue in the grey air, and
riding in a carretela with his father and mother through
tunnels of leaves to the house by the river.

Thei> in a bright morning, the whir of grasshoppers deep in

the damp grass of the plaza, the long sprawling
schoolhouse, the nameless faces, the fresh mud smell of the
corridor, and the bell's urgent ringing as his father waved,
winking and smiling, going away down the steps. Room 10
was a sudden loneliness. Through the windows there was a
view of mountains, dark-blue and infinitely far, they
seemed; one might try to journey toward them., across
countless plains, day and night, and never reach them
because they receded into the horizon perpetually; and
seated at his desk in the room with the unknown children,
he imagined himself lost somewhere in that impossible
distance. At noon the day darkened and rained, and his
father came and they left together, sharing a raincoat,
walking down the soft cool raining streets of the town.

Grade Three was Miss Castillo, the ruler in her hand

pointing, rapping the table, tapping the blackboard, Writing,
Arithmetic, her vpice sometimes tired, sometimes harsh, but
often happy, even laughing, and leading the class in song, a
warm and vibrant voice; and the year, too, was the typhoon
skies of July and August, the thick greenness of the plaza,
new friends, Vic, Junior, Kiko, Doming, matchboxes of
spiders, marbles, airplane model cut-outs, Batman, the
Human Torch, Captain America, color prints of cowboy stars,
the odors of ink and chalk, the twin flags fluttering over the
schoolhouse, and the hot lemon sun between the long rains.

He was nine years old now, an only child, thin and pensive
but capable of outbursts of intense energy, his mop of hair
shaking loose over his eyes. He liked the town more than
the previous ones they had lived in: here were two movie
houses and high school cadets drilling with wooden rifles in
the plaza and Bombay bazaars on the main street; cascoes
came down the huge river and the train whistles said come
to the city, come; and listening to the fading machine
rumble in the night, he felt a pang of waiting for dreams he
could not touch with words.

His father clerked in the treasurer's office, in the municipal

hall, a neat tile-roofed building surrounded by great acacias;
and in the mornings they would leave the house together,
side by side, the boy trying to match his father's stride,
brisk and certain, across the bridge with its massive iron
girders, the boats bobbing on the flashing water, Rizal
Street streaming noisily with children hurrying to school.
Remembering the other town, the tiny crumbling
schoolhouse, the stillness under the dusty palms, he wished
fervently that his father would not be assigned again to
work elsewhere. In the backyard of the house his father had
taken, there was a santol tree with branches miraculously
arranged for a young boy's easy climbing, and from a
comfortable perch secret among the leaves, he could see a
bend of the river and a part of the main street, and he could
play at being an eagle or the pilot of a fighter plane.

The house itself, which they shared with a family, was

pleasant enough: it had a porch shaded by a morning-glory
vine, and through the wide kitchen window one looked out
on a checker-board of fields, and on the edge of the world
the glint of rails, the train crawling small as a toy but its
power trembling through your arms on the windowsill.

He would wave to the passengers, although he knew he was

too far to be seen, and fancy himself on the train too,
counting the telegraph poles going by, faster, almost
blurring together, finally slowing down, the city rising about
him, vast and mysterious.

He hoed a plot behind the school building and planted

pechay and tomatoes and eggplants, in a row of similar
plots like fresh graves, the names printed on placards set in
the dark soil like little crosses. October came, and winds
blew cool cotton clouds through the sky, the cloud-shadows
passing swift on the ground, over the rooftops, on the
church and the convento, the trees, the river. Fascinated, he
would pause during a game at recess to watch the shadows
racing across the schoolyard, gone in a twinkling, dissolving
toward the mountains, the unseen places.

In Room 10, with the stern portraits of heroes watchful on

the walls, under the thumb-tacked cardboard slogans, he
added and multiplied and divided sums gradually growing
complex, recited patriotic poems, sang the children's songs
about the ripe guavas and far Zamboanga and Maria going
to town. At a program for visiting school officials, he was
one of a group of unwilling boys that did a folk dance; and
only Miss Castillo's gift of chocolate candy relaxed his
rebellion enough for him to go through the steps with
passable grace. His favorite subject was Geography, for in
the large blue-covered book was the tang of the oceans,
and the mists of valleys, the proud names of countries. It
seemed then that all of the world became familiar and near,
the way it was with the town, its regions explored and made
his own, the woods behind the convento, the riverbank, the
shortcuts to school, known and therefore free of danger.

A photographer came with his black shrouded camera and

took a picture of the class ranged on the front steps, with
him in the front row with Miss Castillo because he was
among the bright ones. In the picture his face had a tense,
almost belligerent look. "Remember to smile next time," his
mother said.

A CLASSMATE named Jaime had been absent for more than

a week, and one morning, Miss Castillo said, "Jaime is dead."
The room drained of sound and from the other wing of the
building filtered faint voices like murmurs, and in the next
room a girl recited on in a singsong tone.

The teacher's announcement seemed to hang in the

unstirring room for a long time, and he noted a fly buzzing
on a wall. The awesome fearful word sank slowly into his
understanding, and brought a thrill of terror to his heart. He
stared at the vacant desk and he experienced again, as on
the first day of class, a sense of mountains unreachable
forever, while a pressure weighed against his ears and
hummed remotely in the quiet room.
In the afternoon the class trooped to Jaime's house, a dim
sagging nipa shack on the outer edge of town. Everyone
spoke in hushed careful voices, as if an immense calamity
would claim them all at once if they showed the slightest
disrespect. He looked at Jaime's half-closed lightless eyes
and chalk lips and turned away, a bewildered shock dry in
his throat. He had known the dead boy but slightly: a sullen
face, a shrill laugh, the frayed faded clothes of the very
poor, that was all; and Jaime was more alien now, a
complete stranger. The crowded house oppressed him, it
would bury him in its darkness; and he sought out Junior
and Doming and they went down the ladder to the yard and
sat there on the roots of an old tree, not talking, until their
teacher came and told them they could go home. In the
rapid dusk, they ran as if pursued, panting into the more
familiar quarter of town, where the streetlights were, the
bustle of carretelas, the stores.

He dreamed one night of Jaime alive, Jaime's mouth forming

words but without sound, trying to talk, his hands gesturing
desperately; but there was no telling what it was he wanted
to say. "What happened to your voice?" he asked Jaime in
the dream, and then they were in the classroom and Jaime
stood before them, speechless, his eyes pleading and
helpless. The bell signaled the end of school, and they fled
from the room, and he looked for Jaime so they could take
the train together to the city; but Jaime was gone, and he
searched for him around the building, calling out his name
in all the rooms, and Miss Castillo said, "What is it? Tell me,
what have you lost?" He wakened then, to morning and his
father standing beside the bed, smiling. "You were talking in
your sleep," his father said, his hand warm and gentle on
the boy's cheek, as though checking on a fever. "Get up now
or you'll be late for school. . ."
DURING A recess period, one of the sixth graders pushed
him against another boy, who lashed at him instantly,
tackling him to the ground.

They wrestled, a fist jabbed at his ear, he freed himself,

struck back, swung and landed a blow on his opponent's
mouth, his weight behind the blow, his knuckles crashing
against teeth. Someone pulled him away, while others
chanted "Fight1. Fight!" fiercely crowding around him. It had
all happened in a few seconds; and recovering from the
suddenness, he saw whom he was fighting, a boy he did
not^know. He wanted to explain that it was all a mistake,
there was no reason to punish each other; but the other
boy, crying now, cursing furiously, came at him, leading
with his fists.

The bell dispersed the little mob, sending them all flying
back to their rooms. He had cut his knuckles, and he sucked
at them, tasting for the first time the salt of blood, his heart
thumping, feeling trapped and outraged, a victim, forced
into a fight. He sensed further violence waiting for him,
hiding in ambush wherever he would go, and there was no
returning. He could only wait, and fight back, hard, but
against his will when he was struck again.

In the noon sun, outside the gate, the boy he had fought
stood waiting, stood in his path with three others, their
hatred focused on him, like heat through a magnifying lens,
burning into his chest. But the tall boy from Grade Six, the
one who had pushed him, was suddenly by his side, a
protective arm thrown around his shoulder.

"You touch him and I'll break your bones, all four of you," the
tall boy said. "Stay away from him, do you hear? Go!" And
the four slunk away, glancing back as though to say, just
you wait, we'll get you yet, tomorrow, next week, someday.
"Why did you make us fight?"

The boy from Grade Six laughed. He had large crooked teeth
and a ripe pimple on his nose. "I must have tripped and you
happened to be in the way/' he said. "My name's Dado, and
you are my friend, yes?"

He did not know what to say. He felt faint and hungry and it
was hot standing in the sun.

"You fought well, you know," said Dado. "I like the way you
got him on the mouth. I can teach you some other tricks,
you know, and they'll never be able to lick you."

They went across the plaza, Dado's hand heavy on his

shoulder.

He had an impulse to shake off the hand, and run. A certain

instinct warned him against Dado's companionship, but at
the same time he knew the consequences of his rejection.

"I'm going home," he said.

"Of course," said Dado. "I'll even walk you home if you like.
But first, there is something we must settle." He asked with
the air of a conspirator: "You have money with you?"

"Why?"

"I asked the question."

"I spent it all this morning."

Dado's hand gripped his arm, tightening. "Don't you lie to

me."

"But it's true," he said.

"You owe me fifty centavos," said Dado.

"But I don't owe you anything."

"I'm telling you. It ought to be a peso, but I like you, so we'll

make it fifty centavos. That's fair enough, isn't it?"

"But —"

"Bring the money this afternoon. Tell your father it's for a
school program. Tell him anything, but bring some money, is
that clear?"

He glanced away, at the mountains blue in the glare, the

giant boul-ders of clouds, the trees and the town, the
confusion and the fear knotted in his chest.

Dado said softly, like a brother, kind and understanding,

"Don't look so glum. I'm your friend. I saved you from a
beating, didn't I?

Look, when you give the money this afternoon, I'll take you
to our secret place. It's like a cave. Nobody knows about it,
only the members of our gang."

"You're making it all up."

"Ah, you'll like it there, of that I'm sure. The fifty centavos
will be your membership fee. You'll be the first to join from
Grade Three.

Later on, we'll ask all your friends to join."

"There's no such place. I don't believe you."

"I'll be waiting for you this afternoon," said Dado.

His FATHER and mother had finished lunch when he arrived,
and he ate hurriedly in the kitchen; and when his mother
noticed a bruise on his knee, he said he had stumbled
playing in the schoolyard. He sneaked his coconut-shell
bank out of the house while his parents were taking their
siesta, and broke it with a stone and pocketed five ten-
centavo coins and hid the shattered shell in a bush. If his
father would only come down now and ask why he had
destroyed the shell, he might tell him. . . The house was
quiet in the leafshade, he was alone, and Dado was waiting
for him.

"Come with me," said Dado when he handed over the

money, catching him abruptly by the wrist. "Come, I'll show
you our hiding place,"

and before he could protest, Dado had dragged him through

a break in the hedge and under the school building.
Powerless to resist, captured in some tide of force, he half-
crawled deeper into the damp gloom, Dado pulling him on,
until they came to a hole dug in the ground.

There were boys in the pit; some were smoking cigarettes,

red dots glowing like demon eyes in the half-light; and with
the dank rotting smell of sunless earth rose the sharp fume
of alcohol. "Go in," said Dado; and when he did not move,
crouched on the hard-packed edge of the pit, *he was
shoved sprawling into a tangle of arms and legs and muted
spiteful laughter. He had dropped his books and he could
not find them, groping for them on the dark bottom of the
pit.

"Meet our new treasurer," said Dado.

"Let me go," he whimpered.

"You can't go unless we say so/' someone said.

"Maybe he wants a drink/' said another, laughing.

A bottle was thrust at him, but he would not touch it. The
bell began to ring for the start of the afternoon session, and
he began to sob, and a hand was clapped roughly on his
mouth. His crying stopped after a while, and he sat quiet
and trembling, his back against the cool wall of earth, the
red cigarette eyes glowing about him. "You tell anyone
about this place and we'll kill you," someone said, he could
not see who it was; all their faces were vague and
featureless in the hidden twilight. He wanted to tell them
Please let me go and I won't ever tell; but no sound came
from his throat, he could not speak, like Jaime in the dream;
and somewhere beyond the darkness that was the floor
above them, the children were singing: "What shall we do
when we all go out — all go out — all go out —" their voices
distant and forlorn.

He had one hope left, that Miss Castillo had not called the
roll and marked him absent for the afternoon.

The Conquerors

WE LOST, the Lieutenant told Sister Rosario one day in mid-

December, because of the monsoon rains and the flooding
of the supply roads in the lowlands. Our men fought well
and bravely, he said (his right leg had been blown off by
mortar-fire: he spoke to her as he lay on one of the cots that
crowded the college assembly hall). The 7th Infantry held
out for months against overwhelming numbers; the Bishop's
own militia died to the last man covering the retreat from
the contested pass; if the rains hadn't been so bad, said the
Lieutenant, we would have driven them back over and
beyond the mountains.
Sister Rosario avoided his eyes while he talked of the war:
she was conscious of the shape of the stump under the
blanket. She looked out the windows at the acacias in the
courtyard. The chill of the nights had yellowed the leaves:
she saw a shower of them fall across the sunlight; a
peaceful scene; but outside on the sidewalks, against the
campus walls, the refugees huddled beside their push-carts,
cooking their midday meals on blackened stones. Blue
smoke curled above the street; perhaps, she told herself,
knowing it was not so, it is only the old jani-tor burning the
fallen leaves.

Through August and September of that year the rear guard

fought gallant, isolated battles, while the main force, its
tanks bogged down in the mud, its supply trucks abandoned
on the flooded plains, withdrew to the South, toward the city
and the sea. With the soldiers came the refugees, thousands
of them, trudging through the rains, pushing their carts and
their barrows, or riding down the swollen river in barges and
fishing boats, driven on as by some horrifying disease and
carrying, with their pots and pans and bundled clothing,
statuettes and framed prints of Christ and the Blessed
Virgin.

The counter-attack in October, because it was far too late,

turned into a rout; the clear skies darkened with enemy
planes; whole divi-sions were slashed into tattered
companies that streamed single-file into the city, to dig
trenches under the trees of the parks and await new officers
and another command. Then the planes started coming
over, at first in two's and three's flying high beyond the anti-
aircraft guns and not dropping bombs, until two weeks later,
when waves of conventional bombers escorted by jets hit
the port area and the airfield and the fuel dumps. For a day
and night the oil and gasoline exploded into the sky; cinders
fell like rockets on the school grounds and burned down the
library and the auditorium; the walking wounded and the
refugees encamped on the sidewalks helped the nuns fight
the fire away from the other buildings. Another raid blasted
all but two of the bridges that spanned the river; bombs
rained down on the commercial district along the banks;
smoke billowed over the city and hid the sun.

But today there had been no raid so far, no sound of hostile

planes.

The sun was cool through the trees. Sister Rosario listened
to the Lieutenant explaining to her, in a hoarse toneless
voice, the retreat from the North, as if the sanity of speech
would heal his more interior wounds. She stared at the trees
with her clear nun's eyes; how incredibly peaceful, she
thought; the courtyard should be crowded now with blue-
uniformed girls preparing gift-packages for the poor. It was
time to build the creche by the grotto of the Blessed Mother.

The Lieutenant broke off abruptly; there was the hum of

engines; he half-raised himself on an elbow. "Ours," he said
and he lay back and lighted a cigarette. Sister Rosario
stacked the food trays together, smiled brightly at the
Lieutenant, and passed down the hall between the cots and
out into the courtyard, where an ambulance and a score of
jeeps stood parked in the dappled sunlight.

She waited for young Sister Teresa carrying her own share of
alu-minum trays to catch up with her; and together they
took the path to the refectory, sprays of sun glancing off
their black robes like flecks of luminous water.

"I've heard we'll be moving out soon," Sister Teresa said in

her usual breathless manner. "Could that be true, Sister?"

"I do not know," Sister Rosario said. The news didn't excite
her; she had been expecting it for days. But just the same
she felt a tightness surround her heart. "Father Bernard will
come tomorrow. Then we shall know."

"If it is true, then I wonder where we'll be going. Do you

have any idea, Sister? To Santa Cruz, perhaps? Across the
channel?"

"Perhaps," she said. "One cannot tell for sure."

"Sister, do you think things will turn out better for the New
Year?"

"Let us hope so. Yes, Sister, I think things will turn out all
right."

"There's a soldier — he lost an arm, he's such a boy, really.

He said I reminded him of his grandmother. Sister, tell me,
do I look that old?" Laughing, they deposited their trays in
the kitchen and hurried to join the rest of the nuns going
into the chapel for the canonical hour.

The chanted psalms ascended into the quiet day; the leaves
fell on the ambulance and the jeeps and on the flagged
walks. A breeze swept a handful down a corridor where men
lay broken and motionless on the green tiled floor. Trucks
rumbled by and were gone. The vertical shadows slanted
gradually with the afternoon. The sky was blue and empty.

THE MORNING of December 23 was cold, with mist clinging

to the trees. Artillery like approaching drums rolled south of
the city.

The planes came again as Father Bernard read out the

Gospel: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius
Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was procurator of Judea. . The
bombers'flew over the city making a high metallic whine;
the Mass continued, slow, changeless; a succession of
bombs exploded far away.

Father Bernard, in the violet vestments of the Fourth Sunday

of Advent, prayed over the bread and wine on the altar; he
turned to face the nuns and the soldiers and the men and
the women and children, and made the Sign of the Cross.

"Agnus Dei. . . Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of

the world," the nuns sang with a delicate solemnity. The sun
shone fitfully through the stained-glass windows; the planes
had gone; a bell rang silvery. The nuns filed to the
communion rail to receive Christ in a white circular wafer,
their robes whispering like a small wind in the trees. The
Mass moved inevitably to its end; a hushed Deo gratias
floated through the chapel. The soldiers, the people
streamed out of the church, while the nuns remained to sing
the Salve Regina. Trucks roared outside; somebody was
shouting: "Walking patients! Over here!'\Sister Rosario
thought: All this cannot be true, everything is a dream,
although she knew that tomorrow everyone would be gone
and the city surrendered to the enemy.

The morning office was over; she knelt and examined the
polished wood of her pew, a part of her mind numb and
incapable of prayer.

She looked up and saw Father Bernard and Mother

Redempta and Sister Corazon at the altar; Father Bernard
was transferring the Host into a leather satchel; but she felt
nothing. When she glanced up again, Father Bernard was
gone; somebody else had taken away the cross and the
candles and the sanctuary lamp; the tabernacle gaped at
her, hollow and empty. She knelt with her eyes closed,
feeling nothing; she heard the trucks grind outside, and the
other Sisters rise from their pews and go back down the
aisle. Lord, she said in her heart, Lord, you are gone from
this place you have loved so much. She rose finally,
genuflected before the stripped wooden altar, then realized
there was no more Sacrament: the chapel had become a
building, a stone structure with walls and windows and roof,
containing nothing. She remained standing between the
rows of benches; the elevated altar, with its meaningless
steps, appeared preposterous, an absurd table that no one
had any use for. . . With a brisk resolute step she went out
through the Gothic door.

"Sister! Sister Rosario!"

Nurses were assisting the last of the wounded into a

weapons carrier parked in front of the assembly hall. The
Lieutenant, already in the truck, was waving to her; his
voice was so strong, so youthful that at first she failed to
recognize him.

"Goodbye," the Lieutenant called out to her. "And thanks for

everything! We'll see you on the other side!"

"Don't you worry, Sister," said a soldier with an arm in a

sling.

"We'll all be back for the New Year."

"Goodbye," she said. "God go with you. Goodbye."

The truck started and drove out into the sunshine, the
Lieutenant and the others waving to her until the truck
disappeared past the gat£.

She walked across the courtyard to the dormitory, the

leaves breaking crisply as she stepped on them. With a
suddenness that surprised her, a love for all the dead young
men came upon her; doors seemed to swing open in her
soul; she thought of Bethlehem and twenty centuries; she
remembered many things suddenly: Mass on Christmas Eve,
and the Magnificat, and the hymn: "The Lord said to me:
Thou art My Son. . ." She paused on the dormitory steps and
looked at the burned-out shell of the library; the wind bent
the branches and the remaining leaves twinkled like golden
coins in the sun. She prayed to Saint Jo-seph to please keep
the bombers away for the rest of the day.

A PICK-UP van and an army truck came for the nuns soon
after Ves-pers; the drivers and a couple of p.f.c.'s who kept
up a torrent of profanity carried the Sisters' luggage into the
trucks. They worked with such singular earnestness that
Sister Rosario had to smile in admiration despite their
language. The nuns climbed aboard the pick-up. "Everything
okay?" the driver of the pick-up said. "Roll!" said the truck
driver.

"Let's get the hell out before the bastards catch up with
us1." Sister Rosario caught a glimpse of the statue of Our
Lady of Lourdes like a ghost under the dark trees as the
trucks passed through the gate, their headlights dimmed,
going slowly in second gear.

In the darkness she looked back at the convent school: it

was already a strange place to her, it seemed, a cluster of
alien buildings, a foreign land; still she couldn't cry.
Tomorrow the conquerors would enter the city, she had seen
pictures of them: long columns of helmeted, green-
uniformed men marching under red-starred flags.

"Let us pray," Mother Redempta said. "Our Father, Who art

in heaven. . ."

The streets were empty save for jeep-patrols; the artillery

drummed distantly south of the city. The trucks drew up
beside a check-point; there was a brief conference between
guards and drivers; the guards pushed back the wired
barricade and the trucks drove on through the blacked-out
city. Sister Rosario saw a half-moon low in the east, close to
the dark rim of the hills.

On the main boulevard leading to the harbor, the two trucks

joined up with a convoy of assorted vehicles; half-tracks,
jeeps, weapons-carriers. Whistles trilled; the convoy halted;
the dimmed lights went out.

Planes droned overhead. Sister Rosario heard the running

rush of soldier-boots; she became aware of the click of
rosaries in the darkness, and she brought out her own
beads, fingering the sharp edges of the crucifix. Then the
planes were gone; whistles signaled the all-clear, and the
trucks started again, filling the night with their collective
roar.

She saw the sea, the horizon faintly edged with moonlight;
the pick-up stopped with a jolt, she heard the driver utter an
oath. Someone had jumped aboard the driver's cab; a voice,
commanding and fierce, was asking: "You got the nuns from
Holy Cross?" A face peered in through the rear-window:
"Mothers — Sisters — I'm in charge —

follow me."

A soldier lowered the tail-gate and the nuns descended onto

the pier. "The Mother Superior — where's the Mother
Superior?" said the man in charge; he was a Captain: Sister
Rosario saw the twin bars glint in the moonlight, in the
starlight. Mother Redempta came forward; the Captain
asked her if everything was in order; yes, Mother Redempta
said, yes, all of them were quite ready. They followed him
down a ladder; there were sailors; hands reached out for
Sister Rosario and helped her onto the heaving steel floor of
a landing boat.

The engine coughed, then throbbed steadily; the boat

lurched forward and they went past the dark bulk of an LST
and the hull of a capsized ship; farther down the beach
something was on fire. Sister Rosario held fast to the side,
decided not to be sick, the spray stinging her face. A
steamer loomed out of the sea, above the landing craft;
then another ladder, but with a railing this time. She
mounted the steps, her breath coming short with the effort;
a sailor pulled her aboard; the deck was crowded: there
were women, children. She found a stack of boxes to sit on,
while figures shifted and jostled about her; a baby was
crying; she sat there and waited for quietness to return
within her before she began to pray.

She felt the ship vibrate and move at last and after what
seemed a long while, she stood up and picked her way to
the rail. Flames raged in the city receding away. As she
watched, a series of fireballs bloomed into the sky and
disintegrated in orange sparks. A pillar of white fire erupted
over the harbor. To the south of the city artillery flickered
like heat lightning.

When the city had become a reddish glow far on the

horizon, Sister Rosario thought of the chapel and the empty
tabernacle and the shining green tiles of the corridors and
the leaves like golden coins twinkling in the sun. She had
come a long way and she was weary; and she found that
she could weep now, quite without effort and silently.

She wept quietly for the classrooms where she had taught
and the eager child-faces and for the processions on Corpus
Christi, the girls in white showering flowers in the path of
the Blessed Sacrament; for Mary alone in her grotto under
the trees, and the poor of Christ who would not come to the
courtyard for their gifts, and Christmas passing
uncelebrated in the surrendered city.

The waves parted before the bow; and the ship, enormous,
indomi-table, moved over the night sea, toward another
city, and another year.

She heard voices singing, tentative, divided in the wind.

Now, after her tears, she could see with a fresh clarity; the
sky was washed with moonlight, and a ship, and then
others, appeared on the phosphores-cent sea. The voices
came from behind and above her, growing stronger.
Someone called her name; Sister Teresa was suddenly by
her side, pulling at her hand eagerly; and like a young girl
she let herself be led among the crates and the boxes and
bundles of the evacuation and under the shadow of a
lifeboat and up a stairway (on this evening alone she felt as
though she had ascended several thousand steps) to the
fore-deck where a towering man with a beard stood beneath
the moon, beneath the stars, waving his arms, leading a
motley crowd in song.

"O come let us adore Him," the many voices sang to the
open sky.

She found her sister-nuns at the rear of the throng, and she
knelt down on the planks among them; and the voices
flowed around her, carrying her along as in the warm heart
of a shining sea, weak and defenseless yet full of grace and
strength, for she had begun to dream of bright-eyed
children singing the same carol in another country

The World of the Moon

SUDDENLY IT was evening. Windows were flung open to a
hope of wind; but the heat of the long afternoon remained
trapped in the house; cicadas shrilled in the dusty unmoving
trees. The boarders sat around on the veranda and their
conversation fluttered like a powdary moth, vague and
restless in the twilight.

Because he was too young to be at his ease with them, and

old enough to resent their patronage, he stood outside their
circle, in a shadowed doorway, and listened. He was the
landlady's son, and Boy, they would call to him, how are you
today, Boy? It meant nothing, it was only their
condescension. This year, this season, he felt sometimes
outside the boundary of things, belonging nowhere, waiting.
He did not know what it was now he wanted to hear; but in
the smug laughter, the suggestive gestures, he sensed their
conspiracy in some malice.

The fat drug agent who passed through the town once a
month; the municipal clerk who kept spitting over the rail;
the brothers who worked in the softdrinks plant; the
gambler deserted by his wife. . .

They lounged on the veranda of his mother's house and

waited for supper and flicked their cigarette ashes on the
floor, talking about the dance in the next town, and the girls
they were taking there tonight.

The gambler said: "Suppose the jeepney runs out of gas on

the way back?"

The municipal clerk said: "There is that stretch of highway,

where it's like a tunnel under the trees. It would be dark in
there, even on this full-moon night."

The drug agent said: "I see the moon's got you in the head.
You be careful now. . ."
And the moon was rising above the houses, swollen and
yellow in the young evening. Darkness rose like a mist from
the yard. But already beyond the light of the porch, the
acacia leaves had caught the first moonlight; a radiance
was spreading in the sky. His mother rang the dinner bell,
and the boarders stretched up from their chairs, laughing
indolently, jostling one another into the house: a reunion of
old friends.

He lingered on the veranda and looked at the brightening,

gradually silvering moon. He wished his brother Angel had
returned from the city. He remembered the picture in one of
his brother's books: the mountains of the moon, his brother
had said, higher than the tallest ranges of Earth. The
memory focused sharply: the cratered plains, and the
incredible mountains rising steeply from the white horizon.
The moon was part of the planet's substance, millions of
years ago; it keeps one face always turned toward Earth, its
opposite side secret and unknown. . . His brother was kind
and gentle, sharing such wondrous knowledge with him.

The perfect globe of the moon floated in the east, over the
town.

And he wondered how it could hang there in the heavens,

huge and peaceful, exact in its measured orbit, like a being
with a mind of its own. . . He wanted to ask a question, to
possess the joy of an answer; but Angel had not come home
and his longing stuck in his throat like a santol seed.

The moon's presence seemed to move the house ever so

slightly: a kind of breathing, despite the windlessness, a
hidden rustling. The insect monotone in the trees was
another quality of silence. He had agreed to meet Lito and
Ben in the plaza after supper; they would roam the town,
perhaps go swimming, in the moonlight. What was there to
do?

The thick summer heat made it difficult to sleep; in bed,

thoughts swarmed in his brain, incomplete, without order,
but all straining toward a single end, nameless yet. He
watched the growing night, the illuminated clouds drifting
away from the moon. The hand clapping his shoulder
startled him.

"Looking at the moon, Boy?"

The drug agent smiled down at him. His round flabby face
was oily with sweat. He had loosened his belt so that his
belly in the damp undershirt pushed out relaxed and
unashamed.

"A bright night, but too warm, eh, Boy?"

He shrank from the man's familiarity, as though from an

infection.

Among the boarders, the drug agent paid the most attention
to him and his mother and sister, bringing them gifts on his
periodic visits; but somehow he had never learned to like
him.

"When I was your age, nights like this were an occasion,"

the drug agent said. "We'd raid somebody's orchard or steal
his chickens. You have your own gang, Boy? Go out and
have fun, you're only young once. You see this scar here —"
and he traced it on his balding scalp —

"I got that from a bolo one moonlit night. There was this girl,
her father hated the sight of me, almost hacked the life out
of me. If I hadn't jumped out of the window — I was fast on
my feet then, not the way I am now —" and he laughed,
patting his distended stomach, facing the ascending moon.
"Say, you've grown since I saw you last. At the rate you're
shooting up, Boy, you'll soon be itching to go dancing with
the girls, like us bachelors tonight, eh? We work hard, travel
around and don't get much for it. But it has its
compensations, Boy. Moonlight, girls, a dance. . ."

His MOTHER called him in to supper. They ate in the kitchen,

he and his mother and his sister Mina. He was not hungry;
the food had turned cold, tasteless. His mother said: "Here,
this is good for you, finish it." But she hardly glanced at him;
in some way she ignored him; her tone was habitual,
impersonal. She had become to him only a voice calling him
to breakfast, lunch, supper; a mumbling of Hail Mary's in the
next room at night; sometimes a mutter of complaint to no
one in particular; a voice that did not seek him.

But it was not flat and neutral, the voice she used for his
sister; there was a pleading in it, even an accent of pain. He
watched them at table with him, his mother and Mina: he
was only an outsider, listening,

"How many times have I told you, you cannot go," his
mother said.

"If Angel were home, then he could accompany you."

"Fely and Auring and the others, they are all going, Inay,"
Mina said softly. "They are coming over to fetch me, please
let me go."

"I shall talk to them when they come," his mother said.

"It's going to be a big dance. And it's been a long time —"

"Mina, I wish — I wish you would understand what it is I

have been trying to tell you. I want you to be happy with
your friends. But —"

"Then why won't you let me go?"

"But sometimes — young people — If your brother were

here . . .

We, your elders, we have the experience — the years — we

know the dangers ..." She paused, tender and unyielding.

"I promise, Inay, we won't come back late so don't worry."

"No, you cannot go," his mother said, collecting the dishes,
an aging woman with strong slender hands. "Perhaps, if it
were a dance in town. . . But in San Pablo. . . No," she said,
rising to wipe the table clean with a rag. "No, you must not
go."

His sister sat very still, with the same secret gleam in her
eyes that he saw whenever the drug agent arrived with his
gifts. The cicadas whirred faintly in the trees outside. He
heard low laughter from the boarders' rooms, the excited
stamping of shoes in the hallway. What was so special about
a dance anyway? But he was vaguely troubled and sorry for
Mina; he saw her lips tighten as with some decision before
she gathered the rest of the plates to wash in the sink.

The spirit of his sister's sadness followed him down to the

yard.

The moon had risen well above the houses; its light was a
whiteness falling soundlessly He breathed the dry still air;
he would run free and full of power through the night, away
from the faded, crowded house, from the weight of their
lives together.
He ran out to the street, paced by his shadow. The moon
had transformed the town; the streets Were wider, cleaner,
and they led to adventure, somewhere, on a wind-swept
plain. The unpainted houses, drab in the sun, assumed a
grace and loveliness in the wash of moonlight. He passed a
group of young men singing around a guitar; a car turned a
corner, girls were laughing in the car; and the sweet bloom
of flowers flowed to him from a garden.

He came to the plaza, his heart beating strongly, his face

flushed from his running. And the wide openness of the sky,
the lunar brightness over the town halted him with the
strength almost of a physical force. He had to gaze up at the
moon; the moon would lift him up; he would soar away to
the center of the night, the shining disc. For a moment,
there was only the moon and himself and the space
between them, alive with light. He felt the moon moving,
and then the earth moving, beneath his feet. The moon and
the earth drew each other in a powerful attraction, full of
mystery and silence.

The moment ended, and he swung his arms to regain an

inward balance, and he flowed back into his interrupted run,
over the moon-colored grass, toward the glorieta, where Lito
and Ben waited for him.

THE CLEAN moonlight gleamed down upon the town. They

played tag among the benches-, they kicked an empty can
around the kiosko, enjoying its loud clanking in the quiet
plaza. But they tired quickly of their games, and they sat on
the bandstand steps, listless and dejected.

Beyond the plaza, the tops of trees were gentle hills; a few
windows were fallen stars.
Memory stirred in him, glimmerings of faces, voices heard in
a long-ago night. He had never known his father; strangers
lived now in his father's house. As a child he had wakened
one night to a dark form bent over him. But he had not been
afraid, the darkness had been made safe with love. Sleep
now, the voice said. Who had spoken to him out of the dark,
in what house had he slept watched over and loved. . .

He said: "It's so warm. Why don't we go for a swim?" And

they hurried down the two blocks to the river, a placid
molten silver except where it was dark under the bridge.
Shouting for the sake of hearing their voices carry across
the water, they splashed around and gam-boled on the sand
and raced each other to the opposite bank, water spraying,
sparkling in the moonlight, until they began to shiver from
staying too long in the water. A dog on the riverbank bayed
at the moon; they drove it away with fistfuls of pebbles; and
the night grew more still, without wind, the river flowing on
without sound.

They walked in the moon-white emptiness of a street, past

mute shuttered houses and trees standing in pools of
speckled shadow. Refreshed by their swim, they raised their
voices to defy the stillness and the late hour; they were
comrades together, against the night.

"The cemetery!" said Ben.

"What?"

"Yes, let's go down to the graveyard," said Lito.

"What do we do out there?"

"If you two aren't scared, you'll come with me. I want to see
what the place looks like, at night."
"Who's scared? Are you, Lito?"

"Wait — all you want is see the place?

"We'll walk around. And don't worry about the dead. They
can't harm you. If we should come upon a ghost, we'll have
a chat with him."

"You are really crazy1."

"You are afraid1. Go on home!"

"Wait," said Lito. "Haven't you heard of the madman who

sleeps among the tombs? Suppose he —"

"I've seen him," said Ben. "An idiot who wouldn't harm
anyone.

Let's go wake him up if he's there."

"Sigue," said Lito. "We'll ask him to sing his funny songs to
the moon!" *

"Let's go then, you two/' said Ben.

"Anything you can do/' he said, "I can do."

He felt a tremor of fear, a clot of coldness beneath his heart;

but their unity in recklessness, an assurance of novelty at
least, impelled him toward the graveyard. He wanted to be
finished with it, to emerge whole and triumphant from the
test; it would be something, a knowledge of one's courage.
They clambered over the churchyard wall. His chest
tightened, his mouth was dry, and he heard his own heart
beating.

The tombs lay about in the moonlight, pale white as bones.

Lito tripped on a grave sunk in the ground and they laughed
together uneasily.

Ben said in a loud voice, "C'mon, let's walk up to the

western wall1."

He avoided looking about: he might see something, a

shrouded figure drifting among the stone angels, a
blackness that was not shadow.

Where was his father's tomb? In the moonlight, suddenly, he

could not recall the exact location of his father's grave: in
daylight, he thought, he would surely know. Which way was
north, where was the south?

He had lost his sense of direction. Why are we here, at this

hour? A dense ancient smell surrounded them, a compound
of dust and bones and all the yesterdays of the town, a long
decaying nothingness.

They were in the shadow of a mausoleum when a weight

slammed against his back and hurled him to the ground.
The impact of his fall cut off his cry. He fell again, into a pit
of pure terror. Lito and Ben were gone. A dark shape
towered over him. He sprang up to escape, and a hand
wrenched him back roughly.

His heart thudded like a bass drum in the graveyard silence.

The cold moist hand that gripped him twisted his arm; his
attacker loomed before him, the face dark and featureless in
the mausoleum shadow. Helpless and frozen, he tensed for
the final violence, the ultimate horror.

The hand released him, pushed him away, and he ran.

Sobbing, he ran back across the cemetery, clambering
blindly over the wall, his chest heaving as he ran through
the night alone. All the people had left the town, all the
houses were abandoned now. He was alone, pursued and
doomed; his cry for help would drift unheard among the
houses; no door would open for him, and the moonlight
would last forever.

But there was the house suddenly, with its veranda and its
many rooms, where his mother lived, and his sister, and the
strangers. A light burned in one of the boarders' rooms; they
had not left him. He leaned panting against the trunk of the
acacia in the yard. He could have collapsed onto the ground
and slept there until morning, drugged by the fatigue of his
terror.

He staggered up the back steps, numb with the relief of

being home. He rapped on the door, weakly; the rustle of a
mat, and the houseboy opened the door. In the unlighted
kitchen, he groped for the tap and drank, and his throat
ached with each swallow. He paused, and drank again, and
his heart eased at last into a slower beating.

The house was dark, and in the quietness he heard his

mother coughing. He tiptoed to his bed by a window, feeling
drained and hollow. And through the window, he saw Mina
and a man cross the yard, swiftly, like thieves escaping with
their loot, in the bright and soundless moonlight.

The Light and Shadow of Leaves

WHEN I first came to the town (his father said in the

darkness) it VSLS May in 1923; your Tio Emong and I took
the train from Manila and the bus from Tarlac, because then
the railway had no line to the western towns but cut on
straight to Dagupan. A cold rain fell; it was the first rain of
the season, bursting over the city in the night with sharp
cracklings of thunder, and it followed us into Bulacan and
Pampanga in the morning dusk. What kind of fiesta are you
having anyway — a river festival? I remarked with what I
thought was an ingenious irony. But I shouldn't worry, your
uncle said — the townsfolk would go on with the coronation
ball, come fire or high water; it was the social event of the
year; everyone would be at the plaza, even if it meant an
affair of raincoats and umbrellas. Admirable people, I said
glumly, imagining myself waltzing away in a knee-deep
flood, wearing a brave absurd smile against the endless
rain.

You never knew your Tio Emong. He was the eldest son of
Lola Isabel, and he died in an auto crash before you were
born. We were classmates at the University, and stayed in
the same boarding-house in Intramuros; I have this vivid
memory of him, in a habitual pose — his expression half-
smiling and thoughtful beneath the brim of his hat, a hand
kneading his chin — a fine young man, and as true and loyal
a friend as any one could hope to find in a lifetime. We were
like brothers; I had none; I didn't know it then, in the train in
the dim raining day, but his town would also become my
own.

The wet station-sheds, the flat sodden fields cancelled the

jubilant spirit in which I had accepted your uncle's invitation;
one didn't travel all these miles just to attend a rain-soaked
fiesta. I tried to console myself: there would be one
supremely lovely girl in the crowd, whose face one will be
warmed to remember, whose voice one will never forget. . .
Suddenly, past Angeles, we sped into noon sunlight, we
swung from shadow to brightness, the rain dropped away
like some boundary that separated the seasons; it was as
though we had moved into another day. The train seemed to
gather more speed, its whistle flying in gay broken pieces
over the windy fields. A man who had been dozing through
the sunless morning, his face covered by a Free Press,
jerked awake, lassoed us into conversation; he was
incredibly fat, I remember, with a shock of white hair, and
an enormous laugh. He offered us cigars; the pungent
tobacco made me a trifle dizzy, but we had run out of
Piedmont cigarettes. He was bound for Pangasinan, he said,
to visit daughter and grandchildren; he had a son, a
pensionado, in America; there was a strained good nature
about him, as if he were trying to stifle a loneliness with the
weight of his booming laughter. In Tarlac he shook hands
with us rather solemnly, wishing us the best of luck in the
world. You look like my son, tall and young, he said to me;
an old man, traveling alone. . .

Emong and I had lunch at the Pantranco station. Our bus left
at three, rumbling across the quiet drowsing provincial
capital to the dirt road that began at the other end of town.
The passengers, garrulous and laughing for the first mile or
two, were soon stunned to silence by the hot glare; cogon
wilted beside the dusty road; we passed Santa Ignacia, then
no more than a brown cluster of huts, and Santa Ines, more
than a decade away from the prosperity of its sugar mills.
Rain had oppressed me in the morning; now a paste of heat
coated my skin; the hard quaking bus would never stop.
Patience, we are almost there, said Emong. A river gleamed
between bamboo brakes; children paused in their play by
the road and waved us on toward the town. An arch
proclaimed welcome in red block letters, and finally the road
sloped down to the river; the bus shuddered to a halt on the
clay bank. The bridge had not been built, only a few piles
stood bare in the green water; rafts and outriggered bancas
ferried passengers to the poblacion. It would be years yet
before traffic could flow over the finished span.

Somewhere a band was playing a martial version of La

Paloma; the dying sun was in my eyes, and my first view of
the town was a golden blur of trees and houses on the
opposite bank. Rockets swished and banged in the clear sky,
and a high wind carried the white smoke-puffs into the
sunset haze. Emong knew our boatman and they had a
companionable laugh together, talking in the melodious
dialect that I too would soon learn; I trailed my hand in the
water, in the deep river; I felt the warm pull of the
undertow, constant and powerful. A fleet of calesas waited
for us, and the silver tinkle of their bells was a welcome,
too, along with the fireworks and an aroma of rice-cakes and
the band playing.

We rode down the main street — Calle Simon de Anda: it is

called Quezon Avenue now — the horsehooves clattering on
the cobblestones; and I looked at the town in the ancient
fading light, the balconied houses with their broad shell-
paned windows, the acacias with the evening already blue
and darkening among the leaves, and the plaza —

four hectares, Emong informed me with a grand gesture —

in the center of the town. And there, he said, is the Leonor
Rivera Auditorium, with its glorieta in the'middle, and that is
our church, the largest in the province; while the band
played La Golondrina on a platform in a corner of the square
and bells clanged and colored stars drifted down in the early
twilight.

I had visited other towns, had gone to other fiestas, like any
other young man; but never before this strange kinship, this
sudden happy recognition. Perhaps it was because I had
prepared myself to be disillusioned; the reality was at once
a happy surprise, and somehow, a sort of memory; I felt as
though I had lived here before, loved here my deepest love,
and I knew the names of the streets, the history of each
house, the blend of light and shadow under the trees. The
destiny that awaited me here must have touched me with
its prescient breath; we passed by your mother's house, and
I heard a piano, and Emong said: My cousin Luming, you'll
meet her at the ball tonight — only a name, but soon, after
one first glance at her, I would never be the same again.

Emong's house was a block away from your mother's on Del

Pilar Street; a massive house full of children; they swarmed
around us and played their noisy games until your Lola
Isabel shooed them all away.

Through the house ran a festive bustle, doors slamming,

people hurrying up and down the stairs, and I shed off
tiredness like a soiled shirt; I was happy I had come. In the
warm leaf-murmuring night beyond the windows music from
the plaza throbbed faintly, calling; voices laughed and called
in the lamplit street; something different and luminous and
wonderful, it seemed, had been promised everyone on this
summer night. After dinner, bathed and shaved and
pomaded, we set out for the dance in evening attire. We
were young and invincible, your uncle and I, and we would
never grow old and know grief and die; and we walked with
eager expectant leisure to the celebrations in the plaza,
through the strange and yet so familiar town.

I remember the faraway night with a precise and living

vividness, moment by moment, while time less distant has
lost its outlines, more recent faces have become anonymous
as in a faded photograph .. . The auditorium was an island of
light set in the middle of the wide plaza; beyond its skyward
glow hung a spray of stars; the orchestra in the kiosko was
fiddling a brisk rigodon. Emong pointed out your mother's
parents going through the paces of the dance — your
grandmother wore a Maria Clara costume with a noble
graceful air; your grandfather was a gaunt bemustached
man. The rigodon ended; at last we can dance, Emong said;
but the president of the Professionals Club had a little
speech to make, and after the polite applause, Emong
steered me toward his cousins where they sat in an
evening-gowned group, your mother and your Tia Mely and
a flock of cousins from Vigan.

In all my life I have never seen eyes lovelier than your

mother's; they spoke a soft, secret language; I would lose
myself in the depths of their meaning. Emong introduced
me. I wanted to talk to her at once, to possess her entire
attention. But she turned back to the girlish chatter of her
group; and I could only watch her profile, her lips forming
words; I would make her speak her truest self to me alone.
And the music began; but she had promised the first dance
to somebody, she said; perhaps the next? — and she rose
and she was tall and even lovelier, and it seemed an
amused question shone for a second in her glance.

She danced with a man from Gerona — a suitor, so she

would tell me later; she didn't love him, although she had
felt obliged to reward his fidelity with a measure of friendly
affection. But I didn't know that then; and while they danced
they conversed with an earnestness I found impossible not
to resent. Who was this man? What was he in her life?

Already I was jealous; I had fallen in love with her.

I was drawn to your mother as to a vision of a beautiful

heart-rending truth that, denied, could have driven me to
despair; it was that way, suddenly, dancing with her in the
Maytime night. I had met other women; I had known the joy
and the sadness of their love; but never had they inspired
that irrevocable commitment of one's entire being.

To be happy with her, that was not enough, it seemed; with

a little effort, one could be happy anywhere; I would
embrace pain for her sake. We talked about the city, I
remember, your mother and I; about the town, the
possibility of rain, about Emong and I turning into dis-
reputable physicians — her nose, I noted with delight,
crinkled when she laughed, and she had a slightly husky
voice; small talk, on my part an attempt at wit to fill a
silence and an awe within the enclosing music, while the
miserable longing beat in my blood.

Shortly before midnight the dancing ceased, a trumpet and

a flourish of drums stilled the crowd, and the entourage of
the fiesta queen entered glittering through the gate. Puring
Cabrera was the queen that year and Manoling Santos her
tuxedoed consort; Mang Tacio, the town poet, declaimed
fervently on her myriad charms and then Governor Agana
placed the crown on her royal head. And the dancing was
resumed with a vengeance, on the violin waves of melodies
one hears only in dreams now, "Sweet Hawaiian Moonlight,"
"The Song of the Volga Boatman"; and she would foxtrot
with the young man from Gerona, and waltz with me, and
tango to the other side of the pavilion with someone else in
love with her. If the night should never end —

but a group rose to leave, and another, and another

followed. She must go, she said; her cousins were waiting
for her.

We escorted them home, Emong and I, and the suitor from

Gerona; in the cool dawn there were only our voices and the
slow shuffle of our walking and the passage of a wind in the
tunneled trees. A life, a time of careless wandering youth
was over for me; I walked, through the town with your
mother, into the years of the future. The porch light shone
through the low-hanging branches of the acacia in the yard;
we said good night in the soft light and darkness; I managed
to touch her hand, I could only touch her hand, briefly, for
all the love that burned in me; and before she was lost in
the leafshadows it seemed the gentle inquiry twinkled again
in her eyes. I stood in the empty street, looking up at your
mother's house, at an illumined window veiled by leaves —

and I could have remained standing in front of the house

like a drunken fool till morning, breathing my love up toward
her window, if Emong had not been there to pull me away. .
.

But I would see her again, and I would write her reams of
letters from the city, humble and extravagant, fierce and
hopeful and lonely; I would come to the town on weekends,
as often as I could, that year, and the next, to visit her, in
the house on Del Pilar Street, in the high-ceilinged sala with
the pedestaled ferns and carved formal furniture; and stiff in
a starched collar and the rather cramped americana of
those days, beneath the stern portraits of another
generation, I would sit listening with a careful alertness to
your grandfather's discourse on Mr. Leonard Wood and
Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmena and complete,
immediate independence from America, while he stroked his
mustache and glared about him as though to challenge any
contrary opinion; until your mother would come to the room
at last and he would give me one final suspicious scrutiny
before leaving the two of us together — a marble-topped
table separated her from me, like some uncompromising
chaperone guarding her against the rage of my love.

Rain and sun and the train; the unbridged river, the lamp of
a calesa swinging down a street, cicadas in the peaceful
trees, and a tracery of light and leaf darkness moving across
your mother's face on an evening late in December when
she said she loved me too — all of it (his father said) haunts
me still, the tone of that distant time; the day dims softly,
suddenly, as though shadows of clouds were passing at
noon over the quiet town.
II

One night when he was eight years old, something — a door

closing, moonlight raying through the leaves — nudged him
to an instant wakefulness; he stared at the pale dark room,
and waited — and it was like being in the last portion of a
dream, that hushed moment in a dream before the elusive
face reveals itself and the question becomes spoken at last.
Beside him his brother Luis breathed on evenly; leaves
whispered on the roof; filtered moonlight shifted on a wall.
Whence heard the far music, it seemed an extension of the
dream, an echo rising out of the depths of his interrupted
sleep; and he lay there knowing, although he could not
phrase it in words, the immensity of the darkness, and his
place in it, a corner encircled by trees and glimmering light.

From the plaza, made farther by the night, the music came
in fragments on the wind; it said something about the
vastness of night, and a going away, somewhere. . . His
father and mother — where had they gone? When would
they return? It was late, late, and he was awake in the silent
house with the moonlight and the music straying through
the leaves.

He crossed the room and flicked on the light, reaching on

tiptoe for the switch; the room was as it had always been,
safe and familiar.

His elder brother turned on his side and mumbled and slept
on; they were to go this week to the city, for the Carnival —
it would be his first time; to talk about it was almost like
being there, in that magical land.

But Luis would only get angry if he would wake him now. . .
Where was everyone else? Was there no one to talk to him
now that he was awake in the night? The hallway was dark
beyond the door.

He peered into the cavern of the house; he recalled his dead

grandfather — once, the maids said, they had seen the
ghost of the bemustached old man creaking up the stairs.
But tonight he was no longer afraid; there was a light in the
room he shared with his brother.

He found the chain of the hall lamp, and smiled to see the
interior of the house flash into being, created from the
darkness — the latticed archway at the head of the stairs,
the pendulumed clock like a faithful servant stationed
against the wall. No ghost confronted him, only the striped
cat hunting mice under the chairs.

In the midnight hour he wandered with a new daring,

switching on lights and marveling at the splashes of
brightness where there had been the alien dark. He ate a
snack of fruit and crackers and, grateful for the company,
poured a saucer of milk for the cat. He was awake in the
deep living night; it was an achievement, in a class with the
first long journey from home, a masculine exploration. He
sat by a window to wait for his parents and struggled to
keep awake; when they arrived they found him curled
asleep in the chair, and in the morning he woke with a small
half-conscious remembrance of being carried back to bed in
his father's arms.

On the Sunday of the trip to Manila, he had a cold and fever.

His Papa and brother and sisters left without him; he cried
when he heard the car roar away; now he would hug his
illness close to him and die and they would be sorry for
having left him behind. His mother caressed his fevered
brow; he would surely go as soon as he got well, his mother
promised. But the Carnabal was over when they took him to
the city; the season was over, and the desolation of the fair
grounds was like the ruin of an enchanted country; and not
even a cowboy film at the Ideal and a treat at Tom's Dixie
Kitchen and all the toys and comic books piled on him could
quite soothe the special grief for what he had lost, the shine
and magic and joy of the Fair.

The city was his uncle Sebio's apartment in Paco, the

rumble of the tranvia, freighters on the Pasig, and the damp
iodine stench of the beach near the Luneta. He was
homesick through his two-week vacation; older boys
excluded him from their games, on the cemented central
court of the apartments strung with lines of wash. Home in
the town in Tarlac, he played soldier with Luis and the Dizon
boys from next door. They charged yelling war-whoops
under the cool trees, retreated and advanced again over
ground soaked with imaginary blood; the roofed green-
painted swing was their field hospital, and the nurses were
their sisters, Alice and Celia, ensnared the while from their
dolls.

And when he tired of the mock violence he could roller-skate

in the plaza, or unloose his kite into the winds; or best of all,
see the latest chapters of the jungle serial at the Cine
Filipinas, where he could go in free because the manager
was his father's compadre. Sometimes in the evenings his
Tia Upeng's friends would come to the house, and a young
man called Agustin would thump out medleys of popular
tunes on the piano, or they would play the Victrola, and
dance; and his father and mother would join the impromptu
party, his father twitching exaggeratedly in a conga and
everyone laughing; and it was 1939 and then 1940, and he
was in the first year of high school now, and one summer
his voice changed, it assumed a low uncertain timbre, with
an occasional falsetto note that embarrassed and
bewildered him. He was in love, forever he was sure, with
Elizabeth Reyes, a classmate who was somewhat of a
tomboy but could be mysteriously feminine when she
wanted to. He felt himself changing, growing into a new
identity

— even his face, he decided, had altered, from an oval

boyishness to the thinner angles of a young man's face that
was his father's, in a picture taken some twenty years ago. .
.

The rains came, storms lashed at the trees; night started

early, and with it, a peace, a certain warmth within the
house, the family gathered in the sala after supper as
around a fire lit against the cold prowling outside. But when
the phone rang a summons for his father to rush out into
the raining dark — a woman in labor, a dying child — the
boy grew aware of a loneliness in the keening wind. The
calm clear days returned, the churchbells rang for Mass and
the Angelus and for the living and the dead; the sun
warmed the new pale green leaves; the war was in North
Africa and in the barrage-ballooned skies of London

— a world away, abstract and remote. In October his mother

celebrated her birthday with a lechon picnic at their farm in
San Antonio, and driving home in the Oldsmobile they sang
all the Christmas songs they knew, and he asked his father
if this Christmas he could have a bicycle, and his father said
perhaps, and they teased him about the girl Elizabeth
Reyes, how he would show off to her with his feet on the
handle-bars and then go tumbling straight into a ditch.

His father had a clinic on Quezon Avenue, across from Mrs.

Concepcion's drug store; after his classes in the morning he

would pass for his father and they walked home together,
through dappled pools of acacia shade. This street was
cobbled when I first came to the town, his father would
remark; or nodding at a house — Mr. Galang, a good friend,
used to live there; and the son, trying to match his father's
stride, would experience a vague nostalgia, a disturbance as
subtle as the fall of dust in a stillness. The same sense of so
many unknown years, but sharp and restive now, beat in his
heart one evening in December of 1941, as he sat with his
family on the veranda, while truck convoys rumbled
somewhere in the town blackout, carrying brave doomed
men northward to fight on the invaded beaches.

In the night without lights, without shadows, he listened to

the soft voices; how strange; it was as though the war did
not surround them, the solid blackness. He could not see
their faces; even as he sat, he felt himself moving as in the
tides of a dream — moving toward the unknown and
dreadful face, the fatal question; he was eight again,
suddenly awake in the dark, but no strains of distant music
floated through the leaves. He waited, alone, for the final
frozen shape of the dream.

His father was saying: — that was in May 1923, and one had
to take the bus from Tarlac, because the train went to
Dagupan. It was a long journey, and the bridge had not
been built . . .

But how did you cross the river? his sister Celia asked. Did
you swim, Papa? f

There were boats, his father chuckled, for the bus

passengers. The river was much deeper then, and wider. . .

You came with Emong, his mother said.

Who is Emong, Mama? asked Luis.

My cousin. . . Your uncle. . . He and Papa were the best of
friends, his mother said. Then after a while: Papa and I were
married in the church, here in the town, and our yard was
filled with tables and people, and in the evening there was a
dance, with green and red and golden lanterns hanging from
the trees. . .

Announcing himself nervously, stumbling once on the steps,

Mr.

Dizon came up the porch. Where shall we go? Mr. Dizon

said, faceless in the dark. Should we stay on in town? His
father and Mr. Dizon discussed the war; it should be over by
January, his Papa said; rein-forcements were on the way; the
enemy would be driven into the sea and his paper cities
bombed to ashes. When a plane droned in the dangerous
sky, the voices ceased; the trucks had halted; and there was
only the vibration of the plane receding, and the new fear
and the breath of the long-ago peace merging in the tight
measured beating of the boy's heart.

III

April: the long rainless season is a glare of incandescent

heat in the shriveled fields; the diesel train rushes on into
mid-afternoon, its swaying hum inducing sleep and
disturbing it. He closes his eyes against the day and in the
reddish semi-dark thinks of his wife, the children, his
mother, his brother; and the purpose of his trip. . . Now this
question of selling the farm — it's the last piece of land they
have, but if the price is right. . . Money isn't everything, but
it helps — he smiles, without pleasure; a place of his own in
the suburbs, instead of the cramped fly-infested apartment
on a one-way street. . . His wife, pale, gentle and pregnant,
her anxious frown making her look more fragile, more need-
ful of his love; be happy, he whispers to her now in his mind;
be very happy. . . He dozes fitfully; the train slows down; but
it is only the provincial capital gliding nearer across the
fields, a scatter of galvanized iron roofs ablaze with sun, the
squat tower of the water reservoir like some giant
tombstone.

Then the stubbled earth again; he stares at the brown hills,

and beyond them the Zambales mountains under the glitter
of the sky, as if trying to recognize something. He wishes he
had someone to talk to, a friend to whom he might say:
We'll soon reach the town — I grew up there — it's been
years... The man beside him is engrossed in a paper-back
novel; a stranger with a life of his own, protected by an
invincible indifference. Finally the three hills on the horizon
arrange themselves into a particular formation that he has
known since boyhood homecomings; the town lies behind
these hills; an impatience stirs him from his seat to stand at
the window; the burned wind washes past him, a surf of
insistent voices. It is four o'clock; the sun is in his eyes, and
he peers as through a golden haze at the first unfolding
view of houses and river.

He takes a calesa from the railway station; the cochero

looks familiar, and he wonders if the old man might have
been one of his father's patients. . . Going over the concrete
low-railed bridge that has replaced the steel-girdered span
destroyed in the war, he notices the shallowness of the
river, the sandbars with children playing on them; the rice
mill on the riverbank has dumped its chaff in a yellow
mound that trails down to the water's edge. On an impulse,
although it is the longer way, he directs the rig driver to
pass through the main street; here, in a tangle of jeepney
traffic, the heat assails him with an almost palpable
pressure, while a moviehouse blares out a sound-track of
horsehooves and gunfire. A three-story hotel stands where
his father had rented space for a clinic; the drugstore in
front is still there, though, but bigger now, more prosperous-
looking, its refreshment counter crowded with customers.
The kiosko in the plaza appears smaller and weather-
beaten; nipa tiendas have sprouted in a corner of the
square, although the fiesta is still a whole month away;
workmen are giving the convento a new coat of paint; a new
parish priest. . .

In this part of town only the churchyard has kept its original
trees; as the calesa passes through their long shade, a soft
cool bird-chirping ripple of dimness and light, he feels an
abrupt uneasiness; a kind of longing presses on his chest
and is gone before his mind can reach and define it.
Something — it is like a phrase he cannot speak, on the tip
of his tongue; a remembrance without an image. . .

He looks with a numb curiosity at the faded houses on Del

Pilar Street, the aged baroque houses spared by both war
and fashion, the ornamented eaves, the verandillas, the
brick entresuelos preserved, as it were, at some point of
arrested decay. The same street; nothing, it appears, has
changed; and there's the gate with its trellis of vines; but
the acacia in the yard has been cut down, the trimmed
sawed-off trunk lies on the ground strewn with crushed
leaves. A wisp of bitter smoke curls toward him — the tree's
charcoaled stump burning slowly down to its roots in the
bright afternoon. Exposed to the unscreened sun, the
veranda seems to have sagged lower, become narrower; the
upstairs windows have a swept bareness, as after a storm.
He feels a puzzled dejection: in the cleared space there is an
absence, a loss more than of enclosing leaves.

A strange light fills the sala, the warm unshaded afternoon;

but except for the piano, which is now with his sister Alice,
the room has retained its dark-polished chairs, the antler
hat-rack, the marble table.

His sister-in-law Auring emerges from the kitchen, blinking

her surprised welcome. His brother is asleep, she says. No,
she shouldn't wake him up; and the children? Boys will be
boys, sighs Auring; they come home for meals, then skip out
again to heaven knows where.

He finds his mother propped up on pillows in her room. He

kisses her hollow parchment cheek, they smile at each
other, without words.

Her hair has turned white; but her eyes are shining darkly,
intense and alive. He helps her to an armchair, beside the
alcove of her saints; through the window wafts a faint slow
odor of smoke.

For a while they don't speak, and then his mother says: I
had the feeling you would come, Pepe. Last night, I had the
strongest feeling you would come to visit me.

I have the pills that you need, Mama. Auring wrote. Now you
are going to be all right.

The pains are not so bad any more, she says. Before, I could
not sleep. . . How is Lina?

The baby is due in September. Now I want a boy. I hope it's

going to be a boy.

I shall pray for a boy, for you.

Lina sent some things. Slippers, and a veil. Here, she got
them from a store in Plaza Santa Cruz.
They are very pretty. She should not have bothered, bless
her. The girls, how are the girls?

They're fine. Teresa can hardly wait to go to school. Baby

helps Lina with the cooking.

I miss them. Tell them to send their pictures to Lola.

The tree had to be cut down, his brother explains during

supper.

Anay had eaten half-way into the trunk; the tree might have
fallen on the house; a lot of firewood stacked in the garage
anyway. Later in the night he and Luis sit on the porch,
drinking beer. A few stars and a waning moon hover beyond
the eaves; the acacia stump glows redly in the yard, its
slightly acrid smoke lingering in the thick air. Luis tells him
about a case he is handling for a Chinese businessman;
flushed with beer, his stout bespectacled face has an
arrogant confidence; he is sure to outmaneuver the other
lawyer, a fresh graduate; the fee would be a tidy sum. And
as for sidelines — well, now, he has been lucky at poker
lately, Luis informs him, chuckling contentedly. And how is
life treating you, Pepe? He expects a raise very soon; the
company is expanding; otherwise it's the same old grind, a
trickle of savings for the future. He hesitates, peers into his
glass, the rehearsed words tight in his throat.

I have this friend, in Manila. Actually the brother-in-law of a

friend.

He wants to buy a farm — rice or sugar — anywhere, so long

as it can be reached by car. I was wondering. . .

Yes? His brother empties his glass and wipes the beer foam
from his lips with a characteristic rub of his hand.
That piece of land we have in Pitong Bayug, it's just the size
he wants. Maybe we could — sell it. This fellow Mallari has
the cash. . .

Luis goes into the house for more ice and San Miguel beer,
and sags heavily back on the rattan sofa; in repose his face
is an impassive mask. For what seems a long minute, they
do not speak; he can hear a dog barking, Vic Damone
singing on a radio across the street.

I've thought about it too, says Luis. A lot of times, in fact. It's
very good land, Pepe. It's never failed us, even when there
wasn't enough rain. . . Your friend won't be sorry if he gets
it, I can tell you that. . . He adds after a gulp of beer: Mama
won't like the idea, though.

Luis, maybe you could convince her. Luis, you have a way
with her, you could try.

Let's study the case — the small print, you know. Your
friend's not in a hurry, is he?

No. No, I don't think so. But this Mallari may get another
offer —

he's been looking around. He told me he's sick and tired of

the city, he wants to try farming, in the province — You
know the kind. . .

Why don't you bring him down for the fiesta? Maybe we can
talk business then.

That would be fine. We may come even earlier. Maybe next

week. . .

Let's you and I think about this some more, says Luis. About
the timing, and the price. . .
He rests, fatigued, against the chair, the tension relaxing in
his shoulders; nothing has been decided yet, but the
question has been asked, the problem spoken, defined at
last. His brother rambles on, between swallows of beer, with
a revived animation — maybe he should go into local
politics, run for mayor under the Nacionalistas — young
blood, that's what the town needs; a man with the courage
and compassion of a Magsaysay. Plans, guaranteed
schemes: one should know where one wants to go, then
plan the campaign with the precision and audacity of a
military tactician. He nods dully at his brother's enthusiasm,
mumbling his replies through a fog of tiredness.

He drags himself upstairs — the grandfather clock is gone, I

wonder what time it is — the same room, he realizes
drowsily, the chest of drawers in the same corner, but a new
bed, hard and uneven. He prays his shortened Act of
Contrition, and a Hail Mary, and drops into a chasm of sleep
as soon as he snuggles his head into the pillow.

In the deep, compressed dark before dawn he wakes up to

the slow burning smell rising from the yard. He hears a
sound beyond the held breath of the house, a leaf-murmur,
a distant wind; and a longing comes suddenly upon him, a
straining toward the inmost center of a memory — what is
this he must recall, what are these words he has forgotten
and cannot speak? Years of leaves, a certain quality of light
and shadow. . . He stares, troubled and restless, at the
congealed lattice patterns printed by the streetlight on a
wall, and at last, with a focused effort, he remembers
moments of the lost time lived in this house; he remembers
his father, and a night in the mountain village they had
thought safe from the war — they needed a doctor, said the
armed, bandoleered men fleeing from the pursuing enemy,
and his father had gone away with them into the silent
forest. . .
A cock-crow shrills across the dawn. He closes the window
against the smoke smell drifting into all the rooms of the
house, and returns to the unaccustomed bed, thinking: An
early train — be back before noon

— got to see Mallari about the land; sleepless now and

impatient for the morning.

Poems of Innocence,

Portraits of a Generation,

News for the Social Historian

A YOUNG MAN'S book, especially the first one, is Literature

with a capital L. As youth slips away, so does the big L from
literature, which takes its place as but one of the many
offices of a lifetime. After all, even the most devoted writer
also has to be, say, a husband, father, citizen, girl watcher,
or amateur astronomer.

But O for that time of youth when writing is the be-all and
end-all of existence! It's when the beginner, if he has any
talent at all, produces his most charming work. The later
product may have polish; but aura, a wonderful aura, is
what the early efforts have — and no wonder, considering
how rapt, dreamy, moody and exalted the young writer
usually feels when he's writing!

That haze of dawn is what gleams in the early stories of

Gregorio Brillantes, all the 20 of his 1961 collection, to
which he has added five more, also youthful, to form his
second book, The Distance to Andromeda (National Book
Store, 318 pages.) Actually he has added six stories, for the
preface counts as one of his best, though not among his
youthful, narratives.
That preface is a brief memoir: he is 17 or 18, has already
published some fiction in the weeklies, is still at the Ateneo.
At a dance party, an Assumption girl called Ditas asks him,
while they're dancing, why he writes. He is startled by her
question "because she was a cheerful, laughing girl, so
unlike the melancholy poetess he adored that year."

And he disappoints her. As she strains for his "brilliant,

magnificent, tremendous, unforgettable answer," he
mumbles a "vague, forgettable reply." The music ends and
he walks her back to her seat. When they meet again, a few
more times, she seems to have forgotten, or lost interest in,
her question. She marries and, a few years later, she's dead.

When he reads her obit, he remembers the night of the

dance and her question.

"Through the day or the space of an evening, he. . .

recreated and transformed her, as it were, so that she would
stand still and listen. . .

and he might at last begin to answer her question."

And the answer?

"Fiction, like life, is ultimately unquantifiable' and therefore

'one writes it with one's desire.' The author's desire, the
shape of it during the years he wrote these stories, is
evident enough in this collection.

They are the record of a young man's passage through a

particular time. . ."

As rites of passage, these stories report the aches of youth

in so heightened a language that they now read like poems,
poems from a pure age of innocence, a quality not quite
noticed when they first appeared because we were then all
so struck by the new note they sounded in Philippine fiction:
the religious motif.

As has been noted before, Philippine fiction in English had

hith-erto been remarkable for the complete absence in it of
a religious dimension; and what few writers, before
Brillantes, tried to bring this into our fiction did so with such
defiance and self-consciousness as to make it shrill and
unnatural.

There are no such false notes in Brillantes. The thing is not

"brought in" at all: it is already there, as a natural parf of the
scene, as an integral part of the native scene. That's the
Brillantes accomplishment. He made even the non-believer
see that religion, whether merely as cultural furniture (the
Sacred Heart on the stairway, the Last Supper in the dining
room) or as the very heart of the matter (the conflict
between creed and conduct), is as much a part of Philippine
life as pan de sal and adobo, as the weather and the news.

In fact, these Brillantes stories report on odd bit of news for

the social historian. A usual drama in fiction, especially the
fiction of or about the young, is the rebellion of the skeptic
young against the faith of their fathers. In Brillantes, the
struggle is reversed. It's the fathers who are skeptic, it's the
sons who suffer from faith.

The father in "The Exiles" can only smile in amusement to

hear that his son "talks with plaster saints." The boy priest
in "A Wind over the Earth," after performing the last rites for
an old man no longer vocally able to protest, recalls that his
own father died drunk — and wonders "how many of us die,
never knowing in this life the infinite love of God." And in
"Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro," the cynical father, having
seen his devout son baptize a dying baby, jestingly thinks of
asking his son: "Father, what must I do to gain eternal life?"
The roles have been reversed — and a portion of our history
illuminated. In the generation of Brillantes (or, anyway,
during the youth of that generation), the fathers can only
look down in amusement or anger or anguish at the devout
faith of their sons; the sons begin from this faithlessness of
their fathers.

And we suddenly realize the historical background for the

observation that our prewar fiction in English was without a
religious dimension — and also for the phenomenon that,
after the war, a Brillantes can be swiftly followed by a
Wilfredo Nolledo, a Renato Madrid, a Resil Mojares, and
others similarly "metaphysical." Their kind of writing would
have been unthinkable in the times of the Commonwealth1.

It's this "news" that the young Brillantes was (unwittingly?)

reporting.

And our present reactions indicate how accurate, even

merely as reportage, the early fiction of Brillantes is, a
fiction that provided us with a truer and deeper picture of
our society that can be gained from historical accounts. In
his story, "The Years," a birthday party is all the argument is
about — but in a few pages we get a poignant panorama of
one family, one town, one particular era, one particular
social class: the provincial gentry of the 1950s. We see the
clothes they wore, the houses they lived in, the food they
ate, even the minds they thought in. And the cars they rode
in — Oldsmobile and Chewies and Jeeps — are vivid enough
to be part of the cast.

Brillantes can be as graphic in his dialogue:

"We go dancing at the Nile and then drive around and

maybe park at El Faro. You'll like her, guy. Real class. Looks
like Pier Angeli. Dances the cha-cha like a queen. Right
down your alley, guy."

What a lot of memories not only the acute detail but the
exact idiom evokes!

Brillantes has since moved on to a larger fiction: "less

subjective and more ironic, more political, perhaps even
more religious and metaphysical." Even while being more
casual and profane. The novellas of his maturity are
certainly wry histories that grip the mind. But his early tales
are poems and they live in the heart. At least three of them

— and we're not telling which — belong on any list of great

Philippine fiction — Literature with a capital L.

Adapted from

Philippine Panorama,

June 29, 1980

About the Author

GREGORIO CONCEPCION BRILLANTES was born in Camiling,

Tarlac, and educated at the Ateneo de Manila. He was
executive editor of the Philippines Free Press, editor-in-chief
of Asia-Philippines Leader magazine in 1972, and has since
served as editor and writer for The Manila Review, Veritas,
National Midweek, Philippine Graphic and other journals.
Several of his short stories, collected in The Distance to
Andromeda and The Apollo Centennial, won Free Press,
Palanca and other awards, and have been anthologized in
the Philippines and in the U.S., and translated into German,
Czech, Japanese, Indonesian, Ma-laysian and other
languages. For his fiction and journalism, he received the
Southeast Asia Write Award from the Queen of Thailand, the
Gawad Para Sa Sining from the Cultural Center of the
Philippines, the Araw ng Maynila Award, Catholic Mass
Media and Catholic Authors awards, the Tawid Award from
the National Press Club and the Gawad Patnubay ni Balagtas
from the Writers Union of the Philippines.

A Palanca Hall of Fame honoree, he is a founding member of

the Philippine Chapter of International PEN and of the
Philippine Alumni Association of the East-West Center in
Hawaii. He and his wife, UP

languages professor Lourdes Castrillo Brillantes, have three

daughters and live in Santa Mesa Heights, Quezon City.