Survey of Philippine Literature

BIAG NI LAM-ANG (Life of Lam-ang) is a pre-Hispanic epic poem of the Ilocano people
of the Philippines. The story was handed down orally for generations before it was
written down around 1640 assumedly by a blind Ilokano bard named Pedro Bucaneg.

BUOD NG OF BIAG NI LAM-ANG

(SUMMARY OF BIAG NI LAM-ANG)

Don Juan and his wife Namongan lived in Nalbuan, now part of La Union in the northern
part of the Philippines. They had a son named Lam-ang. Before Lam-ang was born,
Don Juan went to the mountains in order to punish a group of their Igorot enemies.
While he was away, his son Lam-ang was born. It took four people to help Namongan
give birth. As soon as the baby boy popped out, he spoke and asked that he be given
the name Lam-ang. He also chose his godparents and asked where his father was.

After nine months of waiting for his father to return, Lam-ang decided he would go look
for him. Namongan thought Lam-ang was up to the challenge but she was sad to let
him go.

During his exhausting journey, he decided to rest for awhile. He fell asleep and had a
dream about his father’s head being stuck on a pole by the Igorot. Lam-ang was furious
when he learned what had happened to his father. He rushed to their village and killed
them all, except for one whom he let go so that he could tell other people about Lam-
ang’s greatness.

Upon returning to Nalbuan in triumph, he was bathed by women in the Amburayan river.
All the fish died because of the dirt and odor from Lam-ang’s body.

There was a young woman named Ines Kannoyan whom Lam-ang wanted to woo. She
lived in Calanutian and he brought along his white rooster and gray dog to visit her. On
the way, Lam-ang met his enemy Sumarang, another suitor of Ines whom he fought and
readily defeated.

Lam-ang found the house of Ines surrounded by many suitors all of whom were trying
to catch her attention. He had his rooster crow, which caused a nearby house to fall.
This made Ines look out. He had his dog bark and in an instant the fallen house rose up
again. The girl’s parents witnessed this and called for him. The rooster expressed the
love of Lam-ang. The parents agreed to a marriage with their daughter if Lam-ang
would give them a dowry valued at double their wealth. Lam-ang had no problem
fulfilling this condition and he and Ines were married.

It was a tradition to have a newly married man swim in the river for the rarang fish.
Unfortunately, Lam-ang dove straight into the mouth of the water monster Berkakan.
Ines had Marcos get his bones, which she covered with a piece of cloth. His rooster
crowed and his dog barked and slowly the bones started to move. Back alive, Lam-ang
and his wife lived happily ever after with his white rooster and gray dog.

Excerpt: [Link]
epics-mga-epiko-lam-ang-an-iloko-epic-bilingual-tagalog-english-version_789.html

The Maguindanao Tale of the Faithful Wife

(1) Once there lived in the Sultanate of Bandiamasir an aged man who had an only son.
They lived comfortably together until the time came for the boy to marry. He loved a girl
from the same town but before he could make any arrangements, his father fell ill and
was soon near death. He called his son to him and said “My son, never marry a balo
(widow) but a raga (young lady).”
(2) After his father died, the son made up his mind to find the meaning of his father’s
advice and forthwith married a raga. But he married two other women as well: a balo
and bituanem (divorce). As all three lived harmoniously together he kept puzzling over
the advice left to him by his father.
(3) One day a new Sultan ascended the throne as the old one had died. This new
Sultan turned loose his magnificent rooster and then proclaimed that whoever touched it
would be killed.
(4) When the son heard of this decree he was very glad because now he had a way of
testing his father’s advice. He caught the royal rooster and brought it home. Then he
called his three wives, showed them the rooster and said: “Kill the rooster and cook it for
my dinner.”
(5) The three women turned pale when they realized the meaning of what he said. The
balo and the bituanem immediately refused and hurriedly left the house, not wanting to
be implicated in the crime.
(6) The raga took the rooster, killed it and served it to her husband.
(7) Then he knew what his father meant by his dying words. Only the raga could be
faithful.

The Friar and the Filipino (Excerpt from El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal)
Vox populi, vox Dei

We left Isagani haranguing his friends. In the midst of his enthusiasm an usher
approached him to say that Padre Fernandez, one of the higher professors, wished to
talk with him. Isagani’s face fell. Padre Fernandez was a person greatly respected by
him, being the one always excepted by him whenever the friars were attacked.
“What does Padre Fernandez want?” he inquired.

The usher shrugged his shoulders and Isagani reluctantly followed him.

Padre Fernandez, the friar whom we met in Los Baños, was waiting in his cell, grave
and sad, with his brows knitted as if he were in deep thought. He arose as Isagani
entered, shook hands with him, and closed the door. Then he began to pace from one
end of the room to the other. Isagani stood waiting for him to speak.

“Señor Isagani,” he began at length with some emotion, “from the window I’ve heard
you speaking, for though I am a consumptive I have good ears, and I want to talk with
you. I have always liked the young men who express themselves clearly and have their
own way of thinking and acting, no matter that their ideas may differ from mine. You
young men, from what I have heard, had a supper last night. Don’t excuse yourself—”

“I don’t intend to excuse myself!” interrupted Isagani.

“So much the better—it shows that you accept the consequences of your actions.
Besides, you would do ill in retracting, and I don’t blame you, I take no notice of what
may have been said there last night, I don’t accuse you, because after all you’re free to
say of the Dominicans what seems best to you, you are not a pupil of ours—only this
year have we had the pleasure of having you, and we shall probably not have you
longer. Don’t think that I’m going to invoke considerations of gratitude; no, I’m not going
to waste my time in stupid vulgarisms. I’ve had you summoned here because I believe
that you are one of the few students who act from conviction, and, as I like men
of conviction, I’m going to explain myself to Señor Isagani.”

Padre Fernandez paused, then continued his walk with bowed head, his gaze riveted on
the floor.

“You may sit down, if you wish,” he remarked. “It’s a habit of mine to walk about while
talking, because my ideas come better then.”

Isagani remained standing, with his head erect, waiting for the professor to get to the
point of the matter.

“For more than eight years I have been a professor here,” resumed Padre Fernandez,
still continuing to pace back and forth, “and in that time I’ve known and dealt with more
than twenty-five hundred students. I’ve taught them, I’ve tried to educate them, I’ve tried
to inculcate in them principles of justice and of dignity, and yet in these days
when there is so much murmuring against us I’ve not seen one who has the temerity to
maintain his accusations when he finds himself in the presence of a friar, not even aloud
in the presence of any numbers. Young men there are who behind our backs
calumniate us and before us kiss our hands, with a base smile begging kind looks from
us! Bah! What do you wish that we should do with such creatures?”
“The fault is not all theirs, Padre,” replied Isagani. “The fault lies partly with those who
have taught them to be hypocrites, with those who have tyrannized over freedom of
thought and freedom of speech. Here every independent thought, every word that is not
an echo of the will of those in power, is characterized as filibusterism, and you know
well enough what that means. A fool would he be who to please himself would say
aloud what he thinks, who would lay himself liable to suffer persecution!”

“What persecution have you had to suffer?” asked Padre Fernandez, raising his head.
“Haven’t I let you express yourself freely in my class? Nevertheless, you are an
exception that, if what you say is true, I must correct, so as to make the rule as general
as possible and thus avoid setting a bad example.”

Isagani smiled. “I thank you, but I will not discuss with you whether I am an exception. I
will accept your qualification so that you may accept mine: you also are an exception,
and as here we are not going to talk about exceptions, nor plead for ourselves, at least,
I mean, I’m not, I beg of my professor to change the course of the conversation.”

In spite of his liberal principles, Padre Fernandez raised his head and stared in surprise
at Isagani. That young man was more independent than he had thought—although he
called him professor, in reality he was dealing with him as an equal, since he allowed
himself to offer suggestions. Like a wise diplomat, Padre Fernandez not only recognized
the fact but even took his stand upon it.

“Good enough!” he said. “But don’t look upon me as your professor. I’m a friar and you
are a Filipino student, nothing more nor less! Now I ask you—what do the Filipino
students want of us?”

The question came as a surprise; Isagani was not prepared for it. It was a thrust made
suddenly while they were preparing their defense, as they say in fencing. Thus startled,
Isagani responded with a violent stand, like a beginner defending himself.

“That you do your duty!” he exclaimed.

Fray Fernandez straightened up—that reply sounded to him like a cannon-shot. “That
we do our duty!” he repeated, holding himself erect. “Don’t we, then, do our duty? What
duties do you ascribe to us?”

“Those which you voluntarily placed upon yourselves on joining the order, and those
which afterwards, once in it, you have been willing to assume. But, as a Filipino student,
I don’t think myself called upon to examine your conduct with reference to your statutes,
to Catholicism, to the government, to the Filipino people, and to humanity in general—
those are questions that you have to settle with your founders, with the Pope, with the
government, with the whole people, and with God. As a Filipino student, I will confine
myself to your duties toward us. The friars in general, being the local supervisors of
education in the provinces, and the Dominicans in particular, by monopolizing
in their hands all the studies of the Filipino youth, have assumed the obligation to its
eight millions of inhabitants, to Spain, and to humanity, of which we form a part, of
steadily bettering the young plant, morally and physically, of training it toward its
happiness, of creating a people honest, prosperous, intelligent, virtuous, noble, and
loyal. Now I ask you in my turn—have the friars fulfilled that obligation of theirs?”
“We’re fulfilling—”

“Ah, Padre Fernandez,” interrupted Isagani, “you with your hand on your heart can say
that you are fulfilling it, but with your hand on the heart of your order, on the heart of all
the orders, you cannot say that without deceiving yourself. Ah, Padre Fernandez, when
I find myself in the presence of a person whom I esteem and respect, I prefer to be the
accused rather than the accuser, I prefer to defend myself rather than take the
offensive. But now that we have entered upon the discussion, let us carry it to the end!
How do they fulfill their obligation, those who look after education in the towns? By
hindering it! And those who here monopolize education, those who try to mold the mind
of youth, to the exclusion of all others whomsoever, how do they carry out their
mission? By curtailing knowledge as much as possible, by extinguishing all ardor and
enthusiasm, by trampling on all dignity, the soul’s only refuge, by inculcating in us worn-
out ideas, rancid beliefs, false principles incompatible with a life of progress! Ah, yes,
when it is a question of feeding convicts, of providing for the maintenance of criminals,
the government calls for bids in order to find the purveyor who offers the best means of
subsistence, he who at least will not let them perish from hunger, but when it is a
question of morally feeding a whole people, of nourishing the intellect of youth, the
healthiest part, that which is later to be the country and the all, the government not only
does not ask for any bid, but restricts the power to that very body which makes a boast
of not desiring education, of wishing no advancement. What should we say if the
purveyor for the prisons, after securing the contract by intrigue, should then leave the
prisoners to languish in want, giving them only what is stale and rancid, excusing
himself afterwards by saying that it is not convenient for the prisoners to enjoy good
health, because good health brings merry thoughts, because merriment improves the
man, and the man ought not to be improved, because it is to the purveyor’s interest that
there be many criminals? What should we say if afterwards the government and the
purveyor should agree between themselves that of the ten or twelve cuartos which one
received for each criminal, the other should receive five?”

Padre Fernandek bit his lip. “Those are grave charges,” he said, “and you are
overstepping the limits of our agreement.”

“No, Padre, not if I continue to deal with the student question. The friars—and I do not
say, you friars, since I do not confuse you with the common herd—the friars of all the
orders have constituted themselves our mental purveyors, yet they say and
shamelessly proclaim that it is not expedient for us to become enlightened, because
some day we shall declare ourselves free! That is just the same as not wishing the
prisoner to be well-fed so that he may improve and get out of prison. Liberty is to man
what education is to the intelligence, and the friars’ unwillingness that we have it is the
origin of our discontent.”
“Instruction is given only to those who deserve it,” rejoined Padre Fernandez dryly. “To
give it to men without character and without morality is to prostitute it.”

“Why are there men without character and without morality?”

The Dominican shrugged his shoulders. “Defects that they imbibe with their mothers’
milk, that they breathe in the bosom of the family—how do I know?”

“Ah, no, Padre Fernandez!” exclaimed the young man impetuously. “You have not
dared to go into the subject deeply, you have not wished to gaze into the depths from
fear of finding yourself there in the darkness of your brethren. What we are, you have
made us. A people tyrannized over is forced to be hypocritical; a people denied the truth
must resort to lies; and he who makes himself a tyrant breeds slaves. There is no
morality, you say, so let it be—even though statistics can refute you in that here are not
committed crimes like those among other peoples, blinded by the fumes of their
moralizers. But, without attempting now to analyze what it is that forms the character
and how far the education received determines morality, I will agree with you that we
are defective. Who is to blame for that? You who for three centuries and a half have had
in your hands our education, or we who submit to everything? If after three centuries
and a half the artist has been able to produce only a caricature, stupid indeed he must
be!”

“Or bad enough the material he works upon.”

“Stupider still then, when, knowing it to be bad, he does not give it up, but goes on
wasting time. Not only is he stupid, but he is a cheat and a robber, because he knows
that his work is useless, yet continues to draw his salary. Not only is he stupid and a
thief, he is a villain in that he prevents any other workman from trying his skill to see if
he might not produce something worth while! The deadly jealousy of the incompetent!”

The reply was sharp and Padre Fernandez felt himself caught. To his gaze Isagani
appeared gigantic, invincible, convincing, and for the first time in his life he felt beaten
by a Filipino student. He repented of having provoked the argument, but it was too late
to turn back. In this quandary, finding himself confronted with such a formidable
adversary, he sought a strong shield and laid hold of the government.

“You impute all the faults to us, because you see only us, who are near,” he said in a
less haughty tone. “It’s natural and doesn’t surprise me. A person hates the soldier or
policeman who arrests him and not the judge who sends him to prison. You and we are
both dancing to the same measure of music—if at the same note you lift your foot in
unison with us, don’t blame us for it, it’s the music that is directing our movements. Do
you think that we friars have no consciences and that we do not desire what is right? Do
you believe that we do not think about you, that we do not heed our duty, that we only
eat to live, and live to rule? Would that it were so! But we, like you, follow the
cadence, finding ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis: either you reject us or the
government rejects us. The government commands, and he who commands,
commands,—and must be obeyed!”

“From which it may be inferred,” remarked Isagani with a bitter smile, “that the
government wishes our demoralization.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that! What I meant to say is that there are beliefs, there are
theories, there are laws, which, dictated with the best intention, produce the most
deplorable consequences. I’ll explain myself better by citing an example. To stamp out a
small evil, there are dictated many laws that cause greater evils still: ‘corruptissima in
republica plurimae leges,’ said Tacitus. To prevent one case of fraud, there are provided
a million and a half preventive or humiliating regulations, which produce the immediate
effect of awakening in the public the desire to elude and mock such regulations. To
make a people criminal, there’s nothing more needed than to doubt its virtue. Enact a
law, not only here, but even in Spain, and you will see how the means of evading it will
be sought, and this is for the very reason that the legislators have overlooked the fact
that the more an object is hidden, the more a sight of it is desired. Why are rascality and
astuteness regarded as great qualities in the Spanish people, when there is no
other so noble, so proud, so chivalrous as it? Because our legislators, with the best
intentions, have doubted its nobility, wounded its pride, challenged its chivalry! Do you
wish to open in Spain a road among the rocks? Then place there an imperative notice
forbidding the passage, and the people, in order to protest against the order, will
leave the highway to clamber over the rocks. The day on which some legislator in Spain
forbids virtue and commands vice, then all will become virtuous!”

The Dominican paused for a brief space, then resumed: “But you may say that we are
getting away from the subject, so I’ll return to it. What I can say to you, to convince you,
is that the vices from which you suffer ought to be ascribed by you neither to us nor to
the government. They are due to the imperfect organization of our social system:
qui multum probat, nihil probat, one loses himself through excessive caution, lacking
what is necessary and having too much of what is superfluous.”

“If you admit those defects in your social system,” replied Isagani, “why then do you
undertake to regulate alien societies, instead of first devoting your attention to
yourselves?”

“We’re getting away from the subject, young man. The theory in accomplished facts
must be accepted.”

“So let it be! I accept it because it is an accomplished fact, but I will further ask: why, if
your social organization is defective, do you not change it or at least give heed to the
cry of those who are injured by it?”

“We’re still far away. Let’s talk about what the students want from the friars.”
“From the moment when the friars hide themselves behind the government, the
students have to turn to it.”

This statement was true and there appeared no means of ignoring it.

“I’m not the government and I can’t answer for its acts. What do the students wish us to
do for them within the limits by which we are confined?”
“Not to oppose the emancipation of education but to favor it.”

The Dominican shook his head. “Without stating my own opinion, that is asking us to
commit suicide,” he said.

“On the contrary, it is asking you for room to pass in order not to trample upon and
crush you.”

“Ahem!” coughed Padre Fernandez, stopping and remaining thoughtful. “Begin by

asking something that does not cost so much, something that any one of us can grant
without abatement of dignity or privilege, for if we can reach an understanding and dwell
in peace, why this hatred, why this distrust?”

“Then let’s get down to details.”

“Yes, because if we disturb the foundation, we’ll bring down the whole edifice.”

“Then let’s get down to details, let’s leave the region of abstract principles,” rejoined
Isagani with a smile, “and also without stating my own opinion,”—the youth accented
these words—“the students would desist from their attitude and soften certain asperities
if the professors would try to treat them better than they have up to the present. That is
in their hands.”

“What?” demanded the Dominican. “Have the students any complaint to make about my
conduct?”

“Padre, we agreed from the start not to talk of yourself or of myself, we’re speaking
generally. The students, besides getting no great benefit out of the years spent in the
classes, often leave there remnants of their dignity, if not the whole of it.”

Padre Fernandez again bit his lip. “No one forces them to study—the fields are
uncultivated,” he observed dryly.

“Yes, there is something that impels them to study,” replied Isagani in the same tone,
looking the Dominican full in the face. “Besides the duty of every one to seek his own
perfection, there is the desire innate in man to cultivate his intellect, a desire the more
powerful here in that it is repressed. He who gives his gold and his life to the State has
the right to require of it opporttmity better to get that gold and better to care for his life.
Yes, Padre, there is something that impels them, and that something is the government
itself. It is you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule the uncultured Indian and deny him his
rights, on the ground that he is ignorant. You strip him and then scoff at his nakedness.”

Padre Fernandez did not reply, but continued to pace about feverishly, as though very
much agitated.

“You say that the fields are not cultivated,” resumed Isagani in a changed tone, after a
brief pause. “Let’s not enter upon an analysis of the reason for this, because we should
get far away. But you, Padre Fernandez, you, a teacher, you, a learned man, do you
wish a people of peons and laborers? In your opinion, is the laborer the perfect state at
which man may arrive in his development? Or is it that you wish knowledge for yourself
and labor for the rest?”

“No, I want knowledge for him who deserves it, for him who knows how to use it,” was
the reply. “When the students demonstrate that they love it, when young men of
conviction appear, young men who know how to maintain their dignity and make it
respected, then there will be knowledge, then there will be considerate professors!
If there are now professors who resort to abuse, it is because there are pupils who
submit to it.”

“When there are professors, there will be students!”

“Begin by reforming yourselves, you who have need of change, and we will follow.”
“Yes,” said Isagani with a bitter laugh, “let us begin it, because the difficulty is on our
side. Well you know what is expected of a pupil who stands before a professor—you
yourself, with all your love of justice, with all your kind
sentiments, have been restraining yourself by a great effort while I have been telling you
bitter truths, you yourself, Padre Fernandez! What good has been secured by him
among us who has tried to inculcate other ideas? What evils have not fallen upon you
because you have tried to be just and perform your duty?”

“Señor Isagani,” said the Dominican, extending his hand, “although it may seem that
nothing practical has resulted from this conversation, yet something has been gained.
I’ll talk to my brethren about what you have told me and I hope that something can be
done. Only I fear that they won’t believe in your existence.”

“I fear the same,” returned Isagani, shaking the Dominican’s hand. “I fear that my
friends will not believe in your existence, as you have revealed yourself to me today.”1

Considering the interview at an end, the young man took his leave.

Padre Fernandez opened the door and followed him with his gaze until he disappeared
around a corner in the corridor. For some time he listened to the retreating footsteps,
then went back into his cell and waited for the youth to appear in the street.
He saw him and actually heard him say to a friend who asked where he was going: “To
the Civil Government! I’m going to see the pasquinades and join the others!”

His startled friend stared at him as one would look at a person who is about to commit
suicide, then moved away from him hurriedly.

“Poor boy!” murmured Padre Fernandez, feeling his eyes moisten. “I grudge you to the
Jesuits who educated you.”

But Padre Fernandez was completely mistaken; the Jesuits repudiated Isagani2 when
that afternoon they learned that he had been arrested, saying that he would
compromise them. “That young man has thrown himself away, he’s going to do us
harm! Let it be understood that he didn’t get those ideas here.”

Nor were the Jesuits wrong. No! Those ideas come only from God through the medium
of Nature.

DEAD STARS by Paz Marquez Benitez

Photo courtesy of NASA

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly
enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had
made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush–they lost
concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation
issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering
away among the rose pots.
“Papa, and when will the ‘long table’ be set?”
“I don’t know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be
next month.”
Carmen sighed impatiently. “Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over
thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting.”
“She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either,” Don Julian nasally commented,
while his rose scissors busily snipped away.
“How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?” Carmen returned,
pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. “Papa, do you remember how
much in love he was?”
“In love? With whom?”
“With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of,” she said
with good-natured contempt. “What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic–
flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that–”
Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less
than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was
not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night
when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza,
man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love–he seemed to have missed it. Or
was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an
exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made
up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of
soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it,
was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days,
the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when
something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to
see. “Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it,” someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he
had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the
way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much
engaged to Esperanza.
Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so
many. Greed–the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to
squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but
half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for
immediate excitement. Greed–mortgaging the future–forcing the hand of Time, or of
Fate.
“What do you think happened?” asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.
“I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they
are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to
prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament–or of affection–on the part of
either, or both.” Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking now with an evident
relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. “That
phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it,
was Alfredo’s last race with escaping youth–”
Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother’s perfect physical repose–almost
indolence–disturbed in the role suggested by her father’s figurative language.
“A last spurt of hot blood,” finished the old man.
Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had
amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall
and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight
recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer’s eyes,
and astonishing freshness of lips–indeed Alfredo Salazar’s appearance betokened little
of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with
keen, clear brain.
He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps;
then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate
which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road
bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.
The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open
porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.
Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house,
rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas
meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now–
One evening he had gone “neighboring” with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence,
since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This
particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. “A little mental
relaxation now and then is beneficial,” the old man had said. “Besides, a judge’s good
will, you know;” the rest of the thought–“is worth a rising young lawyer’s trouble”–Don
Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.
A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the
Judge’s children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic
Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted–the judge limiting himself to a casual
“Ah, ya se conocen?”–with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle
throughout the evening.
He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her
thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge’s sister, as he had
supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified
rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it
was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.
To his apology, she replied, “That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I
remembered a similar experience I had once before.”
“Oh,” he drawled out, vastly relieved.
“A man named Manalang–I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the
young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, ‘Pardon me, but my name is
Manalang, Manalang.’ You know, I never forgave him!”
He laughed with her.
“The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out,” she pursued, “is to
pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without help.”
“As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I–”
“I was thinking of Mr. Manalang.”
Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of
chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory
conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch.
The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and banged away as the player’s
moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had
such a charming speaking voice.
He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister
of the Judge’s wife, although Doña Adela was of a different type altogether. She was
small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately
modeled hips–a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a
likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and
lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson
which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.
On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road
to the house on the hill. The Judge’s wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian
enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought
out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low
hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours–warm, quiet March hours–sped by.
He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet what
feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course.
Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some
uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.
Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly
realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of
the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go “neighboring.”
He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful,
added, “Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle’s.”
She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies.
She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate
feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if
he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman.
That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving
Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something
that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.
It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and
so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows
around, enfolding.
“Up here I find–something–”
He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted
intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, “Amusement?”
“No; youth–its spirit–”
“Are you so old?”
“And heart’s desire.”
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
“Down there,” he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, “the road is too broad,
too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery.”
“Down there” beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the
darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere,
bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.
“Mystery–” she answered lightly, “that is so brief–”
“Not in some,” quickly. “Not in you.”
“You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery.”
“I could study you all my life and still not find it.”
“So long?”
“I should like to.”
Those six weeks were now so swift–seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep
in the living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the
past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day,
lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer
moments.
Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday
afternoon at Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach.
Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She and Doña Adela spent most of
the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable
absurdities of their husbands–how Carmen’s Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that
he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit to her father; how Doña
Adela’s Dionisio was the most absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his
collar, or with unmatched socks.
After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving
young coconut looked like–“plenty of leaves, close set, rich green”–while the children,
convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the rippling sand left by the
ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined
against the gray of the out-curving beach.
Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her
footsteps, narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he
removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.
When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.
“I hope you are enjoying this,” he said with a questioning inflection.
“Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach.”
There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and
whipped the tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was
something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction.
Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more
compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was
there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny temper,
and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.
“The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn’t it?” Then, “This, I think, is the last time–
we can visit.”
“The last? Why?”
“Oh, you will be too busy perhaps.”
He noted an evasive quality in the answer.
“Do I seem especially industrious to you?”
“If you are, you never look it.”
“Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be.”
“But–”
“Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm.” She smiled to herself.
“I wish that were true,” he said after a meditative pause.
She waited.
“A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid.”
“Like a carabao in a mud pool,” she retorted perversely
“Who? I?”
“Oh, no!”
“You said I am calm and placid.”
“That is what I think.”
“I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves.”
It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert
phrase.
“I should like to see your home town.”
“There is nothing to see–little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them,
and sometimes squashes.”
That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal
more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him.
“Nothing? There is you.”
“Oh, me? But I am here.”
“I will not go, of course, until you are there.”
“Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn’t even one American there!”
“Well–Americans are rather essential to my entertainment.”
She laughed.
“We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees.”
“Could I find that?”
“If you don’t ask for Miss del Valle,” she smiled teasingly.
“I’ll inquire about–”
“What?”
“The house of the prettiest girl in the town.”
“There is where you will lose your way.” Then she turned serious. “Now, that is not quite
sincere.”
“It is,” he averred slowly, but emphatically.
“I thought you, at least, would not say such things.”
“Pretty–pretty–a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that
quite–”
“Are you withdrawing the compliment?”
“Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye–it is more than
that when–”
“If it saddens?” she interrupted hastily.
“Exactly.”
“It must be ugly.”
“Always?”
Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of
crimsoned gold.
“No, of course you are right.”
“Why did you say this is the last time?” he asked quietly as they turned back.
“I am going home.”
The end of an impossible dream!
“When?” after a long silence.
“Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to
spend Holy Week at home.”
She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. “That is why I said this is the last time.”
“Can’t I come to say good-bye?”
“Oh, you don’t need to!”
“No, but I want to.”
“There is no time.”
The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool
far away at the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does
solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all
violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked
into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.
“Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life.”
“I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things.”
“Old things?”
“Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage.” He said it lightly, unwilling to
mar the hour. He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling
second.
Don Julian’s nasal summons came to them on the wind.
Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face
away, but he heard her voice say very low, “Good-bye.”
II
ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and
entered the heart of the town–heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs,
of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a
cluttered goldsmith’s cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens;
heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers on the door; heart
of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convento, now circled
by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly
deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent
summons. Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid
apparel (for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober
black skirts. Came too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay
tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on display
while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes, heirlooms from
a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device.
Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of
the street like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints’
platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices of the choir,
steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.
The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows
suddenly destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into
component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look unaware, and
could not.
The line moved on.
Suddenly, Alfredo’s slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming
down the line–a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause
violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life.
Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.
The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then
back again, where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.
At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir,
whose voices now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the
procession.
A round orange moon, “huge as a winnowing basket,” rose lazily into a clear sky,
whitening the iron roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely
shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males loitered and, maybe,
took the longest way home.
Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd
had dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It
was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while: yet the thought
did not hurry him as he said “Good evening” and fell into step with the girl.
“I had been thinking all this time that you had gone,” he said in a voice that was both
excited and troubled.
“No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go.”
“Oh, is the Judge going?”
“Yes.”
The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned
elsewhere. As lawyer–and as lover–Alfredo had found that out long before.
“Mr. Salazar,” she broke into his silence, “I wish to congratulate you.”
Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.
“For what?”
“For your approaching wedding.”
Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?
“I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow
about getting the news,” she continued.
He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard
nothing to enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early
acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice–cool, almost detached from
personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.
“Are weddings interesting to you?” he finally brought out quietly
“When they are of friends, yes.”
“Would you come if I asked you?”
“When is it going to be?”
“May,” he replied briefly, after a long pause.
“May is the month of happiness they say,” she said, with what seemed to him a shade
of irony.
“They say,” slowly, indifferently. “Would you come?”
“Why not?”
“No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?”
“If you will ask me,” she said with disdain.
“Then I ask you.”
“Then I will be there.”
The gravel road lay before them; at the road’s end the lighted windows of the house on
the hill. There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain,
a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the present were not, and
that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace
of home.
“Julita,” he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, “did you ever have to choose between
something you wanted to do and something you had to do?”
“No!”
“I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who
was in such a situation.”
“You are fortunate,” he pursued when she did not answer.
“Is–is this man sure of what he should do?”
“I don’t know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and
rushes downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether
one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him.”
“But then why–why–” her muffled voice came. “Oh, what do I know? That is his problem
after all.”
“Doesn’t it–interest you?”
“Why must it? I–I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house.”
Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.
Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled
in his mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near
wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and
Esperanza herself–Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the
efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.
He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of
aversion which he tried to control.
She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable
appearance. She never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling
reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman
past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a slight
convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious care, even elegance; a
woman distinctly not average.
She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about
Calixta, their note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding
imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: “Well, what of it?” The remark
sounded ruder than he had intended.
“She is not married to him,” Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice.
“Besides, she should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never
thought she would turn out bad.”
What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?
“You are very positive about her badness,” he commented dryly. Esperanza was always
positive.
“But do you approve?”
“Of what?”
“What she did.”
“No,” indifferently.
“Well?”
He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. “All
I say is that it is not necessarily wicked.”
“Why shouldn’t it be? You talked like an–immoral man. I did not know that your ideas
were like that.”
“My ideas?” he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. “The only test I
wish to apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am
justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she is not married–is
that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not.”
“She has injured us. She was ungrateful.” Her voice was tight with resentment.
“The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are–” he stopped, appalled by the passion
in his voice.
“Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have
been indifferent to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some
are trying to keep from me.” The blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing
sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?
“Why don’t you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of
what people will say.” Her voice trembled.
Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What
people will say–what will they not say? What don’t they say when long engagements
are broken almost on the eve of the wedding?
“Yes,” he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, “one tries to be fair–
according to his lights–but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one’s self first. But that
is too easy, one does not dare–”
“What do you mean?” she asked with repressed violence. “Whatever my shortcomings,
and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my
place, to find a man.”
Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a
covert attack on Julia Salas?
“Esperanza–” a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. “If you–suppose I–” Yet how
could a mere man word such a plea?
“If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of–why don’t you tell me
you are tired of me?” she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely
shamed and unnerved.
The last word had been said.
III
AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the
lake, he wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He
was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine Islands
vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not
been so important to the defense. He had to find that elusive old woman. That the
search was leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia Salas’ home should
not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to the
prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight
years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he
could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too
much. The climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness,
and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up
sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not
heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.
He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to
what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had
simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions that got a man
nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The
essential himself, the himself that had its being in the core of his thought, would, he
reflected, always be free and alone. When claims encroached too insistently, as
sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw
things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At
such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but
immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.
Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town
nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the
ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous
mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple shadows of the hills. There
was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to
the darker blues of evening.
The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the
dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet
the boat–slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-shore speech. From
where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether
the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted.
“Is the abogado there? Abogado!”
“What abogado?” someone irately asked.
That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.
It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida
Samuy–Tandang “Binday”–that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar’s second letter had
arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, “Go and meet the abogado and invite him
to our house.”
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the
boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his
first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an answer. “Yes,” the
policeman replied, “but he could not write because we heard that Tandang Binday was
in San Antonio so we went there to find her.”
San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do
something for him. It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.
Eight o’clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a
somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to
be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His
heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles
driven into the water.
How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light
issuing forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An occasional
couple sauntered by, the women’s chinelas making scraping sounds. From a distance
came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street–tubigan perhaps, or
“hawk-and-chicken.” The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a
pitying sadness.
How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her?
That unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of
incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married–why?
Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was
something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant
trifles–a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a dream–at times
moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished prayer.
A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon
wove indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its
angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock’s
first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.
Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would
surely be sitting at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The
house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable
relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.
“Good evening,” he said, raising his hat.
“Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?”
“On some little business,” he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.
“Won’t you come up?”
He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the
window, calling to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs
with a lighted candle to open the door. At last–he was shaking her hand.
She had not changed much–a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had
gone. He missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She
asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative
tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing wonder that he should
be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the
loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze. The girl must have
noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.
Gently–was it experimentally?–he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt
undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly
interested him.
The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-
studded sky.
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
So all these years–since when?–he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long
extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some
immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where
live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.
This is the 1925 short story that gave birth to modern Philippine writing in English.

How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife

(American Colonial Literature)
By Manuel E. Arguilla
She stepped down from the carretela of Ca Celin with a quick, delicate grace. She was
lovely. SHe was tall. She looked up to my brother with a smile, and her forehead was on
a level with his mouth.

"You are Baldo," she said and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. Her nails were
long, but they were not painted. She was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in
bloom. And a small dimple appeared momently high on her right cheek. "And this is
Labang of whom I have heard so much." She held the wrist of one hand with the other
and looked at Labang, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud. He swallowed and
brought up to his mouth more cud and the sound of his insides was like a drum.

I laid a hand on Labang's massive neck and said to her: "You may scratch his forehead
now."

She hesitated and I saw that her eyes were on the long, curving horns. But she came
and touched Labang's forehead with her long fingers, and Labang never stopped
chewing his cud except that his big eyes half closed. And by and by she was scratching
his forehead very daintily.

My brother Leon put down the two trunks on the grassy side of the road. He paid Ca
Celin twice the usual fare from the station to the edge of Nagrebcan. Then he was
standing beside us, and she turned to him eagerly. I watched Ca Celin, where he stood
in front of his horse, and he ran his fingers through its forelock and could not keep his
eyes away from her.
"Maria---" my brother Leon said.

He did not say Maring. He did not say Mayang. I knew then that he had always called
her Maria and that to us all she would be Maria; and in my mind I said 'Maria' and it was
a beautiful name.

"Yes, Noel."

Now where did she get that name? I pondered the matter quietly to myself, thinking
Father might not like it. But it was only the name of my brother Leon said backward and
it sounded much better that way.

"There is Nagrebcan, Maria," my brother Leon said, gesturing widely toward the west.

She moved close to him and slipped her arm through his. And after a while she said
quietly.

"You love Nagrebcan, don't you, Noel?"

Ca Celin drove away hi-yi-ing to his horse loudly. At the bend of the camino real where
the big duhat tree grew, he rattled the handle of his braided rattan whip against the
spokes of the wheel.

We stood alone on the roadside.

The sun was in our eyes, for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide and
deep and very blue above us: but along the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the
southwest flamed huge masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a golden haze
through which floated big purple and red and yellow bubbles when I looked at the
sinking sun. Labang's white coat, which I had wshed and brushed that morning with
coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and his horns appeared
tipped with fire.

He faced the sun and from his mouth came a call so loud and vibrant that the earth
seemed to tremble underfoot. And far away in the middle of the field a cow lowed softly
in answer.

"Hitch him to the cart, Baldo," my brother Leon said, laughing, and she laughed with him
a big uncertainly, and I saw that he had put his arm around her shoulders.

"Why does he make that sound?" she asked. "I have never heard the like of it."

"There is not another like it," my brother Leon said. "I have yet to hear another bull call
like Labang. In all the world there is no other bull like him."

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

"If you continue to talk about him like that, either I shall fall in love with him or become
greatly jealous."

My brother Leon laughed and she laughed and they looked at each other and it seemed
to me there was a world of laughter between them and in them.

I climbed into the cart over the wheel and Labang would have bolted, for he was always
like that, but I kept a firm hold on his rope. He was restless and would not stand still, so
that my brother Leon had to say "Labang" several times. When he was quiet again, my
brother Leon lifted the trunks into the cart, placing the smaller on top.

She looked down once at her high-heeled shoes, then she gave her left hand to my
brother Leon, placed a foot on the hub of the wheel, and in one breath she had swung
up into the cart. Oh, the fragrance of her. But Labang was fairly dancing with impatience
and it was all I could do to keep him from running away.

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

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

"What is it you have forgotten now, Baldo?" my brother Leon said.

I did not say anything but tickled with my fingers the rump of Labang; and away we
went---back to where I had unhitched and waited for them. The sun had sunk and down
from the wooded sides of the Katayaghan hills shadows were stealing into the fields.
High up overhead the sky burned with many slow fires.

When I sent Labang down the deep cut that would take us to the dry bed of the Waig
which could be used as a path to our place during the dry season, my brother Leon laid
a hand on my shoulder and said sternly:

"Who told you to drive through the fields tonight?"

His hand was heavy on my shoulder, but I did not look at him or utter a word until we
were on the rocky bottom of the Waig.

"Baldo, you fool, answer me before I lay the rope of Labang on you. Why do you follow
the Wait instead of the camino real?"

His fingers bit into my shoulder.

"Father, he told me to follow the Waig tonight, Manong."

Swiftly, his hand fell away from my shoulder and he reached for the rope of Labang.
Then my brother Leon laughed, and he sat back, and laughing still, he said:

"And I suppose Father also told you to hitch Labang to the cart and meet us with him
instead of with Castano and the calesa."

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

"Look, Noel, yonder is our star!" Deep surprise and gladness were in her voice. Very
low in the west, almost touching the ragged edge of the bank, was the star, the biggest
and brightest in the sky.

"I have been looking at it," my brother Leon said. "Do you remember how I would tell
you that when you want to see stars you must come to Nagrebcan?"

"Yes, Noel," she said. "Look at it," she murmured, half to herself. "It is so many times
bigger and brighter than it was at Ermita beach."

"The air here is clean, free of dust and smoke."

"So it is, Noel," she said, drawing a long breath.

"Making fun of me, Maria?"

She laughed then and they laughed together and she took my brother Leon's hand and
put it against her face.

I stopped Labang, climbed down, and lighted the lantern that hung from the cart
between the wheels.

"Good boy, Baldo," my brother Leon said as I climbed back into the cart, and my heart
sant.

Now the shadows took fright and did not crowd so near. Clumps of andadasi and arrais
flashed into view and quickly disappeared as we passed by. Ahead, the elongated
shadow of Labang bobbled up and down and swayed drunkenly from side to side, for
the lantern rocked jerkily with the cart.

"Have we far to go yet, Noel?" she asked.

"Ask Baldo," my brother Leon said, "we have been neglecting him."
"I am asking you, Baldo," she said.

Without looking back, I answered, picking my words slowly:

"Soon we will get out of the Wait and pass into the fields. After the fields is home---
Manong."

"So near already."

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

Then we were climbing out into the fields, and through the spokes of the wheels the
light of the lantern mocked the shadows. Labang quickened his steps. The jolting
became more frequent and painful as we crossed the low dikes.

"But it is so very wide here," she said. The light of the stars broke and scattered the
darkness so that one could see far on every side, though indistinctly.

"You miss the houses, and the cars, and the people and the noise, don't you?" My
brother Leon stopped singing.

"Yes, but in a different way. I am glad they are not here."

With difficulty I turned Labang to the left, for he wanted to go straight on. He was
breathing hard, but I knew he was more thirsty than tired. In a little while we drope up
the grassy side onto the camino real.

"---you see," my brother Leon was explaining, "the camino real curves around the foot of
the Katayaghan hills and passes by our house. We drove through the fields because---
but I'll be asking Father as soon as we get home."

"Noel," she said.

"Yes, Maria."
"I am afraid. He may not like me."

"Does that worry you still, Maria?" my brother Leon said. "From the way you talk, he
might be an ogre, for all the world. Except when his leg that was wounded in the
Revolution is troubling him, Father is the mildest-tempered, gentlest man I know."

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

I stopped labang on the road before our house and would have gotten down but my
brother Leon took the rope and told me to stay in the cart. He turned Labang into the
open gate and we dashed into our yard. I thought we would crash into the camachile
tree, but my brother Leon reined in Labang in time. There was light downstairs in the
kitchen, and Mother stood in the doorway, and I could see her smiling shyly. My brother
Leon was helping Maria over the wheel. The first words that fell from his lips after he
had kissed Mother's hand were:

"Father... where is he?"

"He is in his room upstairs," Mother said, her face becoming serious. "His leg is
bothering him again."

I did not hear anything more because I had to go back to the cart to unhitch Labang. But
I hardly tied him under the barn when I heard Father calling me. I met my brother Leon
going to bring up the trunks. As I passed through the kitchen, there were Mother and my
sister Aurelia and Maria and it seemed to me they were crying, all of them.

There was no light in Father's room. There was no movement. He sat in the big
armchair by the western window, and a star shone directly through it. He was smoking,
but he removed the roll of tobacco from his mouth when he saw me. He laid it carefully
on the windowsill before speaking.

"Did you meet anybody on the way?" he asked.

"No, Father," I said. "Nobody passes through the Waig at night."

He reached for his roll of tobacco and hithced himself up in the chair.
"She is very beautiful, Father."

"Was she afraid of Labang?" My father had not raised his voice, but the room seemed
to resound with it. And again I saw her eyes on the long curving horns and the arm of
my brother Leon around her shoulders.

"No, Father, she was not afraid."

"On the way---"

"She looked at the stars, Father. And Manong Leon sang."

"What did he sing?"

"---Sky Sown with Stars... She sang with him."

He was silent again. I could hear the low voices of Mother and my sister Aurelia
downstairs. There was also the voice of my brother Leon, and I thought that Father's
voice must have been like it when Father was young. He had laid the roll of tobacco on
the windowsill once more. I watched the smoke waver faintly upward from the lighted
end and vanish slowly into the night outside.

The door opened and my brother Leon and Maria came in.

"Have you watered Labang?" Father spoke to me.

I told him that Labang was resting yet under the barn.

"It is time you watered him, my son," my father said.

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

The Return
by Edith L. Tiempo

If the dead years could shake their skinny legs and run
As once he had circled this house in thirty counts,
He would go thru this door among these old friends and they would not shun
Him and the tales he would tell, tales that would bear more than the spare
Testimony of willed wit and his grey hairs
He would enter among them, the fatted meat about his mouth,
As he told of how he had lived on strange boats on strange waters
Of strategems with lean sly winds,
Of the times death went coughing like a sick man on the motors,
Their breaths would rise hot and pungent as the lemon rinds
In their cups and sniff at the odors
Of his past like dogs at dried bones behind a hedge,
And he would live in the whispers and locked heads.
Wheeling around and around and turning back was where he started:
The turn to the pasture, a swift streak under a boy's running;
The swing, up a few times and he had all the earth he wanted;
The tower trees, and not so tall as he had imagined;
The rocking chair on the porch, you pushed it and it started rocking,
Rocking, and abruptly stopped. He, too, stopped in the doorway, chagrined.
He would go among them but he would not tell, he could be smart,
He, an old man cracking bones of his embarrassment apart.

A Heritage of Smallness by Nick Joaquin

Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a
small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying:matanda pa kay
mahoma; noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari.
Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each
day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the smallest degree of
retail: the tingi.

What most astonishes foreigners in the Philippines is that this is a country, perhaps the
only one in the world, where people buy and sell one stick of cigarette, half a head of
garlic, a dab of pomade, part of the contents of a can or bottle, one single egg, one
single banana. To foreigners used to buying things by the carton or the dozen or pound
and in the large economy sizes, the exquisite transactions of Philippine tingis cannot but
seem Lilliputian. So much effort by so many for so little. Like all those children risking
neck and limb in the traffic to sell one stick of cigarette at a time. Or those grown-up
men hunting the sidewalks all day to sell a puppy or a lantern or a pair of socks. The
amount of effort they spend seems out of all proportion to the returns. Such folk are,
obviously, not enough. Laboriousness just can never be the equal of labor as skill, labor
as audacity, labor as enterprise.

The Filipino who travels abroad gets to thinking that his is the hardest working country
in the world. By six or seven in the morning we are already up on our way to work,
shops and markets are open; the wheels of industry are already agrind. Abroad,
especially in the West, if you go out at seven in the morning you’re in a dead-town.
Everybody’s still in bed; everything’s still closed up. Activity doesn’t begin till nine or
ten– and ceases promptly at five p.m. By six, the business sections are dead towns
again. The entire cities go to sleep on weekends. They have a shorter working day, a
shorter working week. Yet they pile up more mileage than we who work all day and all
week.

Is the disparity to our disparagement?

We work more but make less. Why? Because we act on such a pygmy scale. Abroad
they would think you mad if you went in a store and tried to buy just one stick of
cigarette. They don’t operate on the scale. The difference is greater than between
having and not having; the difference is in the way of thinking. They are accustomed to
thinking dynamically. We have the habit, whatever our individual resources, of thinking
poor, of thinking petty.

Is that the explanation for our continuing failure to rise–that we buy small and sell small,
that we think small and do small?

Are we not confusing timidity for humility and making a virtue of what may be the worst
of our vices? Is not our timorous clinging to smallness the bondage we must break if we
are ever to inherit the earth and be free, independent, progressive? The small must ever
be prey to the big. Aldous Huxley said that some people are born victims, or
“murderers.” He came to the Philippines and thought us the “least original” of people. Is
there not a relation between his two terms? Originality requires daring: the daring to
destroy the obsolete, to annihilate the petty. It’s cold comfort to think we haven’t
developed that kind of “murderer mentality."

But till we do we had best stop talking about "our heritage of greatness” for the national
heritage is– let’s face it– a heritage of smallness.

However far we go back in our history it’s the small we find–the nipa hut, the barangay,
the petty kingship, the slight tillage, the tingi trade. All our artifacts are miniatures and so
is our folk literature, which is mostly proverbs, or dogmas in miniature. About the one
big labor we can point to in our remote past are the rice terraces–and even that
grandeur shrinks, on scrutiny, into numberless little separate plots into a series of layers
added to previous ones, all this being the accumulation of ages of small routine efforts
(like a colony of ant hills) rather than one grand labor following one grand design. We
could bring in here the nursery diota about the little drops of water that make the mighty
ocean, or the peso that’s not a peso if it lacks a centavo; but creative labor, alas, has
sterner standards, a stricter hierarchy of values. Many little efforts, however perfect
each in itself, still cannot equal one single epic creation. A galleryful of even the most
charming statuettes is bound to look scant beside a Pieta or Moses by Michelangelo;
and you could stack up the best short stories you can think of and still not have enough
to outweigh a mountain like War and Peace.
The depressing fact in Philippine history is what seems to be our native aversion to the
large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise. The pattern may have been set
by the migration. We try to equate the odyssey of the migrating barangays with that of
the Pilgrim, Father of America, but a glance of the map suffices to show the differences
between the two ventures. One was a voyage across an ocean into an unknown world;
the other was a going to and from among neighboring islands. One was a blind leap into
space; the other seems, in comparison, a mere crossing of rivers. The nature of the one
required organization, a sustained effort, special skills, special tools, the building of
large ships. The nature of the other is revealed by its vehicle, the barangay, which is a
small rowboat, not a seafaring vessel designed for long distances on the avenues of the
ocean.

The migrations were thus self-limited, never moved far from their point of origin, and
clung to the heart of a small known world; the islands clustered round the Malay
Peninsula. The movement into the Philippines, for instance, was from points as next-
door geographically as Borneo and Sumatra. Since the Philippines is at heart of this
region, the movement was toward center, or, one may say, from near to still nearer,
rather than to farther out. Just off the small brief circuit of these migrations was another
world: the vast mysterious continent of Australia; but there was significantly no
movement towards this terra incognita. It must have seemed too perilous, too unfriendly
of climate, too big, too hard. So, Australia was conquered not by the fold next door, but
by strangers from across two oceans and the other side of the world. They were more
enterprising, they have been rewarded. But history has punished the laggard by setting
up over them a White Australia with doors closed to the crowded Malay world.

The barangays that came to the Philippines were small both in scope and size. A
barangay with a hundred households would already be enormous; some barangays had
only 30 families, or less. These, however, could have been the seed of a great society if
there had not been in that a fatal aversion to synthesis. The barangay settlements
already displayed a Philippine characteristic: the tendency to petrify in isolation instead
of consolidating, or to split smaller instead of growing. That within the small area of
Manila Bay there should be three different kingdoms (Tondo, Manila and Pasay) may
mean that the area wa originally settled by three different barangays that remained
distinct, never came together, never fused; or it could mean that a single original
settlement; as it grew split into three smaller pieces.

Philippine society, as though fearing bigness, ever tends to revert the condition of the
barangay of the small enclosed society. We don’t grow like a seed, we split like an
amoeba. The moment a town grows big it become two towns. The moment a province
becomes populous it disintegrates into two or three smaller provinces. The excuse
offered for divisions i always the alleged difficulty of administering so huge an entity. But
Philippines provinces are microscopic compared to an American state like, say, Texas,
where the local government isn’t heard complaining it can’t efficiently handle so vast an
area. We, on the other hand, make a confession of character whenever we split up a
town or province to avoid having of cope, admitting that, on that scale, we can’t be
efficient; we are capable only of the small. The decentralization and barrio-autonomy
movement expresses our craving to return to the one unit of society we feel adequate
to: the barangay, with its 30 to a hundred families. Anything larger intimidates. We
would deliberately limit ourselves to the small performance. This attitude, an
immemorial one, explains why we’re finding it so hard to become a nation, and why our
pagan forefathers could not even imagine the task. Not E pluribus, unum is the impulse
in our culture but Out of many, fragments. Foreigners had to come and unite our land
for us; the labor was far beyond our powers. Great was the King of Sugbu, but he
couldn’t even control the tiny isle across his bay. Federation is still not even an idea for
the tribes of the North; and the Moro sultanates behave like our political parties: they
keep splitting off into particles.

Because we cannot unite for the large effort, even the small effort is increasingly
beyond us. There is less to learn in our schools, but even this little is protested by our
young as too hard. The falling line on the graph of effort is, alas, a recurring pattern in
our history. Our artifacts but repeat a refrain of decline and fall, which wouldn’t be so
sad if there had been a summit decline from, but the evidence is that we start small and
end small without ever having scaled any peaks. Used only to the small effort, we are
not, as a result, capable of the sustained effort and lose momentum fast. We have a
term for it: ningas cogon.

Go to any exhibit of Philippine artifacts and the items that from our “cultural heritage” but
confirm three theories about us, which should be stated again.

First: that the Filipino works best on small scale–tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work
in gold or silver, decorative arabesques. The deduction here is that we feel adequate to
the challenge of the small, but are cowed by the challenge of the big.

Second: that the Filipino chooses to work in soft easy materials–clay, molten metal, tree
searching has failed to turn up anything really monumental in hardstone. Even carabao
horn, an obvious material for native craftsmen, has not been used to any extent
remotely comparable to the use of ivory in the ivory countries. The deduction here is
that we feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the challenge of materials that
resist.

Third: that having mastered a material, craft or product, we tend to rut in it and don’t
move on to a next phase, a larger development, based on what we have learned. In
fact, we instantly lay down even what mastery we already posses when confronted by a
challenge from outside of something more masterly, instead of being provoked to
develop by the threat of competition. Faced by the challenge of Chinese porcelain, the
native art of pottery simply declined, though porcelain should have been the next phase
for our pottery makers. There was apparently no effort to steal and master the arts of
the Chinese. The excuse offered here that we did not have the materials for the
techniques for the making of porcelain–unites in glum brotherhood yesterday’s pottery
makers and today’s would be industrialists. The native pot got buried by Chinese
porcelain as Philippine tobacco is still being buried by the blue seal.

Our cultural history, rather than a cumulative development, seems mostly a series of
dead ends. One reason is a fear of moving on to a more complex phase; another
reason is a fear of tools. Native pottery, for instance, somehow never got far enough to
grasp the principle of the wheel. Neither did native agriculture ever reach the point of
discovering the plow for itself, or even the idea of the draft animal, though the carabao
was handy. Wheel and plow had to come from outside because we always stopped
short of technology, This stoppage at a certain level is the recurring fate of our arts and
crafts.

The santo everybody’s collecting now are charming as legacies, depressing as indices,
for the art of the santero was a small art, in a not very demanding medium: wood.
Having achieved perfection in it, the santero was faced by the challenge of proving he
could achieve equal perfection on a larger scale and in more difficult materials:
hardstone, marble, bronze. The challenge was not met. Like the pagan potter before
him, the santero stuck to his tiny rut, repeating his little perfections over and over. The
iron law of life is: Develop or decay. The art of the santero did not advance; so it
declined. Instead of moving onto a harder material, it retreated to a material even easier
than wool: Plaster–and plaster has wrought the death of relax art.

One could go on and on with this litany.

Philippine movies started 50 years ago and, during the ‘30s, reached a certain level of
proficiency, where it stopped and has rutted ever since looking more and more primitive
as the rest of the cinema world speeds by on the way to new frontiers. We have to be
realistic, say local movie producers we’re in this business not to make art but money.
But even from the business viewpoint, they’re not “realistic” at all. The true businessman
ever seeks to increase his market and therefore ever tries to improve his product.
Business dies when it resigns itself, as local movies have done, to a limited market.

After more than half a century of writing in English, Philippine Literature in that medium
is still identified with the short story. That small literary form is apparently as much as
we feel equal to. But by limiting ourselves less and less capable even of the small
thing–as the fate of the pagan potter and the Christian santero should have warned us.
It’ no longer as obvious today that the Filipino writer has mastered the short story form.

It’s two decades since the war but what were mere makeshift in postwar days have
petrified into institutions like the jeepney, which we all know to be uncomfortable and
inadequate, yet cannot get rid of, because the would mean to tackle the problem of
modernizing our systems of transportation–a problem we think so huge we hide from it
in the comforting smallness of the jeepney. A small solution to a huge problem–do we
deceive ourselves into thinking that possible? The jeepney hints that we do, for the
jeepney carrier is about as adequate as a spoon to empty a river with.

With the population welling, and land values rising, there should be in our cities, an
upward thrust in architecture, but we continue to build small, in our timid two-story
fashion. Oh, we have excuses. The land is soft: earthquakes are frequent. But Mexico
City, for instance, is on far swampier land and Mexico City is not a two-story town. San
Francisco and Tokyo are in worse earthquake belts, but San Francisco and Tokyo
reach up for the skies. Isn’t our architecture another expression of our smallness spirit?
To build big would pose problems too big for us. The water pressure, for example,
would have to be improved–and it’s hard enough to get water on the ground floor flat
and frail, our cities indicate our disinclination to make any but the smallest effort
possible.

It wouldn’t be so bad if our aversion for bigness and our clinging to the small denoted a
preference for quality over bulk; but the little things we take forever to do too often turn
out to be worse than the mass-produced article. Our couturiers, for instance, grow even
limper of wrist when, after waiting months and months for a pin ~a weaver to produce a
yard or two of the fabric, they find they have to discard most of the stuff because it’s so
sloppily done. Foreigners who think of pushing Philippine fabric in the world market give
up in despair after experiencing our inability to deliver in quantity. Our proud apologia is
that mass production would ruin the “quality” of our products. But Philippine crafts might
be roused from the doldrums if forced to come up to mass-production standards.

It’s easy enough to quote the West against itself, to cite all those Western artists and
writers who rail against the cult of bigness and mass production and the “bitch goddess
success”; but the arguments against technological progress, like the arguments against
nationalism, are possible only to those who have already gone through that stage so
successfully they can now afford to revile it. The rest of us can only crave to be big
enough to be able to deplore bigness.

For the present all we seen to be able to do is ignore pagan evidence and blame our
inability to sustain the big effort of our colonizers: they crushed our will and spirit, our
initiative and originality. But colonialism is not uniquely our ordeal but rather a universal
experience. Other nations went under the heel of the conqueror but have not spent the
rest of their lives whining. What people were more trod under than the Jews? But each
have been a thoroughly crushed nation get up and conquered new worlds instead. The
Norman conquest of England was followed by a subjugation very similar to our
experience, but what issued from that subjugation were the will to empire and the verve
of a new language.

If it be true that we were enervated by the loss of our primordial freedom, culture and
institutions, then the native tribes that were never under Spain and didn’t lose what we
did should be showing a stronger will and spirit, more initiative and originality, a richer
culture and greater progress, than the Christian Filipino. Do they? And this favorite
apologia of ours gets further blasted when we consider a people who, alongside us,
suffered a far greater trampling yet never lost their enterprising spirit. On the contrary,
despite centuries of ghettos and programs and repressive measures and racial scorn,
the Chinese in the Philippines clambered to the top of economic heap and are still right
up there when it comes to the big deal. Shouldn’t they have long come to the conclusion
(as we say we did) that there’s no point in hustling and laboring and amassing wealth
only to see it wrested away and oneself punished for rising?

An honest reading of our history should rather force us to admit that it was the colonial
years that pushed us toward the larger effort. There was actually an advance in
freedom, for the unification of the land, the organization of towns and provinces, and the
influx of new ideas, started our liberation from the rule of the petty, whether of clan,
locality or custom. Are we not vexed at the hinterlander still bound by primordial terrors
and taboos? Do we not say we have to set him “free” through education? Freedom,
after all is more than a political condition; and the colonial lowlander–especially a
person like, say, Rizal–was surely more of a freeman than the unconquered tribesman
up in the hills. As wheel and plow set us free from a bondage to nature, so town and
province liberated us from the bounds of the barangay.

The liberation can be seen just by comparing our pagan with our Christian statuary.
What was static and stolid in the one becomes, in the other, dynamic motion and
expression. It can be read in the rear of architecture. Now, at last, the Filipino attempts
the massive–the stone bridge that unites, the irrigation dam that gives increase, the
adobe church that identified. If we have a “heritage of greatness it’s in these labors and
in three epic acts of the colonial period; first, the defense of the land during two
centuries of siege; second, the Propaganda Movement; and the third, the Revolution.

The first, a heroic age that profoundly shaped us, began 1600 with the 50-year war with
the Dutch and may be said to have drawn to a close with the British invasion of 1762.
The War with the Dutch is the most under-rated event in our history, for it was the Great
War in our history. It had to be pointed out that the Philippines, a small colony practically
abandoned to itself, yet held at bay for half a century the mightiest naval power in the
world at the time, though the Dutch sent armada after armada, year after year, to
conquer the colony, or by cutting off the galleons that were its links with America, starve
the colony to its knees. We rose so gloriously to the challenge the impetus of spirit sent
us spilling down to Borneo and the Moluccas and Indo-China, and it seemed for a
moment we might create an empire. But the tremendous effort did create an elite vital to
our history: the Creole-Tagalog-Pampango principalia - and ruled it together during
these centuries of siege, and which would which was the nation in embryo, which
defended the land climax its military career with the war of resistance against the British
in the 1660’s. By then, this elite already deeply felt itself a nation that the government it
set up in Bacolor actually defined the captive government in Manila as illegitimate. From
her flows the heritage that would flower in Malolos, for centuries of heroic effort had
bred, in Tagalog and the Pampango, a habit of leadership, a lordliness of spirit. They
had proved themselves capable of the great and sustained enterprise, destiny was
theirs. An analyst of our history notes that the sun on our flag has eight rays, each of
which stands for a Tagalog or Pampango province, and the the Tagalogs and
Pampangos at Biak-na-Bato "assumed the representation of the entire country and,
therefore, became in fact the Philippines.

From the field of battle this elite would, after the British war, shift to the field of politics, a
significant move; and the Propaganda, which began as a Creole campaign against the
Peninsulars, would turn into the nationalist movement of Rizal and Del Pilar. This
second epic act in our history seemed a further annulment of the timidity. A man like
Rizal was a deliberate rebel against the cult of the small; he was so various a magus
because he was set on proving that the Filipino could tackle the big thing, the complex
job. His novels have epic intentions; his poems sustain the long line and go against
Garcia Villa’s more characteristically Philippine dictum that poetry is the small intense
line.

With the Revolution, our culture is in dichotomy. This epic of 1896 is indeed a great
effort–but by a small minority. The Tagalog and Pampango had taken it upon
themselves to protest the grievances of the entire archipelago. Moreover, within the
movement was a clash between the two strains in our culture–between the propensity
for the small activity and the will to something more ambitious. Bonifacio’s Katipunan
was large in number but small in scope; it was a rattling of bolos; and its post fiasco
efforts are little more than amok raids in the manner the Filipino is said to excel in. (An
observation about us in the last war was that we fight best not as an army, but in small
informal guerrilla outfits; not in pitched battle, but in rapid hit-and-run raids.) On the
other hand, there was, in Cavite, an army with officers, engineers, trenches, plans of
battle and a complex organization - a Revolution unlike all the little uprisings or mere
raids of the past because it had risen above tribe and saw itself as the national destiny.
This was the highest we have reached in nationalistic effort. But here again, having
reached a certain level of achievement, we stopped. The Revolution is, as we say
today, "unfinished."

The trend since the turn of the century, and especially since the war, seems to be back
to the tradition of timidity, the heritage of smallness. We seem to be making less and
less effort, thinking ever smaller, doing even smaller. The air droops with a feeling of
inadequacy. We can’t cope; we don’t respond; we are not rising to challenges. So tiny a
land as ours shouldn’t be too hard to connect with transportation - but we get crushed
on small jeepneys, get killed on small trains, get drowned in small boats. Larger and
more populous cities abroad find it no problem to keep themselves clean - but the
simple matter of garbage can create a "crisis” in the small city of Manila. One American
remarked that, after seeing Manila’s chaos of traffic, he began to appreciate how his city
of Los Angeles handles its far, far greater volume of traffic. Is building a road that won’t
break down when it rains no longer within our powers? Is even the building of sidewalks
too herculean of task for us?

One writer, as he surveyed the landscape of shortages—no rice, no water, no garbage

collectors, no peace, no order—gloomily mumbled that disintegration seems to be
creeping upon us and groped for Yeat’s terrifying lines:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold:

Mere anarchy is loosed…

Have our capacities been so diminished by the small efforts we are becoming incapable
even to the small things? Our present problems are surely not what might be called
colossal or insurmountable–yet we stand helpless before them. As the population
swells, those problems will expand and multiply. If they daunt us now, will they crush us
then? The prospect is terrifying.

On the Feast of Freedom we may do well to ponder the Parable of the Servants and the
Talents. The enterprising servants who increase talents entrusted to them were
rewarded by their Lord; but the timid servant who made no effort to double the one
talent given to him was deprived of that talent and cast into the outer darkness, where
there was weeping and gnashing of teeth:

“For to him who has, more shall be given; but from him who has not, even the little he
has shall be taken away."

Ang Tinaguan ni Pocholo

ni Satur Apoyon
DILI SILA ig-unsa. Bisag managtrato na lang. Labi nag magtiayon ba sila. Apan ania
sila isip lab-as nga mga estranghero ug estranghera sa sulod sa usa ka lawak sa otel
sa kinapusoran sa Nuweba York, USA niining nagkatugnaw nga kagabhion sa hinapos
nga bulan sa Nobiyembre tuig 1999.
Gikan sa ilang sulagmang panagkita sa bar sa unang salog niining Manhattan
International lnn nga misangpot sa romantikong “candle light dinner” ug “ballroom
dancing” sa mao gihapong salog sa gambalay, nagkasabot sila si Pocholo ug Lorna nga
mokuha ug usa ka kuwarto sa ikapitong andana aron dimdimon ang dugos sa himaya .
Pipila lang ka gutlo sa ilang pagsulod sa Room 711, midangkulos si Lorna ngadto sa
banyo aron mag-shower. Samtang nagpaminaw si Pocholo sa sonata sa tinabisak sa
banyo, iyang gipaandar ang tv set ug gipili ang gugmahanong pasundayag. Unya
mihinay-hinay siya sa pagpanulindaw sa unsa may mayugom nga alak sa refrigerator
sulod sa ilang kuwarto. Maoy una niyang giatake ang miniature nga botelya sa Pedro
Domecq. Gidimdim kadto ni Pocholo samtang gitan-aw ang romantikong lilas sa
telebisyon sa lalaki ug babaye nga nasay-a sa gamayng pulo human sa trahedya sa
kadagatan nga naglunod sa ilang “Love Boat”.
Pagkataudtaod, maorag nakita ni Pocholo ang iyang kaugalingon sa lalaki samtang si
Lorna mimay-ong usab sa babaye sa lilas nga gipasundayag sa telebisyon.
Kanang motuhik-tuhik daw punay ang lalaki sa paris niining babaye, ingon og si
Pocholo ang gilamian.
Sa paghinunahuna sa ingon, misamot ang gana ni Pocholo sa pagyarok sa alak.
Human matiti ang Fundador, gisunod na usab niya paghulbot ang gamitoyng botelya sa
Carlos I gikan sa ref.
Wala madugay, migawas si Lorna sa banyo nga seksi uyamot sud-ongon sa nipis nga
bath robe nga mipabulto gihapon sa iyang bigot nga lawas bisan pa sa iyang
pangedaron nga milapas nag diyotay sa ikakap-atan. Unya, dihadiha nag-ilis si Lorna.
Nagsul-ob siyag nipis nga itom nga panty ug gitaklapan sa puti nga negligee.
Sa gibiaw nga mahagitong talan-awon, daw hibatyagan ni Pocholo nga miursa ang
dagaang nga dili masabtan sa tibuok niyang kalawasan.
“Something hot, too, while I take my own shower?” sukot-sugyot ni Pocholo kang Lorna
nga mahagitong mihana sa pagtupad kaniya.
“Why not… labi nag adunay champagne,” tubag ni Lorna nga nagpalaway sa manag-
atbangay nga mga maisogong ugdo sa iyang dughan.
Tuod, mitultol si Lorna sa ref aron suhiron ang nagkalain-laing mini bottled wine nga
sarang makahaling og kainit sa bag-ong giligoang kalawasan.
Samtang didto sa banyo, nagpatabisak na usab si Pocholo sa hot shower. Apan wala
lang kaayo siya magdugay didto. Paggawas niya, nagtapis lang siya og laparong tualya
sa otel. Ang kahimsog sa iyang lawas wala malilong sa masuhirong mga mata ni Lorna.
Sa kaibog niya sa katigson sa lawas ni Pocholo, daw misamot ang iyang gana
sa pagpadayon sa pagdudimdim sa tsampen sa sopa nga gituparan og “lampshade”.
Mag-45 na si Pocholo sa nagsingabot nga Disyembre 29.
“Ang bathrobe mo?”
“Di na kinahanglan… daw impiyerno pa ang lawas ko sa akong nainom nga alak,” salo
ni Pocholo nunot ang pagtultol na usab sa ref aron modugang pa og inom sa lain na
upod nga matang sa alak.
“Ayawg ingna nga maglumos ka pa’g alak ining orasa?” salabtonong pahimangno ni
Lorna nga maorag gibati na usab og panggaang sa iyang kalawasan kinsa wala
maanad sa maong matang sa ilimnon sukad pa sa iyang pagkadalaga hangtod sa iyang
kaminyoon mga napulog tulo na karon ka tuig.
“Usa ka tagay na lang paingon sa kama,” mapasumbingayong tubag ni Pocholo.
Maorag miduyog ang kahigayonan sa gibati ni Pocholo—og kaha maingon usab kang
Lorna—sanglit ang esena nga nabiaw sa lain na usab nga lilas sa telebisyon sa ilang
lawak bahin man gihapon sa panagdulog diin ang protagonistang lalaki ug babaye
nagromansa sa tumang kamainiton sa kama.
Gikan sa ref, si Pocholo mitupad kang Lorna sa sopa. Pulos sila naggunit sa ilang
tagsatagsa ka kopa sa alak. Samtang nagtan-aw sa makapalaway nga esena sa kama
sa telebisyon, magtinan-away sila si Pocholo ug Lorna matag karon ug unya nga sila
ray nasayod sa kahulogan sa ilang mga mata ug linubok sa ilang dughan.
Daw gibatobalani sa katahom ni Lorna, midip-ig og diyotay si Pocholo sa walang kiliran
niini. Gikalawat kadto ni Lorna. Nakasabot sa pagsanong sa babaye sa gibuhat niya,
mitusik si Pocholo sa walang aping sa katupad. “Sambog kadto sa alak, Lor…” ni
Pocholo pa pagkahuman.
Walay kibo si Lorna. Unya gibutang ang iyang kopa sa kilid sa lampshade ug mihay-ad
sa sandiganan sa sopa.
Misunod usab si Pocholo sa pagpahimutang sa iyang kopa tupad sa gibutangan sa
kopa ni Lorna. “Unsa…. Naigo ka na, Lor, sa imong giinom.”
“Medyo.”
Midutdot si Pocholo uban sa pagpasalay sa iyang tuong bukton sa mahunolhunol nga
abaga ni Lorna. Gilayon mipaundayon kini sa pagpauraray sa lalaki nga nabagat niya
pipila lang ka takna.
“Gusto na kong motuyhad sa kama, Poch.”
“Aw, oo, sige, balhin ngadto sa katre.”
Mitindog si Lorna. Dihadiha nabiaw na usab ang kaseksi niya uban sa iyang itom nga
panty ug puti nga negligee. Nanagko god ang mga mata ni Pocholo ug ang iyang mga
ngabil naumog sa sinay-a sa iyang laway.
Sa dihang mihay-ad na si Lorna sa kama, misamot ang sunog sa luog nga pagbati nga
nagsugod nag hinas sa katibuk-an ni Pocholo. Ang maong talan-awon nahimong
batobalani nga nagbutad kang Pocholo aron motupad sa babaye nga misteryosa pa
hangtod niining tungora.
Miaginod ang mga tukbilong gutling.
Gawas sa unlan, gipapaunlanan pa gayod ni Pocholo ang iyang tuong bukton ni Lorna.
Misunod usab og tambid ang wala niyang bitiis ug paa sa walang bahin sa babaye.
Gilayon mikuyanap ang talagsaong dinagaang sa nagkadikit nilang kalawasan.
“Unsa bay nagtukmod nimo nga moduol kanako didto sa bar ganina?”
“Kaamgid ka man god ni Laarni.”
“Kinsa si Laarni.”
“Asawa ko.”
“Asawa mo? Nan, di kaha ko kupogan karon nga nakigdulog kanimo?
“Layo kaayo ang Pilipinas. Ikaduha taudtaod na siyang mibiya kanako…”
Mipuli ang mubong kahilom.
“Sa imong kabahin, wa kahay magwara-warag pinuti niining higayona?” pakisayod ni
Pocholo.
“Tingali ang duha ko ka bayong anak. Apan sahi kang Laarni, layo usab sila kanato
niining higayona.”
“Ang Mister mo diay?”
“Duha na ka tuig kong nabiyuda sa balo kong bana.”
Daw nakaginhawag halawom, mikupog gilayon si Pocholo kang Lorna. Hugot kaayong
gigakos kini. Pagkataudtaod, giukoban sa halok nga makapaso.
Sa nakalugak na si Lorna, kini miingon: “Katam-is sa imong halok.”
Mibalos og hunghong si Pocholo: “Kanus-a ang kataposan mong…?”
“Sa tighapon sa kataposang biyahe sa piloto kong kapikas nga si Capt. Edgardo
Paloma sa Philippine Airways. Nakras siya sa China Sea ug sukad niadto wa na igkita.”
Kahilom na usab. Apan langas kaayo ang mga tudlo ni Pocholo nga ingon og iya sa usa
ka piyanista. Maora pog gianipay si Lorna sa kagilok sa gihimo sa lalaki.
“Nganong ania ka man karon sa New York?” pakisayod ni Pocholo.
“Stopover kini una ko mosakay sa Caribbean cruise agi sa Miami, Florida,” tubag ni
Lorna.
“Nindota nimo, da.”
“Ikaw, nganong nia man sab ka dinhi?” si Lorna na usay nagpakisayod.
“Nagpalayo sa mapait nga handomanan nga gibilin ni Laarni sa kataposan namong
dulog mga unom na karon ka tuig ang milabay.”
“Unsa diay nahitabo?”
“Gitalikdan ako ni Laarni og nahanaw siya sa kangitngit. Bisan ang kapolisan naglisod
hangtod karon sa pagsuhid kaniya,” tulugkarong tubag ni Pocholo.
“Nagtrabaho ka?”
“Oo. Apan off nako ron. Drummer ko sa usa ka nayit klub dili layo dinhi.”
Sa pagbali sa hangin, si Lorna na ang nagpanikad nga daw tigreng nasamdan.
Mihangos siya. Nagpanguma. Nangitlib sa punoan sa dalunggan ni Pocholo. Mibalos og
makasunog nga halok.
Unya, mituaw sa kamahimayaon: “Mao kini ang labing mainitong pasakalye sa dula sa
kama, Poch, sukad masukad!.”
Gibatig garbo si Pocholo sa iyang nabati. Mao nga gidigo na usab niya og halok si
Lorna. Gisundan pa gayod niya pagtiti ang dugos sa nagatuybong duha ka muto sa
dughan sa mabigot nga katupad.
“Sige na, Poch… sige na…” nangagni si Lorna.
Daw wala kadto hidunggi ni Pocholo. Nagpadayon lang siya sa pag-ungad-ungad o
pagpanibsib sa liogan ug dughan sa kadulog.
“Sige na lagi, Poch.”
Gisalo kadto ni Pocholo og mahanggabong halok.
Pagkalingkawas ni Lorna, misugyot kini: “Kon di ka mopaibabaw, unsay maayog ako na
lay mopatong? Nakatilaw ka na bag gidagit sa helikopter, Poch?”
“Makadaghan na.”
“Ngano man?”
“Helikopter man to si Laarni”.
“Gusto mo nga magpilotog bag-ong helikopter?”
Apan nahisagmuyo si Pocholo sa hagit.
“Wa mo ako tubaga, Poch?”
Inay tubagon ni Pocholo ang nangukit, gilumsan na upod niya kini sa laing buylo sa
mga halok .
“Sige na lagi Poch! Sige na intawon!” nag-aliwaros nga pangagni ni Lorna nga motidlom
na sila sa mahimayaong huyong-huyong.
Apan mao sa gihapon ingon ug wala makadungog si Pocholo sa yangongo sa babaye.
Sa kaawo ug kalagot sa iyang kabawo sa kagustohan niadtong tungora, gipatibugsok ni
Lorna ang tuo niyang kamot ngadto sa bugan sa lalaki. Apan abtik nga miiwas ang
lalaki. Wala maguniti ni Lorna ang buot niyang tuk-on. “Ngano, Poch, nga ihikaw mo
kana?”
Wala gihapoy tubag nga naani si Lorna gikan sa lalaki nga nagpabiling nag-igwad sa
paggakos kaniya.
Uban sa hiniusang kusog, giluwatan ni Lorna ang kataposang hunat sa pagdakop sa
kinatawo ni Pocholo nga tingali adunay misteryo.
Bisan sa paglikay ni Pocholo, wala na siya makaikyas sa pagtabon sa kahangtoran sa
iyang tinagoan nga gibilin sa kataposang gabii nila ni Laarni.
Hinuon, dinhay nagunitan si Lorna. Apan wala kadto niya ikalipay kay dili man kadto igo
nga makahumpay sa mitaob na untang kauhaw sa himaya nga ikahatag lang sa usa ka
tinuod ug hingpit nga lalaki.
Sungsong sa mayugotong tinan-awan ni Lorna, huyhoy nga miisplikar si Pocholo sa
hinungdan: “Sa tumang pangabubho ni Laarni nga may relasyon kami sa iyang
manghod nga dalagita, iya akong giabisan niadtong kataposan namong dulog.
Pagkahuman, miikyas siya ug milampanog sa diing suok sa kalibotan!”
Sa misunod nga mga gutlo, mitiyabaww sa tumang kaawo ang babaye: “Ngano bang
naingon niini… kanus-a nga buot na akong maghubog sa gikahidlawang romansa
human sa pagtaliwan sa akong bana?”
“Pasayloa nga nalimbongan ta ka, Lorna. Sahi kanimo, nangindahay usab kong
modimdim sa nahidlawang saro sa kalipay…” salo ni Pocholo.
Apan daw wala na makadungog si Lorna sa pahayag sa lalaki. Hinunoa, nagpadayon
siya sa paglawdati ug pagpaminti sa naalang-alang nga pagpabuga sa nag-aliwaros
nga pagbati sa kahiladman nga taudtaod nang giuhaw sa lawasnong panginahanglan.

Ways of Dying
By Anthony Tan
2019
Whichever way the wind blows
They fall with the flowers
Ever so gently, shaken down from twigs.
They fall on summer street
Where they are trapped in tire ruts
And become brown paste,
Spoiling the blackness of tar.
Others fall with the flowers
On the leaf-matted lawn
Where chickens feed all day.
Others on the roof of an old house
Whose dark corners finally become a refuge.
Through nooks and crannies they crawl
Their way into the dark rooms,
Eliciting shrieks from the virgins
Who in fright ambush them
With broom, fire or candle wax.
The few survivors go on their way,
Finding their niches in empty cans
Behind boxes and uncovered glasses.
They grow wings in the dark
And vindicate their precarious trek
With a rattle against the lampshade.
In a night or two they die,
But they must die in a way
Proper to their importance as survivors:
Their mottled wings outspread
In a beautiful fall.