People in the War

Gilda Coredero – Fernando

OUR FRONT door opened right into the sidewalk, and the street sloped down to a lily-dappled
river, in our house in the city. Across the river a soap opera was always taking place: a man with two wives
lived in an unpainted house beside the lumber mill when the sun went down the wives began to quarrel
clouting each other with wooden clogs, and a bundle of clean wash came flying Out of the window into
the silt below. We watched them chase each other down the stairs, clawing each other's clothes off and
rolling down the embankment, and the dogs of the neighborhood surrounded them, barking and snarling
- till from the lumber mill the husband emerged - a shirtless apparition with a lumber saw in his hand.

At least once a month they held wakes on the river bank. They rented a corpse, strung up colored
lights and gambled till the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes a policeman wandered in - having heard
some rumor, and poked around with his night stick. But there would be a corpse, and it was truly dead,
there would be the card games, but no suspicion of betting (the chips having been scooped away together
with the basket of money) and the policeman would saunter away, wiping a tear, leaving the poor relatives
to their grief and their gambling.

We must move to another neighborhood, my Father said everyday. We planted trees to screen
them from sight, we planted trees to preserve our respectability. A truck unloaded two acacia trees on
our doorstep, saplings no bigger than I. The houseboy made a bamboo fence around their trunks and
every afternoon the maids hauled out pails to water them.

Soon the trees grew tall and lush with yellow-green leaves and the crickets sang in them. Then
the street boys shook them for bugs and crickets, or stripped off the bark with penknives or swung on the
branches till they snapped. My Father waged an indefatigable battle with the street boys for why should
they want to destroy beautiful things? He was terribly good with a slingshot and seldom missed his target-
for ammunition he used a round clay pellet instead of a stone and it made a painful red mark. In time my
Father just-had to lean out of the window and the boys scampered down the trees, and after a while they
learned to leave the trees alone.

The soft dappled shade served many purposes. The branches sheltered a group of nursery school
children with sausage curls whose playground had been turned during the Occupation into a garrison. In
the afternoons a Japanese girl named Sato-san came to air a nephew and a niece and lay out rice cakes
under the spreading trees. She was masseuse in the Japanese barbershop at the corner which was always
brilliant with neons and sweet with the odor of Bay Rum. Occasionally, a dispossessed family of tattered
jugglers did their act in the shade of the acacias. They laid a dirty tarpaulin on the ground and tumbled on
it, juggling wooden balls and bottles. Then the father stood on a barrel and balanced them on his shoulder
and it was the most daring, most brilliant finale I had ever seen. As they made their bow, an indifferent
crowd dropped a coin or two into the man's soiled hat, and once I saw someone drop in a rotten mango.

Our driver now turned houseboy (our Plymouth had been commandeered) hailed from a pot-
making region and he would come from vacation with a tobacco box full of hard clay pellets baked in the
sun, for my Father's slingshot- a year's supply till the next vacation. My Father had a low opinion of the
Imperial Army. When I showed him my report card, he thundered, What do you mean 75 in Algebra, 95
in Nippongo! Am I raising a little geisha?

Oh yes, one night he almost got into real trouble with that slingshot. A drunken Japanese officer
was kicking noisily on the door of the family living downstairs, calling the young girl's name amorously and
growling like a jungle ape. Annoyed, my Father flung back the bed sheets and charged to the window with
his slingshot. Mother tried to pull him back, but already Father had aimed and hit - right in the seat of the
olive drab pants. It was blackout and the Jap was at a disadvantage - flattened behind the window, his
treacherous opponent let loose another hail of pellets. With horrible war cry, the soldier unsheathed his
sword, a grim Samurai brandishing reprisal in the air. Mother and I cowered in our nightgowns and
embraced each other. Whenever the officer's drink-clouded eyes looked up at our direction, my father
shot at him from another window. Finally, the Jap stumbled away, his hobnailed boots echoing in the
deserted midnight street. We half-expected the Imperial Army to storm our door the next morning, but
they never came, I guess the Jap was too drunk to remember it.

After a while our curtain of trees became useless. The people on the other side of the river raised
a contribution to build a bamboo bridge across it and the bad elements started coming into town. It was
a narrow, split bamboo bridge that swayed, and the Japanese soldiers loved to walk on it.

As the beggars with coconut shell in their palms increases in number, it became a usual thing to
find a bloated corpse under a newspaper. Everyone was suddenly interested in food production: the twin
curly-haired young men from across the river began to cultivate the ground surrounding the acacias. From
two o'clock until sundown they puttered among the neat plots, loosening the soil around the flourishing
yams and talinum buds, fetching water in cans, collecting fertilizer from under the dokars parked in the
street. Aquilino was the leaner, handsome twin, he was my brown god in an undershirt, reeking of sweat
and fertilizer; but when Santos knocked on our door with a basket of talinum tops for Mother, I couldn't
decide who I liked better. When the jasmine climbing from our window box was replaced with the more
practical ampalaya, I carved their names in the fruit, and the letters grew as the fruit grew: Santos and
Aquilino.

II
 The Spanish family renting the downstairs portion of our house opened a small laundry but
retained their fierce pride. The women sat behind the unpainted counter in their bedraggled kimonos, like
soiled aristocracy, handling the starched pants drying on the wire hangers with pale finicky fingers. They
pretended to understand nothing but Spanish and a customer's every Tagalog word sent them huddling
together in consultation if you were overtaken there by lunchtime, in the kitchen Senora Bandana placed
a wet rag on her hot frying pan. The daughter then came out and said wheedling, Cena tu ya aqui, having
made you believe, by the fabulous sizzle that there was a chicken or at least a milkfish in the pan. Since it
was unthinkable to stay over for a meal during those hard times, you left with thanks and profuse
apologies. The family then commenced on its meal of rice and bagoong, smugly sitting on their
reputations.

They had been paying P15 a month before the war and insisted on paying the same rent in
Japanese money. My father continually begged them to leave so we could take in boarders, but whenever
he brought up the subject, Señora Bandana had one of her heat attacks. Finally, they compromised by
giving us back two rooms which we needed for Mr. Solomon and Boni.

Boni was a fourth cousin from Batangas on my Mother's side. He had gotten stranded in Manila
when the schools closed and came to live with us because he found it easier to make money in the city,
on buy-and-sell. He always had some business or another: he had converted an old German bicycle into a
commercial tricycle rented it to a man every morning. He also dealt in wooden shoes, muscovado, agar-
agar from the sea and cotton batting for auto seats. On father's birthday, Boni presented him a skeletal
radio he had tinkered with, that he could catch the Voice of Freedom and it pleased my father to no end.
Once Boni bought three truckfuls of bananas wholesale - our garage was full of them there was hardly any
space to walk. That venture had been a fiasco - before he could resell the lot, half of them rotted away
while he was at a dance in Paranaque.

Boni was an expert balisong weilder. He could hit a coin four feet away, the knife making a clean
hole in the center of it. He also had a bad habit of throwing the knife at cockroaches and lizards and cutting
them to ribbons. Once he threw it at a stray cat that was annoying him below his window and my mother
almost had a fit. Send him away, my mother told my father over the tulia broth. Make him go home to
the province. My father took the knife away and told Boni to behave. Boni's father was an unbeliever, and
when he died, which was three years before the war, he asked the family to erect a devil on his gravestone.
And there it still stands in the cemetery in Batangas, regal and black, its tail long and sharp as an arrow,
its eyeballs and armpits a fiery red, lording it over all the weeping angels and white crosses. On All Soul's
Day, Boni alone came to visit the grave, to cut away the weeds and replant the devil a deep, glossy black.

Mr. Solomon occupied what had been Señora Bandana's sala. He hung up his crucifix and his hat and
locked the door and never opened it again. Mr. Solomon owned vast salt beds in Bulacan and his dream
was to control the salt market in Manila. Just before the war he was competing with the Chinese
merchants and whatever price he dictated the merchants had to follow. In the great salt war there was a
time when salt was selling for ten centavos per sack.
 His four sons joined Marking's Guerillas after the fall of Bataan, and Mr. Solomon became its
heaviest contributor. The Japanese had seized his salt beds and when he became the kempetai's most
hunted man, he begged my papa, who was his old friend, to hide him and that was why he was boarding
with us.

Mr. Solomon stayed all day in Señora Bandana's sala, gazing out the window saying nothing. He
listened to the nursery school children singing; he watched Sato-san air her nephew and nieces; he
dropped coins into the juggler's hat. But we had to pass his food down a wobbly dumbwaiter. My brother
Raul and I complained whenever we were assigned to deliver the food, especially if there was hot soup,
but Mother said to be patient with Mr. Solomon as he was a man who had "gone through the fire of
suffering. “The only time Mr. Solomon ever went out of his room was when he offered to show Papa how
to make ham. After rubbing the fresh pig's thigh with salt, he brought out a syringe and shot the red meat
full of salt-peter and other preservatives. Then he wrapped it in a cloth and told Mama to keep it in the
ice box for three months. Mama said Mr. Solomon was probably getting tired of eating fish.

When Eden and Lina came to stay with us, I gave up my room to sleep with Mother. They were
home-loving sisters who made my room look nice with printed curtains and put crocheted covers on the
beds. Under the bed they had many boxes of canned goods, mostly milk for Eden's baby. A basket lined
with diapers was hung from the rafters and the baby slept in it.

Eden and Lina's father was Papa's brother and they used to live in Cabanatuan where they had a
rice mill. As children, we used to play baseball in the area of cement beside the granary where the palay
was spread out to dry, during our vacation in the province before the war. Their mother ran a restaurant
called “Eden’s Refreshment" where she served a thick special dinuguan smoking right from an earthen
pot. Tia Candeng had a fault - she played favorites, it was always “Eden is pretty, Eden is a valedictorian,
My child Eden..."Never Lina. Lina ran around in ragged slack and played cara y cruz with the mill hands.
On Eden's eighteenth birthday they rented the roof garden of the municipio and held a big dance. Her
dress was ordered from Manila and cost three hundred fifty pesos,The town beautician worked all day
putting a lot of pomade and padded hair in her pompadour. They sent us an 8x10 photograph of Eden on
her debut with a painted waterfall in the background.

After that, a rich widower used to motor all the way from Tarlac to visit Eden. An engineer also
fell in love with her and lavished the family with bangus from their fishpond when the charcoal-fed Hudson
and Ford stopped by their gate. Tia Candeng, all a-flutter brought out from her stock of pre-war canned
goods precious hot dogs to fry and serve to the rivals. But one day a small squat soldier without a job blew
into town and Eden ran away with him. He was a mere lieutenant and a second one at that, and Tia
Candeng never forgave them They came to the city to live, in a muddy crooked street. Minggoy and Eden
had violent quarrels. Whenever they did, Eden bundled her cake pans and pillows and mats and photo
albums and the week-old baby and stayed with us for a few days. In the latter part of the Occupation, her
husband joined the guerillas and Eden came to live with us permanently.

Lina came later. Her stringiness had blossomed into a willowy kind of slenderness and she had her
Mother's knack for housekeeping. But she was of a nervous temperament. Continually, she wove
"Macrame" bags of abaca twine in readiness for the day when we would be fleeing the bombs. She had
also fashioned a wide inner garment belt of unbleached cotton, with numerous secret pockets.

II

My brother's room was the largest in the home, it was the size of the sala and the dining room
together because in the good old days it had been a billiard room. It led out to an azotea and had a piano
in it. His friends, Celso, Paquito and Nonong were always in Raul’s room for they were trying to put out an
ambitious book of poems. Celso's father had an old printing press, rusty from disuse, and they lugged it
up to the room and were always tinkering with it, trying to make it work. Boni offered them a price for
the scrap metal, and they threw an avalanche of books at him.

The piano had been won be an uncle of Nonong who was timbre-deaf from a raffle. This uncle
was so timbre-deaf in fact that the only tune he could tell from another was the National Anthem because
everyone stood up when it was played. All he had to spend for was the ticket and transportation, and on
Nonong's birthday the beautiful second-hand Steinway was presented to him instead of the books he
wanted. Nonong's room was too small for the books he wanted. Mother never objected to the boys
lugging things into the house just as long as they never lugged things out.

Sometimes they stuck a candle in a bottle and my brother Raul read the Bible deep into the night.
They called me their Muse and allowed me to listen to their poems for I had read Dickinson and Marlowe
and of course that made me an authority, and besides I was always good for a plateful of cookies or to
fetch an extra chair. Paquito could play "Stardust" in the Steinway and Celso could do a rib-splitting
pantomime, but best of all I like Nonong although he couldn't do anything. Nonong gave me a Ticonderoga
pencil he had saved all the way from before the war - it was stuck on a painted card where you could read
your fortune. On Christmas I gave him a handkerchief embroidered with his initials in blue thread.

Nonong was always trying to make an intellectual out of me. The few books I read - Les Miserables,
Rashomon, Graustark and Inside Africa - were all from him. I ransacked my father's trunk of books for
something to present to him in return and came up with the fourth volume of Encyclopedia Britannica,
from John the Baptist to Leghorn.

I have read a lot of authors, Nonong used to say teasing me, but best of anything I've read I liked
the Encyclopedia Britannica, from John the Baptist to Leghorn.

Once, after a visit to a friend's house, Raul couldn't fetch me and my mother telephoned, Don't
go home alone, Nonong is here, I will send him over to fetch you. We walked down the avenue laughing
under the unlighted street lamps, the carretelas and tricycles zigzagging past us.

Let's drop by your office, Nonong, I said, so you can get the book you promised to lend me.

All right, Nonong said, although there's not much print left to read any more the — Bureau has
inked out all the nice pages and covered the pictures.
 That's all right, I said, flinging my arms in a bored gesture the way I had seen movie stars do. It's
better than dying slowly of boredom.

Are you lonely, Victoria?

No, I said defiantly, deep in my heart, lying.

We walked.

We turned into the stairs of his office in R. Hidalgo over which was a sign in Japanese characters.
The back of the building had been bombed out and no one had bothered to clear up the rubble. There
was a blackout notice again that night and it was pitch dark in the building. We groped our way to the
head of the stair, and into the room. There were five desks and Nonong's was the farthermost, under the
electric fan. Kneeling, Nonong opened each drawer and ransacked its contents. It's here somewhere, he
said.

I went out to the little balcony and stood looking down at the gradually emptying street. It was
four days before Christmas. There were paper lanterns hanging at the windows of the houses but none of
them was lighted, and they swated, rustling drily in the cold wind. I was tired of the war. I wished Nonong
would put his arms around me and kiss my mouth and always love me, but l knew that if he even as much
touched my hand I would slap him hard on the mouth and kick him on the shin and never speak to him
again. He stood silently beside me and put his lean arms on the window sill, I could see the veins taut on
them. Behind us, the darkness was absolute and complete.

What are you going to be after the war, Nonong?

Oh ...a writer, I guess, or a bum or something.

Me, I'm going to buy a house on top of a hill and live there all my life alone.

Suppose someone falls in love with you?

Who's going to fall in love with me, silly?

I looked up at the stern profile etched in the dark, thin and beautiful and ascetic, like the face of
Christ. Heavens, Nonong, I exclaimed. You look like God!

Don't be blasphemous, Victoria, where's your convent school breeding? He smiled. I've got the
book now, let's go if you're ready.

We felt our way through the pitch-dark corridor to the stairs at the foot of which was the door in
a well of smoky light.

We were the lost generation: My brother Raul and his friends were neither men nor boys, they
were displaced persons without jobs and they roamed the streets restlessly in search of something useful
to do. My father had started a business making oil lamps and the boys helped him in the mornings, cutting
the glass and hammering open the tin cans and shaping them in the vise to fit the pattern. But their
afternoons were empty. Nonong and I learned to lag behind after church and walk, nibbling roasted
coconuts what tasted like chestnuts when we were together. Sometimes I went with the gang to the
Farmacia de la Rosa where we could order real fresh milk ice-cream. Mrs. de la Rosa told us her fresh milk
came all the way from Pampanga every day and had to pass four sentries and that was why it was so
expensive. Sometimes we went to Tugo and Pugo stageshow to buy an hour's laughter, at other times we
rented bicycles and rode to the very end of town where nobody knew us, peeping over the fences of
Japanese garrisons with the flag of the Rising Sun fluttering over it.

One day I told my Mother that Nonong was coming that afternoon and if I could ask him for
supper. I slaved over a plateful of cassava cookies in front of a hot tin charcoal oven. Lina was the good
cook but I disdained her help and advices. For supper we had fresh tawilis from Batangas, and a good
piece of the ham that Mr. Solomon had made. We waited for an hour past suppertime and still Nonong
had not come. When we finally did sit down for supper, nobody Said anything except for Boni who, having
arrived late, looked at the extra plate quizzically, opened his mouth and closed it again like a fish gasping
for air.

It was raining when Nonong came, smelling of beer, three hours late and Sorry. I had already put
away the supper dishes and cassava cookies I had sweated over all afternoon, and I was still angry. He sat
on the large kamagong chair and I sat on the other kamagong chair opposite him with the vase of santan
flowers between us. And then we looked at each other and stopped dead still. For we could feel each
other's hearts and knew what was there, what had been growing for months without our knowledge and
consent. And heavy with grief I said simply I dreamt of you last night. You were sitting on a chair and I was
on the floor hugging your knees and I said I love you, and you said, That's all right you’ll get over it.

He put out his fingers tentatively, and stroked the back of my hand and I pulled it away. But in a
minute we were touching again and I was crying into his palm and he said, Help me, I'm so unhappy. But
after a while we hear Eden's slippers slapping on the floor of the dining room where she had gone to open
a can of milk for the baby, and I told him to go away and never see me again.

On February 17, Nonong telephoned me. We talked a long long time about this and that and many
useless things. Then just before the Japanese cut off our line, I heard his voice at the other end say soft
but clearly, Listen to this, Victoria, and remember: I-love-you. And that was the only time he ever said it.

IV

We had to run to the church rotunda and even there the dug-outs were in every place, you were
lucky if you could find a place to dig. The house had burned down and Boni had gotten himself burned
trying to save Mr. Solomon who had panicked and couldn't get himself out of his locked room. Father and
Raul were carrying Boni in a blanket fashioned into a hammock. Lina and I walked together - she had on
her belt on which were all her treasures, and the six string bags with clothes on them. I was carrying my
favorite dress, a pillow and a bottle of precious water. Immediately behind us Eden walked, the two-
month-old baby in her arms. Mother walked last of all, pale and tight-lipped, carrying the kettleful of rice
she had boiled for the noonday meal, and the slices of roasted pork. From Taft you could see clear through
the seashore for all the buildings were charred and rutted. The Japanese had barricaded themselves in
the Rizal Coliseum and you could hear the mortar shells go boom from there and boom again a mile away.

A trio of planes roared dangerously low. Shakily, Lina and I dived into a shelter where a Chinese
consul and his family crouched, and bitterly, they reproached us for crowding them in the already cramped
space. Mother had run into another hole and ran out screaming for there was in it a man with half his face
shot off Outside the shelter, we could hear Boni begging, Please don't leave me .. . We were scattered in
all directions.

Somehow we found each other again. Papa's plan was to go south to Pasig to escape the mortar
shells that were coming from the north. He and Raul took up Boni again and started to walk. Somewhere
in the running, I had lost my shoes and was proceeding barefoot; I had also forgotten my favorite dress in
the last dugout. Whenever the mortar shells dropped around us, we threw ourselves flat on the ground
and covered our ears, but still we could hear the whistling and the unearthly screams of the people who
had been hit. After one of the raids, which lasted longer than usual, we burrowed out of the shelters to
find Boni gone. Some told us later that he had been seen crawling to Taft Avenue.

On our way to Pasig we scampered for safety into the old Avellana home, the Only one standing
in Malate. A Japanese sniper in a battered car was shooting at us and we went into the enclosed ruins,
picking our way hurriedly over the wounded and the dead. Raul was the calmest of all. He had taken the
kettle of rice from Mother and whenever he dived to the ground; a little of the rice spilled but he gathered
it again, brushing the earth from the pork with invincible good humor. He had his rosary with him and
never parted with it, he vowed that if nobody got hurt he would become a priest.

We entered the damaged cellar and found there a group of hysterical mestizas. One of them,
Señora Bandana's daughter, a friend of Lina, persuaded her that the place had been continuously
machine-gunned and that they should transfer to a concrete garage nearby where the rest of the family
were. Lina left with her. We were willing to take our chances and remained behind. We settled ourselves
comfortably, taking small swallows of water from our bottle but none of us could eat. The baby sucking
at Eden's breast was drawing blood and Eden's tears were falling on its face. In a few moments Lina was
back alone. She was hysterical. The garage she and her friend had gone into had been hit by a grenade,
and she had seen the whole Bandana family and her friend perish in it.

We ran without any sense of direction. Finally, we found a high concrete wall against which
several galvanized iron sheets had fallen, forming a safe shelter but every time someone moved, the
sheets clattered noisily, betraying our presence. The few remaining Japanese soldiers were desperate:
with bayonets bared, they Stalked the ruins, thirsting to run through anything that moved. Raul pillowed
his head in his arms and snored like a baby. We heard a Japanese soldier patrolling nearby, his hob-nailed
boots crunching heavily on the rubble. Eden's baby began to whimper. Eden offered her breast but the
baby refused it, for it could no longer give any nourishment, keep him quiet, my mother hissed. The
footsteps were growing fainter and then they stopped altogether. We heard a revolver cock. Then the
footsteps started again, tracing the same path outside our shelter. The baby was now whimpering in
earnest. Beat its head with a bottle, somebody suggested. The bottle was thrust into Papa's hands. He
raised his hands for the blow and brought them down limply, he had a weak stomach. He next tried to
strangle the tiny neck but his fingers turned weak and rubbery. The soldier was almost upon us. Luckily
the baby quieted for a moment.

Only when the footsteps recede could we talk. Papa said, Eden go away with your child and save
us, and maybe you too can be saved elsewhere. Eden crept out slowly, making an infernal racket with the
sheets. In a moment she was crawling back. Wordlessly, she turned over the baby to Papa like an offering.
The Japanese was returning. Lina cursed, restlessly she paced back and forth, standing up and sitting
down. I've got it! she cried. Let me . . . She took a pillow I had been carrying all this time and put it on the
baby's face. Then she sat on it, hard. The mother stared dumbly at the earth, her hands dangling between
her legs. There was a struggling underneath the pillow and a smothered whimper. Slowly, Lina got up,
biting her nails. She became hysterical and Papa had to hit her across the mouth. Eden took the dead baby
and began rocking it to sleep.

We slept from exhaustion. The crunching footsteps had disappeared. The moon rose bright and
clear like the promise of another time, and we could find Our way out. A group pushing a wooden cart full
of pots and pans and mats and bundles was coming towards us. The Americans are here, the father of the
group we met said. They have gone over Santa Cruz Bridge. Papa counted the heads. Boni was gone. Mr.
Solomon was gone. We couldn't find Eden. We looked back to where we had come from and through the
twisted buttresses of the ravished homes, we could see a lonely figure poking amid the debris.

She has probably gone back to bury the child, Mother said.

Let's go ahead then, Father said. She'll catch up with us.