A Wilderness of Sweets by Gilda Cordero Fernando

I was twelve when the war broke out and sixteen when it ended, and during most of that sad
and beautiful time, we lived in an old two-storey house in Singalong. A bright, irreverent boy
named Badel was in love with me, and I with him, and inevitably he lived in the house in front.
Badel was quick and smallish, had one gold- capped tooth and a complexion Mother described
as "grayish blue," but to me he was Paris and Apollo and Adonis, and each day I died a
thousand deaths for him. It was 1942 and my mother was working as a dietitian in an
emergency hospital, but my father, who was an army captain just released from Capas, had no
job, and he would go into small buy- and-sell ventures. He would find a man who wanted to sell
a piece of land and find another who wanted to buy it. He would purchase a backyardful of
twisted steel windows and sell the whole lot two days after for a profit. My eldest brother Paby's
wife, Yoying, had just had a baby, and Paby too, bought cheap pieces of jewelry and resold
them. Or he bought three ratty blankets today and exchanged them for six almost-new denim
pants tomorrow. Mother, too, bought twenty pounds of fresh butter from a black market dealer,
but before she could resell them, our ancient refrigerator broke down and all the stuff melted.
Business was contagious. Eventually, Yoying, my other brother Leo, our neighbors Esme, Rosy,
and of course, Badel, and I, decided to put up our own store. Rosy's stepmother had once run a
botica and she sold us her counter, cash box, shelves, and jars. The boys put up a collapsible
stall in front of the church and we sold everything in it-ladies' wooden shoes, oil lamps, jumping
watches, some moldy dictionaries we had discovered in Esme's old piano bench, macramé
string bags, Akebono and Pirate cigarettes, timsim brooches dipped in food coloring, a
confection called Panchitos, and slices of sour pineapple suspended in some questionable
cloudy solution.
The profits of the oil lamps were mostly Esme's and Leo's because they collected the tin cans
out of which the lamps were made. That of the macramé bags was Paby and Yoying's, because
Yoying made them. The capital for the wooden shoes was Badel's, but I got a percentage from
the profits for I helped to fetch the clogs from a queer, castle-like house in San Juan. The
earnings of cigarettes supplied by Leo's Japanese friend were consequently Leo's, but the sun-
dried peanuts were Rosy's because we dried them on a strip of sidewalk in front of her house.
Over this intricate business empire, I was appointed manager, for I was parsimonious and slow
in mathematics, and no five-centavo note could come in or go out without being entered into a
wry account book.
Badel liked to sit in the stall and joke about my esoteric computations, popping Panchitos in his
mouth, or peanuts, or fishing a sopping pineapple from the foggy jar. I'd list each item that slid
down his gullet and shake before his face a kilometric and overdue account. "My, you'd make a
mean wife," he'd say, trying on a brooch. He'd squint down at the notebook, following the
divisions and the fractions and the square roots up and down the margins, clucking with delight.
"Ah!" his finger would pause at some stooped and gnarled digit, "It should be a 9, not a 5, you're
lucky to have me around." And that was how the sessions always ended. I liked to go along
when Leo and Esme brought the tin cans up to the house of Mr. Pajamas, who made the lamps.
He was Esme's father and lived next door and he was supposed to be dying of some
mysterious liver fluke, and consequently wore his pajamas from break of morn till the set of sun.
His wife was a petite shriveled wo with a floury face and they later lost Esme's six-year-old boo
during the confusion of the Liberation, although: couldn't foretell this and were always giggling
behind Mr. Pajama at the time, back and being quite mean.
The six-year-old son was supposed to have been seen fleeing with a Negro and was never
found again. No one reported has seen the child die, though, and Mr. and Mrs. Pajamas never
lo hope, setting a place for the boy at their table each mealtime and spending a fortune following
up leads, (which, I suppose, is what made Esme slightly dorty-I mean, you don't wait for a ghost
come to supper for years and not have it tell on you somehow). The years after the war Esme's
folk were still putting ads in the new per. The boy would have been sixteen then, and they would
even let the prospect live with them for a while. But something always came up to convince
them that he could not possibly be their son. The last was a young man who had been found by
a fisherman wandering alone in the woods after the Liberation, but he promptly fell in love with
Esme, which proved beyond doubt that he was not their son. And last we heard, Mr. Pajamas
had become neurasthenic and was in danger of losing his mind.
But at that time he was just a cheerful inventor from whom we got our supply of lamps. He
transacted all his business from a beach chair equipped with castors so that he could move
from one part of his room to the other without disturbing his liver flukes. The tin cans were
scrubbed till they shone like halos and placed on a Lary Susan with all his tools, and this Lazy
Susan too had wheels and could be happily rolled about. The telephone was nailed to a piano
stool which could also be pushed and pulled about.
As a matter of fact Mr. Pajamas combed his hair in front of a hand mirror screwed to a chair leg
cemented on to a skate. And he could wheel around his lamp wicks on the enamel cover of a
freezer mounted on a bicycle wheel. Near the window was a castored tin box enclosing a light
bulb that heated coconut oil and it also could cook an egg. And if he was warm, Mr. Pajamas
cooled himself with an air nozzle that could clean a typewriter, too. And all these were on
castors and rolling merrily about.
But the boys were growing away from us, Esme and I felt, as we busied ourselves with girl
tasks, bleaching spots out of our dresses or sticking a needle in and out of an embroidery hoop,
and indeed, they never had time, after a while, to take their turns at minding the store. Their
activities no longer centered solely around the street in front of our houses, and they spoke in
whispers about a guerrilla paper Badel's father was putting out. We knew it was called The
Patriot and was mimeographed behind the stairs of Mr. Mercado's room (for we sometimes
went up their stairs to borrow salt or vinegar from his wife). On Wednesdays, Leo and Badel
rode out on their bicycles to distribute the paper, always leaving one on top of President Laurel's
gate.
My brother Paby was away from home more than anybody else. One morning I heard him in our
sala telling Badel about a certain "Mammy" he was supposed to contact. When I asked them if
this "Mammy" lived in Parañaque where I knew the guerrilla headquarters was, Paby turned his
back on me and Badel put his hands in his pockets, pretending not to hear.
So, I went into the bedroom and looked into the pier mirror. My hair had been trimmed short to
save on curling and this made me look about ten years old instead of thirteen. My back was as
flat as a board and so was my front. It was very discouraging. Some of Paby's socks were in
neat balls on Mama's bed where she had been mending them and I chose two and slipped them
into the front of my dress, but they looked exactly like what they were: a pair of Paby's holey
socks. I experimented with them a bit, pushing the socks up so high they looked like a football
player's shoulders, then down low like the paps of an old woman dragging her way to the grave.
Then I put them in their proper place so that I had this mountainous phony bust, and walked
around top-heavy, frowning vilely at the wolves and repugnantly down at my anguished suitors,
and then I had this bright idea. I got Mama's bed sheet and rolled it up into a ball and placed it
on my tummy. Seven months. Ho-hum. But the front of my dress kept riding up so that I had to
keep pulling the hem down, oh, it was really such a bother to be pregnant in this heat, and that
boring husband refusing to even hunt green mangoes! in this world, everything broken in the
war, roofs and toilets and . I could ha Then the door swung open, why can't a girl have a bit of
privacy locks, and Badel's face came around the door and his jaw dropped quickly several
inches. Then his eyes lighted up and crinkled with laughter "Excuse me, Mrs.," he said, ducking
out
A couple of times the boys still had an old fit of exuberance smashed him dead with a broom.
And one moonlit night they yelled for Esme and Rosy and me to play tumbang preso with them
in the empty lot in front of the bicycle shop. Leo put up two of his tin cans for goals and defined
the limits of our hiding places, and dispersing, we laughed and screamed with abandon.
Remembering the best place to hide, I crawled into the back of Mr. Rosal's bicycle shop. It was
pitch-dark in the room and soundlessly I crouched under a tricycle and waited. My heart was
pounding in my throat but after a while I became conscious that I was not alone in the room. A
muffled sob came from deep within the hood of another tricycle, followed almost immediately by
a man's urgent voice in a desolate attempt at consolation. A trouser leg rippled in the dark and
the man stood up-and from the shaggy hair and the hooked nose I could tell it was Mr. Rosal.
He had a large head and he held it in his hands as if it were overripe and might snap from its
stem any minute. He paced back and forth, while the woman in the tricycle continued sobbing.
Mr. Rosal knelt down on the floor and rested his head on her knees.
Outside, shrill screams issued from the hiding places in the moonlight, like small alarms.
Miserably, I hugged my knees and waited, not daring to make a sound, fearing my heart would
at any moment now burst open, spilling my blood and my secrets upon the dirt floor.
Mr. Rosal did not move for a long time and I thought he had fallen asleep. The seat of the
tricycle creaked as the woman shifted her weight. After a while the woman said "I have to go,"
quite clearly, and stood up and fumbled inside her limp handbag. Sliding what looked like a
stubby lipstick over her lower lip, the woman walked into a splash of moonlight by the
windowsill. She turned towards the work table in a heavy fluid gesture, and I could see the face
fully, bruised with muddy tears. Of course, I recognized it--but for a puzzled moment it seemed
out of the context in the bicycle shop- it should be before a hot stove, in the doorway of the
house in front, calling Badel Mercado home to supper. Mr. Rosal joined Badel's mother in the
pool of light and I could hear him murmuring words of endearment, his loose old lips with the
ridges in them going plop, plop, plop, as he talked. She was looking wetly up at him, with
mounting horror and I noted her chin that was beginning to sag the crow's feet spreading down
the corners of her eyes, and the tears spilling over their banks like a tiny rill.
I ran out of the bicycle shop and out into the street screaming "Save me! Save me!" Badel
pulled me to his hiding place behind some tangled garlic vines asking me if I had hurt myself. I
shook my head, gulping, and felt the laughter and the tears rising in my throat. Badel put his
arms firmly about my shoulders and pushed my head down upon his breast pocket. The air was
heavy with the oppressive odor of garlic flowers and I thought I would swoon. "You're trembling,"
Badel said, "Whatever it is, don't think about it." I shut my eyes tight and bit my lip and after a
while the funny feeling subsided. I lifted my head away from Badel embarrassedly and
unloosened his arms gently from my shoulders. He took my hand and kissed its dirty palm.
"Please don't see any more ghosts," he pleaded.
In those days Esme came to the house each afternoon, and we sat idly on the hammock,
languidly sipping kalamansi juice in tall glasses. We read Maysie Grieg and Faith Baldwin
endlessly, haunting the garage of Mr. Magsalin which had been turned early in the Occupation
into a lending library. People were so hungry for books, the garage conducted a thriving
business, and Mr. Magsalin rented out everything from Jack London to telephone directories.
Flipping the pages of some weepy love story, I would sometimes look up and find my Jonathan
or my Kim or my Jeremy standing in the mist before me. "I was on my way downtown," Badel
would say, looking at me with Jonathan's eyes. "But I decided to drop in on a hunch. It is almost
like a tryst."
Sometimes when Esme was helping her father with the lamps, there was nothing to do but talk
to silly Yoying. My brother's wife was extremely pretty, with smooth, almost transparent skin that
showed little red veins and which she took great care of, never wiping her cheeks with a towel
but letting them dry in the air. When I laughed at her beauty routines, she said I was so raggy
looking anyway I'd grow up and never mind if I didn't comb my hair or popped off a couple of
buttons, and I've grown, and alas, tis true, 'tis true.
Yoying kept voluminous scrapbooks on diets and beauty tips, like how to dig out blackheads
and whiteheads, how to remove fat from your hips and transfer it to your bust with proper
exercise, but since neither Esme nor I had hips or a bust to begin with, her enthusiasm was lost
on us. But Yoying had her points. You could, for instance, ask her things like "What is love?" or
"Where do babies come from?" that you couldn't comfortably ask your mother or your brothers,
but she gave such dreary answers you got to wondering why people ever bothered to fall in love
or make babies.
Once when Yoying was pregnant, I was swinging on the ham-mock and accidentally kicked her
tummy. It wasn't much of a shove, but she lost her balance and went sprawling into a roll of
mats. She made a great fuss about it, waddling about and stroking her great belly, saying the
baby would surely come out with a harelip and I would be blamed. I pretended not to care, but
long after she had forgotten the incident I would wake up in the middle of the night and die with
worry about it.
Now Yoying had a beautiful harelip-less baby and I had nothing, nothing. Stiff-legged, I would
walk to the kitchen and collect strips of paper from the woodbox. They were remnants of colored
calendars and balance sheets fetched from the Imprenta nearby for our kindling for in those
days I was not interested in writing. I was interested in drawing. I drew continuously and
voluminously, lining up my colored paper on the windowsill, prodding a half-asleep Yoying on
the hammock to ask her opinion on some character or another I was incorporating in the
continuing stories, comic-book fashion. Sometimes Badel passed by on the street below, on his
way to some earthshaking errand of coconuts or cigarettes for his father, and that would be the
end of the afternoon's chapter. Sighing, I would pillow my chin upon my wrist, and stay
motionless till dusk fell, and the sun sank into the gentle breast of evening. "Stop mooning
around," my mother scolded, and deliriously I would move from the window with an almost
physical pain. Now I knew at last what it felt like to be in love: like a bruised pomelo, like a
drowned cat, like a toothache, like a lost button, like a mop.
Our house had a flat space on its roof accessible by a flight of steep stairs and a small trap
door, through which you could step softly out into the dusk, and I liked to go up there when the
wind was brisk. Up there you could see all the roofs of the neighboring houses, rising in uneven
peaks and buffed with the soots of infinite cookings, as the war progressed getting shabbier and
shabbier, till you could tell how many years had passed from the patches and the tinker's stars
that had blossomed on them, and the layering of rust, and the obsolete chimneys getting
crookeder and crookeder, like men grown tired and old. My elbows and knees were always
smeared from scaling the slope of ours, but towards the end of the war our roof had been worn
paper-thin, and was quite a hazard to climb.
But those days I could climb to the very top and feel the cold wind against my thin legs and play
God. For I could look into the window of every house-into the high-raftered kitchens and the
close shadowy bedrooms and the cool hushed parlors with their filigreed clocks frozen forever
at some forgotten dinner hour. I could stretch out a hand and touch a rafter over Mr. Pajama's
bedroom and see him huddled on his beach chair, pushing and pulling his telephone about. Or I
could blow a ball of cinders into Mrs. Ilustre's curtain of sausages swinging above her hissing
stove. And I could count the plates on her kitchen table and tell how many people were having
dinner that night.
Across the street I could catch Mrs. Mercado stealing out of her house in a jersey dress, in her
eternal quest for love, her mouth sullen, her hair wind-tossed, her shawl covering a bowl of
sweets for her lover in the bicycle shop. If the stage show at the theater was finished early, the
roofs would be washed with a pink light: the streets would be spilling with people and tricycles,
on the corners always girls with violet makeup, and tall pompadours striking some foolish
bargain with Japanese officers, smiling serenely in their shining boots.
But it was always pure and lonely in my summit, and often o Iman who loved me inf the roofs I
wept for all the grand impossible things Badel wished me to be, which I couldn't, couldn't.
Someday I would raise a flock of urchins, married to some uncomplicated man who loved me
infinitely, who would make me the queen of his home and his brooms and mops, expecting no
alchemy and no miracles. For even when Badel said he loved me, I could feel him sifting my
qualities critically, chopping me into little pieces, pressing me like a sentence, reducing me to
the lowest terms, to the least common denominator of my timorous and unequal self. And try as
he might, he could fashion nothing out of the clod of me, my thoughts were cinders, my soul
was shallow, it had no brook. But I love you, Badel, I would say to the first pale star, I love you
for nothing. Keep it for a rainy day.
Schools opened again in January and every day Leo and I hang by the straps of some always-
full streetcar. It dislodged us two corners away from the school gate and we passed by a sentry
with a bayonet in his box before whom we had to make a three-quarters bow. The school
garden had lost its flower beds as had every garden and lawn and every vacant lot in the city-
replaced upon order of the Food Administration with neat rows of pechay and cabbages.
Leo was in Second Year and Badel was in Fourth Year, and my friends Esme and Rosy and I
were in First together, and we were all taking the "Completion Course." We still used our old
textbooks, but now, certain passages like "the might of America" and "Yankee Doodle" and
"Manuel L. Quezon" were inked out, and the dollars and cents in the arithmetic problems were
replaced by yen or pesos. You couldn't ever see a map of Europe or a picture of Abraham
Lincoln which were now pasted over with opaque black paper, although the mischievous boys in
the back row were always turning up the edges to say hello to their old friends. Occasionally, we
still took up American authors, but only if they behaved themselves and talked only about
landscapes and the weather. If they didn't, we came across something like: See the shipping of
XXXX far north and XXXX and the heights of XXXX and hear the XXXX singing, but we could
always hold the page up to the light and fill in the missing words. Once a month a long-lipped
Japanese censor, who smelled of soy sauce, came to examine our books and berate the
teacher for the unglued portions.
We did a lot of singing and physical education in the schoolyard. Afice the Japanese and
national anthems, we made a quarter-turn, bowed in assembly to the rising sun, and recited the
Ten Principles of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The principal turned on the tiny pho nograph on the
sill of his office window, and we began the Radio Taiso exercises which involved a good deal of
inhaling and squatting. Then we filed to our rooms and brought out our books and learned all
about prehistoric times, and divided yen and pesos and read what was left of Walt Whitman.
After that it was time for current events and we reported news like:
Many household goods, which were before the war taken for granted in America, are now
considered expendable. Vacuum cleaners, electric refrigerators, radios, phonographs, and
sewing machines are scarce since they are no longer produced and there is little choice in pots,
pans, stoves, hardware, and dresses. Shirt- nails have been shortened, ruffles removed from
nightgowns to save on cloth, and matches reduced to a quarter of an inch to save on lumber
Then the bell rang and we went out to the garden to hoe the pechay
The afternoons were devoted to Nippongo. I liked Nippongo because we were given a bamboo
brush and a silver of black ink and were made to paint squiggly characters starting from the
backs of our notebooks and from right to left. In the corridors and the washrooms we spouted
things like Domo arigato and Ohayo gosaimashta, and Badel was my tomadachi although he
aishimasta me very much.
The Third and Fourth Years had a Japanese teacher, but we only had Miss Corpuz, who was
never more than one jump ahead of us, teaching the words she had learned from her Japanese
instructor during the weekend. Miss Corpuz was a fractious Visayan spinster given to mercurial
rages. She had once played Caligula on Teachers' Night and the mark it left was deep and
lasting. She would stand on the platform and empty the vials of her wrath in a repertoire of
Japanese insults upon our surprised and uncomprehending faces. The war had stranded Miss
Corpuz in Manila, and she was always trying to go home, had once actually succeeded in
boarding a grossly overloaded sailboat on a black market ticket. But the frail craft cap. sized in a
storm-down went the ship and most of the passengers but our Miss Corpuz was unsinkable-she
swam doughtily to shore with her valise and was back in school the next morning, still slightly
damp but magnificent and terrifying in her deathlessness.
On special holidays, like the entry of the Japs into Manila or the fall of Singapore, we were
marched over Jones Bridge which was now Banzai Bridge, fluttering little paper flags with fierce
red dots on them. We gathered in the Luneta and listened to some important Jap like Hideki
Tojo or Yamashita (later hanged) make a growly speech in Nippongo and when we were
through we f arms and shouted "Banzai!" three times although we hadn't under- stood a word.
Once, General Aguinaldo was made to speak and we thought he would say something hopeful
like MacArthur will re-turn, but the old general only talked about nationalism and food production
in a frightened little voice. Then the crowd was dispersed and we proceeded to Daitoa Avenue,
or Mulawen, or Daiei, or whichever were now the new names of the streets we lived in. flung up
our
At the end of the school year, Leo got the highest grade in Nippongo and he was invited by the
long-lipped Japanese censor to work as an interpreter in their offices in the Walled City. (I didn't
get any honors and was reduced to queuing for our 120 gm. ration of rice at the neighborhood
Biba store, and collecting water in drums from the faucets at night.) Leo received a fabulous
salary of eighty pesos a month, which was quite a boon to Papa and Mama, and he was able to
see movies like Hot Spot, Chocolate Soldier, and some of the Tugo and Pugo stage shows.
The nature of Leo's job consisted of listening to the foreign broadcasts from Radio Japan behind
locked doors while his friend Long Lips stretched out on a dusty divan and closed his eyes.
Long Lips would dictate to Leo in Japanese what to write and Leo would translate it into English.
The pattern of their handiwork was invariable:
The war in the South Pacific, where battles are being fought one after the other in rapid
succession, will develop with much greater ferocity. Our archenemy, the Americans, driven
desper ate due to muddled war strategies, are undoubtedly flinging themselves against our
defense lines with utter desperation. In the attacks on the Solomons and the Gilbert Groups,
they have last in one coup more than 300 battleships (times two) and nearly 100,0000
combatants (times three). The Japanese forces suffered no losses. (Utter lie.)
Copies were passed on to the Shin Bun sya, and the afternoon editions usually carried one of
Leo's doctored news items,
Leo's job provided Mr. Mercado with a source of authentic news safer than listening to the
shortwave radio in the house of the old woman called "Manny" in España. But Leo had to see
Mr. Mercado only at night because he feared being followed. He would retranslate the news he
had heard into its original version for The Patriot and Badel would write a searing editorial to
accompany it.
By this time I knew all about the underground goings-on in the bodega (once I had even been
sent by Paby to fetch mimeograph paper from the old woman in España, whom I remember as
extremely fat, and sitting, with her voluminous nightgown arranged about her, upon a tall
chamber pot) and hence was drafted to do the illustrations for The Patriot. Each afternoon Badel
would come into the study, hovering like a harpy over the windowsill where I sat drawing, while I
burst out in goose bumps in the effort to please him. He would pick up each half-finished sketch
and examine it mock-seriously too small! Too large! Head like a doorknob! Face like an
Andrews sister! Legs like sticks till I stamped my feet in desperation and tore my masterpiece to
bits after all, what were we illustrating, a brochure of the Louvre?
But in an hour Badel would be back, begging me to draw an- other-never mind if it's ghastly,
never mind if it stinks! His friends all conceded him a grudging admiration, recognizing the gifts
he possessed to an enviable degree, but he scorched everyone's soul up of its waters, for
everything must be perfect for him. And so Badel was always unhappy, and I thought (as I
picked up my pencil wearily to repeat the seventeenth drawing that day) what a burden it must
be to see the clockworks: to know the motives of hate and love; how things fall into place; where
the earth sinks, where the seas flow; how every angel falls.
In the latter part of the year 1943, the embroidery shop in Parañaque that was being used as
guerrilla headquarters v raided by the Japs, and all of Paby's friends descended upon our
house. They stayed with us a whole fortnight and although won edge all the time, they brought
into our gray lives an aura of festivity. We let them have all our rooms except Mama's, where
the family stayed, and the overflow was accommodated by Mr. Ilustre.
Although the young guerrilleros were well-behaved and tried to help as much as they could
(husking the floors, washing the dishes and their own clothes) still the work involved was
tremendous. Most of them were Capas releases and still suffering from the effects of
malnutrition and malaria, and Mother was forever boiling singkuna bark and giving liver
transfusions and spoonfuls of the cod liver oil Maria Orosa was bottling from the biya of our own
rivers. Of course the guerrillas contributed their share in the marketing, but even then one
wasn't ever sure of finding enough in the markets anymore, and Mother's stock of canned
goods, which she had hoped would last until December, was finished in two weeks.
One Saturday Yoying and I were sent to market with a whole bayong of money, but it also
happened to be the first raid of Manila by the Americans. When we went into the market, we
found all the lights doused. Not a soul was in sight, the vendors hiding under the concrete white-
tiled counters, and their wares with them. We went from stall to stall but no one would sell us
anything, save a vegetable vendor who was persuaded to part with a bundle of kangkong for a
hundred pesos. And we never even saw her face, just a voice and a shaking hand reaching out
from under a counter surrounded by baskets.
The guerrilla leader stayed in a bedroom in Mr. Ilustre's house during those two weeks. It was
the only house that eventually merged unscathed from the Liberation of Manila. When the last
Japanese had retreated, the guerrilla leader remembered the house and put up a kangaroo
court in Mr. Ilustre's sala, beheading every suspected spy and collaborator in it. For days the
ravaged vicinity echoed with screams and beatings, and for months after the "trials" had ended,
Mrs. Ilustre still couldn't scrub all the blood out of her floors:
Through the years her young sons would hear ghostly footsteps and human groans and
unexplained gushings from tightly shut faucets, and once, a niece, coming down the kitchen to
heat a bottle of milk for the baby, saw a green apparition with ankle-length hair smiling at her
from an open door. Much as the Ilustres loved the house. which had belonged to them for
generations, living in it became unbearable, and two years after the war they sold the house to a
soda-bottling company, and for considerably less than it was worth.
To my mother's eternal dismay, some young guerrillero or an- other was from then on lodging
with us for a day or two. And it was also at about this time that a Japanese sentry, who had
befriended Leo at his office, was regularly coming to the house for dinner.
Ito, the sentry, was a gentle, slow-witted Jap, crumpled from the crown of his wilted cap to the
strips of his never-straight leggings. He was forty if I was a day, and he had never risen above
the rank of corporal. Ito would never become the Tiger of Malaya. Mother was not surprised
about Ito, for that was not the first time Leo had brought home strange unscrubbed creatures,
and she treated the Jap with the same reverence that she accorded the wingless roosters and
the leek-horned goat in Leo's zoo in our backyard. That first time, just before leaving, Ito
extracted from a messy wallet a round something which he placed reverently into my palm. Was
it a love pill? Was it a quartz or a tektite or a secret weapon or a talisman? No, Leo translated, it
is a stone from a Shinto shrine. I turned the pebble foolishly in my fingers and as soon as Ito
turned his back, I tossed it out the window.
At least once a month, when he had a day's leave, Ito would come to the house with his clothes
wrapped in a badly laundered bandana and beg to sleep there. Gallantly, Leo offered his room
and his bed, but Ito would not hear of it, and my brother dug up a bedraggled cot from the cellar
and Ito slept in our vestibule.
Ito volunteered no information about his life in the army, we asked him no questions and he
asked none. Only later, when Paby's whereabouts were betrayed did Ito's visits raise our tardy
suspicions. Ito liked music and never tired of listening to my thunderous rendition of Love and
Devotion (my only piece). Sitting on the flounced rocking chair by the window, Ito would gaze at
the setting sun, at intervals I would catch him through the polished lid of the piano, blowing his
nose into a handkerchief. His sadness baffled me (why should he cry when he was a
conqueror?) so that I was always impatient with him, purposely hitting the wrong notes to annoy
him. But Ito never even noticed, wrapped up in communion with the setting sun.
To Leo's embarrassment, I delighted in tormenting Ito: placing a toad under his pillows or hiding
the bathroom soap the minute he stepped out of the vestibule with a towel over his arm. With
infinite patience, Ito would pick up the toad and set it loose in the garden, and after a while he
brought his own soap. Sometimes Ito would be absent for quite a while, gone on a tour of duty
somewhere in Luzon. But one gentle evening the door would open and Ito would stand
uncertainly in the starlight, as crumpled and woebegone as ever.
The last time we saw him was after a stint in New Guinea-It walked through the backdoor
carrying a monkey and a white bird. I was making some peanut brittle in the kitchen and they
filled the air with their screeching and I told Ito I would fry his bird in the skillet and drown his
monkey in a pot. Ito laughed and told me in his horrible English that the white bird was for me,
its name was Peace, it was his gift, his present, better than a stone. The bird hopped on my
shoulder, fluffed its feathers arrogantly, and gave my ear a sharp tweak.
Leo made an elaborate cage with several perches, and a crystal bath, and we fed the bird corn
and bananas, setting the cage out each morning to warm in the sun. Peace had small bright
eyes and a long tail and fluffed its feathers and crooned, and I showered upon it all the love and
affection I had denied its master.
Once, our gang all came from the Luneta where there had been a parade, when we went by the
yard of Panaderia that had been turned into a Japanese garrison. The place was a notorious
chamber of horrors, the rooms marked one, two, or three, depending upon the gravity of the
offense (one was failing to salute a sentry; two was profiteering and carrying Philippine
currency; three was multiple crimes ranging from espionage to supporting guerrillas and a sure
stepping stone to Fort Santiago). Several boards were always purposely loose on the fence
enclosing the yard and because we could hear screams inside, we stopped to look
The small patio, which in happier times used to be lined with large tubs of rising dough, was
broiling in the noonday sun. A stake had been driven into the ground in the center, and a
woman was tied to it stark-naked. A dirty Jap carrying a piece of burning kindling stood in front
of the woman, and each time he asked a question, he applied its flaming end to the hair of her
armpits. All her fingers were bleeding where the nails had been detached, and whenever the
woman screamed, her milk-white body would writhe in a terrible agony. I held tightly to Badel's
hand and Esme whispered a shocked prayer.
People had gathered all over the fence around us but no one could do anything. "She is not a
spy," an onlooker who recognized the woman said. "She is a prostitute. They are torturing her
because she would not give in to their captain." I could see Paby's face and its expression
frightened me he was clutching the top of the board fence with both hands and I could see that
his knuckles were livid.
For weeks we could not forget the incident, and the following months, as if by signal, our
guerrilleros became extremely active. My own brothers were now assigned to sabotage
submarine landings in Navotas (Allied forces making brief ocular inspections and pulling out an
hour after) and somehow we knew that this young group in our midst was responsible for
sending all the lights in the city blinking. The dynamos in Caloocan were heavily guarded and it
was impossible to effect a total blackout, but one of the boys would crawl on his belly to knife a
sentry and cut an electric wire, providing an almost-as-effective interval of intermittent darkness.
Badel was with two new recruits, Nonong and Carding, assigned to contact scrap iron dealers to
find out how much scrap was being bought by the Japs (and being made into arms or used to
repair the ailing Japanese battleships in Cavite). The newspapers were always bragging about
the amount of war materials pouring in from Japan, but the heavy local buying of scrap
convinced them otherwise, and this interesting bit of intelligence was promptly relayed to
Parañaque.
The guerrillas were also in contact with food dealers and suppliers (was the country really
feeding the whole Japanese army or did they receive their own supplies from Japan as
reported?) and were always watching the airfields. They knew the type of craft based in the
hangars and the number of weapons carriers that passed on the highways in the course of a
day. And all of these matters were faithfully reported to guerrilla hide-outs. To Badel's
bewilderment. he became the recipient of a part shipment of counterfeit Japanese war notes
printed by American sympathizers in Australia-but Mrs. Mercado promptly made use of it to
finance a string of beauty shops featuring charcoal croquignoles.
But Paby was the most brazen of the lot, having a hand even in the most useless mischiefs.
Once, he instructed young boys to substitute stones for fish in the baskets being confiscated by
Japs from a truck. Another time he gave a Japanese colonel a hot foot during a rally. Before the
end of six months, there was a price on Paby's head, but he wouldn't go into serious hiding until
at the end of July a bearded stranger visited Mr. Rosal in his bicycle shop to inquire where my
brother was staying. Paby belittled the incident, but all throughout the dinner he put his arm
tenderly about Yoying's growing waist (she was pregnant again), and he carried the baby all
over the house, swinging it up and down in an arc till it gurgled with laughter. But there was a
hysterical quality to Paby's gaiety even as he slapped our bottoms and told us to behave
ourselves when he was gone.
For a long time he closeted himself in the bedroom with Yoying, and when they came out again,
Yoying was crying. "Get my clothes ready," he told her gently. "I shall sleep away tonight and
come back for them tomorrow."
That same evening we were awakened by the sound of a truck stopping below our bedroom
windows and disgorging Japanese soldiers on the sidewalks. We peeped through the shutters
and saw them talking to one another, pointing up at our dark windows. And then a tremendous
rapping shook the house, for it is a peculiar manner the Japanese knock, never using their
palms or their knuckles like ordinary mortals, but the butts of their rifles, and not just a few times
but continuously, and loud enough to wake the dead. Father and Mother sent the small boy who
ran our errands down to open the door, and Yoying groped under the bed for Paby's bundle of
clothes, which she unknotted and dropped piece by piece into the clothes hamper.
The boy unlatched the door and the soldiers came trooping up our narrow stairs, shouting for
someone to put on the lights, and I ran through the house flicking on all the switches even if
there was supposed to be an alert. There were twenty or twenty-five of them including some
Filipinos, and everyone in bustling high spirits, all except the officer who stood aloof and
seemed to be superior to their shenanigans, and spoke softly, a passable sibilant English, all
purl and sucked wind, the precise syllables like the hissing of water on a hot blade. The officer
asked Papa why his other son, Pablo Sonido, was not home, and Papa answered that Paby
was in the province, doing some buy and sell, for we were having a hard time making both ends
meet here, in the city. And Leo pointed to the wall on which were pasted Father's release
papers from the Philippine Army, and the certificate from the "rejuvenation course" he had
undergone from the Japanese, and he tried to summon the honeyed Nippongo phrases he had
learned so well, but like startled birds they had fled him.
Nakamura, as we later learned what the officer's name was, did not seem satisfied and his men
began tramping into the bedrooms and ransacking the drawers, forcing open wardrobes and
tearing up the linoleum, unscrewing picture frames and ripping open the mattress on the double
bed with their bayonets. But they found nothing. What they were presumably hunting for-Paby's
enlistment papers with Ramsey's guerrillas, as well as the copies of The Patriot, were sewn
neatly in the padding of the ironing board which was folded on the floor of the kitchen. As soon
as the knocking had started, our washerwoman had sunk down on it with a stunned expression
on her face like a fallen ox, remaining stolidly seated on our secrets for the duration of the visit,
and the Japs never even came near her.
Then a garrulous Jap lifted the typewriter from the study table and shook it, and my heart leapt
to my throat as my drawings for The Patriot came sailing down to the floor. The Jap picked up a
caricature, turned it over several times, spat on it and threw it disgustedly into the sink.
Then Nakamura turned on Yoying who was following us around dazedly, suckling the baby, and
asked her for a picture of her husband. When she said she didn't have any, the Jap did not
believe her, and then Papa said he had one, and straightaway walked to the roll-top desk in the
study room, from one of whose confused drawers, he magically produced a yearbook caten by
silverfish where Paby had a picture that looked so little like him (with eyes very wide and hair
like boar's bristles) that we had often laughed about it. And Yoying ran for a pair of scissors, still
suckling the baby at her breast, and clumsily cut the picture out, and to this day we have the
year- book with the jagged scissored window in it.
The Japs conferred with one another and Nakamura said they would have to take my father to
headquarters for questioning until we could produce Paby, and my father said yes, readily, and
immediately went to the bedroom and told Mama not to worry, putting on his socks and his
shoes and his sweater, for it was typhoon season and wet and chilly. We watched the Japs
bring away my father and as they walked down the stairs I saw tucked neatly in the back pocket
of a Jap's uniform, a thick coil of rope such as we had heard they used to beat up prisoners
within Fort Santiago and I had to run to the bathroom, to vomit into the tub and was sick for
quite a while afterwards.
When everyone had boarded, the truck drove away, but we could still hear the crunching of
hobnailed boots on the sidewalk for they had left two Japs behind to guard us. We went back to
bed and couldn't sleep and Yoying crept miserably under the covers, suck- ling and suckling her
baby.
Early the next morning we peeped through the shutters and saw the two Japs still patrolling the
sidewalk. Sometime during the morning Paby was coming back for his clothes. He had arranged
for Yoying to hang a piece of cloth on one of the iron flowerpot holders of the windows if
anything was amiss, just like in the movies and Yoying washed several bright handkerchiefs in
the sink and draped them casually over the potholders, taking great care to look nonchalant
about it.
The next time we peeped, the Japs were gone. A pushcart rattled by loaded with skimpy
coconuts. A bloated baby was dying on a copy of the Tribune on the sidewalk. In the middle of
the morning. Leo called Mama to the shutters and asked her if she recognized the man in a blue
polo shirt, who had, since the Japs left, been loitering idly on the street--and Mama said yes, of
course, isn't it that mechanic. Robert Taylor? We had given the man that nickname long ago
because of a certain swarthy resemblance to that movie star he was employed by Mr. Rosal to
repair the bicycles in his shop. Mrs. Mercado had told us that Robert Taylor was a Japanese in-
formed, being paid a sack of rice for every betrayal, and now we remembered it and became
really apprehensive for Paby. We knew that even if Paby heeded all of Yoying's multicolored
signals, his mere appearance in the neighborhood would doom him-Robert Taylor needed no
yearbook pictures to identify a neighbor.
Two of my uncles lived on Taft Avenue but we were uncertain about phoning them for the Japs
were not above tapping the telephone lines. So Leo scribbled a note to my elder uncle,
requesting him to post a lookout on the corner of every street leading to our house to intercept
Paby and tell him not to go home. That my father had been taken away for questioning but that
he should not, on any account, tell Paby that Papa was gone. (And my younger uncle himself,
we later learned, intercepted Paby at Pennsylvania, riding home in a tricycle.) dan med owe a to
The problem was getting the note to my uncle's house-any- one who went out through either our
front or back door would have to emerge into the sidewalk, and would surely be followed.
Mother decided to dispatch the errand boy-he was a runty twelve-year-old and fitted easily
through the bathroom window, and Leo slipped a rope around his waist and lowered the boy
gently into the patio of the Ilustres. From there the boy would make his way through the kitchens
and backyards till he emerged six doors away, from Mr. de Leon's house.
And so we waited in terror, and in the middle of the morning Yoying came up with the
announcement that the baby was feverish and had been throwing up, and no wonder. Yoying
had been nursing it with a sour and frightened stomach a whole evening. After a while we were
really worried about the baby's appearance although ceased fretting and fallen into a shallow
sleep, and Mother said we might as well have him baptized, it might help. And Yoying dressed
the infant up in his best baby shirt and wrapped him in a blue blanket that had been Paby's
when he was small it.
Yoying and Leo remained behind to keep an eye on t to watch out in case the Japs returned. I
hailed a calesa to bring us to the church and Mother kept saying poor, poor baby, all along the
way, for she had always envisioned her first grandchild being baptized in a long gown with lace
and ribbons and a big celebration afterwards and would not surrender her dream easily. I felt
the baby's and they were stone cold. things and feet,
We had the baby listed in the sacristy and were unceremoniously herded by a taciturn priest
through the violet twilight of the church illumined only by the candles on St. Jude's altar. Behind
the railing, Mama held the baby's head over the baptismal font, and the priest trickled water
from a pink shell on its forehead and pronounced the words that made it a Christian. And as I
looked over my shoulders, I caught a glimpse of Robert Taylor under the shadow of one of the
pillars.
Pedro Sonido III, we announced, as we proudly bore the baby up the stairs of our house, and
Yoying poured some cups of chocolate and brought out a platterful of rice cakes, but we
couldn't eat it, for we began remembering Paby and Father.
And it was that way for many days but Paby never came-and we presumed that he had gone to
the mountains. By this time I had finished hemstitching fifteen pillow slips and Badel pronounced
us engaged. Once on our way to the queer, castle-like house in San Juan where we bought the
wooden shoes, he pointed out a small entresuelo with a window box of jasmine and said his
father owned it and would I like to live there? It was a tumbledown thing with fretted cornices,
and I asked worriedly, has it got a bathtub? Has it got a shower and Badel slapped his forehead
and said, Oh, Joy, you do slay me you should be happy in a hole in the ground, up a tree, or in
a cave, anywhere in the world with me And I was sorry and ashamed for being so faithless.
Badel and Leo still met on Saturdays with Mr. Mercado in his bodega to mimeograph The
Patriot and smuggle out the copies to its growing sympathizers. But Leo no longer went to the
Walled City for his translations. And his Corporal friend, Ito, never came back to visit us he must
have been killed in one of the obscure skirt mishes somewhere in the Marianas. The white bird,
Peace, had grown fat and noisy, the plumes of her glossy tail cascading gracefully like a royal
train, and we hang her cage proudly in the sunshine of our windows, beside our orchids that had
begun to bloom.
Badel was now reporting to another guerrilla headquarters (this time in Cavite), and sometimes
he would be gone for days. The Japs were zoning the area oftener and oftener. They could
never discover which house was actually the headquarters and they would rope off whole
blocks of houses bordering the sea and order all the men into the plaza and a Filipino with a
sack covering his head. with holes for eyes, would point out the guilty ones. But the guerrilla
headquarters always had advance notice of these raids and the guerrillas would already be in
their hiding places before the raid began-although once, they were caught offguard and Badel
had to jump into the sea and hide underwater for several hours. I was often utilized by Badel to
take maps to Cavite-he packed them into bamboo tubes the way one packs honey, and
tremblingly, Esme or Rosy and I would ride with them in a carretela. But I wasn't a very good
courier, and after every such feat of daring, I would come down with an allergic chill.
I don't know if Mother knew about the maps, but if she did she didn't say anything, and there
were many other things weighing on her mind. Father had been gone for almost a month. Once
a week Nakamura of the Kempeitai paid a visit to our house to report that Father was still alive.
The orchids had bloomed earnestly on all our windows and the sala was redolent with flowers. I
think Nakamura liked Mother because she had high cheekbones and her eyes were up-slanted
and she looked exactly like a Japanese woman. Mama would send Papa's clothes through him
and Nakamura would bring back the soiled ones.
He never tired of hounding Mama with questions about Paby, but she always had a sassy
answer that never failed to raise her even higher in his esteem. Let my husband out, she would
say, swatting the flies savagely off the dining table, and he and I will search for Paby How can I
go looking for Paby alone when I am only a woman? I would lose my way in an hour
Then one day Nakamura said: "This is the last bundle of clothes you will receive, Tomorrow we
are bringing your husband to the North Cemetery and make him dig his grave. You may make
ready his best garments."
Mother bit her lip, but she would not give a Jap the satisfaction of seeing her crying. Humbly she
begged him to carry a box of medicines to Father "to show him how much I care for him." And
Nakamura chuckled hollowly and said he could not deny a wish for a condemned man.
Mother went to the kitchen to prepare her "medicine." It consisted of mongo beans which she
roasted in the charcoal oven and ground into bits and mixed with powdered milk. This she
wrapped in little squares of white paper exactly like medicine and packed into a small shoe box.
Mother was as concerned with the body as with spiritual things, and she was determined that
Father should have a good last meal along with his last prayers. Nakamura had never before
consented to bringing anything but clothes to Father, but now he acceded readily. With Papa's
best pants and shirt tucked under one arm and the shoe box under the other, Nakamura bowed
ceremoniously and said, "Sayonara."
We prayed on our knees endlessly all day and night and at dawn Nakamura was back with
another bundle of dirty clothes. "We have decided to postpone your husband's execution for
tomorrow." Nakamura said with elaborate politeness. "You may come at three o'clock to the
Aquarium to bid him goodbye."
We were in Intramuros at the stroke of three. The Aquarium where my father was confined was
an old tunnel in which tropical fish and octopuses and weird deep-sea creatures used to be kept
in giant tankards before the war, as part of the zoo. But now all the deep-sea creatures had died
and it was used as a prison. A foul odor of human excrement billowed from within.
We showed the sentry our passes and he let us in through a narrow entrance as dark as pitch.
A shark could conceivably live in comfort in such a place, but a tall man would have great
difficulty standing erect. We waited anxiously in the passageway, half-stand- ing and half-sitting
against a crumbling ledge. It was drizzling out- side-we could hear from a loudspeaker in the
yard a Jap making a speech. He spoke perfect English and except for the fact that he was
envisioning a glowing Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, one could mistake it for an
American talking. After about half an hour, a lank figure appeared in the passageway, all skin
and bones and drooping hair, peering intently at us through rheumy eyes. "Mama?" the
apparition called in my father's voice.
Mother walked quietly into Papa's arms and we hugged him tightly and covered him with kisses.
He was foul-smelling and un- believably dirty but a happy smile slashed his narrow face and he
said, "Let's go." We could hardly believe our ears, and wobbly as he was, Father began
dragging us towards the gate. "Didn't that fool Nakamura tell you? It's his Commanding Officer's
birthday and they're setting me free."
Pablo Sonido Senior, the papers later reported, had been set free to show that the Japanese
are "considerate, kind, and forgiving," He was also suffering from malaria and had a racking
cough. Because he was a personal friend of Captain Nakamura, Father had never been given
the "water cure," or flogged, or hung upside down from the rafters, although he had to wait his
turn like the rest of the ghostly crew for the ladleful of gruel poured smoking into the cup of his
trembling palms. During interrogations, Nakamura would come out from behind his grim official
desk and drop down on the bench beside Father, questioning him almost reluctantly. From the
very beginning, Father told him-Nakamura: You are a Captain, I am a Captain, we are both
officers and gentlemen-and on that plane their relations always remained.
In the days that followed, Mother set about fattening Father with a vengeance. She bartered our
typewriter and some of her precious gold dishes monogrammed Pablo Y Olimpia for several
sacks of white rice and a live pig. She went about almost in rags, and would not try to get a new
dress, since it meant that much less flesh picked from the bones of Papa. Bony Papa had
emerged from the dungeon decorated with ticks and body lice. Mother boiled his clothes in a
kettle in the yard. She cropped his hair and scrubbed every inch of his body with a stiff, soapy
brush. Every afternoon, after his bath, she laid him on the sofa and sponged him mercilessly
with a towel soaked in Lysol-for the vermin seemed to crawl our of his very pores, and for weeks
they would not leave their host. And while Mama scrubbed industriously, Papa howled to high
heavens, crying, "Olympia, Olympia you're flaying the skin off me!"
Every day Papa walked about the garden in his bare feet to absorb from the earth the
phosphorous that would make him strong When I whispered to him that I would marry Badel
someday, he roared, "That pipsqueak? That nincompoop?" and I knew he was getting well.
Mother didn't find it funny at all. She blamed the war for making us older than our years,
deplored the lessons of love and subterfuge we learned from the neighborhood, the hard times
that deprived us of lipstick and pretty clothes and sent us out into the world like pauper children.
She swore she would not let me marry till I was good and thirty if she had to apply a slipper to
my bottom each time I forgot it.
When Yoying and I went biking with Rosy and Esme in the afternoons, Mother would send the
errand boy to trail after us, but we would pedal very fast and lose him in the labyrinthine paths
and side streets, or send him on some fool's errand for apples in the stalls of Bustillos. Panting,
we would race up to the swelling rise of the giant pipe in Aviles street, coasting off it in a
delirious sweeping bump. We would jump off our bicycles and chain them to the hydrant, and sit
under the shade of some ancient trees with Badel and Nonong and Carding. Yoying would sit
away discreetly and begin working on her macramé bags.
Mother must have had an inkling of it, for we came home glowing and abstracted and suddenly
very hungry. She told Yoying to stay home and tend to her baby, for from then on she would go
biking with us, she needed the exercise. Mother rode very erect on Yoying's bicycle with her
hair in a net and wearing her yellow culottes while we followed reluctantly behind, and there
were no more wild goose chases and delirious bumps, and no dappled shade and macramé
bags.
But there were still the "Everybody's parties" which were held at a different friend's house each
time, and there we would meet the boys. The parties began at two and ended before curfew
time. Each one would bring a contribution-some dish prepared with much ceremony-Esme's
famous fritters. Rosy's pinipig balls, Alma's suman and my heart-shaped dishes of squiggly
gelatin topped with dribblings of vapid jam. We had a collection of scratchy records which we
played endlessly-Moonlight Serenade, Inspiration, Jeal- ousy Stardust, Why Do Robins Sing,
Yours, Pennsylvania 6500, Chat- tanooga Choo-Choo, Donkey Serenade, Siboney, and of
course, In the Mood. We were all learning how to dance-we would try to cut a fancy step and
dissolve into giggles but as the afternoon wore on we grew more and more intrepid till we could
shuffle and dip and swoon. Mother could find no vigorous objection to the parties and consoled
herself with sending a protesting Leo to fetch me at six.
In between the dances, Badel and I sat on the chairs in the porch holding hands, spinning
dreams like intricate silver cobwebs. And when we danced, we belonged solely to each other; I
could feel his heart beating upon the hollow of my throat: I knew I had but to say the word and
we would walk into a magic land...through glittering tents, groves of myrrh, flowering odors,
cassia, nard, and balm, a wilderness of sweets.
For you are my love and my joy.
We will get married.
We will live together In a little candy house
Beside a lemonade lagoon.
In time, love became a tight orange ball of passion that left us no rest-it filled us up to the brim,
burning our mouths like hot lava, and flowing over our arms and our bodies. It was there all the
time, quickening every minute with its urgency, and one Sunday in October, Badel whispered: I
can't stand it any longer. Meet me tomorrow noon with all your clothes in the store.
In the blazing noonday sun I waited for Badel the next day in the store. My fingers were fluttery,
my knees were water, my heart was a swelling moon.
An old man bought a lamp.
A woman examined a wooden shoe fussily, shaking its velvet top like a butterfly on the wing.
A boy with a mask speared a sour pineapple from the the jar. fog, in
"You've given back too much change." Where shall we go and what shall we do?
"Can't you see you've wrapped the wrong pair? They don't belong at all together." Where have
you gone and why haven't you come to me?
At four o'clock. Yoying came to relieve me, bearing her scrap books on beauty and diets. Her
tummy swelled slightly under the cotton skirt. She plumped down on the stool, sighing, and
leafed languidly through the scrapbook. "What's a nice name for this baby if it's a boy?" she
asked, clucking over a hairdo. "Leonidas? Gregorio: Bienvenido? Oh, but they're old men's
names we could name this new one Nestor Vicente and call him NV-do you like that name?"
"No."
"Alejandro then, or Paulo? Celso? Nick?"
"What about Hitler?" I said. "Or Shylock, or Lucifer"
"My, you're in a black mood today!"
Where have you gone and why don't you come?
The shadows lengthened, the wind rose, whipping the striped aw ning of the little store. Yoying
looked worriedly up at the sky. I believe it's a storm. Let's pack up. Joy, gather the boxes, wrap
the brooches, tie up the wooden shoes, count the lamps, don't forget the scrapbooks. Is
anything the matter? Oh, the raindrops! Hurry through the downpour, skip over the puddles, run
like mad home!
Sleep the sleep of the dead on a pillow steamy with tears. Thermometer. Vicks. Hot compress.
Upon my forehead lay a stone, and I was sinking, sinking, into a gray sea.
Hello, said the moonfishes. Hello, said the starfishes. Where are you going so fast? I am going,
I said, trying with great dignity to stand on the clockwise of a whirlpool, to meet my lover. Why
doesn't he come up to meet you? Cried the angel fishes.
Because I said, allowing a bubble, he's very-I swallowed another bubble, very important. Do you
have any idea where I could find him?
Where else? Cried the minnows, darting like quicksilver in and out of the nets of my bain In the
cavern, of course. That's where everyone goes. Eventually Can you swim? Not really I laughed,
gulping a bubble. But you see. I can float. Float! Chorused the minnows. But you're not even
floating-you're at the very rack bottom, sea bottom. of things!
Well, I said, standing up very straight and toppling backward immediately I can always walk.
The moonfishes tittered. They looked at one another and followed me curiously their fins
threshing the water excitedly, and into the great hall of the cavern we entered, and in a somer
sault I saw all the human limbs floating densely about me like debris after a picnic.
If you can find all the pieces that are yours, the goby guarding the entrance said through puffed
cheeks, I shall put them all in a bag and you can bring them home.
Littering the floor of the cavern were glittering arms and pale shining thighs, and mouths that
bloomed like coral flowers each never a twin of the next, but duplicated a million fold, stretching
for miles as far as the eye could see, piling up on the horizon at the end of the cave like a great
luminous mountain.
But what have you done, I cried, that you have all come unhitched? The disembodied eyes
glowed among the seaweeds, the uprooted tongues shifted sadly in the sand. But I know, I said,
my head feeling large, feeling waterlogged again. You have all fought in the war!
But where is Badel? I cried, filling my arms with limbs, going on all fours to put them together in
the sand, but none of the limbs would fit, none of the eyes were pairs. It is worse than a jigsaw
puzzle! I said in exasperation, throwing the whole mass up, flickering and floating in the water-
air If you can find his heart, the angel fish said, taking pity. Everything else will fit together, for
that is the key to the puzzle. Madly I scrambled about, searching for a heart, but they were all
out of shape, beaten and mashed and purple, oh, where could I find a heart? Maybe he never
had one to begin with, taunted the minnows, gibbering and jabbering about my ears
Ah, but I had come up with one from the jumble of seaweed, a crimson heart that could belong
to no one but Badel, a patriotic hean, flushed and beating every million, and I dangled it
triumphantly in their faces. You see! I said to the fishes, bearing the heart in glory to the gaby
Around the heart I held in my hand the goby circled delicately, brushing it with a fin. Is that all
you found? The goby asked that all you found for your trouble-a seashell? I stared at my palm
and in it indeed lay a curving seashell I wept. For the inside of the pinned and gold chamber
was a sadly Is desolately
Tuck in the blanket. Thermometer. Vaporizer. Soup? No. What empty time is it? What day?
What year? What century?
Her flu's gone.
Bud by dose is clogged. I am udwadted and udluvd.
Late in the afternoon Esme came with a basket of blinding flowers, quivering in the sun. She
was in a white dress, her hair drawn back neatly with a golden clip. She went to the window to
raise a blind. "My, it's been a week," Esme said, plumping the pillows and tucking a fresh sheet
over my legs, "Are you okay now?"
"Sure, why not?"
I sat up, drawing my knees to my chest. Esme poured a cup of hot weak tea and drank it. "Didn't
they tell you?" Esme called over her shoulder brightly. "The Cavite headquarters was raided last
Monday. They all had to leave for the mountains. Badel said to tell you he was sorry he couldn't
say goodbye."
After Badel left, there were still the "Everybody's Parties," and I still went with my friends to all of
them, bearing my trembling contributions of pink gelatin, and finally learned to dance an
indecorous boogie-woogie with much shuffling and hysterical laughter. Glow- ing, we still sat on
the creaky chairs, chattering about the latest Lamberto Avellana stage show, while the boys
hovered hopefully about in their sharkskin pants, remnants of a prewar splendor grown a little
short at the ankles. And the strains of Moonlight Serenade and Inspiration floated from the
phonograph, palpable in the steaming air, like memories.
My mother no longer found it necessary to go along on our biking spree, for she knew in her
heart that I would go nowhere and meet no one. We would ride to the very end of the boulevard,
our own legs flashing, and life turned on like the bright spokes of our bicycles, being nowhere
and resolving nothing. At dusk I turned into the crunchy gravel path of our house, and another
day was folded away forever. I dropped the bicycle clips into the vase in the vestibule, shaking
my hair loose and walking barefoot to the bedroom, locking the door against my mother's
soothing advice and ministrations. Occasionally, I still went up to the roofs, but I felt too old to
climb them. Even without looking, I could tell that my world below had already turned into ashes.
Badel grew up to be a wise and great man, but at the time there was no hint yet of the
greatness in him and he was just as foolish as the rest of us because he came home from the
mountains on his birthday. He bounded into the backyard and stole softly in through the kitchen
door while the family was at supper.
Mama and Papa soon learned about it and were presently in the next house, full of questions
about Paby, and Leo and I followed soon after. Badel's mother had scraped the bin to make a
glutinous cassava cake, as large and ponderous as the cover of a manhole. Badel sat on the
long kitchen bench devouring a wedge of cake. He had that shining vitality about him that had
often given me a start (but which I had not yet learned to recognize as the crest of his future
eminence), although his face had become gaunt and the lips were cracked and blistered from
chewing casuy leaves and half-burned sugarcane from the fields the Japs had burned. I could
almost follow him in his journey down the mountains, bareheaded and barefooted in the
sweltering heat, jumping on the burning sand to cool the soles of his feet, hopping from patch of
grass to patch of grass, to stone and dried leaf, and that was how I would remember him
through all the days and the months that followed, and through all the years, when on trips to
some pristine spot in the mountains, with a new and truer love by my side, we drove past the
hot shimmering fields. Badel looked up from his story and said Hello, Joy. You're certainly
grown-up. Aren't you going to wish me a Happy Birthday? So I said. Happy Birthday, Badel, and
sat down beside Father far away on the other side of the table.
Badel had volunteered for this assignment because he wansol to be in the city on his birthday
and Paby was with him at the beginning of it. They were to accompany Ramsey's right-hand
man-a peerless G-2 known to them only as OB, who had several times before stayed in the city
in many guises-a boy in short pan selling coal, a janitor at Cine Ore, an ice-cream vendor, a
puto-seller, He had gathered gossip by standing on street corners, in Chinese cafes where the
government puppets lingered, and by littering around the garrisons in whose locked secret
drawers reposed the bluepri for salvation.
The three of them had set out from Ramsey's headquarters companied by a guide, a wood
gatherer familiar with the terrain of tangled underbrush. A vaporous moon followed them
through the towering easy trees, sifting through the breast-high banks of so- den salahib, over
the confused foot trails barely distinguishable in the shadows.
"Suddenly, from the dense growth ahead was a whir of leaves (said Badel) and moving towards
us came the blurred shades of a herd of carabaos. Some Japanese and Filipinos were astride
the thing animals, the sounds of their talk reaching us on the trail where we stood, rooted in
terror. Then one of the Filipinos cried, Look guerrillas! And rifle shots spattered the night air,
sending Paby and the guide tumbling over me in the tall grass.
"I began to roll around and around, crawling in the brush, bumping over snake nests and
heaven knows what else, hitting my head on invisible rocks, my face and arms slashed all over
by the rough grass blades, for I was trying desperately to avoid the path of the trotting animals.
"But I had apparently misjudged their direction, for the next time I looked up, I saw them still
moving rapidly towards me, in an oblique disorderly fashion. I decided to lie still and the carabas
galloped so close by that a flank brushed my cheek, and a heavy hoof landed on one of my
thighs!
"But no one had really seen me and eventually the last galloping beast thundered away in the
distance. After a while I got up on my knees, massaging my bruised thigh. The moon had risen
above the rim of La Mesa Dam and it was quiet all around. I could see Paby standing under a
camry tree with the guide and they beckoned to me and together we searched for OB.
"Then the wood gatherer climbed a tree and spotted a figure sprawled on the ground at the spot
where we had first sighted the carabaos. OB was dead. We dug a grave and buried him and
Paby decided that he should go back to the mountains to break the news to Ramsey. And I was
to proceed to the city."
For a day and a night, Badel made his way down the mountains, following the signs in the trail
indicated by the wood gatherer. His food supply had run out and he assuaged his hunger by
stuffing the soggy fruits of casuy in his mouth or chewing on young leaves and wild roots.
At daybreak he had reached the outskirts of Manila. Rusty carriers were floating peacefully in
the bay and several Japanese clad only in G-strings, were taking a constitutional on the seawall.
Believing Badel, after his weary journey, to be one of those casualties of the Occupation, crazed
either by hunger or privation, they had in a jesting mood, grappled with him, hurling him thrice
over their shoulders in an expert jujitsu into the sea from which each time he came up
spluttering. Luckily, some hostesses in evening dress came following, strolling drunkenly down
the boulevard, and the Japs moved on to a more pleasant divertissement.
As Badel talked, Mrs. Mercado sobbed quietly in her hands. Mr. Mercado turned down the wick
of the oil lamp to a sliver. The windows were covered with black paper and the kitchen was un-
comfortably warm as Badel told my parents all about Paby.
Paby was well, in fact he was one of the few who had never fallen ill. He was loved like a son by
Ramsey, and stayed close to the American guerrilla camp most of the time. Once in a while he
was sent down on horseback to solicit contributions from the foothill towns and he would ride
back under cover of darkness loaded with supplies. Paby's only complaint was the leeches, of
which the mountain had an inexhaustible supply--they clung to his ankles and calves and if he
had tobacco he smoked them out and if he had none, hehad to pick them off with his hands.
Paby had killed seven Japs and he sent Yoying his love.
Footsteps crunched on the walk outside-in an instant Badel had jumped up and bolted out the
window to hide in Mrs. Ilustre's cellar. But the Jap had only come to scold about the light and
went back to patrolling the street.
At dawn after he was properly shaved and dressed in clean clothes, before he left, Badel came
to say goodbye. He stole in through the low window of the study where I now slept and shooed
the grumbling maid away and sat uneasily upon a trunk of books. I looked at him through the
thick mosquito net, wondering how I could have fallen in love with this zealot, this brash young
patriot who had no room for anything in his heart but his own dreams. I rubbed my eyes and he
brushed the mosquito net impatiently away, balling it above my head like a mass of clouds and
he said, I'm sorry, Joy. What happened? We were going to get married. He held his arms out
achingly in the dark.
When this is over, he gestured vaguely, I shall be back and we will get married.
We will live together.
In a little candy house.
Beside a lemonade lagoon.
We shall be very happy.
I'm sure of it.
And Badel cried.
Oh, why are we so full of useless talk!
Let's make it do, I said. Let's keep it that way.
I guess it will have to do, for always.
I was tired of kneeling so I got up.
You'll change your mind, he said, and his determination glowed like a living thing between us. I'll
make you if it's the last thing I do.
Goodbye, Badel.
Goodbye, Joy.
I love you.
Have a glorious war.
During the latter part of the Occupation, no truck ever came to collect the garbage anymore and
the neighborhood began to dump their refuse on the sidewalk in the corner. When the wind blew
over the rancid mountain, its stench and its flies filled our bedrooms so that Mother was always
at odds with the neighbors who would lift their eyebrows innocently and shake their heads in
hurt-no, not as, we burn our trash, it must be those people in front! And at night my mother
would hide behind the bitter melon trellis in wait for the culprit to steal out with his garbage box.
The houseboy of Rosy's family began coming into our yard in the afternoon to sweep the leaves
from under the swing and the bamboo benches in order to eat of the atis that had bloomed in
clutches of dry tight fruit. Rosy's family had evacuated to the fish- ponds, leaving the boy to fend
for himself and the houseboy's legs were now bloated up to the thigh as were his belly and his
cheeks. Mother took pity on him and let him sleep on a piece of burlap in our garage, and we
gave him our leftovers which wasn't much, for by this time we had very little to eat ourselves,
reduced to mixing cubes of wry camote with our gruel. (The day the Americans arrived, this
houseboy was the first to hobble to the barracks, but by then he could no longer wear his pants
for his thighs had swollen to the size of tree trunks, and he went around in a knee-length
camiseta he had begged from Papa. All throughout the day he did odd jobs like fetching water
and scraping mud off the combat boots of the GIS, and they let him gorge himself on their
preserved butter and salmon and meat loafs and puddings. Sometime after the boy had lain in
our garage that same night, he woke up my mother saying he was feeling very ill. His hands
were ice cold and his tummy was severely bloated, and before morning he was dead.)
By this time I was almost seventeen and life had ceased being a wilderness of sweets. One
cloudy morning my brother Paby came home from the mountains hidden in a vegetable truck,
and he re-joined our lives as if he had never been away at all. We had long ago consumed all
the wingless chickens of Leo's weird menagerie in the backyard, and now, to celebrate Paby's
homecoming, Leo tearfully consented to the slaughter of its lone survivor, the elk-horned goat
(for it had already denuded the neighborhood of its grass, as far as Vito Cruz, and would
anyway soon succumb from malnutrition.) Father fed it some barbiturates Mother obtained from
the hospital, and killed it as gently as possible, and Mother hung it upside down to drip over a
basin for twenty-four hours. Its legs dangled limply in the air like an imperfect cross, and Mother
hacked the flesh sav agely and stewed the members in onions and peppers without saying a
word. Even as we later partook of a more sumptuous meal than we had in ages, we would take
guilty sidelong glances at Leo and the red sauce streaming down the corners of our mouths and
the burps rising uncontrollably up our throats, we felt shamefully and irremediably like cannibals.
It was at about this time that rice was P100 per small tin of condensed milk, kindling was P50 a
bundle that had cost 2 centavos before the war, and the beggars were always huddled over the
garbage pile which they used for kindling to heat the coconut shells of food they had begged.
Once Leo and I were walking home in great self-pity, for we had just bartered our blanket for
several bags of fibrous tubers, when at the corner we came upon a trembling man roasting a
bloody rat over a pile of trash.
By the dawn of February twelfth, we knew how close the Ameri- cans were because we could
hear the dull booming of the cannons from the North and cover our ears and count five and the
shell would explode all around us. The troops that had landed in Lingayen had ensconced
themselves in the Chinese cemetery and were shelling the Jap-held Rizal Coliseum barely six
streets away so that we were right in the crossfire from both sides.
We knew there was going to be street fighting and the canals bristled with row upon row of
dynamite. Japs in dappled battle uniforms with nets over their faces had ripped open a strip of
asphalt in the middle of the street and were planting land mines- sinister round objects with
upended triggers. Later in the morning they walked into the first floor and, without a word, began
drilling holes on our wall in which to insert the barrels of their numbus.
After a while we could no longer stay inside the house from the stray bullets that kept
zigzagging through the roof, and we brought down what we could of our belongings and
arranged a crude shelter in the concrete garage. Our main fortification consisted of a thick
dining table that had been brought by a galleon at the turn of the century, its polished mahogany
tops seven feet long and three feet wide. My father and my brothers covered its top with
mattresses and laundry bags and placed the cage of Peace beneath its trestle legs. But the
men could never be made to stay in the shelter long. Paby stealing up to the roof to watch the
dogfights, and Leo scrounging the neighborhood for the subterranean guerrilla hide-out where
Mr. Mercado sat sketching a map of the southern districts for the Liberation troops, with all the
mined portion marked. And Mother often had to leave the shelter too, for everyone around knew
that she was a nurse, and were always sending Leo to fetch her for a bleeding shoulder, a
shrapnel in the knee, for some pregnant woman whom the bombs had frightened into a
premature birth.
And each time Mother was gone, I left Yoying and the baby with Papa to watch the dogfights on
the roof. My roof had become a coat of many colors-the red of rust, the green of slime, the silver
of some newer, grafted piece and gaping with the leaky wounds of an old and tiresome war. An
airplane with a red dot would roar over the chimneys, chased by another with a star, so low we
could see the faces of the pilots. They circled warily, gunning each other, while Paby yelled in
my ear, Devour him! Eat him up! Till one or the other plane plummeted to earth in flames, and
our spirits rose or fell depending on which side it was.
Down below in the street, a couple of Japs trudged by, clutching bayonets, Paby brought out his
rusty revolver (the gun we had been hiding all these years in different places-a loose board on
the floor, a beam of the bathroom, the hollow metal statue of Pan on the balustrade) and
savagely emptied its bullets in the direction of the Japs. One of them staggered and fell, and the
rest scampered away for cover. But we must have angered them, for in less than ten minutes,
our house became the target of such machine gunfire that we fled down the stairs in terror and
fell in a tangle of arms and legs into the shelter in the concrete garage.
That was charming, Paby, Yoying said sarcastically, nursing a broken lip from the heel of my
wooden shoe, and the mussed baby reached for its father with a beatific smile.
At eleven o'clock the Japs had begun to set fire to the houses on Taft Avenue and we could
hear the sucking, snapping sound of the holocaust through the bared windows of the garage.
Pieces of walls and roof floated eerily in the air like scraps of papers in the orange red, heat-
drenched sky. Papa thought it best to move to the church, and we helped my brothers pile our
belongings on a wooden push cart which we rolled out into the street.
Outside a girl lay dead face down in the canal, her buttocks and her legs sticking up. People
were all about, trundling pushcarts, hushing children, seeking cover in panic behind some wall
whenever the planes staged a dogfight directly overhead. Smoke hung thickly upon the air so
that you could look right into the sun. Out of the fog stepped a dazed Esme, her dress torn,
blood dripping down her legs. Are you hurt, Esme? Mother cried. She shook her head and
balled her skirt in embarrassment between her legs Where is your family? My father asked. I
don't know, said Esme bewilderedly, I don't know, I'm looking for them, and before Father could
restrain her, she had run away.
In the churchyard we came upon Mrs. Mercado holding her husband to her breast. A shrapnel
had plowed through his temple and uncapped his skull, exposing the throbbing oystery mass of
his brain. What shall I do? Mrs. Mercado asked hysterically. What shall I do? She rocked him in
her arms and his eyelids flickered in sorrow and she bent down and sucked the breath out of his
fevered mouth Mother fetched a clean towel from the pushcart and told Paby to wet it and I
looked away as Mother wrapped it around Mr. Mercado's brain. And Papa went to search for
some brandy, some gin, anything to dull the pain.
We wet our own handkerchiefs in the fountain of the churchyard and placed them over our
noses, for the interior of the church was filled with smoke. And we made our way to a side altar
thick with marble slabs proclaiming in gilt letters a wish of peace for the dead. Our neighbor, Mr.
Ilustre came in through a side door in high spirits, for a relative had told him that Sto. Tomas
had been liberated, and that the Americans were building a pontoon to take the place of Sta.
Cruz Bridge. Mr. Ilustre would not come inside the church, but sat by the door with the bullets
whizzing past his cars. and folded his arms over his chest. He had inverted a flat washbasin
with corrugated edges over his head like a comic helmet, and whenever he wanted to say
something, he had to turn his head very slowly, so as not to tilt the washtub off balance. But
after a while Mr. Ilustre pitched forward, and we didn't have to examine him to know that he was
dead.
The parish priest walked down the aisle carrying the ciborium, a golden-rayed sun upon his
breast. You can't stay here, the priest told the families grouped on the pews. The church is
choked to the belfry with dynamite.
The wind had changed direction and the fire was moving away and we decided to go back to
our house. We found the back part of the house collapsed and the sooty chimneys in squashed
masses among the frames of windows and doors. Our bird cage lay among the wreckage and
Peace was lying on its floor in a mass of bloody plumes. We crawled into the garage and
cooked a meal of gruel, building a small fire with the wood of a broken chair.
By three o'clock, the Japs had become desperate and were killing every male in sight. We hid
Papa and Paby under some pillows and bedclothes and sat on them till they complained that
our weight would kill them faster than the Japs. Leo was nowhere in sight, gone on some foolish
errand of mercy with a bottle of disinfectant and a swab of gauze. Through a gap in the door we
could see the street strewn with corpses like so many dolls. A Jap stalked by with a fixed
bayonet and his foot tripped on a mattress rolled against a fence. With both hands, the Jap lifted
the mattress and found an old man underneath. Tomodachi! Tomodachi! The man babbled,
going down on his knees to hug the Jap's legs, and the Jap lifted his bayonet and buried it into
the man's neck.
Soon after, several women whom the slaughtering had turned into jabbering idiots burst in
through the door of the garage. They were wild-eyed and barefoot and restlessly paced the
garage. They've killed every one of our husbands, Mrs. Rosal, who was among them, said, we
are looking for some cloth to make a flag. If we make a Japanese flag, another woman said, Do
you think they will have mercy on us? Look! A fat woman said, coming up with a red tablecloth
from a laundry bag, It's just what we need. She inverted a plate on it and drew a circle which
she cut out with the scissors from Mother's bag. The other women helped her pin the red circle
on one of the baby diapers and they tied it to the end of a ceiling broom. Up and down the
streets they marched in a crazy parade, waving the flag above their heads and singing a
Japanese song, and other women poured out of the neighboring houses to sing and join in the
parade. But at the corner they encountered a squad of Japs, who machine-gunned every single
woman in the group.
Then someone outside screamed, Mrs. Sonido, your son Leo's been hit.
Where, where is he? My mother cried, getting up suddenly, dropping the scissors and the
tablecloth, and a finger pointed, there- over there! And we ran. And my father ran, the whirring
of the shells over us, and a grenade rocked the ground and we fell flat on it, feeling it trembling
under us, and the people screaming, and the house in smoke, and the Japs gone berserk.
My father found my brother Leo face down near the canals. A man lay cowering under the still
warm body of my brother, using him for cover, his thin shoulders shaking like a fearful ague, and
my father pulled my brother's body harshly away from the man.
My brother lay on the earth, staring up at the petrified trees with eyes of glass. There was a
bullet hole in his cheek and my father felt the back of Leo's head where the bullet had plowed
through, and it was matted with blood. The smoke hung upon the sky like an awful fog and the
noonday sun was a dim orange ball far away in the kingdom of God. The bombs rained silently
upon the burning world, and I sat upon my haunches and watched my father grow wild with a
terrible grief. There was no sun and there was no wind but my mother went about putting things
right, as she always did in our house-setting up chairs, and picking up after us children, and
putting the kettle to boil. After a while I heard her ex-claim softly; oh, he's so dirty, and let's clean
him up. And they lifted my brother to the shelter we had made. And my mother cleaned him up
and bandaged neatly the hole in his cheek, and we covered him with a blanket and some
clothes. My father sat immobile, his back towards us, refusing to accept the death of his favorite
son
The earth was a wilderness of slaughter, gaunt dogs detached a human arm here, a leg there,
and where could you begin to dig when you couldn't find a spade and didn't know where your
yard ended and the next began? But although we watched day and night, our tears and our love
could not preserve my brother, and after a day and a half, my mother decided that we should
burn the body and we knew that she was right.
Paby and I helped her lift my brother and carried him to what seemed to be our yard, under the
shade of some banana plants. And we laid him gently upon the sod. My mother pulled one of
the mattresses over him and soaked it with kerosene, and lit it, and it began to burn with a
steady yellow flame.
My mother sat on a stone watching the body burn and my father sat away from her in the
shelter, staring at the cage where Peace had died. That night the Japs strafed our shelter from
their secret hiding places among the rubble and the barbed wire and the burrows in the ground.
And a stranger with guns tucked in his belt and bullets in a grisly row over his chest, came
stamping into our shelter, jumping right into the midst of us, and he said, They're here- they've
liberated PGH-you don't believe me? And he overturned his jacket, Look at my treasures, look
at all that chili-con-carne and Spam. And forthwith he peeled a tin, and laughing, proffered the
minced red meat to us. Where is Leo? Said the stranger, looking from one to the other of us,
holding out his feast of meat. Where is Leo? And Paby said, Oh Badel, he's gone, he's gone.
My mother always said, My Joy, be brave. My brother had been dead two days but fresh bodies
are difficult to burn, and I went out in the early mist of morning, to look at my brother who had
died. I touched the blackened mattress over him and it puffed up and disintegrated under my
touch. Half of the body was already gone and a heavy sweetish odor came untangled, and I
rained upon it clods of mud.
My brother was dead and I could see my mother coming into the yard with another can of
kerosene and matches. She was in an old dress whose prints had washed out and she hadn't
changed much, except for an aching in the joints and a flutter in the heart, and her hair that had
become the tired white of wood you find washed up on the shore in the sand. She poured the
kerosene upon crying silently, laving it like precious oils upon the poor disappeared parts. My
father had not uttered a word since Leo died. the corpse,
An American tank rumbled by, and I had never seen one, so I walked to the gate to watch. The
gate had fallen on its hinge and hung like a torn wing. On the littered street lumbered a large,
muddy gray-green tank with stars on its body, and several pretty girls with leis around their
necks were sitting on its top with some Gls. A guerrillo in a ragged hat was walking behind it,
holding up the bloody head of a Jap.
People were dancing on the streets, hugging one another with tears in their eyes and whenever
they yelled "Victory Joe," the Gls threw showers of candy and gum. One of the chewing gums in
a red-white-and-blue wrapper landed on the crossbar of our gate. I picked it up and kept it in my
pocket, because my brother dead, my brother was dead and I couldn't find a flower, but I would
save him a piece of gum.