DEAD STARS

Paz Marquez Benitez

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him,
stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come
even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless
melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian
and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.
"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"
"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."
Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not?
And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."
"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose
scissors busily snipped away.
"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a
worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"
"In love? With whom?"
"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with goodnatured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades,
notes, and things like that--"
Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years
ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the
mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the
dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he
seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid
imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made
up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those
days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he
divined it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of
tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on
somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone
had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for
a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much
engaged to Esperanza.
Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the
desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion
it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future
fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the
hand of Time, or of Fate.
"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.
"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool
than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain
placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to
philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned
down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning.
Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"
Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence-disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.
"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.
Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his
blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent
ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of
forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance
betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with
keen, clear brain.
He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down
the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and
forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao
hedge in tardy lavender bloom.
The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could
glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.

Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and
occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not
even know her name; but now-One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a
point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had
allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man
had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young
lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly
wisdom.
A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children
that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions
had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence
that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.
He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don
Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and
that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady
should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.
To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a
similar experience I had once before."
"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.
"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose
from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never
forgave him!"
He laughed with her.
"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to
hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without help."
"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"
"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."
Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young
man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas
had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled
and banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas
could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.
He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's
wife, although Doa Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide
brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the
complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She
had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying
tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.
On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on
the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not.
After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out
to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet
March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet
what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only
when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his
thoughts of the girl next door.
Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for
several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont
to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring."
He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added,
"Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."
She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a
believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct.
If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly
love another woman.
That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas
something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied
beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.
It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly
sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.

"Up here I find--something--"

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed,
woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"
"No; youth--its spirit--"
"Are you so old?"
"And heart's desire."
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too broad, too trodden by
feet, too barren of mystery."
"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the
fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway
sounds as of voices in a dream.
"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"
"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."
"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
"I could study you all my life and still not find it."
"So long?"
"I should like to."
Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living,
so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had
relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful
shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments.
Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda
where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four
energetic children. She and Doa Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the
merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so
absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit to her father;
how Doa Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his
collar, or with unmatched socks.
After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young coconut
looked like--"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"--while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found
unending entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the
edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving beach.
Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps,
narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and
tossed high up on dry sand.
When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.
"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.
"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach."
There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the tuckedup skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings
poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a
tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the
spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny
temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.
"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can visit."
"The last? Why?"
"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."
He noted an evasive quality in the answer.
"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"
"If you are, you never look it."
"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."
"But--"
"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.
"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.
She waited.
"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."
"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely
"Who? I?"
"Oh, no!"
"You said I am calm and placid."

"That is what I think."

"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."
It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.
"I should like to see your home town."
"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes
squashes."
That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as
if that background claimed her and excluded him.
"Nothing? There is you."
"Oh, me? But I am here."
"I will not go, of course, until you are there."
"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"
"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."
She laughed.
"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."
"Could I find that?"
"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.
"I'll inquire about--"
"What?"
"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."
"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."
"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.
"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."
"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"
"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"
"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--"
"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.
"Exactly."
"It must be ugly."
"Always?"
Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned
gold.
"No, of course you are right."
"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.
"I am going home."
The end of an impossible dream!
"When?" after a long silence.
"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at
home."
She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."
"Can't I come to say good-bye?"
"Oh, you don't need to!"
"No, but I want to."
"There is no time."
The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the
rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace
that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful
serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.
"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."
"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."
"Old things?"
"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He
walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.
Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.
Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard
her voice say very low, "Good-bye."
II.
ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart of
the town--heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor
shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a
consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball

knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convento,
now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly
deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons.
Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this was Holy
Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts. Came too the young men in
droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper
lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes,
heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device.
Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street like a
huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints' platforms were. Above the
measured music rose the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of
burning wax.
The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly
destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals.
Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look unaware, and could not.
The line moved on.
Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--a
girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet
had no place in the completed ordering of his life.
Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.
The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again,
where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.
At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices
now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.
A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron
roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young
women with their rear guard of males loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home.
Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had dispersed
into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza
would be expecting him in a little while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening"
and fell into step with the girl.
"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was both excited and
troubled.
"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."
"Oh, is the Judge going?"
"Yes."
The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As lawyer-and as lover--Alfredo had found that out long before.
"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you."
Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.
"For what?"
"For your approaching wedding."
Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?
"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about getting
the news," she continued.
He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to enlighten
him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No revelation there;
simply the old voice--cool, almost detached from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting
potentialities of song.
"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly
"When they are of friends, yes."
"Would you come if I asked you?"
"When is it going to be?"
"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.
"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony.
"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"
"Why not?"
"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"
"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.
"Then I ask you."
"Then I will be there."

The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill. There
swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that house were
his, that all the bewilderments of the present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long
wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home.
"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose between something you
wanted to do and something you had to do?"
"No!"
"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such a
situation."
"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.
"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"
"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward
of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no
longer depends on him."
"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all."
"Doesn't it--interest you?"
"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."
Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.
Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind
though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect
understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting,
Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.
He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which
he tried to control.
She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She
never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in
church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion,
spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious
care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.
She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their notecarrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled
out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.
"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she
should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out
bad."
What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?
"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.
"But do you approve?"
"Of what?"
"What she did."
"No," indifferently.
"Well?"
He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is that it
is not necessarily wicked."
"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that."
"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to apply to
conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am
right. Living with a man to whom she is not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not."
"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.
"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.
"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent to
me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The
blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say
next?
"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will
say." Her voice trembled.
Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say-what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of
the wedding?

"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to his
lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not
dare--"
"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt
they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man."
Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack
on Julia Salas?
"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere
man word such a plea?
"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are tired of
me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.
The last word had been said.
III.
AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he
wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in
Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and
there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to find
that elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia
Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to
the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had
become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia Salas. Still,
he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of mountains who has known
the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to
his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he
must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.
He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he
recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself; no
more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of
complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being
in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims encroached too
insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw
things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did
Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond
her reach.
Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town nestling in the
dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the outskirts
the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in
the purple shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints
in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.
The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water.
Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat--slow, singing
cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not
distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or not.
Just then a voice shouted.
"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"
"What abogado?" someone irately asked.
That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.
It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy--Tandang
"Binday"--that noon for Santa Cruz. Seor Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but the wife had
read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house."
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would
leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did not
know because that official had not sent an answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write
because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her."
San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him. It
was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.
Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet. A
cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too
early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over
the rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the water.

How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing forlornly
through the single window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's
chinelas making scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on
the street--tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled
him with a pitying sadness.
How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That
unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of incompleteness as
restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a
conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of
irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a dream-at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished prayer.
A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct
filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the low
stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle
Luz.
Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting at
the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in the
sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid
surprise.
"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.
"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"
"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.
"Won't you come up?"
He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her
mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door.
At last--he was shaking her hand.
She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He
missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the
home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing
ease, though with a growing wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her
face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze.
The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.
Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and
emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly interested him.
The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet
seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of
the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the
dear, dead loves of vanished youth
How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife
(American Colonial Literature)
Manuel E. Arguilla
She stepped down from the carretela of Ca Celin with a quick, delicate grace. She was lovely. SHe was
tall. She looked up to my brother with a smile, and her forehead was on a level with his mouth.
"You are Baldo," she said and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. Her nails were long, but they
were not painted. She was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in bloom. And a small dimple
appeared momently high on her right cheek. "And this is Labang of whom I have heard so much." She
held the wrist of one hand with the other and looked at Labang, and Labang never stopped chewing his
cud. He swallowed and brought up to his mouth more cud and the sound of his insides was like a drum.
I laid a hand on Labang's massive neck and said to her: "You may scratch his forehead now."
She hesitated and I saw that her eyes were on the long, curving horns. But she came and touched
Labang's forehead with her long fingers, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud except that his
big eyes half closed. And by and by she was scratching his forehead very daintily.
My brother Leon put down the two trunks on the grassy side of the road. He paid Ca Celin twice the
usual fare from the station to the edge of Nagrebcan. Then he was standing beside us, and she turned
to him eagerly. I watched Ca Celin, where he stood in front of his horse, and he ran his fingers through
its forelock and could not keep his eyes away from her.

"Maria---" my brother Leon said.

He did not say Maring. He did not say Mayang. I knew then that he had always called her Maria and
that to us all she would be Maria; and in my mind I said 'Maria' and it was a beautiful name.
"Yes, Noel."
Now where did she get that name? I pondered the matter quietly to myself, thinking Father might not
like it. But it was only the name of my brother Leon said backward and it sounded much better that
way.
"There is Nagrebcan, Maria," my brother Leon said, gesturing widely toward the west.
She moved close to him and slipped her arm through his. And after a while she said quietly.
"You love Nagrebcan, don't you, Noel?"
Ca Celin drove away hi-yi-ing to his horse loudly. At the bend of the camino real where the big duhat
tree grew, he rattled the handle of his braided rattan whip against the spokes of the wheel.
We stood alone on the roadside.
The sun was in our eyes, for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide and deep and very
blue above us: but along the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the southwest flamed huge
masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a golden haze through which floated big purple and red
and yellow bubbles when I looked at the sinking sun. Labang's white coat, which I had wshed and
brushed that morning with coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and his
horns appeared tipped with fire.
He faced the sun and from his mouth came a call so loud and vibrant that the earth seemed to tremble
underfoot. And far away in the middle of the field a cow lowed softly in answer.
"Hitch him to the cart, Baldo," my brother Leon said, laughing, and she laughed with him a big
uncertainly, and I saw that he had put his arm around her shoulders.
"Why does he make that sound?" she asked. "I have never heard the like of it."
"There is not another like it," my brother Leon said. "I have yet to hear another bull call like Labang. In
all the world there is no other bull like him."
She was smiling at him, and I stopped in the act of tying the sinta across Labang's neck to the opposite
end of the yoke, because her teeth were very white, her eyes were so full of laughter, and there was
the small dimple high up on her right cheek.
"If you continue to talk about him like that, either I shall fall in love with him or become greatly
jealous."
My brother Leon laughed and she laughed and they looked at each other and it seemed to me there
was a world of laughter between them and in them.
I climbed into the cart over the wheel and Labang would have bolted, for he was always like that, but I
kept a firm hold on his rope. He was restless and would not stand still, so that my brother Leon had to
say "Labang" several times. When he was quiet again, my brother Leon lifted the trunks into the cart,
placing the smaller on top.
She looked down once at her high-heeled shoes, then she gave her left hand to my brother Leon,
placed a foot on the hub of the wheel, and in one breath she had swung up into the cart. Oh, the
fragrance of her. But Labang was fairly dancing with impatience and it was all I could do to keep him
from running away.
"Give me the rope, Baldo," my brother Leon said. "Maria, sit down on the hay and hold on to anything."
Then he put a foot on the left shaft and that instand labang leaped forward. My brother Leon laughed
as he drew himself up to the top of the side of the cart and made the slack of the rope hiss above the
back of labang. The wind whistled against my cheeks and the rattling of the wheels on the pebbly road
echoed in my ears.
She sat up straight on the bottom of the cart, legs bent togther to one side, her skirts spread over
them so that only the toes and heels of her shoes were visible. her eyes were on my brother Leon's
back; I saw the wind on her hair. When Labang slowed down, my brother Leon handed to me the rope. I
knelt on the straw inside the cart and pulled on the rope until Labang was merely shuffling along, then
I made him turn around.
"What is it you have forgotten now, Baldo?" my brother Leon said.
I did not say anything but tickled with my fingers the rump of Labang; and away we went---back to
where I had unhitched and waited for them. The sun had sunk and down from the wooded sides of the
Katayaghan hills shadows were stealing into the fields. High up overhead the sky burned with many
slow fires.
When I sent Labang down the deep cut that would take us to the dry bed of the Waig which could be
used as a path to our place during the dry season, my brother Leon laid a hand on my shoulder and
said sternly:
"Who told you to drive through the fields tonight?"

His hand was heavy on my shoulder, but I did not look at him or utter a word until we were on the
rocky bottom of the Waig.
"Baldo, you fool, answer me before I lay the rope of Labang on you. Why do you follow the Wait instead
of the camino real?"
His fingers bit into my shoulder.
"Father, he told me to follow the Waig tonight, Manong."
Swiftly, his hand fell away from my shoulder and he reached for the rope of Labang. Then my brother
Leon laughed, and he sat back, and laughing still, he said:
"And I suppose Father also told you to hitch Labang to the cart and meet us with him instead of with
Castano and the calesa."
Without waiting for me to answer, he turned to her and said, "Maria, why do you think Father should do
that, now?" He laughed and added, "Have you ever seen so many stars before?"
I looked back and they were sitting side by side, leaning against the trunks, hands clasped across
knees. Seemingly, but a man's height above the tops of the steep banks of the Wait, hung the stars.
But in the deep gorge the shadows had fallen heavily, and even the white of Labang's coat was merely
a dim, grayish blur. Crickets chirped from their homes in the cracks in the banks. The thick, unpleasant
smell of dangla bushes and cooling sun-heated earth mingled with the clean, sharp scent of arrais
roots exposed to the night air and of the hay inside the cart.
"Look, Noel, yonder is our star!" Deep surprise and gladness were in her voice. Very low in the west,
almost touching the ragged edge of the bank, was the star, the biggest and brightest in the sky.
"I have been looking at it," my brother Leon said. "Do you remember how I would tell you that when
you want to see stars you must come to Nagrebcan?"
"Yes, Noel," she said. "Look at it," she murmured, half to herself. "It is so many times bigger and
brighter than it was at Ermita beach."
"The air here is clean, free of dust and smoke."
"So it is, Noel," she said, drawing a long breath.
"Making fun of me, Maria?"
She laughed then and they laughed together and she took my brother Leon's hand and put it against
her face.
I stopped Labang, climbed down, and lighted the lantern that hung from the cart between the wheels.
"Good boy, Baldo," my brother Leon said as I climbed back into the cart, and my heart sant.
Now the shadows took fright and did not crowd so near. Clumps of andadasi and arrais flashed into
view and quickly disappeared as we passed by. Ahead, the elongated shadow of Labang bobbled up
and down and swayed drunkenly from side to side, for the lantern rocked jerkily with the cart.
"Have we far to go yet, Noel?" she asked.
"Ask Baldo," my brother Leon said, "we have been neglecting him."
"I am asking you, Baldo," she said.
Without looking back, I answered, picking my words slowly:
"Soon we will get out of the Wait and pass into the fields. After the fields is home---Manong."
"So near already."
I did not say anything more because I did not know what to make of the tone of her voice as she said
her last words. All the laughter seemed to have gone out of her. I waited for my brother Leon to say
something, but he was not saying anything. Suddenly he broke out into song and the song was 'Sky
Sown with Stars'---the same that he and Father sang when we cut hay in the fields at night before he
went away to study. He must have taught her the song because she joined him, and her voice flowed
into his like a gentle stream meeting a stronger one. And each time the wheels encountered a big rock,
her voice would catch in her throat, but my brother Leon would sing on, until, laughing softly, she
would join him again.
Then we were climbing out into the fields, and through the spokes of the wheels the light of the lantern
mocked the shadows. Labang quickened his steps. The jolting became more frequent and painful as we
crossed the low dikes.
"But it is so very wide here," she said. The light of the stars broke and scattered the darkness so that
one could see far on every side, though indistinctly.
"You miss the houses, and the cars, and the people and the noise, don't you?" My brother Leon
stopped singing.
"Yes, but in a different way. I am glad they are not here."
With difficulty I turned Labang to the left, for he wanted to go straight on. He was breathing hard, but I
knew he was more thirsty than tired. In a little while we drope up the grassy side onto the camino real.
"---you see," my brother Leon was explaining, "the camino real curves around the foot of the
Katayaghan hills and passes by our house. We drove through the fields because---but I'll be asking
Father as soon as we get home."

"Noel," she said.

"Yes, Maria."
"I am afraid. He may not like me."
"Does that worry you still, Maria?" my brother Leon said. "From the way you talk, he might be an ogre,
for all the world. Except when his leg that was wounded in the Revolution is troubling him, Father is the
mildest-tempered, gentlest man I know."
We came to the house of Lacay Julian and I spoke to Labang loudly, but Moning did not come to the
window, so I surmised she must be eating with the rest of her family. And I thought of the food being
made ready at home and my mouth watered. We met the twins, Urong and Celin, and I said "Hoy!"
calling them by name. And they shouted back and asked if my brother Leon and his wife were with me.
And my brother Leon shouted to them and then told me to make Labang run; their answers were lost
in the noise of the wheels.
I stopped labang on the road before our house and would have gotten down but my brother Leon took
the rope and told me to stay in the cart. He turned Labang into the open gate and we dashed into our
yard. I thought we would crash into the camachile tree, but my brother Leon reined in Labang in time.
There was light downstairs in the kitchen, and Mother stood in the doorway, and I could see her smiling
shyly. My brother Leon was helping Maria over the wheel. The first words that fell from his lips after he
had kissed Mother's hand were:
"Father... where is he?"
"He is in his room upstairs," Mother said, her face becoming serious. "His leg is bothering him again."
I did not hear anything more because I had to go back to the cart to unhitch Labang. But I hardly tied
him under the barn when I heard Father calling me. I met my brother Leon going to bring up the
trunks. As I passed through the kitchen, there were Mother and my sister Aurelia and Maria and it
seemed to me they were crying, all of them.
There was no light in Father's room. There was no movement. He sat in the big armchair by the
western window, and a star shone directly through it. He was smoking, but he removed the roll of
tobacco from his mouth when he saw me. He laid it carefully on the windowsill before speaking.
"Did you meet anybody on the way?" he asked.
"No, Father," I said. "Nobody passes through the Waig at night."
He reached for his roll of tobacco and hithced himself up in the chair.
"She is very beautiful, Father."
"Was she afraid of Labang?" My father had not raised his voice, but the room seemed to resound with
it. And again I saw her eyes on the long curving horns and the arm of my brother Leon around her
shoulders.
"No, Father, she was not afraid."
"On the way---"
"She looked at the stars, Father. And Manong Leon sang."
"What did he sing?"
"---Sky Sown with Stars... She sang with him."
He was silent again. I could hear the low voices of Mother and my sister Aurelia downstairs. There was
also the voice of my brother Leon, and I thought that Father's voice must have been like it when Father
was young. He had laid the roll of tobacco on the windowsill once more. I watched the smoke waver
faintly upward from the lighted end and vanish slowly into the night outside.
The door opened and my brother Leon and Maria came in.
"Have you watered Labang?" Father spoke to me.
I told him that Labang was resting yet under the barn.
"It is time you watered him, my son," my father said.
I looked at Maria and she was lovely. She was tall. Beside my brother Leon, she was tall and very still.
Then I went out, and in the darkened hall the fragrance of her was like a morning when papayas are in
bloom.
Wedding Dance
Amador Daguio
Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the headhigh threshold.
Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound that carried him across to the narrow door. He slid
back the cover, stepped inside, then pushed the cover back in place. After some moments during
which he seemed to wait, he talked to the listening darkness.
"I'm sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it."
The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house like muffled roars of falling waters.
The woman who had moved with a start when the sliding door opened had been hearing the gangsas

for she did not know how long. There was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave no sign that she heard
Awiyao, but continued to sit unmoving in the darkness.
But Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on all fours to the middle of
the room; he knew exactly where the stove was. With bare fingers he stirred the covered smoldering
embers, and blew into the stove. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of pine on them,
then full round logs as his arms. The room brightened.
"Why don't you go out," he said, "and join the dancing women?" He felt a pang inside him, because
what he said was really not the right thing to say and because the woman did not stir. "You should join
the dancers," he said, "as if--as if nothing had happened." He looked at the woman huddled in a corner
of the room, leaning against the wall. The stove fire played with strange moving shadows and lights
upon her face. She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger or hate.
"Go out--go out and dance. If you really don't hate me for this separation, go out and dance. One of the
men will see you dance well; he will like your dancing, he will marry you. Who knows but that, with
him, you will be luckier than you were with me."
"I don't want any man," she said sharply. "I don't want any other man."
He felt relieved that at least she talked: "You know very well that I won't want any other woman either.
You know that, don't you? Lumnay, you know it, don't you?"
She did not answer him.
"You know it Lumnay, don't you?" he repeated.
"Yes, I know," she said weakly.
"It is not my fault," he said, feeling relieved. "You cannot blame me; I have been a good husband to
you."
"Neither can you blame me," she said. She seemed about to cry.
"No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have nothing to say against you."
He set some of the burning wood in place. "It's only that a man must have a child. Seven harvests is
just too long to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance before it is too late
for both of us."
This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in. She wound the blanket
more snugly around herself.
"You know that I have done my best," she said. "I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed
many chickens in my prayers."
"Yes, I know."
"You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in the terrace because
I butchered one of our pigs without your permission? I did it to appease Kabunyan, because, like you, I
wanted to have a child. But what could I do?"
"Kabunyan does not see fit for us to have a child," he said. He stirred the fire. The spark rose through
the crackles of the flames. The smoke and soot went up the ceiling.
Lumnay looked down and unconsciously started to pull at the rattan that kept the split bamboo flooring
in place. She tugged at the rattan flooring. Each time she did this the split bamboo went up and came
down with a slight rattle. The gong of the dancers clamorously called in her care through the walls.
Awiyao went to the corner where Lumnay sat, paused before her, looked at her bronzed and sturdy
face, then turned to where the jars of water stood piled one over the other. Awiyao took a coconut cup
and dipped it in the top jar and drank. Lumnay had filled the jars from the mountain creek early that
evening.
"I came home," he said. "Because I did not find you among the dancers. Of course, I am not forcing
you to come, if you don't want to join my wedding ceremony. I came to tell you that Madulimay,
although I am marrying her, can never become as good as you are. She is not as strong in planting
beans, not as fast in cleaning water jars, not as good keeping a house clean. You are one of the best
wives in the
whole village."
"That has not done me any good, has it?" She said. She looked at him lovingly. She almost seemed to
smile.
He put the coconut cup aside on the floor and came closer to her. He held her face between his hands
and looked longingly at her beauty. But her eyes looked away. Never again would he hold her face.
The next day she would not be his any more. She would go back to her parents. He let go of her face,
and she bent to the floor again and looked at her fingers as they tugged softly at the split bamboo
floor.
"This house is yours," he said. "I built it for you. Make it your own, live in it as long as you wish. I will
build another house for Madulimay."
"I have no need for a house," she said slowly. "I'll go to my own house. My parents are old. They will
need help in the planting of the beans, in the pounding of the rice."

"I will give you the field that I dug out of the mountains during the first year of our marriage," he said.
"You know I did it for you. You helped me to make it for the two of us."
"I have no use for any field," she said.
He looked at her, then turned away, and became silent. They were silent for a time.
"Go back to the dance," she said finally. "It is not right for you to be here. They will wonder where you
are, and Madulimay will not feel good. Go back to the dance."
"I would feel better if you could come, and dance---for the last time. The gangsas are playing."
"You know that I cannot."
"Lumnay," he said tenderly. "Lumnay, if I did this it is because of my need for a child. You know that life
is not worth living without a child. The man have mocked me behind my back. You know that."
"I know it," he said. "I will pray that Kabunyan will bless you and Madulimay."
She bit her lips now, then shook her head wildly, and sobbed.
She thought of the seven harvests that had passed, the high hopes they had in the beginning of their
new life, the day he took her away from her parents across the roaring river, on the other side of the
mountain, the trip up the trail which they had to climb, the steep canyon which they had to cross. The
waters boiled in her mind in forms of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters tolled and growled,
resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the stiff cliffs; they were far away now from
somewhere on the tops of the other ranges, and they had looked carefully at the buttresses of rocks
they had to step on---a slip would have meant death.
They both drank of the water then rested on the other bank before they made the final climb to the
other side of the mountain.
She looked at his face with the fire playing upon his features---hard and strong, and kind. He had a
sense of lightness in his way of saying things which often made her and the village people laugh. How
proud she had been of his humor. The muscles where taut and firm, bronze and compact in their hold
upon his skull---how frank his bright eyes were. She looked at his body the carved out of the mountains
five fields for her; his wide and supple torso heaved as if a slab of shining lumber were heaving; his
arms and legs flowed down in fluent muscles--he was strong and for that she had lost him.
She flung herself upon his knees and clung to them. "Awiyao, Awiyao, my husband," she cried. "I did
everything to have a child," she said passionately in a hoarse whisper. "Look at me," she cried. "Look
at my body. Then it was full of promise. It could dance; it could work fast in the fields; it could climb the
mountains fast. Even now it is firm, full. But, Awiyao, I am useless. I must die."
"It will not be right to die," he said, gathering her in his arms. Her whole warm naked naked breast
quivered against his own; she clung now to his neck, and her hand lay upon his right shoulder; her hair
flowed down in cascades of gleaming darkness.
"I don't care about the fields," she said. "I don't care about the house. I don't care for anything but you.
I'll have no other man."
"Then you'll always be fruitless."
"I'll go back to my father, I'll die."
"Then you hate me," he said. "If you die it means you hate me. You do not want me to have a child. You
do not want my name to live on in our tribe."
She was silent.
"If I do not try a second time," he explained, "it means I'll die. Nobody will get the fields I have carved
out of the mountains; nobody will come after me."
"If you fail--if you fail this second time--" she said thoughtfully. The voice was a shudder. "No--no, I
don't want you to fail."
"If I fail," he said, "I'll come back to you. Then both of us will die together. Both of us will vanish from
the life of our tribe."
The gongs thundered through the walls of their house, sonorous and faraway.
"I'll keep my beads," she said. "Awiyao, let me keep my beads," she half-whispered.
"You will keep the beads. They come from far-off times. My grandmother said they come from up
North, from the slant-eyed people across the sea. You keep them, Lumnay. They are worth twenty
fields."
"I'll keep them because they stand for the love you have for me," she said. "I love you. I love you and
have nothing to give."
She took herself away from him, for a voice was calling out to him from outside. "Awiyao! Awiyao! O
Awiyao! They are looking for you at the dance!"
"I am not in hurry."
"The elders will scold you. You had better go."
"Not until you tell me that it is all right with you."
"It is all right with me."
He clasped her hands. "I do this for the sake of the tribe," he said.

"I know," she said.

He went to the door.
"Awiyao!"
He stopped as if suddenly hit by a spear. In pain he turned to her. Her face was in agony. It pained him
to leave. She had been wonderful to him. What was it that made a man wish for a child? What was it in
life, in the work in the field, in the planting and harvest, in the silence of the night, in the communing
with husband and wife, in the whole life of the tribe itself that made man wish for the laughter and
speech of a child? Suppose he changed his mind? Why did the unwritten law demand, anyway, that a
man, to be a man, must have a child to come after him? And if he was fruitless--but he loved Lumnay.
It was like taking away of his life to leave her like this.
"Awiyao," she said, and her eyes seemed to smile in the light. "The beads!" He turned back and walked
to the farthest corner of their room, to the trunk where they kept their worldly possession---his battleax and his spear points, her betel nut box and her beads. He dug out from the darkness the beads
which had been given to him by his grandmother to give to Lumnay on the beads on, and tied them in
place. The white and jade and deep orange obsidians shone in the firelight. She suddenly clung to him,
clung to his neck as if she would never let him go.
"Awiyao! Awiyao, it is hard!" She gasped, and she closed her eyes and huried her face in his neck.
The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened, and he buried out into the night.
Lumnay sat for some time in the darkness. Then she went to the door and opened it. The moonlight
struck her face; the moonlight spilled itself on the whole village.
She could hear the throbbing of the gangsas coming to her through the caverns of the other houses.
She knew that all the houses were empty that the whole tribe was at the dance. Only she was absent.
And yet was she not the best dancer of the village? Did she not have the most lightness and grace?
Could she not, alone among all women, dance like a bird tripping for grains on the ground, beautifully
timed to the beat of the gangsas? Did not the men praise her supple body, and the women envy the
way she stretched her hands like the wings of the mountain eagle now and then as she danced? How
long ago did she dance at her own wedding? Tonight, all the women who counted, who once danced in
her honor, were dancing now in honor of another whose only claim was that perhaps she could give
her
husband a child.
"It is not right. It is not right!" she cried. "How does she know? How can anybody know? It is not right,"
she said.
Suddenly she found courage. She would go to the dance. She would go to the chief of the village, to
the elders, to tell them it was not right. Awiyao was hers; nobody could take him away from her. Let
her be the first woman to complain, to denounce the unwritten rule that a man may take another
woman. She would tell Awiyao to come back to her. He surely would relent. Was not their love as
strong as the
river?
She made for the other side of the village where the dancing was. There was a flaming glow over the
whole place; a great bonfire was burning. The gangsas clamored more loudly now, and it seemed they
were calling to her. She was near at last. She could see the dancers clearly now. The man leaped
lightly with their gangsas as they circled the dancing women decked in feast garments and beads,
tripping on the ground like graceful birds, following their men. Her heart warmed to the flaming call of
the dance; strange heat in her blood welled up, and she started to run. But the gleaming brightness of
the bonfire commanded her to stop. Did anybody see her approach?
She stopped. What if somebody had seen her coming? The flames of the bonfire leaped in countless
sparks which spread and rose like yellow points and died out in the night. The blaze reached out to her
like a spreading radiance. She did not have the courage to break into the wedding feast.
Lumnay walked away from the dancing ground, away from the village. She thought of the new clearing
of beans which Awiyao and she had started to make only four moons before. She followed the trail
above the village.
When she came to the mountain stream she crossed it carefully. Nobody held her hand, and the stream
water was very cold. The trail went up again, and she was in the moonlight shadows among the trees
and shrubs. Slowly she climbed the mountain.
When Lumnay reached the clearing, she cold see from where she stood the blazing bonfire at the edge
of the village, where the wedding was. She could hear the far-off clamor of the gongs, still rich in their
sonorousness, echoing from mountain to mountain. The sound did not mock her; they seemed to call
far to her, to speak to her in the language of unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their gratitude for her
sacrifice. Her heartbeat began to sound to her like many gangsas.
Lumnay though of Awiyao as the Awiyao she had known long ago-- a strong, muscular boy carrying his
heavy loads of fuel logs down the mountains to his home. She had met him one day as she was on her

way to fill her clay jars with water. He had stopped at the spring to drink and rest; and she had made
him drink the cool mountain water from her coconut shell. After that it did not take him long to decide
to throw his spear on the stairs of her father's house in token on his desire to marry her.
The mountain clearing was cold in the freezing moonlight. The wind began to stir the leaves of the
bean plants. Lumnay looked for a big rock on which to sit down. The bean plants now surrounded her,
and she was lost among them.
A few more weeks, a few more months, a few more harvests---what did it matter? She would be
holding the bean flowers, soft in the texture, silken almost, but moist where the dew got into them,
silver to look at, silver on the light blue, blooming whiteness, when the morning comes. The stretching
of the bean pods full length from the hearts of the wilting petals would go on.
Lumnay's fingers moved a long, long time among the growing bean pods.
The Virgin
Kerima Polotan Tuvera
He went to where Miss Mijares sat, a tall, big man, walking with an economy of movement, graceful
and light, a man who knew his body and used it well. He sat in the low chair worn decrepit by countless
other interviewers and laid all ten fingerprints carefully on the edge of her desk. She pushed a sheet
towards him, rolling a pencil along with it. While he read the question and wrote down his answers, she
glanced at her watch and saw that it was ten. "I shall be coming back quickly," she said, speaking
distinctly in the dialect (you were never sure about these people on their first visit, if they could speak
English, or even write at all, the poor were always proud and to use the dialect with them was an act of
charity), "you will wait for me."
As she walked to the cafeteria, Miss Mijares thought how she could easily have said, Please wait for
me, or will you wait for me? But years of working for the placement section had dulled the edges of her
instinct for courtesy. She spoke now peremtorily, with an abruptness she knew annoyed the people
about her.
When she talked with the jobless across her desk, asking them the damning questions that completed
their humiliation, watching pale tongues run over dry lips, dirt crusted handkerchiefs flutter in
trembling hands, she was filled with an impatience she could not understand. Sign here, she had said
thousands of times, pushing the familiar form across, her finger held to a line, feeling the impatience
grow at sight of the man or woman tracing a wavering "X" or laying the impress of a thumb. Invariably,
Miss Mijares would turn away to touch the delicate edge of the handkerchief she wore on her breast.
Where she sat alone at one of the cafeteria tables, Miss Mijares did not look 34. She was slight, almost
bony, but she had learned early how to dress herself to achieve an illusion of hips and bosom. She
liked poufs and shirrings and little girlish pastel colors. On her bodice, astride or lengthwise, there sat
an inevitable row of thick camouflaging ruffles that made her look almost as though she had a bosom,
if she bent her shoulders slightly and inconspicuously drew her neckline open to puff some air into her
bodice.
Her brow was smooth and clear and she was always pushing off it the hair she kept in tight curls at
night. She had thin cheeks, small and angular, falling down to what would have been a nondescript,
receding chin, but Nature's hand had erred and given her a jaw instead. When displeased, she had a
lippy, almost sensual pout, surprising on such a small face.
So while not exactly an ugly woman, she was no beauty. She teetered precariously on the border line
to which belonged countless others who you found, if they were not working at some job, in the
kitchen of some married sister's house shushing a brood of devilish little nephews.
And yet Miss Mijares did think of love. Secret, short-lived thoughts flitted through her mind in the
jeepneys she took to work when a man pressed down beside her and through her dress she felt the
curve of his thigh; when she held a baby in her arms, a married friend's baby or a relative's, holding in
her hands the tiny, pulsing body, what thoughts did she not think, her eyes straying against her will to
the bedroom door and then to her friend's laughing, talking face, to think: how did it look now, spread
upon a pillow, unmasked of the little wayward coquetries, how went the lines about the mouth and
beneath the eyes: (did they close? did they open?) in the one final, fatal coquetry of all? to finally,
miserably bury her face in the baby's hair. And in the movies, to sink into a seat as into an embrace, in
the darkness with a hundred shadowy figures about her and high on the screen, a man kissing a
woman's mouth while her own fingers stole unconsciously to her unbruised lips.
When she was younger, there had been other things to do--- college to finish, a niece to put through
school, a mother to care for.
She had gone through all these with singular patience, for it had seemed to her that love stood behind
her, biding her time, a quiet hand upon her shoulder (I wait. Do not despair) so that if she wished she
had but to turn from her mother's bed to see the man and all her timid, pure dreams would burst into
glory. But it had taken her parent many years to die. Towards the end, it had become a thankless

chore, kneading her mother's loose flesh, hour after hour, struggling to awaken the cold, sluggish
blood in her drying body. In the end, she had died --- her toothless, thin-haired, flabby-fleshed mother
--- and Miss Mijares had pushed against the bed in grief and also in gratitude. But neither love nor
glory stood behind her, only the empty shadows, and nine years gone, nine years. In the room for her
unburied dead, she had held up her hands to the light, noting the thick, durable fingers, thinking in a
mixture of shame and bitterness and guilt that they had never touched a man.
When she returned to the bleak replacement office, the man stood by a window, his back to her, halfbending over something he held in his hands. "Here," she said, approaching, "have you signed this?"
"Yes," he replied, facing her.
In his hands, he held her paperweight, an old gift from long ago, a heavy wooden block on which stood,
as though poised for flight, an undistinguished, badly done bird. It had come apart recently. The screws
beneath the block had loosened so that lately it had stood upon her desk with one wing tilted
unevenly, a miniature eagle or swallow? felled by time before it could spread its wings. She had
laughed and laughed that day it had fallen on her desk, plop! "What happened? What happened?" they
had asked her, beginning to laugh, and she had said, caught between amusement and sharp despair,
"Some one shot it," and she had laughed and laughed till faces turned and eyebrows rose and she told
herself, whoa, get a hold, a hold, a hold!
He had turned it and with a penknife tightened the screws and dusted it. In this man's hands, cupped
like that, it looked suddenly like a dove.
She took it away from him and put it down on her table. Then she picked up his paper and read it.
He was a high school graduate. He was also a carpenter.
He was not starved, like the rest. His clothes, though old, were pressed and she could see the cuffs of
his shirt buttoned and wrapped about big, strong wrists.
"I heard about this place," he said, "from a friend you got a job at the pier." Seated, he towered over
her, "I'm not starving yet," he said with a quick smile. "I still got some money from that last job, but my
team broke up after that and you got too many jobs if you're working alone. You know carpentering,"
he continued, "you can't finish a job quickly enough if you got to do the planing and sawing and nailing
all by your lone self. You got to be on a team."
Perhaps he was not meaning to be impolite? But for a jobseeker, Miss Mijares thought, he talked too
much and without call. He was bursting all over with an obtruding insolence that at once disarmed and
annoyed her.
So then she drew a slip and wrote his name on it. "Since you are not starving yet," she said, speaking
in English now, wanting to put him in his place, "you will not mind working in our woodcraft section,
three times a week at two-fifty to four a day, depending on your skill and the foreman's discretion, for
two or three months after which there might be a call from outside we may hold for you."
"Thank you," he said.
He came on the odd days, Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday.
She was often down at the shanty that housed their bureau's woodcraft, talking with Ato, his foreman,
going over with him the list of old hands due for release. They hired their men on a rotation basis and
three months was the longest one could stay.
"The new one there, hey," Ato said once. "We're breaking him in proper." And he looked across several
shirted backs to where he stopped, planing what was to become the side of a bookcase.
How much was he going to get? Miss Mijares asked Ato on Wednesday. "Three," the old man said,
chewing away on a cud. She looked at the list in her hands, quickly running a pencil down. "But he's
filling a four-peso vacancy," she said. "Come now," surprised that she should wheedle so, "give him the
extra peso." "Only a half," the stubborn foreman shook his head, "three-fifty."
"Ato says I have you to thank," he said, stopping Miss Mijares along a pathway in the compound.
It was noon, that unhappy hour of the day when she was oldest, tiredest, when it seemed the sun put
forth cruel fingers to search out the signs of age on her thin, pinched face. The crow's feet showed
unmistakably beneath her eyes and she smiled widely to cover them up and aquinting a little, said,
"Only a half-peso --- Ato would have given it to you eventually."
"Yes, but you spoke for me," he said, his big body heaving before her. "Thank you, though I don't need
it as badly as the rest, for to look at me, you would knew I have no wife --- yet."
She looked at him sharply, feeling the malice in his voice. "I'd do it for any one," she said and turned
away, angry and also ashamed, as though he had found out suddenly that the ruffles on her dress
rested on a flat chest.
The following week, something happened to her: she lost her way home.
Miss Mijares was quite sure she had boarded the right jeepneys but the driver, hoping to beat traffic,
had detoured down a side alley, and then seeing he was low on gas, he took still another shortcut to a
filling station. After that, he rode through alien country.

The houses were low and dark, the people shadowy, and even the driver, who earlier had been an
amiable, talkative fellow, now loomed like a sinister stranger over the wheel. Through it all, she sat
tightly, feeling oddly that she had dreamed of this, that some night not very long ago, she had taken a
ride in her sleep and lost her way. Again and again, in that dream, she had changed direction, losing
her way each time, for something huge and bewildering stood blocking the old, familiar road home.
But that evening, she was lost only for a while. The driver stopped at a corner that looked like a little
known part of the boulevard she passed each day and she alighted and stood on a street island, the
passing headlights playing on her, a tired, shaken woman, the ruffles on her skirt crumpled, the
hemline of her skirt awry.
The new hand was absent for a week. Miss Mijares waited on that Tuesday he first failed to report for
some word from him sent to Ato and then to her. That was regulation. Briefly though they were held,
the bureau jobs were not ones to take chances with. When a man was absent and he sent no word, it
upset the system. In the absence of a definite notice, someone else who needed a job badly was kept
away from it.
"I went to the province, ma'am," he said, on his return.
"You could have sent someone to tell us," she said.
"It was an emergency, ma'am," he said. "My son died."
"How so?"
A slow bitter anger began to form inside her. "But you said you were not married!"
"No, ma'am," he said gesturing.
"Are you married?" she asked loudly.
"No, ma'am."
"But you have -- you had a son!" she said.
"I am not married to his mother," he said, grinning stupidly, and for the first time she noticed his two
front teeth were set widely apart. A flush had climbed to his face, suffusing it, and two large throbbing
veins crawled along his temples.
She looked away, sick all at once.
"You should told us everything," she said and she put forth hands to restrain her anger but it slipped
away she stood shaking despite herself.
"I did not think," he said.
"Your lives are our business here," she shouted.
It rained that afternoon in one of the city's fierce, unexpected thunder-storms. Without warning, it
seemed to shine outside Miss Mijares' window a gray, unhappy look.
It was past six when Miss Mijares, ventured outside the office. Night had come swiftly and from the
dark sky the thick, black, rainy curtain continued to fall. She stood on the curb, telling herself she must
not lose her way tonight. When she flagged a jeepney and got in, somebody jumped in after her. She
looked up into the carpenter's faintly smiling eyes. She nodded her head once in recognition and then
turned away.
The cold tight fear of the old dream was upon her. Before she had time to think, the driver had
swerved his vehicle and swung into a side street. Perhaps it was a different alley this time. But it
wound itself in the same tortuous manner as before, now by the banks of overflowing esteros, again
behind faintly familiar buildings. She bent her tiny, distraught face, conjuring in her heart the lonely
safety of the street island she had stood on for an hour that night of her confusion.
"Only this far, folks," the driver spoke, stopping his vehicle. "Main street's a block straight ahead."
"But it's raining," someone protested.
"Sorry. But if I got into a traffic, I won't come out of it in a year. Sorry."
One by one the passengers got off, walking swiftly, disappearing in the night.
Miss Mijares stepped down to a sidewalk in front of a boarded store. The wind had begun again and
she could hear it whipping in the eaves above her head. "Ma'am," the man's voice sounded at her
shoulders, "I am sorry if you thought I lied."
She gestured, bestowing pardon.
Up and down the empty, rain-beaten street she looked. It was as though all at once everyone else had
died and they were alone in the world, in the dark.
In her secret heart, Miss Mijares' young dreams fluttered faintly to life, seeming monstrous in the rain,
near this man --- seeming monstrous but sweet overwhelming. I must get away, she thought wildly,
but he had moved and brushed against her, and where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she
recalled how his hands had looked that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and about the
wooden bird (that had looked like a moving, shining dove) and she turned to him with her ruffles wet
and wilted, in the dark she turned to him.
Children of the City

Amadis Ma. Guerrero

The father of the boy Victor worked on the waterfront and got involved in a strike, a long drawnout
affair which had taken the following course: It began with charges that the employees were not being
given a just compensation, that part of their earnings were being withheld from them, and that their
right to form a union was being disregarded. It escalated with the sudden dismissal, for unstated
reasons, of several workers, giving rise to fears that more layoffs would be carried out in the near
future. This led to organized defiance, and the setting up of picket lines. Finally, one stifling summer
evening, violence broke out on the piers of the city as the strikers were receiving sandwiches and soft
drinks from sympathetic outsiders.
Victor had been, and still was, too young to understand it all. But when they were living in one of the
shanties that stood in Intramuros, he would frequently overhear snatches of conversation between his
parents regarding his fathers job. Sobra na, his father would say, we cannot take it anymore.
Naglalagay sila, they are depriving us of our wages, and they even have this canteen which charges us
whether we eat there or not.
Then his mothers voice, shrill and excited, would cut in, urging him to swallow it all, accept what little
was given to him and stay away from the groups that wanted to fight back. She spoke bitterly of the
newly emerging unions and that priest with his cohorts and his student volunteers who were trying
to organize the workers. Victors father defended these groups, saying were only protecting the
dockhands interests. You dont know what its like out there, he would say, there have been beatings,
and all sorts of accidents. Its a dreadful place really
Once the boy interrupted them and wanted to know what the discussion was all about, only to be met
with a rebuke from his mother. But he was insistent, the heat of the argument stirring a vague fear
within him, and he asked what a cabo was. To distract him, his father playfully laid hold of him and
hoisted him over his shoulders (although Victor was getting a bit heavy for this sort of thing). And thus
they horsed about the house, or what passed for it, to the tune of the boys delighted shrieks and the
cold stares of his mother.
Occasionally, whenever he would find the time, his father would take him out at night for a stroll along
the Boulevard, to feel the breeze and to walk gingerly on the narrow embankment. The place at this
hour wove its spell around him, a kind of eerie enchantment, and he would gaze fascinated at the
murky waters gently, rhythmically swirling on the shore, and at the beckoning lights of Cavite, and
thrill to the mournful blast of a departing ship.
- Tatang, where is the ship going? - I dont know, Victor. Maybe to the provinces. Maybe to another country, a faraway land. - When will we be able to travel too? - I dont know, when we have a little money, perhaps. The whistle of the ship, which seemed to be a big liner, sounded once more as it steamed out of the
harbor and headed in the direction of the South China Sea. Arm in arm in the darkness punctuated
only by a few insufficient lights, father and son tried to make out the dim outline steadily moving away
from them. Then the ship faded into the shadows, and its whistle sounded no more.
Later they strolled on the promenade and made their way slowly to the Luneta, where his father
bought him some chicharon.
The park was dimly lit and ill-kept, and as they passed by the Rizal monument they noticed a number
of rough-looking men lurking about in its vicinity. Two women, dressed gaudily and unaware of their
presence, were approaching from another direction. As they neared, the men unloosed a volley of
whistles, yells and taunts. Then stones were flung, triggering screams and curses from the two. Victor
was startled at hearing their voices, which, though high-pitched, sounded distinctly masculine.
His father hurriedly led him away from the scene, and to his puzzled queries replied that it was
nothing, just a quarrel, an incident. As an afterthought, he observed that the park had not always been
like this, that once in the distant past it had been a clean and picturesque place.
- Maybe it will become beautiful again in the future
A week after this the dock strike materialized. It was called against a shipping firm following the
breakdown of negotiations. The picket dragged on, with the strikers and their families subsisting on
funds raised by student, labor and civic-spirited elements. And the tide seemingly began to favor the
strikers, for soon the case attracted national attention.
Victors father would return home late at night from the marathon picket manned in shifts, exhausted
but excited, and brimming over with enthusiasm for the cause. His mother made no comment, her
protests having long subsided into a sullen silence.
Students and unionists drummed up public support for the workers, organizing drives for them,
detailing their plight in pamphlets and press interviews. They reinforced the picket lines, held rallies to
boost their morale and distributed food and money. And the shipping managements haughtiness
turned to concern and then to desperation

ONE evening, four months after the strike began, the silence of the piers was broken by the rumble of
six-by-six trucks. There were three of them, and they were heading straight for the picket lines. A shot
rang out, reverberating through the night, then another and a third.
Panic spread through the ranks of the strikers, and a few started to run away. Calls by the activists to
stand fast, however, steadied the majority, who stood rooted on the spot following the initial wave of
fear and shock. Easy lang, easy lang, they wont dare crash through. But the huge vehicles
advanced inexorably, and as they neared, a kind of apocalyptic fit seized three picketers who,
propelled by the months and years of exploitation, charged right into the onrushing trucks.
Amid screams and yells, the barricades were rammed. And the scores of strikers fell upon the 6-by-6s
loaded with goons in a fury, uncaring now as to what happened to them. They swarmed over the
trucks, forced open the doors and fought back with stones, placards and bare fists, as more guns
sounded.
Then the harbor police moved in, and as suddenly as it began, the spasm of violence ended. The
moans of the injured mingled with the strident orders of the authorities to replace the noise of combat.
In addition to the three who had been ran over, two other men had been shot to death. One of them
was Victors father, and his picture appeared on the front page of one newspaper. It showed him
spreadeagled on the ground, eyes staring vacantly, with a stain on his breast.
Later that evening, the news was relayed to Victors mother, and she fell into hysterics. Her cries
betrayed not only anguish but fury and frustration as well, and learning of his fathers death and
seeing and hearing his mother thus, Victor, eight-year-old Victor, cowered in the shadows.
Neighbors took care of him that night, but in the morning he managed to slip out, and he made his
way to the Boulevard, once there walking about aimlessly. He heard the call of newsboys going about
their job, and unknown fears began to tug at him. At a newsstand in the Ermita district his glance fell
on the photo of his father, and he stared at it long and hard. It was the first time he had paid such
close attention to a newspaper.
Victors father was laid to rest three days later at the crowded cemetery to the north. His fellow
workers had passed the hat around, and although the amount collected was meager, contributions
from the union organizers and their supporters had made possible the fairly decent burial. His mother
sobbed all throughout the ceremony, and broke down noisily when the time came for a final look at her
husband. The boy stood at her side, subdued. As the coffin was being lowered, he felt like calling out to
his father, tatang, tatang, but the impulse died down, swept aside by the copious tears of his mother. It
was a bright, clear day. On the avenida extension, the early morning traffic was forming and the sound
of car horns intruded into the place where the mourners were gathered.
Not long after his fathers death, Victor, a third-grader dropped out of school, and plans were made to
employ him as a newsboy with the help of an uncle who was a newspaper agent. His mother, who had
gotten into the habit of disappearing in the afternoons and returning home early in the evening,
pointed out that he was healthy and active, though lacking somewhat in aggressiveness. Surely this
could be easily acquired once he was thrown out into the field?
One day she brought with her a man, a stranger with a fowl breath who swayed from side to side, and
introduced him to Victor as your new tatang. The boy did not respond to him, thinking some joke he
could not comprehend was being played on him. And in the days that followed he avoided as much as
possible all contact with the interloper. This man, unkempt in appearance, seemed to be everything his
father wasnt. For one thing he was always cursing (his father had done so only when angry, and kept
this at a minimum whenever Victor was around.) And in his friendlier moments he would beckon to the
boy and say -want this, sioktong? in such a falsetto tone that Victor coldly looked away. At night he
heard strange sounds behind the partition, accompanied by his mothers giggling and the mans
coarse laughter, and he felt like taking a peek, but some instinct held him back. He was disturbed no
end.
One morning a week after the man moved in. Victor woke up to find him gone, along with his mother.
In their stead stood his agent uncle, Tio Pedring, who said his mother had gone on a long vacation, and
amid assurances that she would come back soon, informed the boy that he was to start to work
immediately as a courier for the newspaper he was connected with. Its easy, Tio Pedring said, and
forthwith briefed him on his duties.
He was to report at the plant every night at 9 oclock, wait for the first edition, which came out at 11
p.m., and observe the routine. He was to sleep right outside the circulation offices, and then awaken
before 4 a.m., for that was the time the city edition was made available. A number of copies, perhaps
15 or 20, would then be turned over to him, and it was up to him to distribute these in the Blumentritt
area. Tio Pedring, his mothers older brother and a thin man with a nervous tic, gave him the names
and addresses of 10 regular customers, and said that it was up to him to develop, his own contacts so
as to dispose off the rest of the newspapers allotted. When he was off-duty, Victor could stay in his

uncles Blumentritt place, and for every newspaper he sold he would get three centavos. No mention
was made of resuming the boys interrupted schooling.
THAT evening at the appointed hour he went over to the newspapers building located in the downtown
section, and was greeted by the sight of scores of ragged, barefooted newsboys swarming before the
dispatchers section. A few were stretched out on the pavement, asleep on kartons that served as their
bed, while others were having their supper, bibingka and softdrinks, from the turo-turo that catered to
them. The majority just milled around, grouped together in tight bunches playing their crude game of
checkers, or simply loafing, awaiting the call to duty. The noise of their conversation, loud and harsh
and punctuated by words like putangina, filled the newspapers building.
In reply to his hesitant queries, the guard directed him to the distributing center, a stifling, enclosed
place adjoining the printing presses. Victor entered, knowing that the notice which said unauthorized
persons keep out
Our work here is rush, rush, rush. Youve got to be listo.
Victor nodded, then, dismissed, made his way back outside, where the chill of the evening had
replaced the heat of the plant. A mood of foreboding descended upon him, like a pall. He was hungry,
but had no money, and so contented himself with watching the other newsboys. He wanted to mingle
with them, but they didnt seem to be very friendly. A dilapidated ice cream pushcart stood at one end
of the corner, and to this the urchins went for their ice cream sandwiches, consisting of one or two
scoops tucked into hot dog and hamburger-sized bread. Beside it was a Magnolia cart, patronized by
outsiders.
One boy stood out from among the throng. The others called him Nacio, and like all of them he wore a
dirty T-shirt and faded short pants, and had galis sores on his legs, but cheerfulness emanated from
him and he seemed to enjoy a measure of popularity among his companions. Upon noticing Victor
watching from the side he detached himself from a group and offered him a cigarette.
Surprised, Victor demurred, and said he did not know how to smoke. Nacio shrugged his shoulders, as
if to say hindi bale, then asked if Victor was new on the job. Upon receiving a reply in the affirmative,
he nodded in satisfaction and told the other to learn from him, for he would teach him the tricks of the
trade, such as how to keep a sharp eye out for customers, how to swiftly board a bus or jeep and alight
from it while still in motion, and so on
Nacio invited him to eat, but again Victor declined, saying he had no money.
- Hindi problema yan! the irrepressible Nacio said, Sige, Ill pay for you. He turned to the turo-turo
owner: Hoy, Aling Pacing! Pianono at Coke nga ho! Will you give me a discount? Aling Pacing only
looked down coldly at the boy, and grunted no discount for you. No discount for any of you Nacio winked at Victor as he paid, took the rolls and drinks, and handed over to the other his share.
Victor wolfed down the pianono, although it didnt taste too new, and drank with deep satisfaction
while his companion chattered on, regaling him with his experiences as a carrier and his ability to
skillfully dodge in and out of traffic. He disclosed that once he had been sideswiped by a car, but
escaped only with a few scratches, and boasted: Im the fastest newsboy in Manila. Victor marveled
at his luck in finding such a fine friend.
As the time for the release of the first edition neared, an air of expectation materialized outside the
plant. The newspapers trucks and vans stood in readiness. The newsboys grew in number and began
to form a dense mass. Their conversation became louder, more excited, and their horseplay rougher.
Shortly after 11 p.m. a team of dispatchers emerged with the initial copies, the ink of the presses still
warm on them, and was greeted by yells of anticipation. A stampede followed, and Victor noted that
for every bundle turned over to a newsboy, one distributor jotted down on a piece of paper the number
allotted to him.
The clamor grew as the boys dashed out of the building and surged into the darkened streets. They
were like school children being let out for recess. The noise continued, then subsided after a few
minutes, with the last urchin scampering away. The nighttime silence returned once more to the area,
broken only by occasional shouts of the men loading the main bulk of the provincial edition into the
trucks, the toot of passing motorists horn and the sound of laughter from drunkards in the sari-sari
store in front.
Victor settled himself on the pavement, and despite the hard ground he felt tired and sleepy. He used
his right arm as a pillow, and thought briefly about his father, his mother and the man she had taken
up with, Tio Pedring and the days events, before sleep claimed him.
He awakened several hours later, jolted by the noise of the second wave of newsboys gathering for the
city edition. Gingerly he stretched his cramped arms and legs, peered about him and shivered, for it
had grown much colder. He kept an eye out for Nacio, although he felt sure he would not come back
anymore tonight. He could recognize, though, some of the faces in the crowd.
The same procedure took place at 4 a.m., it was like a reel being retaken. The routine was now familiar
to Victor, but with a difference. This time he was a participant in the activities, and he found himself

caught up in the excitement. All weariness gone from him, he sped away in the company of his
colleagues, holding on tightly to his ration of 15 copies. Exhilaration coursed through him, and he ran
and ran, stopping only when he reached the avenida. The others had scattered in different directions,
and the street stretched away endlessly, virtually devoid of traffic. Its stores had long closed down for
the night, and only a few neon signs glowed.
He began to walk slowly, sober now, his responsibilities heavy on him. His destination was Blumentritt.
As he crossed Azcarraga, a taxi slowed down, and its passenger called out to him. Tremblingly he
handed over a paper, and received 15 centavos in turn. His very first sale! His spirits soared anew
perhaps it wasnt so difficult after all to sell a newspaper. This impression was bolstered when in a
matter of minutes he made two more sales, to customers at a small, all-night restaurant.
It was still dark when he arrived at the district, and the first thing he heard was the whistle of the train
which passed through the place every evening. He reacted in the same way he had to the foghorn
blasts of the ships along the Boulevard.
He set about reconnoitering the area, to get the feel of it, and took out the list Tio Pedring had given
him. He recalled his uncles words:
- Youre lucky. Not all newcomers have mga suki when they begin, and they have to return so many
copies at first. Tambak sila. The customers included a dressmaker, a barber, a small pharmacist, and
a beautician. And to their places Victor eventually made his way, slipping the newspapers under doors,
into mailboxes, and the apertures of padlocked steel gates.
Soon it grew light, and more jeepneys began to ply their routes, as buses appeared, bound for Santa
Cruz and Grace Park. The signs of activity in the neighborhood market increased while the small parish
church near it remained closed, silent and deserted. Young scavengers, worn out from poking all night
among trash cans, slept inside their pushcarts. Piles of garbage stood on several streets and
alleyways.
Victor made no other sales that day, and he returned to the plant with three unsold newspapers. He
turned them over apologetically. The one in charge now shrugged, then noted that he had not done
badly for a first nights work. He added that he expected Victor to improve in the future and equal the
other newsboys, who always complained that their allotment was not enough. The dispatcher said:
Our newspaper is sikat. By noon we are all sold out in the newsstands.
On his second night on the job, Victor was set upon by a group of street boys his age, who sprang up
from out of the shadows and began to beat him up. He managed to flee from the scene in terror,
leaving behind all his newspapers. For this he was roundly cursed by his uncle, who promised to take it
out on his earnings for the next few days.
He took to haunting his beat even during the daytime and became friends with the little people, the
vendors, the sellers of peanuts, kalamansi, coconuts and pigs, the grocery employees, the market
denizens, the modistas and shop owners, and even some of the patrolmen. Through his constant
presence in the area, he was able to find additional regular customers, and no more did he have to
return unsold copies. At night he went about his tasks with renewed confidence, and when through he
would rest in front of the local bank. Gradually he lost his fear of thugs.
Though his work improved, his relations with the other newsboys didnt. Nacio remained his only
friend, and whenever he was around the others let Victor alone. He couldnt make them out at all, with
their rough games and harsh tongues, their smoking and their constant baiting. At one time he was
jolted awake from the dreamless sleep by the concerted yells of the newsboys, who were hurling
missiles, with the drivers reacting by merely stepping on the gas, and the passengers cowering in
alarm. The guards whose job it was to break up these things did not seem to be around. No one could
give an explanation for the sudden outburst.
VICTOR was eventually allowed to sell both editions of the paper and his daily quota was increased to
20. Soon he was making about three pesos every day, sometimes more. His beat late at night was
transferred to the Boulevard district, where he peddled the provincial edition to night clubbers and
cocktail loungers. In the early hours of the morning he would distribute the city edition to his
Blumentritt customers. Tio Pedring expressed satisfaction with his development, and granted the boy
more decent accommodations and better food at his residence.
Victor settled down into the routine, which would be livened up sometime by big events, like an
earthquake. During such occasions the labor force would swell, augmented by now inactive boys who
had graduated to other fields of endeavor, like pickpocketing and the watch-your-car business. In
January the Press Club held its annual party in honor of newsboys, and Victor and Nacio along with
many others, attended. There were balloons, soft drinks and cookies. Nacio kept stuffing these into his
pockets, to the great amusement of Victor, who was tempted to do the same, but there didnt seem to
be enough around.
That was the last time the two spent together. Within a week Nacio met his death violently; he had
been run over by a car while recklessly charging into the street following the release of the first

edition. The following afternoon, this sign stood at the corner leading to the newspaper building: SLOW
DOWN NEWSBOYS COMING OUT.
Victor grieved for his friend, and from that time on he became even more taciturn and withdrawn.
HE avoided the Boulevard by night, with its motionless ships, its necking couples, jagged embankment
and swaying trees, and stuck to the well-populated areas. The bar district in the southern part of the
city began to attract him, and fortified by his sheaf of newspapers, which was like a badge of
distinction for him, he would stare expressionlessly at the painted girls posing before the doorways
under the garish neon signs, at the customers briefly eyeing them before going in, and at the welldressed bouncers.
On this particular evening the bars were filled with foreign sailors, for a military exercise was to be held
within a few days. Red-faced and grinning, the fair-complexioned seamen made the rounds, boisterous,
arm in arm sometimes, and swaying from side to side (they reminded Victor of the man who had
replaced his father). Helmeted men, with MP arm-bands, stood in front of some of the cocktail lounges.
Victor approached one of the dives and, getting a nod from the bouncer, who saw he was a newsboy,
made his way in. It was almost pitch-dark inside, and it took a few minutes for his eyes to grow
accustomed to the cavern-like atmosphere. Hostesses and sailors were grouped around the small
tables, drinking, talking and laughing shrilly while a combo belted out pulsating music and a singer
strained to make herself heard above the din. Some couples were pawing each other.
He approached a group noisily drinking, and tugged at the sleeves of one sailor.
- You buy newspaper from me, sir. Sige na, Joe.
The other peered at him in surprise, then guffawed loudly, and waved him away. He said thickly Beat
it, Flip boy!
Victor stood rooted on the spot. He didnt understand the words, but the gesture was unmistakable.
Some hostesses started giggling nervously. He was about to turn away in anger and humiliation when
another seaman, blonde and clean-shaven, gently laid a hand over him Wait a minute, sonny. Then
he dipped into his pocket and handed over something to Victor. Here, take it, its yours. Have a grand
time with it.
Victor thanked him automatically, and went out swiftly. He looked at the paper bills in his hand and saw
that they totaled two pesos, practically a nights work for him and the pall that had descended over
him for weeks was suddenly lifted, like a veil. He felt liberated, renewed. He wanted to sing out, to
shout and dance about. And he began to run, joy spurring him on.
Later that night he recounted the incident to his surprised colleagues, who had never seen him this
garrulous before. He elaborated on the story, enriching it with imaginary details, and transformed it
into a tale of danger, excitement and exotic drama. As a clincher, he proudly showed off his money,
realizing his mistake in the next instant. But it was too late. The others began to advance toward him,
encircling him. Their words were flung at him like stones:
- Why arent you like us? - Why dont you smoke? - Why dont you curse? - Say putangina.
Victor drew back, frightened. With a chill he remembered the time the Blumentritt boys had ganged up
on him. I dont say words like that. - Say it! - All right, all right, putangina. But the ephitet carried no conviction, and he repeated it, stronger this
time. The boys laughed in derision, and gave out a mirthless kind of cheer. After uttering the words,
Victor could no longer control himself. He began screaming all kinds of curses, and he hurled himself
bodily upon them, kicking, hitting, screaming, in the grip of a fury he had not known existed within
him.
With a great shout, the others fell upon him. Newsboys sleeping on the ground woke up in alarm, the
night circulation people looked around in consternation, and the turo-turo owner screamed. The melee
continued until a shouting security guard rushed in and roughly broke it up. He led Victor away, and
was about to interrogate him when the boy, who had sustained some cuts and bruises, broke free of
his grasp and fled into the night.
He roamed the streets, the byways and darkened alleys of the teeming district. He passed by children
his age scrounging around trash cans, and dingy motels where couples went in and out. One small
restaurant, a focal point of excitement during the daytime when the racing results were posted, now
stood silent and almost empty, about to close down. His face and body ached from the blows he had
received, and a trickle of blood streamed down his nostrils. He wiped this on his T-shirt. He seemed to
be in good shape otherwise, and he felt relief that the fight had been stopped in time. His thoughts
flew back and forth. He promised himself that he would never go back to the plant, but his resolve
soon began to weaken. He was at a loss as to what to do.

A rough voice to his right drew his attention, and as he turned into a narrow sidestreet leading to the
avenida, he saw a policeman bending over a man sprawled on a heap, and apparently asleep. The
officer kept on shaking the fellow, who failed to respond. Then, cursing, he hit him with his night stick,
as Victor watched
HE reported for work the following evening, prepared for anything. But nothing untoward happened.
Last nights incident seemed to have been forgotten, and the others made no reference to it. Then one
of the boys, whom Victor recognized as a ring-leader, went over to him and, apparently as a kind of
peace offering, held out a cigarette. Victor hesitated, then said he
didnt smoke.
The others began to form around him anew, but this time their attitude was one of curiosity rather
than of menace.
- Sige na, take it. It is very nice to smoke, and it is easy. All you have to do is take a deep breath, then
exhale slowly.
And Victor, his last defenses down, leaned forward and wearily accepted the cigarette, while around
them swirled the life of the city: this city, flushed with triumphant charity campaigns, where workers
were made to sign statements certifying they received the minimum wage, where millionaire
politicians received Holy Communion every Sunday, where mothers taught their sons and daughters
the art of begging, where orphans and children from broken homes slept on pavements and under
darkened bridges, and where best friends fell out and betrayed one another.