FAITH, LOVE, TIME AND DR.

LAZARO by Gregorio Brillantes

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

Gradually his mind stirred, focused; as he rose from the chair he recognized the somber passage in the
sonata that, curiously, made him think of ancient monuments, faded stone walls, a greyness. The brain
filed away an image; and arrangement of sounds released it He switched off the phonograph,
suppressed and impatient quiver in his throat as he reached for the phone: everyone had a claim on his
time. He thought: Why not the younger ones for a change? He had spent a long day at the provincial
hospital.

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

But the connection was faulty, there was a humming in the wires, as though darkness had added to the
distance between the house in the town and the gas station beyond the summer fields. Dr. Lazaro could
barely catch the severed phrases. The mans week-old child had a high fever, a bluish skin; its mouth
would not open to suckle. They could not take the baby to the poblacion, they would not dare move it;
its body turned rigid at the slightest touch. If the doctor would consent to come at so late an hour,
Esteban would wait for him at the station. If the doctor would be so kind

Tetanus of the newborn: that was elementary, and most likely it was so hopeless, a waste of time. Dr.
Lazaro said yes, he would be there; he had committed himself to that answer, long ago; duty had taken
the place of an exhausted compassion. The carelessness of the poor, the infected blankets, the toxin
moving toward the heart: they were casual scribbled items in a clinical report. But outside the grilled
windows, the night suddenly seemed alive and waiting. He had no choice left now but action: it was the
only certitude he sometimes reminded himself even if it would prove futile, before, the descent into
nothingness.

His wife looked up from her needles and twine, under the shaded lamp of the bedroom; she had
finished the pullover for the grandchild in Baguio and had begun work, he noted, on another of those
altar vestments for the parish church. Religion and her grandchild certainly kept her busy She looked
at him, into so much to inquire as to be spoken to: a large and placid woman.

Shouldnt have let the drive go home so early, Dr. Lazaro said. They had to wait till now to call
Childs probably dead

Ben can drive for you.

I hardly see that boy around the house. He seems to be on vacation both from home and in school.

Hes downstairs, his wife said.

Dr. Lazaro put on fresh shirt, buttoned it with tense, abrupt motions, I thought hed gone out again
Whos that girl hes been seeing?... Its not just warm, its hot. You shouldve stayed on in Baguio
Theres disease, suffering, death, because Adam ate the apple. They must have an answer to
everything He paused at the door, as though for the echo of his words.

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

He hurried down the curving stairs, under the votive lamps of the Sacred Heart. Ben lay sprawled on the
sofa, in the front parlor; engrossed in a book, one leg propped against the back cushions. Come along,
were going somewhere, Dr. Lazaro said, and went into the clinic for his medical bag. He added a vial of
pen strep, an ampule of caffeine to the satchels contents; rechecked the bag before closing it; the
catgut would last just one more patient. One can only cure, and know nothing beyond ones work
There had been the man, today, in the hospital: the cancer pain no longer helped by the doses of
morphine; the patients eyes flickering their despair in the eroded face. Dr. Lazaro brushed aside the
stray vision as he strode out of the whitewashed room; he was back in his element, among syringes,
steel instruments, quick decisions made without emotion, and it gave him a kind of blunt energy.

Ill drive, Pa? Ben followed him through the kitchen, where the maids were ironing the weeks wash,
gossiping, and out to the yard shrouded in the dimness of the single bulb under the eaves. The boy
pushed back the folding doors of the garage and slid behind the wheel.

Somebodys waiting at the gas station near San Miguel. You know the place?

Sure, Ben said.

The engine sputtered briefly and stopped. Batterys weak, Dr. Lazaro said. Try it without the lights,
and smelled the gasoline overflow as the old Pontiac finally lurched around the house and through the
trellised gate, its front sweeping over the dry dusty street.

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

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

A lot of what, Pa?

The ways you drive. Very professional.

In the glow of the dashboard lights, the boys face relaxed, smiled. Tio Cesar let me use his car, in
Manila. On special occasions.

No reckless driving now, Dr. Lazaro said. Some fellows think its smart. Gives them a thrill. Dont be
like that.

No, I wont, Pa. I just like to drive and and go place, thats all.

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

Time was moving toward them, was swirling around and rushing away and it seemed Dr. Lazaro could
almost hear its hallow receding roar; and discovering his sons profile against the flowing darkness, he
had a thirst to speak. He could not find what it was he had meant to say.

The agricultural school buildings came up in the headlights and glided back into blurred shapes behind a
fence.

What was that book you were reading, Ben?

A biography, the boy said.

Statesman? Scientist maybe?

Its about a guy who became a monk.

Thats your summer reading? Dr. Lazaro asked with a small laugh, half mockery, half affection. Youre
getting to be a regular saint, like your mother.

Its an interesting book, Ben said.

I can imagine He dropped the bantering tone. I suppose youll go on to medicine after your AB?

I dont know yet, Pa.

Tiny moth like blown bits of paper flew toward the windshield and funneled away above them. You
dont have to be a country doctor like me, Ben. You could build up a good practice in the city. Specialized
in cancer, maybe or neuro-surgery, and join a good hospital. It was like trying to recall some rare
happiness, in the car, in the shifting darkness.

Ive been thinking about it, Ben said. Its a vocation, a great one. Being able to really help people, I
mean.

Youve done well in math, havent you?

Well enough, I guess, Ben said.

Engineering is a fine course too, Dr. Lazaro said. Therell be lots of room for engineers. Planners and
builders, they are what this country needs. Far too many lawyers and salesmen these days. Now if your
brother He closed his eyes, erasing the slashed wrists, part of the future dead in a boarding-house
room, the landlady whimpering, He was such a nice boy, doctor, your son Sorrow lay in ambush
among the years.

I have all summer to think about, Ben said.

Theres no hurry, Dr. Lazaro said. What was it he had wanted to say? Something about knowing each
other, about sharing; no, it was not that at all
The stations appeared as they coasted down the incline of a low hill, its fluorescent lights the only
brightness on the plain before them, on the road that led farther into deeper darkness. A freight truck
was taking on a load of gasoline as they drove up the concrete apron and came to a stop beside the
station shed.

A short barefoot man in a patchwork shirt shuffled forward to meet them.

I am Esteban, doctor, the man said, his voice faint and hoarse, almost inaudible, and he bowed slightly
with a careful politeness. He stood blinking, looking up at the doctor, who had taken his bag and
flashlight form the car.

In the windless space, Dr. Lazaro could hear Estebans labored breathing, the clank of the metal nozzle
as the attendant replaced it in the pump. The men in the truck stared at them curiously.

Esteban said, pointing at the darkness beyond the road: We will have to go through those fields,
doctor, then cross the river, The apology for yet one more imposition was a wounded look in his eyes.
He added, in his subdued voice: Its not very far Ben had spoken to the attendants and was locking
the car.

The truck rumbled and moved ponderously onto the road, its throb strong and then fading in the warm
night stillness.

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

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

With the boy close behind him, Dr. Lazaro followed Esteban down a clay slope to the slope and ripple of
water in the darkness. The flashlight showed a banca drawn up at the rivers edge. Esteban wade waist-
deep into the water, holding the boat steady as Dr. Lazaro and Ben stepped on the board. In the
darkness, with the opposite bank like the far rise of an island, Dr. Lazaro had a moments tremor of fear
as the boar slide out over the black water; below prowled the deadly currents; to drown her in the
depths of the night But it took only a minute to cross the river. Were here doctor, Esteban said, and
they padded p a stretch of sand to a clump of trees; a dog started to bark, the shadows of a kerosene
lamp wavered at a window.

Unsteady on a steep ladder, Dr. Lazaro entered the cave of Estebans hut. The single room contained the
odors he often encountered but had remained alien to, stirring an impersonal disgust: the sourish decay,
the smells of the unaired sick. An old man greeted him, lisping incoherently; a woman, the grandmother,
sat crouched in a corner, beneath a famed print of the Mother of Perpetual Help; a boy, about ten, slept
on, sprawled on a mat. Estebans wife, pale and thin, lay on the floor with the sick child beside her.

Motionless, its tiny blue-tinged face drawn way from its chest in a fixed wrinkled grimace, the infant
seemed to be straining to express some terrible ancient wisdom.

Dr. Lazaro made a cursory check skin dry, turning cold; breathing shallow; heartbeat fast and irregular.
And I that moment, only the child existed before him; only the child and his own mind probing now like
a hard gleaming instrument. How strange that it should still live, his mind said as it considered the spark
that persisted within the rigid and tortured body. He was alone with the child, his whole being focused
on it, in those intense minutes shaped into a habit now by so many similar instances: his physicians
knowledge trying to keep the heart beating, to revive an ebbing life and somehow make it rise again.

Dr. Lazaro removed the blankets that bundled the child and injected a whole ampule to check the tonic
spasms, the needle piercing neatly into the sparse flesh; he broke another ampule, with deft precise
movements, and emptied the syringe, while the infant lay stiff as wood beneath his hands. He wiped off
the sweat running into his eyes, then holding the rigid body with one hand, he tried to draw air into the
faltering lungs, pressing and releasing the chest; but even as he worked to rescue the child, the bluish
color of its face began to turn gray.

Dr. Lazaro rose from his crouch on the floor, a cramped ache in his shoulders, his mouth dry. The
lamplight glistened on his pale hollow face as he confronted the room again, the stale heat, the poverty.
Esteban met his gaze; all their eyes were upon him, Ben at the door, the old man, the woman in the
corner, and Estebans wife, in the trembling shadows.

Esteban said: Doctor..

He shook his head, and replaced the syringe case in his bag, slowly and deliberately, and fastened the
clasp. T Here was murmuring him, a rustle across the bamboo floor, and when he turned, Ben was
kneeling beside the child. And he watched, with a tired detached surprise, as the boy poured water from
a coconut shell on the infants brow. He caught the words half-whispered in the quietness: ..in the
name of the Father.. the Son the Holy Ghost

The shadows flapped on the walls, the heart of the lamp quivering before it settled into a slender flame.
By the river dogs were barking. Dr. Lazaro glanced at his watch; it was close to midnight. Ben stood over
the child, the coconut shell in his hands, as though wandering what next to do with it, until he saw his
father nod for them to go.

Doctor, tell us Esteban took a step forward.

I did everything: Dr. Lazaro said. Its too late

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

In the yard, Esteban pressed carefully folded bills into the doctors hand; the limp, tattered feel of the
money was sort of the futile journey, I know this is not enough, doctor, Esteban said. as you can see
we are very poor I shall bring you fruit, chickens, someday

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

I cannot thank you enough, doctor, Esteban said. You have been very kind to come this far, at this
hour. The trail is just over there, isnt it? He wanted to be rid of the man, to be away from the shy
humble voice, the prolonged wretchedness.
I shall be grateful always, doctor, Esteban said. And to you son, too. God go with you. He was a
faceless voice withdrawing in the shadows, a cipher in the shabby crowds that came to town on market
days.

Lets go, Ben Dr. Lazaro said.

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

You baptized the child, didnt you, Ben?

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

He used to believe in it, too. The power of the Holy Spirit washing away original sin, the purified soul
made heir of heaven. He could still remember fragments of his boy hood faith, as one might remember
an improbable and long-discarded dream.

Lay baptism, isnt that the name for it?

Yes, Ben said. I asked the father. The baby hadnt been baptized. He added as they came to the
embankment that separated the field from the road: They were waiting for it to get well.

The station had closed, with only the canopy light and the blobbed neon sign left burning. A steady wind
was blowing now across the field, the moonlit plains.

He saw Ben stifle a yawn. Ill drive, Dr. Lazaro said.

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

He said, seeking conversation, if other people carried on like you, Ben, the priests would be run out of
business.

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

Now, youll have an angel praying for you in heaven, Dr. Lazaro said, teasing, trying to create an easy
mood between them. What if you hadnt baptized the baby and it died? What would happen to it
then?

It wont see God, Ben said.

But isnt that unfair? It was like riddle, trivial, but diverting. Just because..

Maybe God has another remedy, Ben said. I dont know. But the church says.

He could sense the boy groping for the tremendous answers. The Church teaches, the church
says. God: Christ: the communications of saints: Dr. Lazaro found himself wondering about the world
of novenas and candles, where bread and wine became the flesh and blood of the Lord, and a woman
bathed in light appeared before children, and mortal men spoke of eternal life; the visions of God, the
bodys resurrection at the end of time. It was a country from which he was barred; no matter the
customs, the geography didnt appeal to him. But in the care suddenly, driving through the night, he was
aware of an obscure disappointment, a subtle pressure around his heart, as though he had been
deprived of a certain joy

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

They reached the sleeping town, the desolate streets, the plaza empty in the moonlight, and the
huddled shapes of houses, the old houses that Dr. Lazaro had always know. How many nights had he
driven home like this through the quiet town, with a mans life ended behind him, or a child crying newly
risen from the womb; and a sense of constant motions, of change, of the days moving swiftly toward
and immense revelation touched him once more, briefly, and still he could not find the words. He turned
the last corner, then steered the car down the graveled driveway to the garage, while Ben closed the
gate. Dr. Lazaro sat there a moment, in the stillness, resting his eyes, conscious of the measured beating
of his heart, and breathing a scent of dust that lingered on his clothes, his skin. Slowly he emerged from
the car, locking it, and went around the tower of the water-tank to the front yard where Ben Stood
waiting.

With unaccustomed tenderness he placed a hand on Bens shoulder was they turned toward the cement
walled house. They had gone on a trip; they had come home safely together. He felt closer to the boy
than he had ever been in years.

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

Its all right, Pa.

Some night, huh, Ben? What you did back in that barrio there was just the slightest patronage in this
one your mother will love to hear about it.

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

The impulse of certain humor it was part of the comradeship. He chuckled drowsily: father Lazaro,
what must I do to gain eternal life?

As he slid the door open on the vault of darkness, the familiar depth of the house, it came to Dr. Lazaro
faintly in the late night that for certain things, like love there was only so much time. But the glimmer
was lost instantly, buried in the mist of indifference and sleep rising now in his brain.
FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH by Jose Garcia Villa

The sun was salmon and hazy in the west. Dodong thought to himself he would tell his father about
Teang when he got home, after he had unhitched the carabao from the plow, and let it to its shed and
fed it. He was hesitant about saying it, but he wanted his father to know. What he had to say was of
serious import as it would mark a climacteric in his life. Dodong finally decided to tell it, at a thought
came to him his father might refuse to consider it. His father was silent hard-working farmer who
chewed areca nut, which he had learned to do from his mother, Dodongs grandmother.

I will tell it to him. I will tell it to him.

The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish earthy smell. Many
slender soft worms emerged from the furrows and then burrowed again deeper into the soil. A short
colorless worm marched blindly to Dodongs foot and crawled calmly over it. Dodong go tickled and
jerked his foot, flinging the worm into the air. Dodong did not bother to look where it fell, but thought of
his age, seventeen, and he said to himself he was not young any more.

Dodong unhitched the carabao leisurely and gave it a healthy tap on the hip. The beast turned its head
to look at him with dumb faithful eyes. Dodong gave it a slight push and the animal walked alongside
him to its shed. He placed bundles of grass before it land the carabao began to eat. Dodong looked at it
without interests.

Dodong started homeward, thinking how he would break his news to his father. He wanted to marry,
Dodong did. He was seventeen, he had pimples on his face, the down on his upper lip already was dark
these meant he was no longer a boy. He was growing into a manhe was a man. Dodong felt insolent
and big at the thought of it although he was by nature low in statue. Thinking himself a man grown,
Dodong felt he could do anything.

He walked faster, prodded by the thought of his virility. A small angled stone bled his foot, but he
dismissed it cursorily. He lifted his leg and looked at the hurt toe and then went on walking. In the cool
sundown he thought wild you dreams of himself and Teang. Teang, his girl. She had a small brown face
and small black eyes and straight glossy hair. How desirable she was to him. She made him dream even
during the day.

Dodong tensed with desire and looked at the muscles of his arms. Dirty. This field
work was healthy, invigorating but it begrimed you, smudged you terribly. He turned back the way he
had come, then he marched obliquely to a creek.

Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts, on the grass.
The he went into the water, wet his body over, and rubbed at it vigorously. He was not long in bathing,
then he marched homeward again. The bath made him feel cool.

It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already was lighted and the low
unvarnished square table was set for supper. His parents and he sat down on the floor around the table
to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish, rice, bananas, and caked sugar.

Dodong ate fish and rice, but did not partake of the fruit. The bananas were overripe and when one held
them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong broke off a piece of the cakes sugar, dipped it in his glass of
water and ate it. He got another piece and wanted some more, but he thought of leaving the remainder
for his parents.

Dodongs mother removed the dishes when they were through and went out to the batalan to wash
them. She walked with slow careful steps and Dodong wanted to help her carry the dishes out, but he
was tired and now felt lazy. He wished as he looked at her that he had a sister who could help his
mother in the housework. He pitied her, doing all the housework alone.

His father remained in the room, sucking a diseased tooth. It was paining him again, Dodong knew.
Dodong had told him often and again to let the town dentist pull it out, but he was afraid, his father
was. He did not tell that to Dodong, but Dodong guessed it. Afterward Dodong himself thought that if he
had a decayed tooth he would be afraid to go to the dentist; he would not be any bolder than his father.

Dodong said while his mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There it was out, what he had
to say, and over which he had done so much thinking. He had said it without any effort at all and
without self-consciousness. Dodong felt relieved and looked at his father expectantly. A decrescent
moon outside shed its feeble light into the window, graying the still black temples of his father. His
father looked old now.

I am going to marry Teang, Dodong said.

His father looked at him silently and stopped sucking the broken tooth. The silence became intense and
cruel, and Dodong wished his father would suck that troublous tooth again. Dodong was uncomfortable
and then became angry because his father kept looking at him without uttering anything.

I will marry Teang, Dodong repeated. I will marry Teang.

His father kept gazing at him in inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his seat.

I asked her last night to marry me and she saidyes. I want your permission. I want it. There was
impatient clamor in his voice, an exacting protest at this coldness, this indifference. Dodong looked at
his father sourly. He cracked his knuckles one by one, and the little sounds it made broke dully the night
stillness.

Must you marry, Dodong?

Dodong resented his fathers questions; his father himself had married. Dodong made a quick
impassioned easy in his mind about selfishness, but later he got confused.

You are very young, Dodong.

Im seventeen.

Thats very young to get married at.

I I want to marryTeangs a good girl.

Tell your mother, his father said.

You tell her, tatay.

Dodong, you tell your inay.

You tell her.

All right, Dodong.

You will let me marry Teang?

Son, if that is your wish of course There was a strange helpless light in his fathers eyes. Dodong did
not read it, so absorbed was he in himself.

Dodong was immensely glad he had asserted himself. He lost his resentment for his father. For a while
he even felt sorry for him about the diseased tooth. Then he confined his mind to dreaming of Teang
and himself. Sweet young dream.

Dodong stood in the sweltering noon heat, sweating profusely, so that his camiseta was damp. He was
still as a tree and his thoughts were confused. His mother had told him not to leave the house, but he
had left. He had wanted to get out of it without clear reason at all. He was afraid, he felt. Afraid of the
house. It had seemed to cage him, to compares his thoughts with severe tyranny. Afraid also of Teang.
Teang was giving birth in the house; she gave screams that chilled his blood. He did not want her to
scream like that, he seemed to be rebuking him. He began to wonder madly if the process of childbirth
was really painful. Some women, when they gave birth, did not cry.

In a few moments he would be a father. Father, father, he whispered the word with awe, with
strangeness. He was young, he realized now, contradicting himself of nine months comfortable Your
son, people would soon be telling him. Your son, Dodong.

Dodong felt tired standing. He sat down on a saw-horse with his feet close together. He looked at his
callused toes. Suppose he had ten children What made him think that? What was the matter with
him? God!

He heard his mothers voice from the house:

Come up, Dodong. It is over.

Suddenly he felt terribly embarrassed as he looked at her. Somehow, he was ashamed to his mother of
his youthful paternity. It made him feel guilty, as if he had taken something no properly his. He dropped
his eyes and pretended to dust dirt off his kundiman shorts.

Dodong, his mother called again. Dodong.

He turned to look again and this time saw his father beside his mother.

It is a boy, his father said. He beckoned Dodong to come up.

Dodong felt more embarrassed and did not move. What a moment for him. His parents eyes seemed to
pierce him through and he felt limp.

He wanted to hide from them, to run away.

Dodong, you come up. You come up, he mother said.

Dodong did not want to come up and stayed in the sun.

Dodong. Dodong.

Ill come up.

Dodong traced tremulous steps on the dry parched yard. He ascended the bamboo steps slowly. His
heart pounded mercilessly in him. Within, he avoided his parents eyes. He walked ahead of them so
that they should not see his face. He felt guilty and untrue. He felt like crying. His eyes smarted and his
chest wanted to burst. He wanted to turn back, to go back to the yard. He wanted somebody to punish
him.

His father thrust his hand in his and gripped it gently.

Son, his father said.

And his mother: Dodong

How kind were their voices. They flowed into him, making him strong.

Teang? Dodong said.

Shes sleeping. But you go on

His father led him into the small sawali room. Dodong saw Teang, his girl-wife, asleep on the papag with
her black hair soft around her face. He did not want her to look that pale.

Dodong wanted to touch her, to push away that stray wisp of hair that touched her lips, but again that
feeling of embarrassment came over him and before his parents he did not want to be demonstrative.

The hilot was wrapping the child, Dodong heard it cry. The thin voice pierced him queerly. He could not
control the swelling of happiness in him.

You give him to me. You give him to me, Dodong said.

Blas was not Dodongs only child. Many more children came. For six successive years a new child came
along. Dodong did not want any more children, but they came. It seemed the coming of children could
not be helped. Dodong got angry with himself sometimes.

Teang did not complain, but the bearing of children told on her. She was shapeless and thin now, even if
she was young. There was interminable work to be done. Cooking. Laundering. The house. The children.
She cried sometimes, wishing she had not married. She did not tell Dodong this, not wishing him to
dislike her. Yet she wished she had not married. Not even Dodong, whom she loved. There has been
another suitor, Lucio, older than Dodong by nine years, and that was why she had chosen Dodong.
Young Dodong. Seventeen. Lucio had married another after her marriage to Dodong, but he was
childless until now. She wondered if she had married Lucio, would she have borne him children. Maybe
not, either. That was a better lot. But she loved Dodong

Dodong whom life had made ugly.

One night, as he lay beside his wife, he rose and went out of the house. He stood in the moonlight, tired
and querulous. He wanted to ask questions and somebody to answer him. He wanted to be wise about
many things.

One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youths dreams. Why it must be so. Why one was
forsaken after Love.

Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question was not to be answered. It must be so to make
youth Youth. Youth must be dreamfully sweet. Dreamfully sweet. Dodong returned to the house
humiliated by himself. He had wanted to know a little wisdom but was denied it.

When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered and happy. It was late at night and
Teang and the other children were asleep. Dodong heard Blass steps, for he could not sleep well of
nights. He watched Blas undress in the dark and lie down softly. Blas was restless on his mat and could
not sleep. Dodong called him name and asked why he did not sleep. Blas said he could not sleep.

You better go to sleep. It is late, Dodong said.

Blas raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice.

Dodong did not answer and tried to sleep.

Itay , Blas called softly.

Dodong stirred and asked him what it was.

I am going to marry Tona. She accepted me tonight.

Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving.

Itay, you think it over.

Dodong lay silent.

I love Tona and I want her.

Dodong rose from his mat and told Blas to follow him. They descended to the yard, where everything
was still and quiet. The moonlight was cold and white.

You want to marry Tona, Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas was very young. The life
that would follow marriage would be hard

Yes.

Must you marry?

Blass voice stilled with resentment. I will marry Tona.

Dodong kept silent, hurt.

You have objections, Itay? Blas asked acridly.

Son n-none (But truly, God, I dont want Blas to marry yet not yet. I dont want Blas to marry
yet.)

But he was helpless. He could not do anything. Youth must triumph now. Love must triumph now.
Afterwards it will be life.
As long ago, youth and love did triumph for Dodong and then life.

Dodong looked wistfully at his young son in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad and sorry for him.
AXOLOTL COLONY by Jaime An Lim

After their divorce his wife promptly married her American lover of ten months and moved out of
Bloomington, Indiana, to the East Coast, taking their ten-year-old daughter along. The court, rather
unfairly in his thinking, had granted his ex-wife child custody because of her "financial stability." Tomas
Agbayani, feeling betrayed but unable to do anything about it, continued to stay in Campus View, the
housing on Tenth and Union reserved for student couples, though this was now an irregularity. The
Residence Hall people, had they known of his altered marital status, would have reassigned him to
Eigenmann, the graduate dorm of unmarried students located just across the railroad tracks, or to an
efficiency at Redbud, a one-room affair where a folding sofa-bed marked the austere living-sleeping
area.

But Vilma Teare, the apartment manager, probably feeling sorry for him, had chosen to look the other
way and allowed him to stay another year, which was the time for it would take him to wrap up the final
draft of his doctoral dissertation ("The Third World in America: A Study of Ten Minority Writers"
included the Filipino poet-exile Jos Garcia Villa, among others). Tomas had been working for her for
eight summers now, as part of the motley crew of student hourlies hired to clean the empty apartments
for the incoming batch of new tenants flying into town each September, the start of the academic year
at Indiana University. "It's a pain in the neck. I should know. But believe me, Tom, it always works out for
the best in the end. For everybody. Though it may not look that way right now." Vilma was sympathetic
but hardly surprised. She was a tall, matronly woman who apparently knew what she was talking about.
She herself had been twice divorced.

"Though I've always thought... Aren't you Filipinos Roman Catholics?" A confused frown looked him over
from her white-framed eyeglasses. Over the years as apartment manager, Vilma had seen all sorts of
foreign students come and go: Singaporean, Japanese, Nigerian, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Malaysian, and
even Red Chinese. Enough, at least, to be able to pick up on some of their peculiarities. Iranians and
Saudi Arabians don't eat pork. Indians eat an awful lot of hot peppers. Filipinos eat an awful lot of rice.
South Koreans prefer that odoriferous salted vegetable called kimchi. Muslims worship on Fridays.
Roman Catholics do not allow divorce and contraceptives. The idea of Filipino Roman Catholics
practicing divorce in America bothered her. And it was not the first time either, Tomas had to admit. Nor
the last. He had heard of many sad stories. "Just wondering. Of course, nowadays it's hard to tell."

Actually, the Agbayanis were Presbyterians. In fact, their graduate studies in the States (Edith was doing
her doctorate in zoology and he in American literature) were partially subsidized by the United Board of
Christian Education for Asia. But in the sleepy provincial town of Dumaguete, Tomas could not
remember a single instance of a divorced Filipino couple. Theirs would be the first, a dubious distinction.
He was not naive. Of course, he had known of separated Filipino couples. Of course, he had known of
husbands taking on mistresses on the sly. Of course, he had even heard of wives committing an
occasional indiscretion. But divorced Catholic Filipinos?
Tomas himself, despite his long years in the States and the gradual liberation of his values, could not
quite get used to the idea of being one of those family men who, at the stroke of a pen, had suddenly
found themselves divested of home, wife, and children. It had seemed terribly unfair. In those first
months after the divorce, he moved in a daze like the walking wounded, a bloody casualty of a marriage
on the rocks. What had he done wrong? There had never been any ugly scenes, bitter quarrels, or
brutalities to prepare him for this. Like Edith, he worked and studied at the same time (he handled three
sections of Freshman English every semester), adroitly balancing the many responsibilities of graduate
student, associate instructor, and family man. He taught and studied, did the laundry on weekends,
cooked occasionally, took an hourly job here and there to be able to afford the little extravagances for
his family during birthdays and holidays. So where did he err? Edith would have rephrased the crucial
question: What had he not done? But Tomas would insist, self-righteously, that he had done everything
for them, short of robbing a bank. Well, all right. Perhaps, not everything exactly.

There was that small matter of their piddling sex life. They had taken to sleeping in separate bedrooms
in the last couple of years. One of the luxuries of Campus View was that you could have a room of your
own. Edith used to say, "Why is it that I always have to make the first move?" Meaning: she found
sneaking into his room (after Suzie had gone to bed) increasingly humiliating. It was the woman's
prerogative, after all, to be desired and pursued, not to pursue. But what did she expect? After doing
the day's assignment on Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (interesting), making ten pages of
translation for French 501 (tedious), and checking seventy-five freshman essays in various stages of
incoherence (excruciating), then picking up Suzie from the Japanese babysitter, heating the TV dinner,
and taking out the trash (Edith did the dishes while half-watching the eight o'clock news on Channel 30),
after doing this and doing that, Tomas felt totally exhausted and in no mood for an energetic wrestle in
bed to cap his long wearying day. Could anybody blame him? He was not Tom Selleck, nor was meant to
be. In any case, why take unnecessary risks? At this point in their lives, they needed another baby like
they needed a hole in their head, woman's prerogatives notwithstanding. As Professor Chaitan, that
understanding old man, would have allowed: "Il leur faut du repos...."

Another time Edith had gazed out of their apartment window to a world suddenly empty of people.
"Everybody's gone for spring break," she said wistfully. Campus View was a boxy nine-story building, of
unprepossessing architectural provenance despite the elegant limestone facade quarried from south of
town. Shaped like a massive T, the horizontal bar (consisting of the south and north wing) ran parallel to
Union Street, while its legs (the east wing) jutted out toward a grassy knoll in the back. This area was
usually littered with people: boisterous picnickers chasing frisbees, cyclists gearing up for the Little 500,
baseball players on weekend practice, sunbathers in skimpy bikinis baring the paleness of their winter
flesh to an unseasonably warm spring sun. The Agbayani apartment was ideally located on the third
floor of the east wing (high enough to allow a birds eye view of the grounds but low enough to make
the escape down the stairwell manageable, in case of fire). But that day the area was desolately empty.
Even the resident Peeping Tom in Apt. 606, probably an onanist to boot (in the daylight just a balding
middle-aged man from Turkey doing postgraduate studies in environmental planning), had
disappointedly retired behind the drawn curtains with his binoculars. Edith had watched the scene with
an expression that barely concealed her wistful longing. Where had all the young men and young
women gone? Probably to Florida for a bit of tan, sun, and fun, like turtles in heat during their annual
pilgrimage to their mating ground.

Tomas and Edith, of course, never traveled during the holidays, like most other foreign students on a
strict budget. The Thai occupants of Apt. 312 were home, catching up on their term papers because you
could hear a typewriter thoughtfully going tak tak-tak tak tak-tak. The Japanese couple in Apt. 301
across the hall were doing their spring cleaning and moving furniture with a lot of scraping. In Apt. 308,
the young El Salvadoran couple, husband and wife, were sobbing again. Were they homesick? Did they
leave small children behind? Had something terrible happened in their troubled homeland? It was ironic
that, for all the vastness of America, Tomas and Edith, holed up in Campus View, had seen so little
during their long stay in the States. They had gone outside the state only twice: once to Louiseville to
watch the Kentucky Derby and once to Chicago where they visited the Art Institute and the Museum of
Natural History and went up the Sears Tower to marvel at the dark choppy waters of Lake Michigan that
looked wide as a sea. Both times were sponsored by a church hospitality group that matched foreign
guests with local families willing to entertain them for the weekend.

Surprisingly, the divorce proceedings went without a hitch, largely because Tomas did not feel like
contesting any of the allegations. He was confident that Edith would eventually come around and see
the foolhardiness of this grand guignol. The petition for the dissolution of a marriage, drawn up by the
Legal Services of Indiana that provided free legal counsel to indigents, simply stated that the marriage
was "irretrievably broken." There was one further business of a property settlement, but Edith, in a
gesture of generosity or relief, offered him a free hand to do whatever was proper or necessary. She got
to keep Suzie. And he, if he liked, could keep their small house and lot in Dumaguete, their rusting
appliances, their mismatched pieces of furniture. After the court hearing the three of them walked up
Kirkwood Avenue to the bus stop. Anybody who saw them would have thought that this was some
ordinary happy family out for a leisurely stroll or a bite of pizza at Little Caesars, and not a family already
irretrievably broken.

In mid-February, Edith dropped out of graduate school and moved with Suzie to Newport, R.I., where
John Steinbergh taught at a community college. Only then did Tomas feel the full force of the divorce.
He was angry and bitter. Suzie had written: Dear Daddy, Dad, we have a sailboat and we live in a big big
house.... What civilized law would take a daughter from her father? If he had entertained scenes of
eventual reconciliation and forgiveness, that possibility was now dashed to pieces. The sneaky bitch!
Plotting behind his back! Never in a hundred years did he expect this, and he could not imagine how
theythe sneaks!--had managed to know each other. He recalled a conference on genetics held in
Athens, Ohio, that Edith excitedly attended. When he carefully looked over the old telephone bills,
Tomas discovered that there had been long-distance calls between then for nearly a year. And probably
while he was right there in the kitchen too, frying their chicken dinner or slicing the onions! He could
have kicked himself. How could he have missed what was coming? Regretfully, he had to admit he had
been too engrossed in his own ambitions to see anything else. Looking back, he could now see obvious
signs of impending disaster, some deep unhappiness on her part that he, in his ignorance or distant
preoccupation, was unable to forestall. There was nothing else to do but pick up the broken pieces.

"Is Edith coming back?" The voice on the phone was brisk. It was the zoology department secretary.

"I don't know. She didn't say."

"Well, she still has her things in the office. Would you mind picking them up? We really need her table
for another GA."

Jordan Hall was on Second Street, a more interesting older building with ivy creeping up its limestone
walls. The hallways, painted the usual beige, smelled strongly of formaldehyde. At regular intervals,
display windows were punched into the walls, where stuffed birds and animals crouched in arrested
motion and stared out with glassy eyes. Through a half-opened door, he caught a glimpse of several
stretched boards where crucified cats, skinned to their raw muscles, grinned their eternal grimace of
pain. Great, he thought, and nearly bumped into a waste container in his hurry to get to the end of the
hallway.

"Mrs. Weinstein? I came for Edith's...."

"Oh, yes. This way, please. I'm sorry to bug you about the table but we're a bit overcrowded this
semester." She looked more kindly than she sounded almost motherly, in her gray cardigan and loose
brown dress.

"That's all right. I understand."

Tomas followed the broad efficient back into another room filled with microscopes and glass jars, then
to yet another adjoining room. This must be their special laboratory. He remembered Edith mentioning
it in passing. A huge airy room with greenish light, it was completely lined with metal racks running the
entire length of the room, standing eight racks thick. On the shelves were arranged some two or three
hundred fishbowls half-filled with water. And at the bottom of each bowl stirred a strange orange-gray
creature, half-lizard and half-fish, with feathery things coming out of its gills like red corals. His gasp of
amazement was audible.

"Our axolotl colony," Mrs. Weinstein beamed a proprietary smile. "I bet you've never seen anything like
this."

"No. I can't say I have."

"They're Mexican salamanders. Ambystoma mexicanum."

One smiling graduate assistant looked their way. (Chinese? No, probably Japanese. Most Japanese he
knew had terrible teeth.) With a long teaspoon he was feeding an axolotl something that looked like
frozen ground meat. The creature remained motionless, smelling the meat in the water; then with
lightning quickness, it snatched at the food. Its throat quavered once, twice. Bits of meat swirled in the
water.

"We alternate chicken liver with beef liver."

"No wonder they're so plump."

It was only after a minute that Tomas noticed something very strange and very wrong: the axolotl
crawled in a lopsided way, its tail end dragging to the bottom. Then he saw two perfect depressions of
raw flesh where its hind legs should have been. They had been sliced off at the joints, where limb and
body joined, with a very sharp instrument: the cuts were so clean. When he looked more closely at the
others, he saw that all of them had been mutilated in one way or another. In a petri dish near the sink
he saw shiny pieces of axolotl flesh and internal organs. Another graduate assistant, an Indian, was
dissecting a dead axolotl.

"Unfortunately, a few do die. Despite the care and precautions."

Tomas turned to Mrs. Weinstein. "Was Edith involved in any of... these experiments?"
"Of course. It was part of her assignment. She was pretty handy with the scalpel, if I may say so myself.
And she kept meticulous records of their rate of regeneration."

Regeneration? Or mutilation and forced mutation? On another axolotl, where there used to be a tail,
two rudimentary pinkish knobs had begun to sprout like forked branches.

Poor axolotls. After they were through with the creature, what freak human invention would bungle into
amazing existence?

Tomas gave a faint shudder, remembering the Jewish men and women whose flat buttocks were
pumped full with melted paraffin to voluptuous proportions, and the Jewish children whose genitals
were sliced off or sewed shut to prevent the procreation of the race.

"The regeneration part is routine. What we are really trying to discover is the threshold of recovery."

"You mean just how much you can slice off without killing the poor thing?"

"Not quite that crudely... but, yes, I suppose that's another way of putting it. I know all this seems cruel
to you. But axolotls are very hardy animals. They don't feel much pain. They grow their missing parts.
They heal rapidly."

"I see," he said, with some irony because he was growing inexplicably angry. Such obtuseness. Just
because they cannot cry does not mean they don't feel pain. "All for the benefit of science, I presume."

Mrs. Weinstein drew herself up, straight as a ramrod. "Knowledge has its price, like everything else," she
said, almost coldly.

Sure. And the axolotl shall pay.

"But we're making progress," she went on. "We're getting there. Too bad Edith had to drop out of the
program."
Too bad she did not drop out sooner, Tomas thought bitterly, before the coldness had worked its way
into her heart. He suddenly felt suffocated, as alien and out of place in that antiseptic laboratory as the
wild axolotls in their glass bowls. He could not get away from the blank stares of the mutilated creatures
fast enough.

As it turned out, what Edith had left could easily fit into one brown grocery bag: romance novels in
paperback, the score of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, some old test papers that she failed to return, old
Christmas cards and letters from home, and a fading Polaroid of the three of them taken during their
first winter in Bloomington nearly six years ago. It was a gentler time then. They looked younger, slim
and clear-eyed, the bright future still ahead of them. They were laughing, the three of them, the snow
falling dreamily on their hair and eyelashes. The snowballs in their mittened hands seemed like the most
extraordinary things in the word. Christmassy and magical. (They could not guess the snow's malevolent
power until years later, during the blizzard of 1978, when snow fell for days in slanting sheets, piling up
chest-deep everywhere, cutting off roads, burying abandoned cars, bursting water pipes, and leaving a
family of four in an isolated farmhouse in Brown County frozen to death.)

In the photo, Suzie was warmly bundled in a red fur coat. Tomas recognized the coat as coming from the
Opportunity House, a church-run store selling used things, located on the west side, the poorer side of
town. They often bought their clothes there at bargain prices: shirts for a dollar a piece, dresses for two,
coats for three, T-shirts for a quarter, socks for a dime.

Since it was still early and the spring weather warmish, Tomas decided to walk back to Campus View. At
the back of Jordan Hall was Ballantine where he used to have most of his classes. He thought that in four
months he would be through with his program. It was now just a matter of running off the required
number of copies and having them bound. The approval sheet had already been signed by his
dissertation committee. And then he would be flying home to the Philippines. Alone this time. He felt
nostalgic and sad, as though he were already missing everything: the great revolving globe in the foyer
of Ballantine, the echoing classrooms, the maple and tulip trees outside, bare since last fall, just
beginning to bud. Many other Filipinos had walked the meandering campus pathways, now edged with a
few blooming forsythias. Juan C. Laya was there during the forties. (On the seventh floor of the
university library, he once came across an old yellowing copy of His Native Soil, inscribed to his American
foster parent: "In gratitude for taking me into your hearts and home.") He crossed the bridge over
Jordan River and went round the Showalter Fountain where a reclining Venus floated in the air amidst
the sprays of water jetting out of the mouths of dolphins.

One block further north was 10th Street and from the corner of the university library, he saw Campus
View burning.

Fire, smoke.
But, no, it was just a violet Indiana sunset reflected on the tiers of glass windows and the plume of black
smoke from the basement trash incinerator coming out of the smokestack on top of the building. In the
hallway of the east wing he caught a whiff of beef teriyaki and broiled lambchops. The wing used to be
known as Little Tehran because most of the occupants were Iranians. But times had changed. The Shah
was out, and many of the Iranian students dropped out of school. Now it might become a Little Tokyo or
a Little Riyadh.

Tomas took out two pieces of fried chicken wrapped in foil from the freezer and heated them in the
oven. There was still some leftover rice. He sliced a tomato and an onion, and shook the half-empty
bottle of catsup. While eating dinner, he watched TV. Debonair Bob Barker, host of The Price Is Right,
was calling out for the next lucky number. "Contestant No. 27 of Venice, California, (shriek, applause),
come on down!" A screaming overweight woman in a red halter and black stretch pants ran panting
down the stage. "Now, ladies, what would you give me for this luxurious water bed and bedroom suite
from Broyhill (shriek, applause)... plus this entertainment package (shriek, applause)..." Tomas flicked
the channel to the 8 o'clock news. Bearded Iranian youth, carrying giant posters of Khomeini, were
chanting "Death to Reagan! Down with the USA! Death to Reagan! Down with the USA!" After rinsing
the plate, glass, and spoon, he watered the potted begonia on the windowsill, another one of the things
that Edith had left behind. It was dying. From too little sun? Too much water? He thought of a sailboat
and a white clapboard house on Narragansett Bay. It was terribly unfair. She was his daughter, too.
Despite himself, he was dialing their number in Newport, R.I.

After the fifth distant ring, a voice came through. "Yes?"

"Hello? Edith?"

"Do you have any idea what time it is here?"

"I just need to talk to you."

"Are you all right? You sound terrible."

"I'm okay. Just a slight cold. How are you and Suzie?"

"We're fine." She paused, then added. "She asked about you today."
"Sometimes, I wish we..."

"Tom, please."

He did not mean to say that at all. He had promised himself never to beg or cry. Even before the divorce
was finalized, when some passionate pleading on his part might have changed her mind, he did not beg.
He was not about to start now. "Sorry," he said and had to swallow hard to regain his voice, "Anyway,
when I go home, what shall I tell them?"

"I don't know. The truth, I guess."

"The shock will probably kill them. Nanay had a weak heart. You know that."

"Don't be ridiculous. They'll get over it, soon enough. It's not as if somebody had died or
something."

But somebody or something has, he thought, but did not say it. Instead he said, "I hope you're right. For
our sake. How's Suzie's taking it?"

"As well as can be expected. She's too young to really understand what's going on."

"When I think that I may never see either of you again, once I go..." There again, the self-pity in his voice
edging out any sense of pride.

"Oh, Tom, please." She sounded wretched and tearful enough. But the wretchedness went as quickly as
it came. "Don't do this to me."

"I mean, it's true. I can't just come over to the States and visit. Just like that. It's not going to be easy."

"We'll write," she said. Then she brightened up. "Hey, we can even visit you in Dumaguete for a few
weeks. Won't that be neat? Suzie would just love to visit."
"She'll be different then," he said. Because people do change, despite themselves; he knew that now,
even the ones who love you. Distance can do that, and time and ambition and carelessness. Most of all,
carelessness, as they were careless once, taking the tenuous joys of home for granted. "Perhaps she
won't even recognize me."

"Let's not go into that right now, okay? We'll work something out, Tom. Okay?"

"Okay, I'm sorry."

"Have to go. I'm freezing. The forecast said it could get as low as 30 degrees. Can you imagine that?"

In one leap she was gone. He had lost her. Her mind was elsewhere, on the turning weather and the
warm bed where a naked, blue-eyed man waited to make love to her all night. After the goodbyes and
goodnights ("Kiss Suzie for me...."), Tomas held on to the phone and a moment longer and heard the
severed connection humming in empty space.

Later he woke up in the night, sweating, his left leg dead, his throat dry, as though he had been
breathing through his mouth or pleading in his sleep. When he got up for a drink of water, tiny needles
pricked his numb foot. He looked at his watch. Three o'clock.

Outside the window, the world lay sleeping. Lights lined the streets, but in Campus View almost all of
the apartments were dark. Only the insomniac in Apt. 511, pursued by some private demon, was till
pacing the floors. Bluish shadows leaped and scuttled around his room. The rest were in bed, breathing
quietly in the healing dark. The dirty old man in Apt. 606 entered his Turkish seraglio of veiled
voluptuaries.

The couple in Apt. 308 had followed their tears home to the misty grasslands of Cojutepeque. Freud was
right: our night selves always return to the wellspring of our deepest desires. Some dream of women;
others dream of home. Some want to go home; others want to stay.

Edith, Suzie, he called out, in his heart. What would happen to him now? What would he do for the rest
of his life? I grow old.... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. He slid the bay window shut. A
wind had swept down from the north, bringing the enduring chill of snow. Tomorrow there would be
more frost powdering the grass, and the spring forsythias would prematurely shed their yellow blooms.
He thought of the drugged apparitions in fishbowls, living on an over-rich diet of chicken liver. In the
forest and warm lakes of Mexico, in their element, they could have been the fierce golden creatures that
they were. He felt suddenly cold. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that
they will sing to me. He sat in the easy chair and, drawing his legs underneath, bundled himself tight in
an old woolen quilt. He sat like that for a long time, without moving. He would watch the night rise into
morning. But even as he steeled himself for the long vigil, his eyes grew heavy and his head slowly sank
against his chest.

The last thing he heard, in that half-wakeful state before sleep, was the distant wail of a freight train
moving across the landlocked vastness of the Midwest.
WEDDING DANCE by Amador Daguio

Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the head high 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 anymore. 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 men 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 battle-
ax 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 could 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 thought 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.
DEAD STARS by 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 good-
natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades,
notes, and things like that--"

Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years
ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the
mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the
dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he
seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid
imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up
his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days
love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it
might be.

Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of
tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on
somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone
had seemed to urge in his ears. So, he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for
a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much
engaged to Esperanza.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the
desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it
will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of
ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of
Time, or of Fate.

"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool
than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain
placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to
philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned
down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning. Besides,
that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"

Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--
disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.

"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.

Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his
blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent
ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of
forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance
betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with
keen, clear brain.
He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down
the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and
forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao
hedge in tardy lavender bloom.

The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could
glimpse through the heat-shriveled 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 tucked-
up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings
poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing
charm, all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure
was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a
piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.

"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can visit."

"The last? Why?"

"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."

He noted an evasive quality in the answer.

"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"

"If you are, you never look it."

"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."

"But--"

"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.

"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.

She waited.

"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."

"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely

"Who? I?"

"Oh, no!"

"You said I am calm and placid."

"That is what I think."

"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."

It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.

"I should like to see your home town."

"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes
squashes."

That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if
that background claimed her and excluded him.

"Nothing? There is you."

"Oh, me? But I am here."

"I will not go, of course, until you are there."

"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"

"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."

She laughed.

"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."

"Could I find that?"

"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.

"I'll inquire about--"

"What?"
"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."

"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."

"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.

"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."

"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"

"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"

"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--"

"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.

"Exactly."

"It must be ugly."

"Always?"

Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned
gold.

"No, of course you are right."

"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.
"I am going home."

The end of an impossible dream!

"When?" after a long silence.

"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at
home."

She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."

"Can't I come to say good-bye?"

"Oh, you don't need to!"

"No, but I want to."

"There is no time."

The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the
rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that
is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful
serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.

"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."

"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."

"Old things?"
"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He
walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.

Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.

Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard
her voice say very low, "Good-bye."

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 grass
pith 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 jeweled 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 was
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.

"Julia," 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, Julia. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward of
its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no
longer depends on him."

"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all."
"Doesn't it--interest you?"

"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."

Without lifting her eyes, she quickly turned and walked away.

Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind
though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect
understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting,
Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.

He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which
he tried to control.

She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She
never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in
church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion,
spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious
care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.

She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their note-
carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled
out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.

"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she should
have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out bad."

What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?

"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.

"But do you approve?"

"Of what?"

"What she did."

"No," indifferently.

"Well?"

He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is that it is
not necessarily wicked."

"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that."

"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to apply to
conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am
right. Living with a man to whom she is not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not."

"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.

"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.

"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent to
me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The
blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say
next?

"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will
say." Her voice trembled.
Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say--
what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of
the wedding?

"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to his
lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare--
"

"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt
they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man."

Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack on
Julia Salas?

"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere
man word such a plea?

"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are tired of
me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.

The last word had been said.

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 prosaicness 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 snub crested 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 involutional, 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.
DEAD STARS (for Paz Marquez Benitez) by H.O Santos

If I still think of her today

Why didn't I tell her long ago?

I could have saved all wondering

For I'd have peace if I did know.

If I had learned of metaphors

Before I wondered 'bout the stars

Would I have written verses then

And worshipped Venus instead of Mars?

If I had found my tongue could rhyme

Would I have shown a face sans mask,

A heart unsure? But woe is me--

I'll never know, I didn't ask.

LETTER TO PEDRO, U.S. CITIZEN, ALSO CALLED PETE by Rene Estella Amper

Pete, old friend; nothing in the tall grass have been bought

there isn't really much change by the mayor's son. Now there's a barbed wire

in our hometown since you left. fence about them; the birds have gone away.

This morning I couldn't find anymore The mayor owns a big sugar plantation, three

the grave of Simeona, the cat we buried new cars, and a mansion with the gate
overhung
at the foot of Miguel's mango tree,
with sampaguita. Inside the gate
when we were in grade four,
are guys who carry a rifle and a pistol.
after she was hit by a truck while crossing

the street. The bulldozer has messed it up

We still go to Konga's store for rice
while making the feeder road into the
mountains and sardines and sugar and nails for the coffin.

to reach the hearts of the farmers.

The farmers come down every Sunday Still only a handful go to mass on Sundays.

to sell their agony and their sweat for In the church the men talk, sleep; the children
play.
a few pesos, lose in the cockpit or get
The priest is sad.
drunk on the way home.

Last night the storm came and blew away

A steel bridge named after the congressman's
wife the cornflowers. The cornfields are full of cries.

now spans the gray river where Tasyo, the old

goat, had split the skin of our young lizards Your cousin, Julia, has just become a whore.

to make us a man many years ago. She liked good clothes, good food, big money.

That's why she became a whore.

The long blue hills where we Now our hometown has seven whores.

used to shoot birds with slingshot or spend

the summer afternoons we loved so much Pete, old friend,

doing
every time we have good reason to get drunk uncle, now calls himself Stanley

and be carried home in a wheelbarrow after he began wearing the clothes you sent

we always remember you. Oh, we miss him last Christmas.

both Pete and Pedro.

P.S. Tasyo, the old goat,

Remember us to your American wife, Sends your lizard his warmest congratulations.

you lucky bastard. Islaw, your cock-eyed

THE FARMERS SON by Alfredo Navarro Salanga

There is great power in reason old and bent

It comes like so much rain

Or like strong wind in a dry month I came back

many years later

My father was bent with the words

by work I knew he wanted

his shoulders were bend but by then

by words it was too late

in a contract

he never understood I listened to him

die with words:

While I was still you are lucky

a young man to have learned words

he send me off they will keep you

to school from having bent shoulders

and bid me walk

with straight shoulders By his deathbed

I cried

Learn, he said and spat out

learn words letter's while

that you may pry off my shoulders bent

these letters with grief

that have made me

THE RURAL MAID by Fernando Maramag

Thy glance, sweet maid, when first we met,

Had left a heart that aches for thee,

I feel the pain of fond regret

Thy heart, perchance, is not for me.

We parted: though we met no more,

My dreams are dreams of thee, fair maid;

I think of thee, my thoughts implore

The hours my lips on thine are laid.

Forgive these words that love impart,

And pleading, bare the poets breast;

And if a rose with thorns thou art,

Yet on my breast that rose may rest.

I know not what to name thy charms,

Thou art half human, half divine;

And if I could hold thee in my arms,

I know both heaven and earth were mine