This I Believe

Carlos P. Romulo

I believe above all that a man should be true to himself. I believe a man
should be prepared at all times to sacrifice everything for his convictions.
Twice during my life, I have been called upon to make this kind of sacrifice.
After Pearl Harbor, the Philippines was invaded by Japan. I had never been
a soldier. I was a journalist. But something impelled me to enlist.

I was attached to General MacArthur's staff and went with him first to
Bataan and later to Corregidor. In Corregidor, I was placed in charge of the
broadcast called the Voice of Freedom. The Japanese reacted violently to the
broadcast. I learned that a prize had been put on my head, and worse that
they had gone after my wife and four sons who had been left behind in the
occupied territory. I suffered indescribable torment, worrying about my
loved ones. I wanted to go back to Manila at whatever cost. But I was
ordered to proceed to Australia on the eve of the fall of Bataan.

From Australia, I was sent on to the United States, where I continued to

make the Voice of Freedom heard, regardless of the consequences to my
family. I did not see them again until after the liberation of my country by
the American forces under General MacArthur, aided by the Filipino guerillas
who had carried on a vigorous resistance during the more than three years
of enemy occupation.

The second time I was called upon to make a considerable sacrifice for
my convictions was during the 1953 national elections in the Philippines. I
had never been a politician, but having become convinced that I should do
everything I could to help effect a change of government in my country, I
resigned as Ambassador to the United States and permanent representative
to the United Nations in order to enter the field against the incumbent
president. I founded a third party, the Democratic Party, and accepted the
nomination for president— started a vigorous campaign to awaken the
Filipino people to the need for a change in administration.

Midway in the campaign, it became apparent that the two opposition

parties might lose the election if they remained divided, but had an excellent
chance to win if they would present a united front. I made the painful
decision to withdraw my candidacy. After withdrawing my own candidacy, I
was the campaign manager of Mr. Ramón Magsaysay and campaigned up
and down the land for him. I could not have worked harder if I had been the
candidate myself.

Magsaysay won by a landslide. The temptation was strong for all those
who had worked for him to share in the rewards of victory. I was convinced,
however, that the first duty of everyone who had helped to bring about a
change of government was to give the new president a completely free hand
in making appointments to keep positions in his administration.
Immediately after the elections, I left for the United States.

As I look back, I see this pattern of action and renunciation repeated

over and over again in my life—in things great and small, in war and in peace.
Some may call this a credo of self-sacrifice. I prefer to describe it as being
true to one’s self, no matter what the cost.
 College Uneducation
Jorge Bocobo

I wish to speak on “College Uneducation.” Is it possible that our college

education may “uneducate” rather than educate? I answer “Yes.” It is a
paradox but nonetheless the truth—the grim, unmerciful truth. We all
believe in higher education; else we should not be in the University. At the
same time, college education—like all other human devices for human
betterment—may build or destroy, lead, or mislead.

My ten years’ humble service in the University of the Philippines has

afforded me an opportunity to watch the current of ideals and practices of
our student body. In some aspects of higher education, most of our students
have measured up to their high responsibilities. But in other features—alas,
vital ones!—the thoughts and actions of many of them tend to stunt the
mind, dry up the heart, and quench the soul. These students are being
uneducated in college. I shall briefly discuss three ways in which many of our
students are getting college uneducation, for which they pay tuition fees and
make unnumbered sacrifices.

Book Worship
In the first place, there is the all but delirious worship of the printed page.
“What does the book say?” is, by all odds, the most important question in
the student’s mind whenever he is faced with any problem calling for his own
reasoning. By the same token, may students feel a sort of frenzy for facts till
these become as huge as the mountains and the mind is crushed under
them. Those students think of nothing but how to accumulate data; hence,
their capacity for clear and powerful thinking is paralyzed. How pathetic to
hear them argue and discuss! Because they lack the native vitality of
unhampered reason, their discourse smacks of cant and sophistry rather
than of healthy reasoning and straight thinking.
It is thus that many of our students surrender their individuality to the
textbook and lose their birthright—which is to think for themselves. And
when they attempt to form their own judgment, they become pedantic.
Unless a student develops the habit of independent and sound reasoning,
his college education is a solemn sham.
Compare these hair-splitting college students with Juan de la Cruz in the
barrios. Now, Juan de la Cruz has read very little: no undigested mass of
learning dulls the edge of his inborn logic, his mind is free from the
overwhelming, stultifying weight of unassimilated book knowledge. How
penetrating his perception, how unerring his judgment, how solid his
common sense! He contemptuously refers to the learned sophists,
thus: ”Lumabis ang karunungan mo,” which means, “Your learning is too
much.”

Professional Philistinism
The second manner of college uneducation that I want to speak of is this:
most students make professional efficiency the be-all and end-all of college
education. They have set their hearts upon becoming highly trained lawyers,
doctors, engineers, teachers, and agriculturists. I shall not stop to inquire
into the question of how much blame should be laid at the door of the
faculties of the University for this pernicious drift toward undue and
excessive specialization. That such a tendency exists is undeniable, but we
never pause to count, the cost! We are all of one mind: I believe that college
education is nothing unless it widens a man’s vision, broadens his
sympathies, and leads him to higher thinking and deep feeling. Yet how can
we expect a; this result from a state of affairs which reduces a law student
to a code, a prospective doctor to a prescription, and a would-be engineer to
a mathematical formula? How many students in our professional colleges
are doing any systematic reading in literature? May we not, indeed,
seriously ask whether this fetish of specialization does not smother the
inspiring sense of beauty and the ennobling love of finer things that our
students have it in them to unfold into full-blown magnificence.

The Jading Dullness of Modern Life

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,””says Keats. But we know that beauty
us a matter of taste; and, unless we develop in us a proper appreciation of
what is beautiful and sublime, everything around us is tedious and
commonplace. We rise early and go out into, but our spirit is responsive to
the hopeful quietude and the dew-chastened sweetness of dawn. At night
we behold the myriad stars, but they are just so many bright specks—their
soft fires do not soothe our troubled hearts, and we do not experience that
awesome, soul stirring fascination of the immense ties of God’s universe. We
are bathed in the silver sheen of the moon and yet feel not the beatitude of
the moment. We gaze upon a vista of high mountains, but their silent
strength has no appeal for us. We read some undying verses; still, their
vibrant cadence does not thrill us, and their transcendent though is to us like
a vision that vanishes. We look at a masterpiece of the chisel with its eternal
gracefulness of lines and properties, yet to us it is no more than a mere
human likeness. Tell me, is such a life worth coming to college for? Yet, my
friends, the overspecialization which many students pursue with zeal and
devotion is bound to result in such an unfeeling, dry-as-dust existence.

I may say in passing that the education of the older generation is in this
respect far superior to ours. Our older countrymen say, with reason, that the
new education does not lawfully cultivate the heart as the old education did.

Misguided Zeal
Lastly, this selfsame rage for highly specialized training, with a view to
distinguished professional success, beclouds our vision of the broader
perspectives of life. Our philosophy of life is in danger of becoming narrow
and mean because we are habituated to think almost wholly in terms of
material well being. Of course we must be practical. We cannot adequately
answer this tremendous question unless we thoughtfully develop a proper
sense of values and thus learn to separate the dross from the gold, the chaff
from the grain of life. The time to do this task is not after but before college
graduation; for, when all is said and done, the sum and substance of higher
education is the individual formulation of what life is for, with special training
in some advanced line of human learning in order that such a life formula
may be executed with the utmost effectiveness. But how can we lay down
the terms of our philosophy of life if every one of our thoughts is absorbed by
the daily assignment, the outside reading, and the laboratory experiment,
and when we continuously devour lectures and notes?

“Uneducated” Juan de la Cruz as Teacher

Here, again, many of our students should sit at the feet of meagrely
educated Juan de la Cruz and learn wisdom. Ah! He is often called ignorant,
but he is the wisest of the wise, for he has unravelled the mysteries of life.
His is the happiness of the man who knows the whys of human existence.
Unassuming Juan de la Cruz cherishes no “Vaulting ambition which o’erleaps
itself.” His simple and hardy virtues put to shame the studied and complex
rules of conduct of highly educated men and women. In adversity, his
stoicism is beyond encomium. His love of home, so guilelessly faithful, is the
firm foundation of our social structure. And his patriotism has been tested
and found true. Can our students learn from Juan de la Cruz, or does their
college education unfit them to become his pupils?

In conclusion, I shall say that I have observed among many of our

students certain alarming signs of college uneducation, and some of these
are: (1) lack of independent judgment as well as love of pedantry, because
of the worship of the printed page and the feverish accumulation of
undigested data; (2) the deadening of the delicate sense of the beautiful and
the sublime, on account of overspecialization; and (3) neglect of the
formulation of a sound philosophy of life as a result of excessive emphasis
on professional training.
 The World in a Train
Francisco B. Icasiano

One Sunday I entrained for Baliwag, a town in Bulacan which can well
afford to hold two fiestas a year without a qualm.

I took the train partly because I am prejudiced in favor of the

government-owned railroad, partly because I am allowed comparative
comfort in a coach, and finally because trains sometimes leave and arrive
according to schedule.

In the coach I found a little world, a section of the abstraction called

humanity whom we are supposed to love and live for. I had previously
arranged to divide the idle hour or so between cultivating my neglected
Christianity and smoothing out the rough edges of my nature with the aid
of grateful sights without - the rolling wheels, the flying huts and trees
and light-green palay seedlings and carabaos along the way. Inertia, I
suppose, and the sort of reality we moderns know make falling in love
with my immediate neighbors often a matter of severe strain and effort to
me.

Let me give a sketchy picture of the little world whose company Mang
Kiko shared in moments which soon passed away affecting most of us.

First, there came to my notice three husky individuals who dusted

their seats furiously with their handkerchiefs without regard to hygiene or
the brotherhood of men. It gave me no little annoyance that on such a
quiet morning the unpleasant aspects in other people's ways should claim
my attention.

Then there was a harmless-looking middle-aged man in green camisa

de chino with rolled sleeves who must have entered asleep. When I
noticed him, he was already snugly entrenched in a corner seat, with his
slippered feet comfortably planted on the opposite seat, all the while his
head danced and dangled with the motion of the train. I could not, for the
love of me, imagine how he would look if he were awake.

A child of six in the next seat must have shared with me in speculating
about the dreams of this sleeping man in green. Was he dreaming of the
Second World War or the price of eggs? Had he any worries about the
permanent dominion status or the final outcome of the struggles of the
masses, or was it merely the arrangement of the scales on a fighting
roaster's legs that brought that frown on his face?

But the party that most engaged my attention was a family of eight
composed of a short but efficient father, four very young children, mother,
grandmother, and another woman who must have been the efficient
father's sister. They distributed themselves on four benches - you know
the kind of seats facing each other so that half the passengers travel
backward. The more I looked at the short but young and efficient father
the shorter his parts looked to me. His movements were fast and short,
too. He removed his coat, folded it carefully and slung it on the back of his
seat. Then he pulled out his wallet from the hip pocket and counted his
money while his wife and the rest of his group watched the ritual without
a word.
Then the short, young, and efficient father stood up and pulled out
two banana leaf bundles from a bamboo basket and spread out both
bundles on one bench and log luncheon was ready at ten o'clock. With the
efficient father leading the charge, the children (except the baby in his
grandmother's arms) began to dig away with little encouragement and aid
from the elders. In a short while the skirmish was over, the enemy -
shrimps, omelet, rice and tomato sauce - were routed out, save for a few
shrimps and some rice left for the grandmother to handle in her own style
later.

Then came the water-fetching ritual. The father, with a glass in hand,
led the march to the train faucet, followed by three children whose faces
still showed the marks of a hard-fought-battle. In passing between me
and a person, then engaged in a casual conversation with me, the short
but efficient father made a courteous gesture which is still good to see in
these democratic days; he bent from the hips and, dropping both hands,
made an opening in the air between my collocutor and me - a gesture
which in unspoiled places means "Excuse Me."

In one of the stations where the train stopped, a bent old woman in
black boarded the train. As it moved away, the old woman went about the
coach, begging holding every prospective Samaritan by the arm, and
stretching forth her gnarled hand in the familiar fashion so distasteful to
me at that time. There is something in begging which destroys some fiber
in most men. "Every time you drop a penny into a beggar's palm you help
degrade a man and make it more difficult for him to rise with dignity. . ."

There was something in his beggar's eye which seemed to demand.

"Now do your duty." And I did. Willy-nilly I dropped a coin and thereby
filled my life with repulsion. Is this Christianity? "Blessed are the poor . . ."
But with what speed did that bent old woman cross the platform into the
next coach!

While thus engaged in unwholesome thought, I felt myself jerked as

the train made a curve to the right. The toddler of the family of eight lost
his balance and caught the short but efficient father off-guard. In an
instant all his efficiency was employed in collecting the shrieking toddler
from under his seat. The child had, in no time, developed two elongated
bumps on the head, upon which was applied a moist piece of cloth. There
were no reproaches, no words spoken. The discipline in the family was
remarkable, or was it because they considered the head as a minor
anatomical appendage and was therefore nor worth the fuss?
 Occasionally, when the child's crying rose above the din of the
locomotive and the clinkety-clank of the wheels on the rails, the father
would jog about a bit without blushing, look at the bumps on his child's
head, shake his own, and move his lips saying, "Tsk, Tsk." And nothing
more.

Fairly tired of assuming the minor responsibilities of my neighbors in

this little world in motion, I looked into the distant horizon where the blue
Cordilleras merged into the blue of the sky. There I rested my thoughts
upon the billowing silver and grey of the clouds, lightly remarking upon
their being a trial to us, although they may not know it. We each would
mind our own business and suffer in silence for the littlest mistakes of
others; laughing at their ways if we happened to be in a position to
suspend our emotion and view the whole scene as a god would; or, we
could weep for other men if we are the mood to shed copious tears over
the whole tragic aspect of a world thrown out of joint.

It is strange how human sympathy operates. We assume an attitude

of complete indifference to utter strangers whom we have seen but not
met. We claim that they are the hardest to fall in love with in the normal
exercise of Christian charity. Then a little child falls from a seat, or a
beggar stretches forth a gnarled hand, or three husky men dust their
seats; and we are, despite our pretensions, affected. Why not? If even a
sleeping man who does nothing touches our life!
 Our Hospitality
Teodoro Kalaw

Our popular holidays of old, especially those in honor of the town

Saints used to be announced by invitation cards which were quite exciting
things in those by-gone days. They were sometimes written in acrostics.
The best poets of the town were begged to compose. There would ensure
a great rivalry. So honorable and difficult were the contests that all
amateur Tagalog poets anxiously awaited the arrival of these invitations
cards in order to test that exquisiteness of our language, so characteristic
of our Oriental nature, our subtlety of speech, where gallantry,
parabolism, delicateness of meaning, supreme charm, fluidity and
sonority of diction merged together and were truly a delight. And, verily
these cards were worthy of the best days of Baltazar and Abella. I still
keep one of the year 1861. It is difficult to translate it into another
language. Written by the best poet of the place, some of its paragraphs
are as follows:

Ang di maikubling bulák ng pag-ibig

alon ng ligayang umapaw sa dibdib,
siyang naging hagdang tulay sa
pag-tawid ng puso sa linab na tuwang lalanip.

Sa tulin ng nasang higit sa lumipad

tunod na palasong sa pana'y binigkás,
nabuyò ang isip at di na liningap
ang sagpang ng ganid na dilang pipintas.

Doon sa mayamang araw na sasadsad

na ikatatlong pú nitong lumalakad, kayo't
ang familia'y hintay kong malimbag sa
pintuan namin ang bakás ng yapak.

Meaning: our overflowing joy and happiness are the bridge with which
we invite you, heedless of the severely critical voices which may result of
this our daring, in the hope that, with your family, you will deign to cross
the threshold of this your house on the thirtieth of the present month.

Such invitation cards had two purposes: to describe the attractions of

the feast, like the theatrical performances, the cockfights, the bands of
music, the fireworks; and then to offer in extremely courteous
phraseology, the hospitality of the house.

Hospitality! This again another Filipino virtue, as announced both by

foreign and local authors, friends and detractors alike. That anecdote
about the Filipino who mortgages all that he has to be able to entertain his
guests is already proverbial. Listen to this Visayan song expressive of our
hospitality:

Igsoon sa tabuk nayon

hapit anay sa amon;
bisan waay bugas ñga kan-on,
may buyò ñga pagaman-on,

Hermano que eres de la otra orilla,

ven y pasa un momento;
aunque no tenemos arroz para comer,
tenemos buyo para mascar.

Brother who are from the opposite

shore, Come visit with us for a while;
Though we may have no rice to eat,
Still we have buyo to chew.

When we ask people to eat, we do not

stop with an invitation by word of mouth.
We drag our guest physically to the table
like a prisoner. We say to him:

Ang tunay na pag-anyaya

dinadamayan ng hila.

Quien de veras invita

obliga y arrastra al invitado.

A sincere invitation
is augmented by a pull.

Nagpapakain ma't masama sa loob,

ang pinakakain hindi nabubusog.

Si el que invita esta pesaroso,

el invitado no se queda satisfecho.

If the host is heavy at heart,

his guests will not feel satisfied.
 Moonlight on Manila Bay
Fernando M. Maramang

A light serene, ethereal glory, rests

Its beams effulgent on each cresting wave,
The silver touches of the moonlight lave
The deep’s bare bosom, that the breeze
molests;
While lingering whisphers deepen as the
wavy crests
Roll with weird rhythm, now gay, now
gently grave;
And floods of lambent light appear the sea
to pave---
All casts a spell that heeds not time’s behests.

Not always such the scene: the din of fight

Has swelled the murmur of the peaceful air;
Here East and West have oft displayed their
might;
Dark battle clouds have dimmed this scene so fair;
Here bold Olympia, one historic night,
Presaging freedom, claimed a people’s care.
 ILI-NA
Marcelo de Gracia Conception

And he is carried back into dreams

to beautiful syndowns of his ili-na.
There is the music of young laughter.
He will remembers now his old friendships,
The long-lost ties of long ago.

There he sits under the shadows of the bells

at vesper-time.
The scenes are different now.
The voices are not the same he used to hear.

He is all alone now in the world,

for he feels strange himself.
Seemingly out of place.
Seemingly miscarried by the current of time.

He stands to go. He cannot go.

For the scent of azucena at sundown
brings back to him
the long-lost ties of long ago.
 My Parting Words
Lorenzo B. Paredes

Come lay the dead love out,

And close his vacant eyes,
That once shone with the light
And hope of Paradiza.

Unbend the rounded limbs

So perfect still in death,
Lay by the harmless bow
And poison harrow shealth.

Fold back the broken wings

That now shall mount no more,
Through once beyond the stars
The goldlike child they bore.

Yes, take my hands again,

Through we be parted wide,
And far a moment’s space
Go softly by my side.

While once more, as of old.

A common pain we brave,
And bear our dearest dead
Together to the grave.
 GEORGE WASHINGTON
Bernardo P. Garcia

Soldier and statesman, rarest unison;

High poised example of great duties done
Simply as breathing, a world's honors worn
As life's indifferent gifts to all men born;
Dumb for himself, unless it were to God,
But for his barefoot soldiers eloquent,
Tramping the snow to coral where they trod,
Held by his awe in hollow-eyed content;
Modest, yet firm as Nature's self; unblamed

Save by the men his nobler temper shamed;

Never seduced through show of present good
By other than unsetting lights to steer
New- trimmed in Heaven, nor than his steadfast mood
More steadfast, far from rashness as from fear,
Rigid, but with himself first, grasping still
In swerveless poise the wave-beat helm of will;
Not honored then or now because he wooed
The popular voice, but that he still withstood;
Broad-minded, higher souled, there is but one
Who was all this and ours, and all men's- WASHINGTON.
 The Rural Maid
Fernando M. Maramag

They glance, sweet maid, when first

we met,
Had left a heart that aches for these,
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 these, fair
maid:
I think of these, my thoughts
implore
The hours my lips on thine are laid.

Forgive these words that love

impart,
And pleading, bare the poet’s
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.
 DEAD STARS
Paz Marquez Benitez

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his
room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza,
Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now
beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into
formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from
the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering
away among the rose pots.

"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"

"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza
wants it to be next month."

Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder.

He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired
waiting."

"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally
commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.

"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?"
Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent
air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"

"In love? With whom?"

"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know
of," she said with good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the
beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like
that--"

Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame.
That was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months
of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving
that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and
under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid.
Was he being cheated by life? Love-- he seemed to have missed it. Or was
the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination,
an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies
such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances,
or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the
eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he
divined it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of
those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his
boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was
trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it,"
someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the
shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of
humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much
engaged to Esperanza.

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

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

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

Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical

repose--almost indolence--disturbed in the role suggested by her father's
figurative language.

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

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

Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the
Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six
weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her
name; but now--

One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough
occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying
favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed
himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is
beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you
know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's
trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided
his own worldly wisdom.

A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the
excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent and very
welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions
had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se
conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle
throughout the evening.

He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he
addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the
Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister- in-law, and that her
name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought.
Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly
embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.

To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to
correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I had once before."

"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.

"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time
or so, the young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me,
but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"

He laughed with her.

"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she
pursued, "is to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his
mistake without help."
"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"

"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."

Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in
a game of chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative
spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone
off to chat in the vine- covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood
alternately tinkled and banged away as the player's moods altered. He
listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such
a charming speaking voice.

He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was
unmistakably a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doña Adela was of a
different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes,
clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman
with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia
was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips,
but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of
crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.

On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up

the gravel road to the house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably
offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a
half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and
Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock
and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet March hours-- sped
by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his
company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed
that it seemed a matter of course.
Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did
some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.

Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass.

Alfredo suddenly realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited
for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He
had been eager to go "neighboring."

He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not

habitually untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del
Valle's."

She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked
jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in
their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married,
why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not
possibly love another woman.
That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he
was giving Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He
realized that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned
imperiously, and he followed on.

It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world,
so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close
to her, the shadows around, enfolding.

"Up here I find--something--"

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing
unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"

"No; youth--its spirit--" "Are you so old?" "And heart's desire."

Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every
man?

"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road
is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery."

"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the
stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze
strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices
in a dream.

"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"

"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."

"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."

"I could study you all my life and still not find it." "So long?"
"I should like to."

Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they
been so deep in the living, so charged with compelling power and
sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or
meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with
such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer
moments.

Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to
spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and
a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children.
She and Doña Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the
preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of
their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that
he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit to her
father; how Doña Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men,
sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.

After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him
what a thriving young coconut looked like--"plenty of leaves, close set,
rich green"--while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending
entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far
down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the
gray of the out- curving beach.

Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed.
Here were her footsteps, narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his
black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on
dry sand.

When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.

"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.

"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a
lovely beach.” There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away
from her forehead, and whipped the tucked-up skirt around her straight,
slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings
poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably
pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because
it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was there,
of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny
temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.

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

"The last? Why?"

"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."

He noted an evasive quality in the answer. "Do I seem especially

industrious to you?" "If you are, you never look it."
"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."

"But--"

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

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

She waited.

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

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

"Who? I?"

"Oh, no!"

"You said I am calm and placid." "That is what I think."

"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."
It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look
and covert phrase.
"I should like to see your home town." "There is nothing to see--little
crooked
streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them,
and sometimes squashes."

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

"Nothing? There is you." "Oh, me? But I am here."

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

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

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

She laughed.

"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees." "Could I find that?"
"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.

"I'll inquire about--" "What?"

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

"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now,
that is not quite sincere."
"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.

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

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

"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"

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

more than that when–
If it sadders?" she interrupted hastily.

"Exactly."

"It must be ugly."

"Always?"

Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad,
gfinting 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 a 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 tamat 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 hi heard her voice say very low,
Good-bye.

ALFREDO Saksar turned to the right where, further on, the road
broadened and entered the heart of the town-heart of Chinese stores
shehered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops,
of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a chattered gokismith's
cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old
brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers the door, heart of
grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convento,
now circled by swallows giling in flight as smooth and soft as the
aftermoon itself, Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the
biggest of the church bells kept ringing is 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), okler
women in sober black skirts. Came too the young men in droves, elbowing
each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The gaily decked
rice-paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the
older houses hung colored glass globes, heirlooms from a day when
grasspith wicks floating in cocome of were the chief lighting device.

Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down
the length of the street tke a huge jewelled band studded with glittering
chasters where the saints platforms were. Above the measured music
rose the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid
Sames of burning wax.

The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady
of Sorrows saddenly destroyed the ilkesion of continuity and broke up
those lines of light into component individualk. 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, who, 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 A round orange moon, huge as a wrriowing
basket, rose uzty into a clear sky, whtening the iron roofs and dimming
the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the
young women with their rear guard of makes loitered and, maybe, took
the longest way home.

Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julin Salas.
The crowd had dispersed imo the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those
who lived further 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 poag?"

"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
kong 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?"

Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would
not offend?

"For your approaching wedding."

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 beard 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

"When they are of friends, yes."

"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly

"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 then, 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 was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all
the bewilderment's of the present were not, and that this woman by his
side were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home.

"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to
choose between something you wanted to do and something you had to
do?"

Nor

I thought maybe you had had that experience, then you could understand
a man who was in such a situation."

"You are fortunate, he pursued when she did not answer.

Is-is this man sure of what he should do?"

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

"But then why why" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is
his problem after all"

"Doesn't it-interest you?"

"Why must it? 1-1 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 i 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. Ar

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 comexity to thin

throat;

dressed with self-conscious care, even elegance, a woman distinctly not

average.

She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other,

something about Calista, 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 Calista 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 taked like
an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like

test."

"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 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 wiry
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 fest. 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 Jula Salas?
"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If
you-suppose I-- Yet how could a 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 a resistible 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, wouki, he
reflected, always be free and alone. When clairns 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 buffled 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 subcrested
bellry 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 goklen
ripples on the dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his cars from the
crowd assembled to meet the boat- slow, singing cadences, characteristic
of the Lagna lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not
distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether the president 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 Samry- Tandang "Binday-that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor
Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said,
"Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house.”
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on
board since the bo 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, kagabriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat
settled into a somolent 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 be picked
his way to shore over the ratls made fist to sundry piles driven into the
water.

How peacefiil the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open,
its dien light issuing forlornly through the single window which served as
counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelasmaking
scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children
playing games on the street-rubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken."
The thought of Jula 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 unsaid
ghosts. She had not married-why! Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a
conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something uamolitional,
maybe a recreant awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles-a cool
wind on his forehead, fir-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 wallt and
in the cool, still 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 sating at the window. Where ebse, 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 Off Are you in town?"

On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful

constraint."Won't you come up?"

He considered. His vagae plans had not included this. But Jula 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 case, 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 fet 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 change 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
heaves.

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.
 The Bread of Salt
NVM Gonzalez (1958)

Usually I was in bed by ten and up by five and thus was ready for one
more day of my fourteenth year. Unless Grandmother had forgotten, the
fifteen centavos for the baker down Progreso Street - and how I enjoyed
jingling those coins in my pocket!- would be in the empty fruit jar in the
cupboard. I would remember then that rolls were what Grandmother
wanted because recently she had lost three molars. For young people like
my cousins and myself, she had always said that the kind called pan de sal
ought to be quite all right.

The bread of salt! How did it get that name? From where did its flavor
come, through what secret action of flour and yeast? At the risk of being
jostled from the counter by early buyers, I would push my way into the
shop so that I might watch the men who, stripped to the waist, worked
their long flat wooden spades in and out of the glowing maw of the oven.
Why did the bread come nut- brown and the size of my little fist? And why
did it have a pair of lips convulsed into a painful frown? In the half light of
the street, and hurrying, the paper bag pressed to my chest, I felt my
curiosity a little gratified by the oven-fresh warmth of the bread I was
proudly bringing home for breakfast.

Well I knew how Grandmother would not mind if I nibbled away at one
piece; perhaps, I might even eat two, to be charged later against my
share at the table. But that would be betraying a trust; and so, indeed, I
kept my purchase intact. To guard it from harm, I watched my steps and
avoided the dark street corners. For my reward, I had only to look in the
direction of the sea wall and the fifty yards or so of riverbed beyond it,
where an old Spaniard's house stood. At lowtide, when the bed was dry
and the rocks glinted with broken bottles, the stone fence of the
Spaniard's compound set off the house as if it were a castle. Sunrise
brought a wash of silver upon the roofs of the laundry and garden sheds
which had been built low and close to the fence. On dull mornings the light
dripped from the bamboo screen which covered the veranda and hung
some four or five yards from the ground. Unless it was August, when the
damp, northeast monsoon had to be kept away from the rooms, three
servants raised the screen promptly at six-thirty until it was completely
hidden under the veranda eaves. From the sound of the pulleys, I knew it
was time to set out for school.

It was in his service, as a coconut plantation overseer, that Grandfather

had spent the last thirty years of his life. Grandmother had been widowed
three years now. I often wondered whether I was being depended upon to
spend the years ahead in the service of this great house. One day I
learned that Aida, a classmate in high school,
was the old Spaniard's niece. All my
doubts disappeared. It was as if, before his death, Grandfather had
spoken to me about her, concealing the seriousness of the matter by
putting it over as a joke. If now I kept true to the virtues, she would step
out of her bedroom ostensibly to say

Good Morning to her uncle. Her real purpose, I knew, was to reveal thus
her assent to my
desire. On quiet mornings I imagined the patter of her shoes upon the
wooden veranda floor as a further sign, and I would hurry off to school,
taking the route she had fixed for me past the post office, the town plaza
and the church, the health
center east of the plaza, and at last the school grounds. I asked myself
whether I would try to walk with her and decided it would be the height of
rudeness. Enough that in her blue skirt and white middy she would be half
a block ahead and, from that distance, perhaps throw a glance in my
direction, to bestow upon my heart a deserved and abundant blessing. I
believed it was but right that, in some such way as this, her mission in my
life was disguised. Her name, I was to learn many years later, was a
convenient mnemonic for
the qualities to which argument might aspire. But in those days it was a
living voice.

"Oh that you might be worthy of uttering me," it said. And how I
endeavored to build my body so that I might live long to honor her. With
every victory at singles at the handball court the game was then the craze
at school -- I could feel
my body glow in the sun as though it had instantly been cast in bronze. I
guarded my mind and did not let my wits go astray. In class I would not
allow a lesson to pass unmastered. Our English teacher could put no
question before us that did not have a ready answer in my head. One day
he read Robert Louis Stevenson's

The Sire de Maletroit's Door, and we were so enthralled that our breaths
trembled. I knew then that somewhere, sometime in the not too
improbable future, a benign old man with a lantern in his hand would also
detain me in a secret room, and there daybreak would find me thrilled by
the sudden certainty that I had won Aida's hand.

It was perhaps on my violin that her name wrought such a tender spell.
Maestro Antonino remarked the dexterity of my stubby fingers. Quickly I
raced through Alard-until I had all but committed two thirds of the book to
memory. My short, brown arm learned at last to draw the bow with grace.
Sometimes, when practising my scales in the early evening, I wondered if
the sea wind carrying the straggling notes across the pebbled river did not
transform them into Schubert's

"Serenade."

At last Mr. Custodio, who was in charge of our school orchestra, became
aware of my progress. He moved me from second to first violin. During
the Thanksgiving Day program he bade me render a number, complete
with pizzicato and harmonics.

"Another Vallejo! Our own Albert Spalding!" I heard from the front row.

Aida, I thought, would be in the audience. I looked around quickly but

could not see her. As I retired to my place in the orchestra I heard Pete
Saez, the trombone player, call my name.

"You must join my band," he said. "Look, we'll have many engagements
soon. It'll be vacation time."

Pete pressed my arm. He had for some time now been asking me to join
the Minviluz Orchestra, his private band. All I had been able to tell him
was that I had my schoolwork to mind. He was twenty- two. I was perhaps
too young to be going around with him. He earned his school fees and
supported his mother hiring out his band at least three or four times a
month. He now said:

"Tomorrow we play at the funeral of a Chinese- four to six in the afternoon;

in the evening, judge Roldan's silver wedding anniversary; Sunday, the
municipal dance."

My head began to whirl. On the stage, in front of us, the principal had
begun a speech about America. Nothing he could say about the Pilgrim
Fathers and the American custom of feasting on turkey seemed
interesting. I thought of the money I would earn. For several days now I
had but one wish, to buy a box of linen stationery. At night when the
house was quiet I would fill the sheets with words that would tell Aida how
much I adored her. One of these mornings, perhaps before school closed
for the holidays, I would borrow her algebra book and there, upon a good
pageful of equations, there I would slip my message, tenderly pressing
the leaves of the book. She would perhaps never write back.

Neither by post nor by hand would a reply reach me. But no matter; it
would be a silence full of voices.

That night I dreamed I had returned from a tour of the world's music
centers; the newspapers of Manila had been generous with praise. I saw
my picture on the cover of a magazine. A writer had described how, many
years ago, I used to trudge the streets of Buenavista with my violin in a
battered black cardboard case. In New York, he reported, a millionaire
had offered me a Stradivarius violin, with a card that bore the
inscription: "In admiration of a genius your own people must surely be
proud of." I dreamed I spent a weekend at the millionaire's country house
by the Hudson. A young girl in a blue skirt and white middy clapped her
lily-white hands and, her voice trembling, cried "Bravo!"
What people now observed at home was the diligence with which I
attended to my violin lessons. My aunt, who had come from the farm to
join her children for the holidays, brought with her a maidservant, and to
the poor girl was given the chore of taking the money to the baker's for
rolls and pan de sal. I realized at once that it would be no longer becoming
on my part to make these morning trips to the baker's. I could not thank
my aunt enough.

I began to chafe on being given other errands. Suspecting my violin to be

the excuse, my aunt remarked: "What do you want to be a musician for?
At parties, musicians always eat last."

Perhaps, I said to myself, she was thinking of a pack of dogs scrambling

for scraps tossed over the fence by some careless kitchen maid. She was
the sort you could depend on to say such vulgar things. For that reason,
I thought, she ought not to be taken seriously at all.

But the remark hurt me. Although Grandmother had counseled me kindly
to mind my work at school, I went again and again to Pete Saez's house
for rehearsals. She had demanded that I deposit with her my earnings; I
had felt too weak to refuse. Secretly, I counted the money and decided
not to ask for it until I had enough with which to buy a brooch. Why this
time I wanted to give Aida a brooch, I didn't know. But I had set my heart
on it. I searched the downtown shops. The Chinese clerks, seeing me so
young, were annoyed when I inquired about prices.

At last the Christmas season began. I had not counted on Aida's leaving
home, and remembering that her parents lived in Badajoz, my torment
was almost unbearable. Not once had I tried to tell her of my love. My
letters had remained unwritten, and the algebra book unborrowed. There
was still the brooch to find, but I could not decide on the sort of brooch I
really wanted. And the money, in any case, was in Grandmother's purse,
which smelled of "Tiger Balm." I grew somewhat feverish as our class
Christmas program drew near. Finally it came; it was a warm December
afternoon. I decided to leave the room when our English teacher
announced that members of the class might exchange gifts. I felt
fortunate; Pete was at the door, beckoning to me. We walked out to the
porch where, Pete said, he would tell me a secret.

It was about an asalto the next Sunday which the Buenavista Women's
Club wished to give Don Esteban's daughters, Josefina and Alicia, who
were arriving on the morning steamer from Manila. The spinsters were
much loved by the ladies. Years ago, when they were younger, these
ladies studied solfeggio with Josefina and the piano and harp with Alicia.
As Pete told me all this, his lips ash- gray from practising all morning on
his trombone, I saw in my mind the sisters in their silk dresses, shuffling
off to church for theevening benediction.
They were very devout, and the Buenavista ladies admired that. I had
almost forgotten that they were twins and, despite their age, often
dressed alike. In low-bosomed voile bodices and white summer hats, I
remembered, the pair had attended Grandfather's funeral, at old Don
Esteban's behest. I wondered how successful they had been in Manila
during the past three years in the matter of finding suitable husbands.

"This party will be a complete surprise," Pete said, looking around the
porch as if to swear me to secrecy. "They've hired our band."

I joined my classmates in the room, greeting everyone with a Merry

Christmas jollier than that of the others. When I saw Aida in one corner
unwrapping something two girls had given her, I found the boldness to
greet her also.

"Merry Christmas," I said in English, as a hairbrush and a powder case

emerged from the fancy wrapping. It seemed to me rather apt that such
gifts went to her.

Already several girls were gathered around Aida. Their eyes glowed with
envy, it seemed to me, for those fair cheeks and the bobbed dark-brown
hair which lineage had denied them. I was too dumbstruck by my own
meanness to hear exactly what Aida said in answer to my greeting. But I
recovered shortly and asked:

"Will you be away during the vacation?"

"No, I'll be staying here," she said. When she added that her cousins were
arriving and that a big party in their honor was being planned, I remarked:
"So you know all about it?" I felt I had to explain that the party was meant
to be a surprise, an asalto.

And now it would be nothing of the kind, really. The women's club
matrons would hustle about, disguising their scurrying around for cakes
and candies as for some baptismal party or other. In the end, the Rivas
sisters would outdo them.
Boxes of meringues, bonbons, ladyfingers, and cinnamon buns that only
the Swiss bakers in Manila could make were perhaps coming on the
boat with them. I imagined a table glimmering with long-stemmed punch
glasses; enthroned in that array would be a huge brick-red bowl of
gleaming china with golden flowers around the brim. The local matrons,
however hard they tried, however sincere their efforts, were bound to fail
in their aspiration to rise to the level of Don Esteban's daughters. Perhaps,
I thought, Aida knew all this. And that I should share in a foreknowledge
of the matrons' hopes was a matter beyond love. Aida and I could laugh
together with the gods.
At seven, on the appointed evening, our small band gathered quietly at
the gate of Don Esteban's house, and when the ladies arrived in their
heavy shawls and trim panuelo, twittering with excitement, we were
commanded to play the Poet and Peasant overture. As Pete directed the
band, his eyes glowed with pride for his having been part of the big event.
The multicolored lights that the old Spaniard's gardeners had strung
along the vine-covered fence were switched on, and the women remarked
that Don Esteban's daughters might have made some preparations after
all. Pete hid his face from the glare. If the women felt let down, they did
not show it.

The overture shuffled along to its climax while five men in white shirts
bore huge boxes of goods into the house. I recognized one of the bakers
in spite of the uniform. A chorus of confused greetings, and the women
trooped into the house; and before we had settled in the sala to play "A
Basket of Roses," the heavy damask curtains at the far end of the room
were drawn and a long table richly spread was revealed under the
chandeliers. I remembered that, in our haste to be on hand for the asalto,
Pete and I had discouraged the members of the band from taking their
suppers.

"You've done us a great honor!" Josefina, the more buxom of the twins,
greeted the ladies.

"Oh, but you have not allowed us to take you by surprise!" the ladies
demurred in a chorus.

There were sighs and further protestations amid a rustle of skirts and the
glitter of earrings. I saw Aida in a long, flowing white gown and wearing an
arch of sampaguita flowers on her hair. At her command, two servants
brought out a gleaming harp from the music room. Only the slightest
scraping could be heard because the servants were barefoot. As Aida
directed them to place the instrument near the seats we occupied, my
heart leaped to my throat. Soon she was lost among the guests, and we
played "The Dance of the Glowworms." I kept my eyes closed and held for
as long as I could her radiant figure before me.

Alicia played on the harp and then, in answer to the deafening applause,
she offered an encore. Josefina sang afterward. Her voice, though a little
husky, fetched enormous sighs. For her encore, she gave "The Last Rose
of Summer"; and the song brought back snatches of the years gone by.
Memories of solfeggio lessons eddied about us, as if there were rustling
leaves scattered all over the hall. Don Esteban appeared. Earlier, he had
greeted the crowd handsomely, twisting his mustache to hide a natural
shyness before talkative women. He stayed long enough to listen to the
harp again, whispering in his rapture: "Heavenly. Heavenly . . ."
By midnight, the merrymaking lagged. We played while the party
gathered around the great table at the end of the sala. My mind traveled
across the seas to the distant cities I had dreamed about. The sisters
sailed among the ladies like two great white liners amid a fleet of tugboats
in a bay.
Someone had thoughtfully remembered-and at last Pete Saez signaled to
us to put our instruments away. We walked in single file across the hall,
led by one of the barefoot servants.

Behind us a couple of hoarse sopranos sang "La Paloma" to the

accompaniment of the harp, but I did not care to find out who they were.
The sight of so much silver and china confused me. There was more food
before us than I had ever imagined. I searched in my mind for the names
of the dishes; but my ignorance appalled me. I wondered what had
happened to the boxes of food that the Buenavista ladies had sent up
earlier. In a silver bowl was something, I discovered, that appeared like
whole egg yolks that had been dipped in honey and peppermint. The
seven of us in the orchestra were all of one mind about the feast; and so,
confident that I was with friends, I allowed my covetousness to have its
sway and not only stuffed my mouth with this and that confection but also
wrapped up a quantity of those egg-yolk things in several sheets of
napkin paper. None of my companions had thought of doing the same,
and it was with some pride that I slipped the packet under my shirt. There,
I knew, it would not bulge.

"Have you eaten?"

I turned around. It was Aida. My bow tie seemed to tighten around my
collar. I mumbled something, I did not know what.

"If you wait a little while till they've gone, I'll wrap up a big package for
you," she added.

I brought a handkerchief to my mouth. I might have honored her

solicitude adequately and even relieved myself of any embarrassment; I
could not quite believe that she had seen me, and yet I was sure that she
knew what I had done, and I felt all ardor for her gone from me entirely.

I walked away to the nearest door, praying that the damask curtains
might hide me in my shame. The door gave on to the veranda, where once
my love had trod on sunbeams. Outside it was dark, and a faint wind was
singing in the harbor.

With the napkin balled up in my hand, I flung out my arm to scatter the
egg-yolk things in the dark. I waited for the soft sound of their fall on the
garden-shed roof. Instead, I heard a spatter in the rising night-tide
beyond the stone fence. Farther away glimmered the light from
Grandmother's window, calling me home.
But the party broke up at one or thereabouts. We walked away with our
instruments after the matrons were done with their interminable good-
byes.

Then, to the tune of "Joy to the World," we pulled the Progreso Street
shopkeepers out of their beds. The Chinese merchants were especially
generous. When Pete divided our collection under a street lamp, there
was already a little glow of daybreak.

He walked with me part of the way home. We stopped at the baker's when
I told him that I wanted to buy with my own money some bread to eat on
the way to Grandmother's house at the edge of the sea wall. He laughed,
thinking it strange that I should be hungry. We found ourselves alone at
the counter; and we watched the bakery assistants at work until our
bodies grew warm from the oven across the door. It was not quite five,
and the bread was not yet ready.
 Scent of Apples
Bienvenido N. Santos

When I arrived in Kalamazoo it was October and the war was still on. Gold
and silver stars hung on pennants above silent windows of white and
brick-red cottages. In a backyard an old man burned leaves and twigs
while a gray-haired woman sat on the porch, her red hands quiet on her
lap, watching the smoke rising above the elms, both of them thinking the
same thought perhaps, about a tall, grinning boy with his blue eyes and
flying hair, who went out to war: where could he be now this month when
leaves were turning into gold and the fragrance of gathered apples was in
the wind?

It was a cold night when I left my room at the hotel for a usual speaking
engagement. I walked but a little way. A heavy wind coming up from Lake
Michigan was icy on the face. If felt like winter straying early in the
northern woodlands. Under the lampposts the leaves shone like bronze.
And they rolled on the pavements like the ghost feet of a thousand
autumns long dead, long before the boys left for faraway lands without
great icy winds and promise of winter early in the air, lands without apple
trees, the singing and the gold!

It was the same night I met Celestino Fabia, "just a Filipino farmer" as he
called himself, who had a farm about thirty miles east of Kalamazoo.
"You came all that way on a night like this just to hear me talk?"

"I've seen no Filipino for so many years now," he answered quickly. "So
when I saw your name in the papers where it says you come from the
Islands and that you're going to talk, I come right away."

Earlier that night I had addressed a college crowd, mostly women. It

appeared they wanted me to talk about my country, they wanted me to
tell them things about it because my country had become a lost country.
Everywhere in the land the enemy stalked. Over it a great silence hung,
and their boys were there, unheard from, or they were on their way to
some little known island on the Pacific, young boys all, hardly men,
thinking of harvest moons and the smell of forest fire. It was not hard
talking about our own people. I knew them well and I loved them. And
they seemed so far away during those terrible years that I must have
spoken of them with a little fervor, a little nostalgia.

In the open forum that followed, the audience wanted to know whether
there was much difference between our women and the American women.
I tried to answer the question as best I could, saying, among other things,
that I did not know that much about American women, except that they
looked friendly, but differences or similarities in inner qualities such as
naturally belonged to the heart or to the mind, I could only speak about
with vagueness.
While I was trying to explain away the fact that it was not easy to make
comparisons, a man rose from the rear of the hall, wanting to say
something. In the distance, he looked slight and old and very brown. Even
before he spoke, I knew that he was, like me, a Filipino.
"I'm a Filipino," he began, loud and clear, in a voice that seemed used to
wide open spaces, "I'm just a Filipino farmer out in the country." He
waved his hand toward the door. "I left the Philippines more than twenty
years ago and have never been back. Never will perhaps. I want to find
out, sir, are our Filipino women the same like they were twenty years
ago?"

As he sat down, the hall filled with voices, hushed and intrigued. I
weighed my answer carefully. I did not want to tell a lie yet I did not want
to say anything that would seem platitudinous, insincere. But more
important than these considerations, it seemed to me that moment as I
looked towards my countryman, I must give him an answer that would
not make him so unhappy. Surely, all these years, he must have held on
to certain ideals, certain beliefs, even illusions peculiar to the exile.

"First," I said as the voices gradually died down and every eye seemed
upon me, "First, tell me what our women were like twenty years ago."

The man stood to answer. "Yes," he said, "you're too young . . . Twenty
years ago our women were nice, they were modest, they wore their hair
long, they dressed proper and went for no monkey business. They were
natural, they went to church regular, and they were faithful." He had
spoken slowly, and now in what seemed like an afterthought, added, "It's
the men who ain't." Now I knew what I was going to say.

"Well," I began, "it will interest you to know that our women have
changed--but definitely! The change, however, has been on the outside
only. Inside, here," pointing to the heart, "they are the same as they were
twenty years ago. God-fearing, faithful, modest, and nice."

The man was visibly moved. "I'm very happy, sir," he said, in the manner
of one who, having stakes on the land, had found no cause to regret one's
sentimental investment.

After this, everything that was said and done in that hall that night
seemed like an anti-climax, and later, as we walked outside, he gave me
his name and told me of his farm thirty miles east of the city.
We had stopped at the main entrance to the hotel lobby. We had not
talked very much on the way. As a matter of fact, we were never alone.
Kindly American friends talked to us, asked us questions, said goodnight.
So now I asked him whether he cared to step into the lobby with me and
talk.
"No, thank you," he said, "you are tired. And I don't want to stay out too
late." "Yes, you live very far."

"I got a car," he said, "besides . . . "

Now he smiled, he truly smiled. All night I had been watching his face and
I wondered when he was going to smile.

"Will you do me a favor, please," he continued smiling almost sweetly. "I

want you to have dinner with my family out in the country. I'd call for you
tomorrow afternoon, then drive you back. Will that be alright?"

"Of course," I said. "I'd love to meet your family." I was leaving
Kalamazoo for Muncie, Indiana, in two days. There was plenty of time.
"You will make my wife very happy," he said. "You flatter me."

"Honest. She'll be very happy. Ruth is a country girl and hasn't met many
Filipinos. I mean Filipinos younger than I, cleaner looking. We're just poor
farmer folk, you know, and we don't get to town very often. Roger, that's
my boy, he goes to school in town. A bus takes him early in the morning
and he's back in the afternoon. He's nice boy."

"I bet he is," I agreed. "I've seen the children of some of the boys by their
American wives and the boys are tall, taller than their father, and very
good looking."

"Roger, he'd be tall. You'll like him."

Then he said goodbye and I waved to him as he disappeared in the

darkness.

The next day he came, at about three in the afternoon. There was a mild,
ineffectual sun shining, and it was not too cold. He was wearing an old
brown tweed jacket and worsted trousers to match. His shoes were
polished, and although the green of his tie seemed faded, a colored shirt
hardly accentuated it. He looked younger than he appeared the night
before now that he was clean shaven and seemed ready to go to a party.
He was grinning as we met.

"Oh, Ruth can't believe it," he kept repeating as he led me to his car--a
nondescript thing in faded black that had known better days and many
hands. "I says to her, I'm bringing you a first class Filipino, and she says,
aw, go away, quit kidding, there's no such thing as first class Filipino. But
Roger, that's my boy, he believed me immediately. What's he like, daddy,
he asks. Oh, you will see, I says, he's first class. Like you daddy? No, no,
I laugh at him, your daddy ain't first class.
Aw, but you are, daddy, he says. So you can see what a nice boy he is, so
innocent. Then Ruth starts griping about the house, but the house is a
mess, she says. True it's a mess, it's always a mess, but you don't mind,
do you? We're poor folks, you know.

The trip seemed interminable. We passed through narrow lanes and

disappeared into thickets, and came out on barren land overgrown with
weeds in places. All around were dead leaves and dry earth. In the
distance were apple trees.

"Aren't those apple trees?" I asked wanting to be sure.

"Yes, those are apple trees," he replied. "Do you like apples? I got lots of
'em. I got an apple orchard, I'll show you."

All the beauty of the afternoon seemed in the distance, on the hills, in the
dull soft sky. "Those trees are beautiful on the hills," I said.

"Autumn's a lovely season. The trees are getting ready to die, and they
show their colors, proud- like."

"No such thing in our own country," I said.

That remark seemed unkind, I realized later. It touched him off on a long
deserted tangent, but ever there perhaps. How many times did lonely
mind take unpleasant detours away from the familiar winding lanes
towards home for fear of this, the remembered hurt, the long lost youth,
the grim shadows of the years; how many times indeed, only the exile
knows.
It was a rugged road we were traveling and the car made so much noise
that I could not hear everything he said, but I understood him. He was
telling his story for the first time in many years. He was remembering his
own youth. He was thinking of home. In these odd moments there
seemed no cause for fear no cause at all, no pain. That would come later.
In the night perhaps. Or lonely on the farm under the apple trees.In this
old Visayan town, the streets are narrow and dirty and strewn with coral
shells. You have been there? You could not have missed our house, it was
the biggest in town, one of the oldest, ours was a big family. The house
stood right on the edge of the street. A door opened heavily and you enter
a dark hall leading to the stairs. There is the smell of chickens roosting on
the low- topped walls, there is the familiar sound they make and you
grope your way up a massive staircase, the bannisters smooth upon the
trembling hand. Such nights, they are no better than the days, windows
are closed against the sun; they close heavily.

Mother sits in her corner looking very white and sick. This was her world,
her domain. In all these years, I cannot remember the sound of her voice.
Father was different. He moved about. He shouted. He ranted. He lived in
the past and talked of honor as though it were the only thing.
I was born in that house. I grew up there into a pampered brat. I was
mean. One day I broke their hearts. I saw mother cry wordlessly as father
heaped his curses upon me and drove me out of the house, the gate
closing heavily after me. And my brothers and sisters took up my father's
hate for me and multiplied it numberless times in their own broken hearts.
I was no good.

But sometimes, you know, I miss that house, the roosting chickens on the
low-topped walls. I miss my brothers and sisters, Mother sitting in her
chair, looking like a pale ghost in a corner of the room. I would remember
the great live posts, massive tree trunks from the forests. Leafy plants
grew on the sides, buds pointing downwards, wilted and died before they
could become flowers. As they fell on the floor, father bent to pick them
and throw them out into the coral streets. His hands were strong. I have
kissed these hands . . . many times, many times.

Finally we rounded a deep curve and suddenly came upon a shanty, all but
ready to crumble in a heap on the ground, its plastered walls were rotting
away, the floor was hardly a foot from the ground. I thought of the
cottages of the poor colored folk in the south, the hovels of the poor
everywhere in the land. This one stood all by itself as though by common
consent all the folk that used to live here had decided to say away,
despising it, ashamed of it. Even the lovely season could not color it with
beauty.

A dog barked loudly as we approached. A fat blonde woman stood at the

door with a little boy by her side. Roger seemed newly scrubbed. He
hardly took his eyes off me. Ruth had a clean apron around her shapeless
waist. Now as she shook my hands in sincere delight I noticed
shamefacedly (that I should notice) how rough her hands were, how
coarse and red with labor, how ugly! She was no longer young and her
smile was pathetic.

As we stepped inside and the door closed behind us, immediately I was
aware of the familiar scent of apples. The room was bare except for a few
ancient pieces of second-hand furniture. In the middle of the room stood
a stove to keep the family warm in winter. The walls were bare.
Over the dining table hung a lamp yet unlighted.

Ruth got busy with the drinks. She kept coming in and out of a rear room
that must have been the kitchen and soon the table was heavy with food,
fried chicken legs and rice, and green peas and corn on the ear. Even as
we ate, Ruth kept standing, and going to the kitchen for more food.
Roger ate like a little gentleman.
"Isn't he nice looking?" his father asked."You are a handsome boy,
Roger," I said.

The boy smiled at me. You look like Daddy," he said.

Afterwards I noticed an old picture leaning on the top of a dresser and
stood to pick it up. It was yellow and soiled with many fingerings. The
faded figure of a woman in Philippine dress could yet be distinguished
although the face had become a blur.

"Your . . . " I began.

"I don't know who she is," Fabia hastened to say. "I picked that picture
many years ago in a room on La Salle street in Chicago. I have often
wondered who she is."

"The face wasn't a blur in the beginning?" "Oh, no. It was a young face
and good." Ruth came with a plate full of apples.

"Ah," I cried, picking out a ripe one. "I've been thinking where all the
scent of apples came from. The room is full of it."
"I'll show you," said Fabia.

He showed me a backroom, not very big. It was half-full of apples.

"Every day," he explained, "I take some of them to town to sell to the
groceries. Prices have been low. I've been losing on the trips."

"These apples will spoil," I said. "We'll feed them to the pigs."

Then he showed me around the farm. It was twilight now and the apple
trees stood bare against a glowing western sky. In apple blossom time it
must be lovely here. But what about wintertime? One day, according to
Fabia, a few years ago, before Roger was born, he had an attack of acute
appendicitis. It was deep winter. The snow lay heavy everywhere. Ruth
was pregnant and none too well herself. At first she did not know what to
do. She bundled him in warm clothing and put him on a cot near the stove.
She shoveled the snow from their front door and practically carried the
suffering man on her shoulders, dragging him through the newly made
path towards the road where they waited for the U.S. Mail car to pass.
Meanwhile snowflakes poured all over them and she kept rubbing the
man's arms and legs as she herself nearly froze to death.

"Go back to the house, Ruth!" her husband cried, "you'll freeze to death."
But she clung to him wordlessly. Even as she massaged his arms and legs,
her tears rolled down her cheeks. "I won't leave you," she repeated.
Finally the U.S. Mail car arrived. The mailman, who knew them well,
helped them board the car, and, without stopping on his usual route, took
the sick man and his wife direct to the nearest hospital.Ruth stayed in the
hospital with Fabia. She slept in a corridor outside the patients' ward and
in the day time helped in scrubbing the floor and washing the dishes and
cleaning the men's things. They didn't have enough money and Ruth was
willing to work like a slave.

"Ruth's a nice girl," said Fabia, "like our own Filipino women."

Before nightfall, he took me back to the hotel. Ruth and Roger stood at
the door holding hands and smiling at me. From inside the room of the
shanty, a low light flickered. I had a last glimpse of the apple trees in the
orchard under the darkened sky as Fabia backed up the car. And soon we
were on our way back to town. The dog had started barking. We could
hear it for some time, until finally, we could not hear it anymore, and all
was darkness around us, except where the headlamps revealed a stretch
of road leading somewhere.

Fabia did not talk this time. I didn't seem to have anything to say myself.
But when finally we came to the hotel and I got down, Fabia said, "Well, I
guess I won't be seeing you again."

It was dimly lighted in front of the hotel and I could hardly see Fabia's face.
Without getting off the car, he moved to where I had sat, and I saw him
extend his hand. I gripped it.

"Tell Ruth and Roger," I said, "I love them."

He dropped my hand quickly. "They'll be waiting for me now," he said.

"Look," I said, not knowing why I said it, "one of these days, very soon, I
hope, I'll be going home. I could go to your town."

"No," he said softly, sounding very much defeated but brave, "Thanks a
lot. But, you see, nobody would remember me now."

Then he started the car, and as it moved away, he waved his hand.

"Goodbye," I said, waving back into the darkness. And suddenly the night
was cold like winter straying early in these northern woodlands.

I hurried inside. There was a train the next morning that left for Muncie,
Indiana, at a quarter after eight.
 ZITA
Arturo B. Rotor

TURONG brought him from Pauambang in his small sailboat, for the
coastwise steamer did not stop at any little island of broken cliffs and
coconut palms. It was almost midday; they had been standing in that
white glare where the tiniest pebble and fluted conch had become points
of light, piercing-bright--the municipal president, the parish priest, Don
Eliodoro who owned almost all the coconuts, the herb doctor, the village
character. Their mild surprise over when he spoke in their native dialect,
they looked at him more closely and his easy manner did not deceive
them. His head was uncovered and he had a way of bringing the back of
his hand to his brow or mouth; they read behind that too, it was not a
gesture of protection. "An exile has come to Anayat… and he is so young,
so young." So young and lonely and sufficient unto himself.

There was no mistaking the stamp of a strong decision on that brow, the
brow of those who have to be cold and haughty, those shoulders stooped
slightly, less from the burden that they bore than from a carefully
cultivated air of unconcern; no common school-teacher could dress so
carelessly and not appear shoddy.

They had prepared a room for him in Don Eliodoro's house so that he
would not have to walk far to school every morning, but he gave nothing
more than a glance at the big stone building with its Spanish azotea, its
arched doorways, its flagged courtyard. He chose instead Turong's home,
a shaky hut near the sea. Was the sea rough and dangerous at times? He
did not mind it. Was the place far from the church and the schoolhouse?
The walk would do him good. Would he not feel lonely with nobody but an
illiterate fisherman for a companion? He was used to living alone. And
they let him do as he wanted, for the old men knew that it was not so
much the nearness of the sea that he desired as its silence so that he
might tell it secrets he could not tell anyone else.

They thought of nobody but him; they talked about him in the barber shop,
in the cockpit, in the sari-sari store, the way he walked, the way he looked
at you, his unruly hair. They dressed him in purple and linen, in myth and
mystery, put him astride a black stallion, at the wheel of a blue
automobile. Mr. Reteche? Mr. Reteche! The name suggested the fantasy
and the glitter of a place and people they never would see; he was the
scion of a powerful family, a poet and artist, a prince.

That night, Don Eliodoro had the story from his daughter of his first day in
the classroom; she perched wide-eyed, low-voiced, short of breath on the
arm of his chair.
"He strode into the room, very tall and serious and polite, stood in front of
us and looked at us all over and yet did not seem to see us.

" 'Good morning, teacher,' we said timidly.

"He bowed as if we were his equals. He asked for the fist of our names and
as he read off each one we looked at him long. When he came to my name,
Father, the most surprising thing happened. He started pronouncing it
and then he stopped as if he had forgotten something and just stared and
stared at the paper in his hand. I heard my name repeated three times
through his half-closed lips, 'Zita. Zita. Zita.'

" 'Yes sir, I am Zita.'

"He looked at me uncomprehendingly, inarticulate, and it seemed to me,

Father, it actually seemed that he was begging me to tell him that that
was not my name, that I was deceiving him. He looked so miserable and
sick I felt like sinking down or running away.

" 'Zita is not your name; it is just a pet name, no?' " 'My father has always
called me that, sir.'
" 'It can't be; maybe it is Pacita or Luisa or--'

"His voice was scarcely above a whisper, Father, and all the while he
looked at me begging, begging. I shook my head determinedly. My
answer must have angered him. He must have thought I was very
hard-headed, for he said, 'A thousand miles, Mother of Mercy… it is not
possible.' He kept on looking at me; he was hurt perhaps that he should
have such a stubborn pupil. But I am not really so, Father?"

"Yes, you are, my dear. But you must try to please him, he is a gentleman;
he comes from the city. I was thinking… Private lessons, perhaps, if he
won't ask too much." Don Eliodoro had his dreams and she was his only
daughter.Turong had his own story to tell in the barber shop that night, a
story as vividly etched as the lone coconut palm in front of the shop that
shot up straight into the darkness of the night, as vaguely disturbing as
the secrets that the sea whispered into the night.

"He did not sleep a wink, I am sure of it. When I came from the market the
stars were already out and I saw that he had not touched the food I had
prepared. I asked him to eat and he said he was not hungry. He sat by the
window that faces the sea and just looked out hour after hour. I woke up
three times during the night and saw that he had not so much as changed
his position. I thought once that he was asleep and came near, but he
motioned me away. When I awoke at dawn to prepare the nets, he was
still there."
"Maybe he wants to go home already." They looked up with concern.

"He is sick. You remember Father Fernando? He had a way of looking like
that, into space, seeing nobody, just before he died."

Every month there was a letter that came for him, sometimes two or three;
large, blue envelopes with a gold design in the upper left hand comer, and
addressed in broad, angular, sweeping handwriting. One time Turong
brought one of them to him in the classroom. The students were busy
writing a composition on a subject that he had given them, "The Things
That I Love Most." Carelessly he had opened the letter, carelessly read it,
and carelessly tossed it aside. Zita was all aflutter when the students
handed in their work for he had promised that he would read aloud the
best. He went over the pile two times, and once again, absently, a deep
frown on his brow, as if he were displeased with their work. Then he
stopped and picked up one. Her heart sank when she saw that it was not
hers, she hardly heard him reading:

"I did not know any better. Moths are not supposed to know; they only
come to the light. And the light looked so inviting, there was no resisting
it. Moths are not supposed to know, one does not even know one is a moth
until one's wings are burned."

It was incomprehensible, no beginning, no end. It did not have unity,

coherence, emphasis. Why did he choose that one? What did he see in it?
And she had worked so hard, she had wanted to please, she had written
about the flowers that she loved most. Who could have written what he
had read aloud? She did not know that any of her classmates could write
so, use such words, sentences, use a blue paper to write her lessons on.
But then there was little in Mr. Reteche that the young people there could
understand. Even his words were so difficult, just like those dark and
dismaying things that they came across in their readers, which took them
hour after hour in the dictionary. She had learned like a good student to
pick out the words she did not recognize, writing them down as she heard
them, but it was a thankless task. She had a whole notebook filled now,
two columns to each page:

esurient greedy.
Amaranth a flower that never fades. peacock a large bird with
lovely gold and
green feathers.
Mirash

The last word was not in the dictionary. And what did such things as
original sin,
selfishness, insatiable, actress of a thousand faces mean, and who were
Sirse, Lorelay, other names she could not find anywhere? She meant to
ask him someday, someday when his eyes were kinder.
He never went to church, but then, that always went with learning and
education, did it not? One night Bue saw him coming out of the dim
doorway. He watched again and the following night he saw him again.
They would not believe it, they must see it with their own eyes and so they
came. He did not go in every night, but he could be seen at the most
unusual hours, sometimes at dusk, sometimes at dawn, once when it was
storming and the lightning etched ragged paths from heaven to earth.
Sometimes he stayed for a few minutes, sometimes he came twice or
thrice in one evening. They reported it to Father Cesareo but it seemed
that he already knew. "Let a peaceful man alone in his prayers." The
answer had surprised them.

The sky hangs over Anayat, in the middle of the Anayat Sea, like an
inverted wineglass, a glass whose wine had been spilled, a purple wine of
which Anayat was the last precious drop. For that is Anayat in the
crepuscule, purple and mellow, sparkling and warm and effulgent when
there is a moon, cool and heady and sensuous when there is no moon.

One may drink of it and forget what lies beyond a thousand miles, beyond
a thousand years; one may sip it at the top of a jagged cliff, nearer peace,
nearer God, where one can see the ocean dashing against the rocks in
eternal frustration, more moving, more terrible than man's; or touch it to
his lips in the lush shadows of the dama de

noche, its blossoms iridescent like a thousand fireflies, its bouquet the
fragrance of flowers that know no fading.

Zita sat by her open window, half asleep, half dreaming. Francisco B.
Reteche; what a name! What could his nickname be. Paking, Frank, Pa…
The night lay silent and expectant, a fairy princess waiting for the
whispered words of a lover. She was not a bit sleepy; already she had
counted three stars that had fallen to earth, one almost directly into that
bush of dama de noche at their garden gate, where it had lighted the
lamps of a thousand fireflies. He was not so forbidding now, he spoke less
frequently to himself, more frequently to her; his eyes were still unseeing,
but now they rested on her. She loved to remember those moments she
had caught him looking when he thought she did not know. The
knowledge came keenly, bitingly, like the sea breeze at dawn, like the
prick of the rose's thorn, or--yes, like the purple liquid that her father
gave the visitors during pintakasi which made them red and noisy. She
had stolen a few drops one day, because she wanted to know, to taste,
and that little sip had made her head whirl.

Suddenly she stiffened; a shadow had emerged from the shrubs and had
been lost in the other shadows. Her pulses raced, she strained forward.
Was she dreaming? Who was it? A lost soul, an unvoiced thought, the
shadow of a shadow, the prince from his tryst with the fairy princess?
What were the words that he whispered to her?
They who have been young once say that only youth can make youth
forget itself; that life is a river bed; the water passes over it, sometimes it
encounters obstacles and cannot go on, sometimes it flows
unencumbered with a song in every bubble and ripple, but always it goes
forward. When its way is obstructed it burrows deeply or swerves aside
and leaves its impression, and whether the impress will be shallow and
transient, or deep and searing, only God determines. The people
remembered the day when he went up Don Eliodoro's house, the light of
a great decision in his eyes, and finally accepted the father's request that
he teach his daughter "to be a lady."

"We are going to the city soon, after the next harvest perhaps; I want her
not to feel like a 'provinciana' when we get there."

They remembered the time when his walks by the seashore became less
solitary, for now of afternoons, he would draw the whole crowd of village
boys from their game of leapfrog or
patintero and bring them with him. And they would go home hours after
sunset with the wonderful things that Mr. Reteche had told them, why the
sea is green, the sky blue, what one who is strong and fearless might find
at that exact place where the sky meets the sea. They would be flushed
and happy and bright-eyed, for he could stand on his head longer than
any of them, catch more crabs, send a pebble skimming over the breast of
Anayat Bay farthest.

Turong still remembered those ominous, terrifying nights when he had

got up cold and trembling to listen to the aching groan of the bamboo floor,
as somebody in the other room restlessly paced to and fro. And his pupils
still remember those mornings he received their flowers, the camia which
had fainted away at her own fragrance, the kampupot, with the night dew
still trembling in its heart; receive them with a smile and forget the
lessons of the day and tell them all about those princesses and fairies who
dwelt in flowers; why the dama de noche must have the darkness of the
night to bring out its fragrance; how the petals of the ylang-ylang,
crushed and soaked in some liquid, would one day touch the lips of some
wondrous creature in some faraway land whose eyes were blue and hair
golden.

Those were days of surprises for Zita. Box after box came in Turong's
sailboat and each time they contained things that took the words from her
lips. Silk as sheer and perishable as gossamer, or heavy and shiny and
tinted like the sunset sky; slippers with bright stones which twinkled with
the least movement of her feet; a necklace of green, flat, polished stone,
whose feel against her throat sent a curious choking sensation there;
perfume that she must touch her lips with. If only there would always be
such things in Turong's sailboat, and none of those horrid blue envelopes
that he always brought. And yet--the Virgin have pity on her selfish
soul--suppose one day Turong brought not only those letters but the
writer as well? She shuddered, not because she feared it but because she
knew it would be.

"Why are these dresses so tight fitting?" Her father wanted to know.

"In society, women use clothes to reveal, not to hide." Was that a sneer or
a smile in his eyes? The gown showed her arms and shoulders and she
had never known how round and fair they were, how they could express
so many things.

"Why do these dresses have such bright colors?" "Because the peacock
has bright feathers.”
"They paint their lips…"

"So that they can smile when they do not want to."

"And their eyelashes are long." "To hide deception."

He was not pleased like her father; she saw it, he had turned his face
toward the window. And as she came nearer, swaying like a lily atop its
stalk she heard the harsh, muttered words:

"One would think she'd feel shy or uncomfortable, but no… oh no… not a
bit… all alike… comes naturally."

There were books to read; pictures, names to learn; lessons in everything;

how to polish the nails, how to use a fan, even how to walk. How did these
days come, how did they go? What does one do when one is so happy, so
breathless? Sometimes they were a memory, sometimes a dream.

"Look, Zita, a society girl does not smile so openly; her eyes don't seek
one's so--that reveals your true feelings."

"But if I am glad and happy and I want to show it?"

"Don't. If you must show it by smiling, let your eyes be mocking; if you
would invite with your eyes, repulse with your lips."

That was a memory.

She was in a great drawing room whose floor was so polished it reflected
the myriad red and green and blue fights above, the arches of flowers and
ribbons and streamers. All the great names of the capital were there,
stately ladies in wonderful gowns who walked so, waved their fans so,
who said one thing with their eyes and another with their lips. And she
was among them and every young and good-looking man wanted to
dance with her. They were all so clever and charming but she answered:
"Please, I am tired." For beyond them she had seen him alone, he whose
eyes were dark and brooding and disapproving and she was waiting for
him to take her.

That was a dream. Sometimes though, she could not tell so easily which
was the dream and which the memory.
If only those letters would not bother him now, he might be happy and at
peace. True he never answered them, but every time Turong brought him
one, he would still become thoughtful and distracted. Like that time he
was teaching her a dance, a Spanish dance, he said, and had told her to
dress accordingly. Her heavy hair hung in a big, carelessly tied knot that
always threatened to come loose but never did; its dark, deep shadows
showing off in startling vividness how red a rose can be, how like velvet its
petals. Her earrings--two circlets of precious stones, red like the pigeon's
blood--almost touched her shoulders. The heavy Spanish shawl gave her
the most trouble--she had nothing to help her but some pictures and
magazines--she could not put it on just as she wanted. Like this, it
revealed her shoulder too much; that way, it hampered the free
movement of the legs. But she had done her best; for hours she had stood
before her mirror and for hours it had told her that she was beautiful, that
red lips and tragic eyes were becoming to her.

She'd never forget that look on his face when she came out. It was not
surprise, joy, admiration. It was as if he saw somebody there whom he
was expecting, for whom he had waited, prayed.

"Zita!" It was a cry of recognition.

She blushed even under her rouge when he took her in his arms and
taught her to step this way, glide so, turn about; she looked half
questioningly at her father for disapproval, but she saw that there was
nothing there but admiration too. Mr.
Reteche seemed so serious and so intent that she should learn quickly;
but he did not deceive her, for once she happened to lean close and she
felt how wildly his heart was beating. It frightened her and she drew away,
but when she saw how unconcerned he seemed, as if he did not even
know that she was in his arms, she smiled knowingly and drew close again.
Dreamily she closed her eyes and dimly wondered if his were shut too,
whether he was thinking the same thoughts, breathing the same prayer.

Turong came up and after his respectful "Good evening" he handed an

envelope to the school teacher. It was large and blue and had a gold
design in one comer; the handwriting was broad, angular, sweeping.

"Thank you, Turong." His voice was drawling, heavy, the voice of one who
has just awakened. With one movement he tore the unopened envelope
slowly, unconsciously, it seemed to her, to pieces.
"I thought I had forgotten," he murmured dully.
That changed the whole evening. His eyes lost their sparkle, his gaze
wandered from time to time. Something powerful and dark had come
between them, something which shut out the light, brought in a chill. The
tears came to her eyes for she felt utterly powerless. When her sight
cleared she saw that he was sitting down and trying to piece the letter
together.

"Why do you tear up a letter if you must put it together again?"

rebelliously.

He looked at her kindly. "Someday, Zita, you will do it too, and then you
will understand."

One day Turong came from Pauambang and this time he brought a
stranger. They knew at once that he came from where the teacher
came--his clothes, his features, his politeness--and that he had come for
the teacher. This one did not speak their dialect, and as he was led
through the dusty, crooked streets, he kept forever wiping his face,
gazing at the wobbly, thatched huts and muttering short, vehement
phrases to himself.
Zita heard his knock before Mr. Reteche did and she knew what he had
come for. She must have been as pale as her teacher, as shaken, as
rebellious. And yet the stranger was so cordial; there was nothing but
gladness in his greeting, gladness at meeting an old friend. How strong he
was; even at that moment he did not forget himself, but turned to his
class and dismissed them for the day.

The door was thick and she did not dare lean against the jamb too much,
so sometimes their voices floated away before they reached her.

"…like children… making yourselves… so unhappy."

"…happiness? Her idea of happiness…"

Mr. Reteche's voice was more low-pitched, hoarse, so that it didn't carry
at all. She shuddered as he laughed, it was that way when he first came.

"She's been… did not mean… understand." "…learning to forget…"

There were periods when they both became excited and talked fast and
hard; she heard somebody's restless pacing, somebody sitting down
heavily.
"I never realized what she meant to me until I began trying to seek from
others what she would not give me."

She knew what was coming now, knew it before the stranger asked the
question:
"Tomorrow?"

She fled; she could not wait for the answer.

He did not sleep that night, she knew he did not, she told herself fiercely.
And it was not only his preparations that kept him awake, she knew it, she
knew it. With the first flicker of light she ran to her mirror. She must not
show her feeling, it was not in good form, she must manage somehow. If
her lips quivered, her eyes must smile, if in her eyes there were tears…
She heard her father go out, but she did not go; although she knew his
purpose, she had more important things to do. Little boys came up to the
house and she wiped away their tears and told them that he was coming
back, coming back, soon, soon.

The minutes flew, she was almost done now; her lips were red and her
eyebrows penciled; the crimson shawl thrown over her shoulders just
right. Everything must be like that day he had first seen her in a Spanish
dress. Still he did not come, he must be bidding farewell now to Father
Cesareo; now he was in Doña Ramona's house; now he was shaking the
barber's hand. He would soon be through and come to her house. She
glanced at the mirror and decided that her lips were not red enough; she
put on more color. The rose in her hair had too long a stem; she tried to
trim it with her fingers and a thorn dug deeply into her flesh.

Who knows? Perhaps they would soon meet again in the city; she
wondered if she could not wheedle her father into going earlier. But she
must know now what were the words he had wanted to whisper that night
under the dama de noche, what he had wanted to say that day he held her
in his arms; other things, questions whose answers she knew. She smiled.
How well she knew them!

The big house was silent as death; the little village seemed deserted,
everybody had gone to the seashore. Again she looked at the mirror. She
was too pale, she must put on more rouge. She tried to keep from
counting the minutes, the seconds, from getting up and pacing. But she
was getting chilly and she must do it to keep warm.
The steps creaked. She bit her lips to stifle a wild cry there. The door
opened.

"Turong!"

"Mr. Reteche bade me give you this. He said you would understand."

In one bound she had reached the open window. But dimly, for the sun
was too bright, or was her sight failing?--she saw a blur of white moving
out to sea, then disappearing behind a point of land so that she could no
longer follow it; and then, clearly against a horizon suddenly drawn out of
perspective, "Mr. Reteche," tall, lean, brooding, looking at her with eyes
that told her somebody had hurt him. It was like that when he first came,
and now he was gone. The tears came freely now. What matter, what
matter? There was nobody to see and criticize her breeding. They came
down unchecked and when she tried to brush them off with her hand, the
color came away too from her cheeks, leaving them bloodless, cold.
Sometimes they got into her mouth and they tasted bitter.

Her hands worked convulsively; there was a sound of tearing paper, once,
twice. She became suddenly aware of what she had done when she looked
at the pieces, wet and brightly stained with uneven streaks of red. Slowly,
painfully, she tried to put the pieces together and as she did so a sob
escaped deep from her breast--a great understanding had come to her.
 THE MATS
Francisco Arcellana

For the Angeles family, Mr. Angeles’; homecoming from his periodic
inspection trips was always an occasion for celebration. But his
homecoming–from a trip to the South–was fated to be more memorable
than, say, of the others.

He had written from Mariveles: “I have just met a marvelous mat

weaver–a real artist–and I shall have a surprise for you. I asked him to
weave a sleeping-mat for every one of the family. He is using many
different colors and for each mat the dominant color is that of our
respective birthstones. I am sure that the children will be very pleased. I
know you will be. I can hardly wait to show them to you.”
Nana Emilia read the letter that morning, and again and again every time
she had a chance to leave the kitchen. In the evening when all the
children were home from school she asked her oldest son, José, to read
the letter at dinner table. The children became very much excited about
the mats, and talked about them until late into the night. This she wrote
her husband when she labored over a reply to him. For days after that,
mats continued to be the chief topic of conversation among the children.
Finally, from Lopez, Mr. Angeles wrote again: “I am taking the Bicol
Express tomorrow. I have the mats with me, and they are beautiful. God
willing, I shall be home to join you at dinner.”

The letter was read aloud during the noon meal. Talk about the mats
flared up again like wildfire. “I like the feel of mats,” Antonio, the third
child, said. “I like the smell of new mats.”
“Oh, but these mats are different,” interposed Susanna, the fifth child.
“They have our names woven into them, and in our ascribed colors, too.”
The children knew what they were talking about: they knew just what a
decorative mat was like; it was not anything new or strange in their
experience. That was why they were so excited about the matter. They
had such a mat in the house, one they seldom used, a mat older than any
one of them.
This mat had been given to Nana Emilia by her mother when she and Mr.
Angeles were married, and it had been with them ever since. It had
served on the wedding night, and had not since been used except on
special occasions.
It was a very beautiful mat, not really meant to be ordinarily used. It had
green leaf borders, and a lot of gigantic red roses woven into it. In the
middle, running the whole length of the mat, was the lettering: Emilia y
Jaime Recuerdo.
The letters were in gold.

Nana Emilia always kept that mat in her trunk. When any one of the family
was taken ill, the mat was brought out and the patient slept on it, had it all
to himself. Every one of the children had some time in their lives slept on
it; not a few had slept on it more than once.

Most of the time the mat was kept in Nana Emilia’s trunk, and when it was
taken out and spread on the floor the children were always around to
watch. At first there had been only Nana Emilia to see the mat spread.
Then a child–a girl–watched with them. The number of watchers
increased as more children came.

The mat did not seem to age. It seemed to Nana Emilia always as new as
when it had been laid on the nuptial bed. To the children it seemed as new
as the first time it was spread before them. The folds and creases always
new and fresh. The smell was always the smell of a new mat. Watching
the intricate design was an endless joy. The children’s pleasure at the
golden letters even before they could work out the meaning was
boundless. Somehow they were always pleasantly shocked by the sight of
the mat: so delicate and so consummate the artistry of its weave.

Now, taking out that mat to spread had become a kind of ritual. The
process had become associated with illness in the family. Illness, even
serious illness, had not been infrequent. There had been deaths.In the
evening Mr. Angeles was with his family. He had brought the usual things
home with him. There was a lot of fruits, as always (his itinerary carried
him through the fruit-growing provinces)pineapples, lanzones, chicos,
atis, santol, sandia, guyabano, avocado, according to the season. He had
also brought home a jar of preserved sweets from Lopez.

Putting away the fruit, sampling them, was as usual accomplished with
animation and lively talk. Dinner was a long affair. Mr. Angeles was full of
stories about his trip but would interrupt his tales with: “I could not sleep
nights thinking of the young ones. They should never be allowed to play in
the streets. And you older ones should not stay out too late at night.”

The stories petered out and dinner was over. Putting away the dishes and
wiping the dishes and wiping the table clean did not at all seem tedious.
Yet Nana and the children, although they did not show it, were all on edge
about the mats.

Finally, after a long time over his cigar, Mr. Angeles rose from his seat at
the head of the table and crossed the room to the corner where his
luggage had been piled. From the heap he disengaged a ponderous
bundle.

Taking it under one arm, he walked to the middle of the room where the
light was brightest. He dropped the bundle and, bending over and
balancing himself on his toes, he strained at the cord that bound it. It was
strong, it would not break, it would not give way. He tried working at the
knots. His fingers were clumsy, they had begun shaking.

He raised his head, breathing heavily, to ask for the scissors. Alfonso, his
youngest boy, was to one side of him with the scissors ready.

Nana Emilia and her eldest girl who had long returned from the kitchen
were watching the proceedings quietly.

One swift movement with the scissors, snip! and the bundle was loose.
Turning to Nana Emilia, Mr. Angeles joyfully cried: “These are the mats,
Miling.” Mr. Angeles picked up the topmost mat in the bundle.
“This, I believe, is yours, Miling.”

Nana Emilia stepped forward to the light, wiping her still moist hands
against the folds of her skirt, and with a strange young shyness received
the mat. The children watched the spectacle silently and then broke into
delighted, though a little self-conscious, laughter. Nana Emilia unfolded
the mat without a word. It was a beautiful mat: to her mind, even more
beautiful than the one she received from her mother on her wedding.
There was a name in the very center of it: EMILIA. The letters were large,
done in green. Flowers–cadena-de-amor–were woven in and out among
the letters. The border was a long winding twig of cadena-de-amor.

The children stood about the spreading mat. The air was punctuated by
their breathless exclamations of delight.

“It is beautiful, Jaime; it is beautiful!” Nana Emilia’s voice broke, and she
could not say any more. “And this, I know, is my own,” said Mr. Angeles
of the next mat in the bundle. The mat was rather simply decorated, the
design almost austere, and the only colors used were purple and gold. The
letters of the name Jaime were in purple.

“And this, for your, Marcelina.”

Marcelina was the oldest child. She had always thought her name too long;
it had been one of her worries with regard to the mat. “How on earth are
they going to weave all of the letters of my name into my mat?” she had
asked of almost everyone in the family. Now it delighted her to see her
whole name spelled out on the mat, even if the letters were a little small.
Besides, there was a device above her name which pleased Marcelina very
much. It was in the form of a lyre, finely done in three colors. Marcelina
was a student of music and was quite a proficient pianist.

“And this is for you, José.”

José was the second child. He was a medical student already in the third
year of medical school. Over his name the symbol of Aesculapius was
woven into the mat.

“You are not to use this mat until the year of your internship,” Mr. Angeles
was saying. “This is yours, Antonia.”

“And this is yours, Juan.” “And this is yours, Jesus.”

Mat after mat was unfolded. On each of the children’s mats there was
somehow an appropriate device.

At least all the children had been shown their individual mats. The air was
filled with their excited talk, and through it all Mr. Angeles was saying over
and over again in his deep voice:

“You are not to use these mats until you go to the University.”
Then Nana Emilia noticed bewilderingly that there were some more mats
remaining to be unfolded. “But Jaime,” Nana Emilia said, wondering, with
evident repudiation, “there are some more mats.”

Only Mr. Angeles seemed to have heard Nana Emilia’s words. He suddenly
stopped talking, as if he had been jerked away from a pleasant fantasy. A
puzzled, reminiscent look came into his eyes, superseding the deep and
quiet delight that had been briefly there, and when he spoke his voice was
different.

“Yes, Emilia,” said Mr. Angeles, “There are three more mats to unfold. The
others who aren’t here…” Nana Emilia caught her breath; there was a
swift constriction in her throat; her face paled and she could not say
anything.

The self-centered talk of the children also died. There was a silence as Mr.
Angeles picked up the first of the remaining mats and began slowly
unfolding it.

The mat was almost as austere in design as Mr. Angeles’ own, and it had
a name. There was no symbol or device above the name; only a blank
space, emptiness.

The children knew the name. But somehow the name, the letters spelling
the name, seemed strange to them.

Then Nana Emilia found her voice.

“You know, Jaime, you didn’t have to,” Nana Emilia said, her voice hurt
and surely frightened.

Mr. Angeles held his tears back; there was something swift and savage in
the movement.

“Do you think I’d forgotten? Do you think I had forgotten them? Do you
think I could forget them? “This is for you, Josefina!

“And this is for you, Victoria! “And this is for you, Concepcion.”

Mr. Angeles called the names rather than uttered them.

“Don’t, Jaime, please don’t,” was all that Nana Emilia managed to say.
“Is it fair to forget them? Would it be just to disregard them?” Mr. Angeles
demanded rather than asked.

His voice had risen shrill, almost hysterical; it was also stern and sad, and
somehow vindictive. Mr. Angeles had spoken almost as if he were a
stranger.

Also, he had spoken as if from a deep, grudgingly-silent, long-bewildered

sorrow.

The children heard the words exploding in the silence. They wanted to
turn away and not see the face of their father. But they could neither
move nor look away; his eyes held them, his voice held them where they
were. They seemed rooted to the spot.

Nana Emilia shivered once or twice, bowed her head, gripped her clasped
hands between her thighs. There was a terrible hush. The remaining mats
were unfolded in silence. The names which were with infinite slowness
revealed, seemed strange and stranger still; the colors not bright but
deathly dull; the separate letters, spelling out the names of the dead
among them, did not seem to glow or shine with a festive sheen as did the
other living names.