I know where the Totonoguen links up with the Andolan creek and how this new river joins the Agno, which never dries even in the years of drought. I have swum in the Agno itself, brought home from its sandy bottom the pieces of pine washed down from the mountains, and these we have splintered to use as kindling wood.
I left Rosales a long time ago; I was grieving then, but they told me I was lucky because I had no quarrel with anyone, that I had everything to look forward to, and that when it would be time for me to return, things would be so changed I would not recognize anything anymore.
Cousin Marcelo was particularly emphatic on that sad, memorable day; I had been away only a year then, and nothing, nothing had changed, and yet he said, “Did you notice that a change has come upon the town? Look at the faces of people—there’s hope there, in spite of everything. I tell you, you will forget what happened to your father, and more important, you will forget the past. Even now, people have forgotten that a year has passed and people died, not by ones and twos but by the hundreds. Think of it. You will remember only what is important.”
But what is important? I looked around me, at the wide, parched plaza, the shriveled people, the balete tree. All will be the same. I refused to believe that people changed merely because some holocaust had coursed through their lives. They will still know happiness as I had known it, they will still talk of pleasant hours as they have lived them. It is going to be this way with me.
“You will not be coming back until you’ve finished college then?” Cousin Marcelo asked.
He was past thirty, and he wore his hair unduly long at a time when it was not fashionable to do so. “I don’t know,” I told him. “I will return, perhaps, on the Day of the Dead, to visit them. And if I cannot come, you will look after them, won’t you?”
It was not necessary for me to have told him thus; he held my hand and pressed it. “Yes,” he said, trying to smile.
It did not take me long to pack, for I was leaving many things behind. Sepa, our cook, had found some of my old books and had brought them in; I picked out one—the Bible—and tucked it in with my clothes. There was still time to look around, to wander around the town, but there was nothing for me to see, no one to visit. I gazed around my room; the hardwood narra floor shone from constant polishing, sometimes with banana leaves, sometimes with coconut meat after the milk had been squeezed. My mementoes were everywhere—the air rifle Cousin Marcelo bought for me, the stuffed squirrel Tio Benito brought home from America. The photographs on the wall were starting to brown—me in a white sailor suit when I had my First Communion, my Cousin Pedring and Clarissa when they were married. And there was a big one—dusty yellow with years although all the faces were still very clear as if the picture had been taken only yesterday but it was years ago when we were mourning Grandfather’s death. Indeed, here was the entire clan—my relatives, uncles and aunts, the servants, too, and the old, faithful people who had served our household.
I remembered the crowd in the yard, the long table under the balete tree laden with pancit, dinardaraan, and basi for all the servants and tenants who had come to pay their respects to Grandfather’s memory.
In Rosales as in many other Ilokano towns of northern and central Luzon, the ninth day of the burial of the dead is celebrated with dining and drinking, depending on the finances of the bereaved family. We call the feast the pasiam—meaning “for the ninth.” On this day, those who are not directly related to the deceased may stop wearing the black clothes of mourning, but not the direct descendants—the children and grandchildren.
A host of relatives had descended upon us, cousins to the third degree whom I’d never seen before, aunts and uncles from Manila, and grown-up nephews and nieces who called me Tio with all the respect that the name demands although I still wore short pants. They crowded the house and spilled out into the yard, and some of the menfolk and the entourage of servants had to sleep in the storehouse, where the grain and the corn in jute sacks were piled high. During the last nine days that preceded the pasiam, every evening at seven a novena was held in the house. Tomas, the old acolyte, had presided over this, singing in a loud, cracked voice “Ora pro nobis” after each of the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. Although the neighbors and the servants prayed with us, we barely filled a corner of the hall. But on the pasiam, it was the parish priest himself, Padre Andong, who led the prayers and Tomas—past sixty and a little hard of hearing—bungled as usual his answers as acolyte. The living room could hardly hold all the members of the clan and the servants, and most of the neighbors had to pray in the adjoining room and in the azotea.
After Padre Andong had sprinkled holy water on the assemblage, our relatives who were not related directly to Grandfather took off their black mourning clothes, but we who were direct descendants still wore black bands on our sleeves or wore black for another year, after which the period of mourning would end.
At around ten in the morning, the prayers concluded, someone in the yard ignited a rocket, which swished up and exploded—the signal for the festivities to begin, for the gin and the basi to flow; it would need another minor calamity for the clan to gather, and for this occasion the town photographer was on hand. His camera, a bulky contraption, staggered him when he carried it up the stairs and posed us all at one end of the hall. “It is not bright,” he complained after he had peeped out of his red velvet shroud, so he poured some powder on a rack, told us to stand still, and at the appropriate signal sent an orange flame spurting up. For some time the smoke and the acrid odor filled the hall. It was then that Father said he would like a bigger picture, which would show part of the house, so we broke up, the cameraman bundling his huge camera again, and filed after him in one burbling procession down the stairs into the yard. There was much laughter and joking as he lined us up on one of the benches before the eating table, the morning sun blazing on our faces.
Looking about him, a bit uncomfortable perhaps in his close-necked alpaca suit, Tio Doro said aloud above the sonorous talk: “We are such a big family, why don’t we have a coat of arms like the great families during the Spanish times?”
Cousin Andring, the perennial jester, shouted: “That’s an excellent idea, Tio. I suggest that our coat of arms shows a demijohn of basi, which shall symbolize our hardiness and, of course, our pleasant disposition.”
In spite of his mother’s angry glare, Cousin Andring was unruffled, and his remark was greeted with prolonged laughter. “And we will have Tio Marcelo do the design, too,” he continued.
My relatives must have considered his second joke in bad taste, for now most of them scowled. It was not difficult to understand their reaction; Cousin Marcelo, though he was pleasant and reliable to some extent, had long been regarded as “the problem” in the family because they considered him unstable. He was the only one who greeted the reference to him with laughter.
Tio Doro was alive with ideas. “We should have someone chronicle our lives, our successes and failures.”
“Mostly the failures—particularly when there is too much gin,” Cousin Andring remarked, happy again.
Tio Doro turned around to look at his relatives, almost all of us still in identical black. Then his eyes rested on me.
“Espiridion,” he called to Father, who sat on the bench behind me. “That’s the job for your boy—he may grow up to be a writer and give us some permanence.”
The blood rushed to my head, and I glowed all over. Behind me, Father said happily, “You can depend on him to do that.”
The photographer shouted that he was ready, and everyone preened. Almost everyone. I saw them then in the shade of the balete tree—the servants, Old David, Sepa, Angel, Tio Baldo—all of them watching us and seeming left out. I turned to Father, who was straightening the creases of his white alpaca suit. “Father, couldn’t we have Sepa and all the others with us in the picture?”
He frowned at me.
“Just one,” I pleaded.
“All right,” he said, still frow
ning, then he called out to them to stand on the low benches in our rear. They hastened to their places, smiling.
Now the picture is before me. Where are they now, these familiar faces? Tio Baldo, Ludovico, and, perhaps, Angel were already dead. Others have left for places unknown—perhaps to Mindanao and the promise of new lands, perhaps to the labyrinths of Tondo and Santa Cruz, where they would work as drivers and house servants, in places where there will be little light and they, too, will be among strangers just as I am now in this blighted town. I knew this from the very beginning—that oil and water could not mix, just as Teresita had told me once.
I am also my father’s son.
CHAPTER
2
All who served us used to tell me that I was born under a dark cloud not so much because my mother died giving birth to me, but because I never saw her. She was, they said with candor and reverence, the most beautiful woman they ever saw, and whenever they would start talking about her who nourished me in her womb, I listened attentively. I would be vastly proud and at the same time feel this sense of loss and futility, and foolishly I would wish to see her even though she be but a pallid ghost.
But I never did, although she lingered in every nook of the house, among the old iron pedestals and the tarnished mirrors, in the garden she once tended, and most of all in the big and troubled room that she had shared with Father. Her portrait there, by Cousin Marcelo, the servants told me, was lifelike. I often stood before it and marveled, for in the light that came in a flood when the sash shutters were open, I could almost feel her long hair, her benign smile upon me, her oval face, her dark eyes. Her expression exuded tenderness, patience, and that virtue of compassion, of forgiveness for even the deepest hurt such as that which Father could inflict.
The painting hung before Father’s writing desk—an old narra masterpiece with a cover that slid down. Cousin Marcelo knew how to capture every nuance in a person’s face, but more than this, he had also rendered in paint my mother’s luminous skin, the very flutter of her eyelashes.
Seeing me there gazing at the picture once, Sepa said: “Don’t you ever think she was that homely; she was much prettier than that—and her hair, her beautiful hair!” Then she called me to the kitchen, and among her shining pots and pans, she told of those times when she helped my mother wash her hair with lye from straw ash, treat it with coconut oil when it was dry, and comb it slowly as if she were combing fragile threads of gold.
Sepa was past fifty and stout like a pampered sow. Like Old David, who looked after the horses, she could not read or write. She used those black, thick slippers called cochos, and she always wore the traditional Ilokano handwoven skirt and rough cotton blouse. She had served the family all her life, and she spoke to Father and me with an intimacy none of the other help ventured to imitate. “If your mother were here now—if she were only here now.”
I remember my first visit to my mother’s grave on a windy October afternoon a few days before All Saints’ Day. I was five or six years old. I was chasing dragonflies in the yard under the watchful eyes of one of the maids when Old David scooped me up in his arms and took me to the house, where Sepa gave me a good scrubbing. She dressed me in my sailor suit, and when I was ready, Father emerged from his room in a white drill suit looking as if he was going to an important feast, for his hair was neatly combed and his robust cheeks shone.
Near the family altar in the sala he picked up a bouquet of roses wrapped in palm leaves. They came from my mother’s rose garden, which Father now tended. Then, taking my hand, he led me down to the yard, where Old David was waiting for us in the calesa. The drive to the cemetery was pleasant; the afternoon was mild, and the smell of grass, the good earth, and the fields yellow with grain filled the air. The wind whistled in the bamboo groves by the side of the road, and Old David sang snatches of his favorite Ilokano song, “If You Still Doubt.”
Father was silent all the way, his eyes at the distance. The road narrowed and was now devoid of gravel; rutted in the rainy season, it was now drying up, the deep lines drawn by bull carts and sleds hardening into neat furrows. We reached the cemetery, its low stone wall shrouded by vagabond cadena de amor. The earth was carpeted in amorseco weeds, and in the empty spaces stood leafless sineguelas trees. The cemetery was busy with people painting the crosses and the slabs with white lime. At the dead end Old David stopped, jumped down, and helped us off.
We walked down a gravel path bordered with rosal, bloomless now till next June, when it would sprout white, scented flowers, to the small chapel at the center of the cemetery. It was already quite late in the afternoon, and the sun was soft on the skin. The vestiges of work were everywhere—the freshly cut grass and the splashes of whitewash on the picket fences and on the figures of plump baby angels that adorned the tombs.
Father held my hand and guided me through the narrow passageways between the tombs. We reached a lot fenced off from the rest by a low iron grill, and in its center was a narrow slab of black marble, bordered with freshly trimmed San Francisco. Father let go of my hand. He removed the palm wrap of the bouquet and placed it at the foot of the slab, then, as if his legs were suddenly knocked away from under him, he fell on his knees on the grass and I, too, compelled by some magic force, knelt beside him. When he spoke, his voice was hollow and sounded far away. “Nena, I’ve brought your son to you now that he is old enough …”
I glanced at Father in the thickening dusk; his hair was tousled by the wind, his white unbuttoned coat flapped about him, and tears streamed down his cheeks.
It was the first time I saw him cry, and I realized how much he must have loved—and still loved—her who was no more.
Ours was an old house with a steep, galvanized-iron roof grown rusty red over the years. It had unpainted wooden siding and sash windows with balustrades that could be flung open to let the breeze in when the days were hot. The ground floor was red tile, and its walls were red brick, scarred in places but whitewashed. The flooring was solid mahogany—long planks two inches thick and a foot wide—laid side by side without a single nail piercing them. When the servants scrubbed the floor, the fine grain of the wood shone.
The furniture was just as old; though some pieces were lost during the Japanese occupation, most of the bigger ones were still with us: the mirrored lockers, the steel pedestals, the marble-topped tables.
A few paintings hung in the living room—just pretty pictures done by my Cousin Marcelo. One that should not have been there was the picture of Don Vicente. The modern frame, a media cuerpo, shows Don Vicente, massive and impregnable, wearing a Panama hat, his corpulent chest almost breaking out from his tight-fitting, collarless suit. The picture hung on the wall by the big clock as a symbol, I think, of the vast authority the rich man wielded over us, particularly Father.
I could not understand then why Father worked for Don Vicente. We had enough to get by, and Father had his own lands to look after. Maybe, as Cousin Marcelo said, he did not have enough courage to leave Don Vicente, or maybe Father knew that if he ceased being close to the Great Man, there would be a hundred fawning and greedy men who would be only too glad to take on his job. This could be the reason, but I don’t think it was; Father took the job because Don Vicente trusted him and, more than that, it gave Father a sense of power such as he would never have known if he tended no more than the land and properties under his name. Once I heard him say to a tenant, “Don’t you know that I can drive you all away from your homes today, right now, if I wanted to? Where will you live? Don Vicente’s word is law, and I am that law!”
But knowing Father, his bluster seldom meant anything, for he was, I always like to believe, just and fair.
The living room, through a door at the right, led to the dining room and the kitchen, which were in a separate structure roofed with clay tile upon which weeds sprouted. At the left of the kitchen, which was Sepa’s domain, was a stone azotea that stretched to the wing of the house including the living room. On warm evenings, when th
e moon bloomed over the town, it was Father’s haunt and mine.
The wide yard—all the way up to the storehouse roofed and walled with galvanized-iron sheets, too—was not grassy like the plaza. The earth was bare and packed tight and clean with carabao dung but for the green patch of garden planted with roses, azucenas, and other flowering plants. Guava trees—their slender branches seldom laden with fruit—stood in the yard, and to their trunks the carabaos of the tenants were often tethered when they came during the harvest season with their bull carts. A woodshed and a stable stood near the storehouse. In all three buildings, big rodents lived, burrowing under the piles of chopped acacia boughs or in the sacks of grain.
One of the pleasant pastimes I used to enjoy as a child was to discover the alien things in the crannies of our home. I used to climb to the attic, endure the sun as it lashed on the iron roof. There, among the dust of years, I poked at old boxes that stored strange shapes and wanton objects. The place I enjoyed best, however, was Father’s room. It adjoined mine, but I seldom had freedom in it except when he was in the field during the planting and harvesting seasons looking after the hacendero’s tenants under his care as encargado and also after our own. Then I would sneak into the room, open his drawers and trunks. There was one beside his dresser that fascinated me most, because it was made of handsome and polished Chinese rosewood embedded with ivory carved into birds and bamboo. It was always locked, and though I had seen him open the other trunks, I never saw him touch this one. I heard him riding down from the stable to the street one Sunday morning, and after he had galloped toward the creek, I was in his room before the rosewood trunk. I lifted the lid, and this time, to my surprise, it was open. The biting scent of naphthalene balls assailed my nostrils. There before me, filled to the brim, were women’s things. I knew at once I had opened my mother’s wardrobe.
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