Trining stretched her hand out. Her voice was composed and clear. “You are cold,” she said. Indeed a breeze had sprung in through the smashed windows. “Lie beside me,” she said. He looked at her face again in the soft dark and listened to the rattle of gunfire in town, then he pulled the sheet over her, leaving her pallid face and her arms, limp at her sides, uncovered. He lay beside her, and as he did so she closed her eyes and only her breathing, quiet and measured, assured him that she was still alive. His hand went under the sheet and passed over her breast, over the wound. Her skin was warm, and there was no trace of wetness around the bandage.
So this was how it would end, in the cold night, with his brow moist with sweat, his wife dying beside him.
Violence was bearing down upon him and on this house, which his grandfather had helped to build. There was no town then, no main street—just a rise of ground covered with shrubs and trees strangled by vines. The shrubs and the trees were all burned by his grandfather and his grandfather’s people. They had chanced upon this land—away from the harried coastal strip in the Ilokos, from where they had migrated—and they helped build this house, this room, where he now waited.
It was quiet again. Cicadas complained in the drenched acacias in the yard, and a dog barked in the street. He turned on his side and gazed at his wife’s quiet face. Her eyes were still closed, and remembering her pain, he stifled the urge to touch her, to wake her up if she was asleep, to disturb her. Quietly he stood up and went to the window. Beyond the moss-covered wall and the asphalted camino provincial lay the black fields of Rosales. Below, in the garden, were tumbled pots of dahlias and roses that Trining had tended. The shattered glass crunched at his feet as he moved away from the window. He turned the bronze latch of the door to the azotea and peered out. Nothing stirred there. He stepped out and leaned on the iron pergola, to which a screen of bridal bouquet clung, its small white blossoms, like his light blue pajamas, distinct in the black. The town could clearly be seen from this vantage, and in some sections of it flames licked at the sky, red throbbing hues that melted into the darkness. Portions of the town were burning, maybe the municipio or his father’s accesorias. From this distance the destruction seemed beautiful. It was as if he was in Sipnget again. He remembered one early twilight when he and his grandfather were setting the yellowed grass afire. He had thrilled then to the crackling of the flames as they enveloped the field so quickly. He had to run, shaking off wisps of warm ash that had swirled up with the flames, then drifted down and covered him—and everything.
The rain at dusk had washed the azotea, and portions of the tile-work were glazed with water. In the reflection the flames, bright as sunset, painted the bowl of darkness above. Now the crackle of burning wood and the hiss of flames reached him and he closed the azotea door and went back to the room.
He bent over Trining and listened again to her breathing. It was even and slow, and happiness lifted him, away from this room and its portents. We are alone now, the two of us. You should not be destroyed, you should live—it is I who should go. You have a great love for life, your youth is fresh, and it will be wasted. Forgive me for giving you not the future but this.
This was the other violence—the mind that was warped, the peace that was shattered and could not be mended. He had seen and known the other kind, seen the mutilated bodies, the clean bullet holes through which life had escaped, the sightless eyes that could no longer guide one along the path of vengeance. He had stood before that unmarked grave in Sipnget—and what had that violence done to him? It had not made him weep. It had not made him strong. He had continued to speak, but to himself alone, and they understood him not, not his father or his tenants—they never knew what it was that he really wanted to say, whether in his poetry or in his prose, what it was that made him procrastinate. Was it really love that moved him? What is the truth that one must believe in now? Passion could well be evil. Logic, then, is what lasts. It cannot be destroyed—like facts, like numbers, like history. Perhaps the answer was in religion and God—how he sought it and how he followed it, through a long and perilous journey, along crooked paths, and in the process, God, how he had lived and yet not loved! If he did love, Ester would not be dead, or Grandfather—and now Trining.
He thought of writing a letter again, but to whom would he address it? Dear Trining, dear world, dear son, who will inherit this rubble: what will happen to us is an indictment against our time. We have everything and nothing. We die in peace, yet in anger. We were born to a world rotten with evil, although we all pledged ourselves to what was good. We spoke softly, but our hands were rough and we lived long and life shortchanged us.
If I live through this, dear wife, dear son, please remember it was not my intention to hurt or to destroy, but I have done these nonetheless. The spring was clear, but time had muddied it. I hate ugliness, but it is part of me, perhaps because it is also part of birth—that miraculous happening is preceded by agony, as is the dawn by the dark, impalpable night.
Words, words—nothing but words. What am I doing? Playing with words when life is about to ebb from her. I must at least prove to myself that I am not a lamb being led to the slaughter, that I made my choice long ago and I must now protect this choice. He went to his father’s room, beyond the long, silent hall. He knew every piece of furniture in it, and he ransacked the glass-paneled case by the window. The gun was there, all right, where he had returned it when Santos had urged him to carry it—and a cartridge box, too. He weighed it in his hand and deftly flipped its chamber open. It was fully loaded.
He was ready now, and he went back to Trining, the gun at his hip, the cartridge box in his hand. She was sitting on the bed. He went to her and told her to lie down and not move. “When it is light, the soldiers will come. Then it will be safe and we can return to the city.”
“You have told me that—”
“But it is true, it is true!”
“No.” Her voice was soft but firm. “I am going to die, and you will, too, if you don’t escape now. I have thought about it, my husband. It is better that you live. You cannot escape if you carry me—you will be slow, you will be spotted, and they will kill you. Please go now while you still can. You can leave by the back.”
He shook his head. Her hands reached out to him, and he embraced her. She had become cold. She sank back into the bed, and although he could not see her eyes as she turned away from him, he knew she was crying.
“Do not cry,” he said, holding her close. “I cannot leave you. I will die first.”
“My husband, my Luis, we cannot fight,” she told him. It was the first time she admitted the truth about themselves. Tenderly he kissed her again. “What is going to happen to you?” she asked.
As if it still mattered, when long ago the primeval sore had claimed him—and yet here she was, like the others who called him friend, worrying about him. He went to the window. The fires had now become wilder, as if the whole center of the town, the market, were now engulfed in flames.
“You can escape. It is so simple,” she insisted behind him.
He went back to her. “One thing is sure,” he said. “I will not leave you. Why should I? This is the least that I can do for you, and this I did not do for the others.”
“Do not talk like that.”
“It was so easy to hate—”
“It was not hate,” she said, reproaching him softly. “Its other side is love.”
Luis laughed drily. “The difference is now very hard to draw, although everything started out so pure. Look at it this way—the muddy lowland river gushes out of clear springs in the mountains. The world began with two sinless people.”
“Don’t talk like that,” she said, pressing his hand to her breast.
“I am sorry,” he said, bending over and caressing her hair. It smelled of freshness and life. “There is an old saying: In vino, Veritas—in wine, truth. I think it should be changed to: In violence, truth. The truth now, my dear wife, is that I have sinned, n
ot just against all those whom I loved, including you, but most important, against Mother and all that she was. I forsook her, but I will not forsake you now. She was everything—Mother—the grace and the patience of the earth. How she sacrificed for me, but what did I do for her? No, I will not leave you.”
It was as if he had intoned an ancient prayer, the oracíon that warded off evil, for the great weight on his chest seemed lifted at last. He had decided that this was his fort, that they must not touch her, the contemptible mob. He heard her sigh, and bending over her, he touched the bandage on her breast. It was wet and warm, and fear rushed back, massive and all-engulfing, but he tried to ward it off, speaking softly: “What do you feel? God, do not leave me. You cannot leave me,” he cried, holding her tightly, and he glanced at her face, but her eyes were closed. “My wife, do not leave me. There are just the two of us now—just the two of us.”
“Luis.” It was a soft, gurgling sound that escaped from her lips, then she was limp, and although her face was still warm, he knew that she was dead. He held her more tightly now, sobbing loudly as he had never cried before, for this was the girl he had grown up with, who knew him as no woman had ever known him, and she was dead. He kissed her lingeringly on the lips, which were still warm, then slowly he laid her down, folded her hands neatly on her breast, smoothed out her hair, and gazed at her face, lighted now by the glow of the fire and quiet in repose.
He went out into the hall. Near the window the bronze statue of the farmer with a plow gleamed in the light of the burning town. There was a shuffle of feet in the street below, raucous peasant voices and the snort of jeeps. He turned to the azotea, and through the broken glass windows, the town—all of it—seemed ablaze. The sky was clear but scabbed with clouds. The air was cool. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
Would death hurt? The knowledge would be meaningless, but even then he wanted to know how it would be in that last moment when that wakeless sleep would come at a time when all his faculties were working—and it was just as well, for there would be no real life in old age when the bones would have become brittle, the mind senile, and the flesh shorn of its nerves.
Down the street the howling of dogs increased. The shuffle of feet on the asphalt had heightened. Like him, they were young—these peasants, riffraff, the aimless generation, which had finally found something to latch on to. These were the young who would always be marched off to a tree and hanged, the pawns who must answer always for their father’s dementia. And the young could do nothing really but accept or forget, as he, too, must now accept.
The shuffling of feet had ceased. The voices below the house were a murmur. They were there, waiting, waiting. It would be simpler if he went to the window and shouted his defiance at them, but that would be foolhardy. It pained him to use the gun, for he had never used one before, never aimed at any man, although as a boy he had gone hunting in the delta with his father, and during the war he had fingered captured Japanese rifles—but to grip a gun and point it at another human being was to play God, to pass irrevocable judgment. He crouched below the statue of the farmer with a plow, the cartridge box on the floor before him. The base of the statue was wood, but it was thick molave and it would give him some measure of protection at least. Protection? What high wall, what bastion could protect him now from this primeval anger that had been released? Yet it was an anger that he had shared and fed on, because he believed in it, because it represented that bleak and trackless waste from which he had come. But this anger was not a mover or a compulsion. It was some effete luxury that titillated the mind and adorned his prose, his poetry, as frills adorn a curtain.
Now this anger had come to claim him, and strangely aware of this, he felt no impulse to reject it. He no longer felt rancor for his father nor for Dantes, nothing but an overwhelming indifference. Now he was simply tired.
What a waste—the thought crossed his mind: If I should live longer and if there still be plenty of potent chemistry in this flesh, I would be like that son I leave behind. I would only bring rot to those whose lives I will touch. Better, then, to be exorcised from this land, better to succumb finally to the avenging fires that I have fanned. What have I known that would convince me that life has meaning? My wife, the dearly beloved life and youth that she gave up for me; the beautiful world of Sipnget, the mornings washed with dew; Mother’s touch … If I die tonight, it will be just a physical death, for I have long since died and only memory has framed me, here where I have trod, and searched and searched but found nothing.
Dominiko-Kai
Shibuya, June 29, 1972
AFTERWORD
SELF AND NATION
IN LITERATURE
Many years back, a group of Ilokano writers from central and northern Luzon invited me to talk at a workshop they had set up in my hometown, Rosales, Pangasinan. They wanted me, with my background as literary editor and novelist, to clarify some of the problems of craft that had been bedeviling them. I did not think it was a difficult assignment; I had done some writing in my own language several years back but had stopped and devoted myself to English, as demanded by my job.
A few words about Ilokano: it is spoken today by some fifteen million Filipinos in northern Luzon and in Mindanao. In Hawaii, the majority of the citizens of Philippine ancestry are Ilokanos, which is perhaps why Marcos elected Honolulu as his place of exile. We are an adventurous people, hardy and given to thrift and perseverance. We are supposedly endowed with carabao patience and cast-iron stomachs, but more than these ethnic idiosyncracies, our language is very precise and sensual, and in the back of my mind I had hoped that I could enrich my writing in English by extracting from my native Ilokano the same nuances and musicality that Richard Llewelyn drew from his native Welsh or, on a much more magnificent scale, James Joyce, from Irish. In fact, one Filipino writer with an Ilokano background had done this successfully: the late Manuel Arguilla. He flavored his stories with the earthiness, the vivid color, and the vitality of Ilokano. Had the Japanese not killed him, his work would have fully flowered and would have brought about—at least for our writers—a deeper appreciation of their native languages—all ninety of them—and the richness they could have imparted to English.
But this is digression; I had meant to say that I was going back to my hometown after many years of living in Manila and elsewhere in Asia. I relished going home; all the remembered words came alive again. I could understand everything that was said in Ilokano, including the archaic expressions and the poetry bubbling all over the place. Slowly I came to realize that I had missed a lot.
Then it was my turn to speak. I started in my own language, but after the first phrases of elaborate greeting, I found myself fumbling, groping for words. The ideas were crystal-clear, but I could not express them and I strained with an expression that had become alien to me. In the end, I had to give up Ilokano and speak in English. I had never felt as I felt then, the terrible sense of inadequacy and helplessness.
They all understood me, of course, for English is one of our three official languages, but the experience humbled me and impinged upon me the fact that, perhaps, I cannot go home again.
I am sure that this experience can be duplicated easily in any part of the world by those individuals like myself who have become urbanized. I am sure that many of us in Asia have raised questions that probe deep into the very core of our personalities and even into the very purpose of our inconsequential lives.
This is not just the result of our history but the complexity of the Philippines itself. Although Tagalog, the national language, can be understood in almost every part of the country now, the language of science and culture, of government and the elite, continues to be English. With a population of seventy million, a third of our people is capable of communication of sorts in English, a fact that has been embroidered into the dubious statistic that we are the third-largest English-speaking country in the world.
Theoretically, the Philippines is ripe for the media revolution, and as
a publisher, I should now be printing thousands of books for this mass market. But we do not read, and most of our people are more comfortable with comic books and TV. Moreover, our low per capita income seems to indicate that a Filipino will take care of his stomach first before he attends to food for the mind. And who can blame him?
What, then, is the future for English? As the lingua franca of the region, it will continue well into the future. But to modernize, we have to develop our own language even, perhaps, at the cost of ignoring altogether our other languages. In promoting this national language, we will also give a genuine cultural base for nationalism. This is no longer an option; it has become a compulsion.
It is perhaps too premature to say that our literature in English may probably decline. This is what happened to the prose and poetry in Spanish written in the 1880s and up to the early 1920s. Even the novels of José Rizal, our national hero, are now seldom read in their original Spanish, although they are required reading in English translation in our schools. Our Spanish poets Fernando Ma. Guerrero and José Corazon de Jesus are unappreciated except by scholars in search of footnotes. Indeed, the literary hiatus between our Spanish past and the American era is wide and final, and Spanish as a literary language in the Philippines is dead. This may well be the price we have to pay so that a national literature will evolve, one that will be read by all our people.
The shift to Tagalog, however, is slow. It could be hastened, but there is continuing opposition by Tagalog chauvinists who refuse to accept the first verity of language, that of communication. Some of these oppositionists wield influence in government and have vested interests as teachers or as bureaucrats; some still insist on the use of archaic Tagalog, on a complicated grammar that favors coinage of words when there are equivalents in popular use. They use aklat (“book”) when everybody uses the Spanish libro.
Perhaps it is time that the Institute of National Language be led and staffed by non-Tagalogs so that the grafting to the national lexicon of non-Tagalog words that are widely used could be hastened. By provoking non-Tagalogs to opt for their own languages in opposition to Tagalog, by making language a vehicle for Tagalog chauvinism, the issue of language, which is central to Philippine development, has been derailed, and what is worse, instead of unifying Filipinos, it has sorely divided us. The worst enemies of Filipino nationalism, therefore, may be found in the Institute of National Language, among them the late Lope K. Santos, who forced upon the school system his balarilà (“grammar,” in Tagalog).
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