The bull loped down the trail and the wheels hit a bump—a root of a tree. Briefly their arms touched.
“Why did you not want them to come along?” he asked afterward. The village was well behind them, just a line of madre de cacao trees.
She turned to him, her face determined. “I told you I would bury him anywhere. That is why it is just the two of us. Over there, at the bend of the river where An-no came upon us, beyond the clump of bamboo—no one can see us dig the grave there.”
“But why there?” Istak asked, surprised. “It is not done that way, you know that.”
“It was what he wanted. He knew he was going to die. Bury me, he said, where there’s water—the river, the sea. Any place where there is water, for water is life, too. Do you understand? And when we have buried him, then I will go. Far away to where his people are so that I can tell them. You will not even remember me then.”
“But I will remember you,” Istak said. He wanted to add, “always,” but he held back. “You cannot travel by yourself now. You know how it is—by land, even by sea—the way is very dangerous. Unless you have companions. You know what I mean.”
She nodded, not as if to acknowledge the truth of what he said but as if to accept the sorrow which she must bear. “But what can they steal from me?” she asked, expecting no answer.
Istak did not reply. “You can stay with us,” he said much later. If she left, there would be peace in their household; the ill wind that his mother had prophesied would not blow their way. And yet, he needed to see her again. Banish the omens then. Why should he believe them? Did he not trust in Someone who bestowed grace on men and saw them safely through their journeys?
They rode in silence. The sun edged up the sky and dust swirled around them as the bull continued its even pace. In a while, the trail dropped into the wide delta of the river, and all around them, the sprouts of cogon grew lush and tall, and farther down, the earth had become sandy. Stones littered the way—some of them boulders that had slid down from the mountains together with dead, uprooted trees when the heavy rains fell in July. Dalin looked around her.
“This will do,” she said, pointing to a spot surrounded by tall grass. Istak drew the reins and the bull stopped. They got down and Dalin unhitched the cart, then tethered the animal to a sprout of cogon and gave it some hay. She got a spade and a hoe from the cart and started digging. Istak took a spade and worked at the other end, the blade sinking quickly into the sandy loam. Soon, the hole was deep, up to their waists, and Istak clambered up, his body dripping with sweat. Dalin, too, was tired and her face was damp with sweat. They had worked in silence.
Questions cluttered his mind. Did she really love the old man? Why should she condemn him to hell? It was so easy to ignore a dying man’s wish and do what was right. Could it be that she herself did not believe in God? And why should she? If God was just, the suffering she had gone through would not have happened. But to such questions, of course, Padre Jose had an explanation—the nature of suffering, the necessity for it, for faith was founded on it, and man would suffer as Christ did. In pain was man’s redemption.
He offered her his hand and helped her out of the narrow pit. Her grasp was firm and warm and her hands were callused like a farmer’s. “You are very tired; you have worked very hard,” he told her.
She smiled, and in the sunlight her teeth were white and even; she did not chew betel nut or smoke, as did many village women, even when they were still young. They hauled the pallet out of the cart; it was heavy and Istak marveled at her strength. He sharpened two lengths of bamboo, then drove the stakes into the ground on both sides of the pit. He tied two lengths of rope then laid the ropes over the grave. They eased the pallet over the ropes and lowered it slowly till it rested snugly at the bottom. Istak intoned the ritual prayer: Tibi Domine commendamus animam famuli, tui, ut defunctum saeculo, tibi vivat …
Beyond the river, from the direction of the sea, the wind careened toward them with the smell of burnt fields. Istak started shoveling back the earth. This was the end, this was the end, and Dalin crumpled on her knees and cried silently at first, then she took a deep breath, and softly, as if in a whisper so that her voice would not travel, she started the wail of the widow.
Ay, I am now alone,
cover to the pot,
useless without you.
What have you left,
salt on my lips,
darkness in my mind.
Why now should I live,
with no blood in my veins,
no breath in my lungs.
Ay, I am now alone.
Istak continued shoveling the earth till a mound formed over the grave. Dalin finally rose. Her eyes were clear; she had no more tears. With her hands, she helped smooth the mound. And the rest of the earth they spread out to mix with the sand so that it would look level, not a grave but some spot where, perhaps, someone had dug up an old pine tree trunk to bring home as kindling wood. The tall grass was not disturbed; it would only be by accident that some boy would stray here, adventuring in this wasteland, and even then, he would not bother wondering what lay beneath this mound. The rains would soon come, grass would sprout even taller, and the flesh of the dead would feed those new roots.
If he returned home, he would have to wash his feet with warm water in the earthen pot laid at the foot of the stairs to cleanse his body and protect the house from the wandering ghost. There might be no such water waiting for him, so Istak said he would go to the river to bathe himself instead. He asked if she wanted to join him and she nodded. He sought privacy behind a screen of grass, where he stripped. Cupping his genitals with his hand he waded into the water and immersed himself quickly. The water was waist-deep, a soothing coolness in the heat. Somewhere, behind some tall reeds, Dalin was splashing. Like all the women who bathed in the river, she did not take off her clothes. Her wet chemise would now be clinging to her body, outlining her shoulders, her breasts. He had reproached himself for such lascivious thoughts—very disturbing but pleasurable—many times in the past, particularly when he conducted those lessons for Capitán Berong’s pretty daughters. The delicious yet forbidden urge would ride down his whole being and flood him with warmth. He was past twenty and still a virgin. For how much longer? When would he finally know a woman?
He let the feeling subside, and after a while, he rose from the water, and cupping his limp manhood in his palm again, he hurried to the tall grass and, still dripping, put on his clothes, which were damp with sweat. He waited till Dalin called out to him that she was ready.
When he returned to the cart, it was still unhitched. In the shade of a camachile tree, Dalin had already laid on the stubby grass a palm-leaf mat with their food—chunks of leftover rice that she had cooked the night before, scraps of salted meat cooked in vinegar, salt, and oil, and small peanut cakes. Her hair was loose and wet and she looked even younger.
“Will you pray the nine-day novena by yourself and keep the year of mourning?” he asked.
She nodded. “Everything else that must be done I will do.”
When they were through eating, she gathered the leftovers carefully and placed the pots back in the cart. “Please,” she reminded him. “If they ask …”
He nodded. He did not want to lie but he had to.
“I will leave you at the fork of the road,” she said. “I will travel only in the day. At night, I will try to find a place where I can be safe. Then when I reach the sea, I will sell this cart and bull and return home by boat.”
“You are very brave.”
“I wish I had more knowledge,” she said. “Not just writing my name and counting. I wish I had a little of what you know.”
“Who told you about me? I am just a farmer.”
“Your brother,” she said. “On the way to your village last night he spoke about you, how learned you are and how you should be in Vigan, or even Manila.”
“There are people who cannot even write their names,” Istak said. “But t
hey are wiser than most who can read.” He turned to her; her skin, freshly scrubbed, was smooth and clear. She was really no more than eighteen—he could see that clearly now.
She bowed and said softly, “I am ignorant, I know.” Then she turned to him, pride in her eyes. “But at least I can write my name.”
“That is good, a beginning,” Istak said quickly. “I was thinking, here in our village many cannot read. I can be a teacher. The catón. And the neighbors will pay not with money but with grain.”
“Is that what you are planning to do?”
“Yes, but I’ll farm, too.”
“What was it like living with a priest?” she asked.
“It was not easy,” he explained. “My time was well divided between my chores and my efforts to improve myself. The work was tiring, too—cleaning the kumbento, chopping firewood, looking after the horses, six of them. The easier tasks, keeping the files, the registry of births, marriages, deaths. And after that, the lessons the old priest gave—science, some botany …” He realized quickly that she did not understand.
Istak turned away as they came creeping back—memories of all those years, wasted now. When he entered Padre Jose’s room for the first time, he was awed by the old books all over the place, leather bound, some of them with gilt edges. Before the old priest had selected him to be a sacristan, all that he knew was the church itself—how massive it was, its walls thick and impregnable, the wood in the sacristy and the kumbento the best that could be dragged from the mountains. Portions of the kumbento were roofed with tile, but the church itself was roofed with galvanized iron, which had rusted in parts.
As a child, he had believed that when huge buildings or churches were built, a fearsome creature called Komaw would kidnap children, kill them, and spill their blood into the foundation diggings so that the buildings would be so blessed they would last a thousand years and those constructing them would not be injured. Surely, it must have taken pails of blood to make this church endure. He had wanted to ask the priest but never dared, for Padre Jose, Istak learned later, was skeptical about the many miracles the other churches claimed and had a surfeit of, a skepticism which the old priest did not voice but which Istak knew was there—in the shaking of the venerable head, in the lift of the thick eyebrows when such topics were brought to him.
The church was more than a hundred years old; he had often imagined the multitude of workers hauling those big rocks and cutting them in perfect shapes to make arches that could withstand earthquakes. He wondered why the church was built on a rise of ground on the fringes of the town—not in the middle as it was with the other churches. The church was like a fort; indeed, it was a sanctuary from Moro raids along the coast—self-sustained, with granaries, wells.
When he was new in the church, one of his chores was to toll the bells. He had delighted in climbing up to the belfry and once up there, past the dim stairway, the wind whistling through, he would scan the vista around him, and look to the far distance, to Po-on, where he came from, where time began—just a smudge of brown hidden by bamboo groves, the river that emerged out of the low hills like a trough of silver and disappeared in the narrow plain, and all around the town, the fields ready for the seed, or—as it was in November and December—a sea of shimmering gold. He would hurry down after the Angelus, the tolling of the bells still humming in his ears, and in the sacristy join the singing: Tantum ergo, tantum ergo. Then to the kitchen where, with the other boys, he helped with the cooking and setting of the table in the dining room, above it a broadcloth which was swung continuously to stir a breeze when it was warm or to drive away the flies. Here was the chipped china, the polished candelabra, the frayed gray napkins, and Padre Jose’s simple dinner of chicken broth, some vegetables, and rice that was cooked soft.
All the rooms in the kumbento and the sacristy were no longer secret; he had grown up cleaning them, learning in them the cartilla and all that Padre Jose had imparted to him—knowledge and a sense of right as well. The old priest was patient; sometimes he would surrender himself to reverie. His bushy eyebrows would lift, his gray eyes glazed, and he would then start those soliloquies—about his sister and brothers, his parents, and that sparkling whitewashed village in Andalucía where he came from, the skies that were always blue, grapes as big as chicos, the golden oranges, the sherry, and most of all, the bread his mother baked. Mail took so long, and sometimes he read to all the acolytes letters that described Spain. Once it was a mighty nation, possessing an empire that stretched across the oceans; but in the decades past, this empire had dwindled. Though Padre Jose never told him, Istak came to realize, too, that the old man joined the priesthood not so much in service to God and country, but to escape the poverty of his own village. And this was what Istak wanted to do, too, what his father and mother had hoped would happen—that he would be a priest, not just so he could flee the drudgery of the village, but because he was the eldest, he could help his brothers and all his relatives who were mired in Po-on.
But the priestly life was not one of ease; even in his old age, Padre Jose worked hard, tending to the people, reaching those sitios where the Ilokanos seldom went, across Tirad to the land of the Bagos where they could be killed, their heads chopped off to decorate some heathen’s house. Padre Jose had prided himself on his order. “We are builders, Eustaquio; above all else, not just of buildings and churches, but of men. We will go wherever there are souls to rescue.” He would tell them then of Saint Augustine, of the first Augustinian in the country, Padre Rada. Padre Jose, without any family, had taken on a bigger one, not just the order to which he belonged, but the Ilokanos, whom he had grown to love.
Can one really love a people? And why not a village? A family—or even a woman? It had all become so remote, Istak’s discovery of his manhood and the desires that had shamed him once and at the same time warmed him to the pleasure that he would surely forgo if he became a priest. She was the eldest of Capitán Berong’s daughters—Carmencita, sixteen and already full-breasted, with flesh aching to be caressed beneath her long skirt. Just looking at her made him feel that all the beauty there was to behold in the world was in those red lips, the pert nose, and the cheeks that shone. Her two younger sisters—Filomena, fifteen, and Angela, fourteen—they were beautiful, too, but not as Carmencita was. They were not bright but they were all clever, and it was not difficult teaching them what he knew, a bit of history, arithmetic—and none of the homemaking arts that all women of high birth such as they would learn in the school in Vigan. It would all be wasted, of course, for Carmencita was just waiting for the right suitor to come to her father’s door so she could be married off to settle in some Ilokano town as mistress of a big stone house.
The sisters came to the convent in the afternoon, and stayed till the Angelus, when they went down the wide churchyard and the street, bringing with them their nubile laughter, and with Carmencita a presence that often was a challenge and a tease, for at sixteen, she knew she was desirable and if she wanted to, she could command men to do her bidding. He would have done so if only he had not been just a farm boy from Po-on. He believed then—as the old priest had taught him to believe—that with knowledge, righteousness, and faith in the Almighty, he would open the gates of Heaven to his countrymen, benighted as they were. But probing his thoughts, his own being, he had felt so small and worthless, for he reached the conclusion that, above all, with the priesthood, he would be able to rise from Po-on, and, perhaps, bring up with him his parents and brothers as well.
“You will not have a woman then,” Carmencita had told him pointedly. They were in the room behind the sacristy, a wide room with walls of thick coral stone and a floor of earthen tile. Outside, in the shaded patio, her younger sisters were playing patintero, while upstairs, Padre Jose was fast asleep, one of the younger acolytes—his arms perhaps already aching—pulling at the huge cloth fan that dangled from the ceiling to ward off the strangling heat of a March afternoon.
What would it matter if he would n
ever know a woman? “If I become a priest, señorita,” he said diffidently, “but that is not for me to say.”
She pouted.
He started the lesson again: “There are really only so many elements on earth. Some are metals—”
“I don’t want to know about elements,” Carmencita said, bending down again to examine her right foot, visible below the hem of her white cotton skirt. Again, he could see the white mounds of her breasts and yes, his heart thumped—the small pink nipples. She straightened up immediately and caught him, and now, the knowing smile.
“Am I beautiful, Eustaquio?”
He could not answer; the blood rushed to his head, to his limbs, burning him, imprinting in his mind that image of her bosom. How shapely were the legs beneath that skirt? The hips?
“Well, are you not going to tell me?”
His throat was parched, “Yes, señorita,” he croaked. “You are beautiful.”
“My foot,” she said gazing at him, witch eyes beckoning while he seemed to sway. “Will you do me a favor? I twisted it this morning. Do you know how to massage a sprain? Weren’t you taught something like that, too?”
He shook his head.
“Please massage it,” she said, suddenly thrusting her right foot forward, baring a white, smooth leg up to the knee.
When he did not move, she repeated, “Please …”
He moved toward her as if in a daze, and then knelt. With trembling hands, he held her right foot and slowly started to massage it.
“Higher up the leg,” she said, her voice bright with pleasure. The touch of her flesh kindled in him this want so intense, so deep, it stirred him immediately. When she finally said enough, he still knelt, ashamed to rise knowing that she would see what she had done to him, the proclamation of his manhood.
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