They camped that night in a shallow field flanked by bald hills. Not long ago the field was planted to rice—they could see that in the strands that stubbled the land, in the broken dikes that bordered each plot. Close by, madre de cacao trees had started to bloom and there was even a sprout of banana trees without fruit. Istak wondered what had happened to the village nearby, why the people had gone. In the lead cart, he approached the hamlet, intoning loudly, ¡Bari-bari!—the ritual incantation with which an intruder sought permission to pass unknown precincts guarded perhaps by inhospitable spirits. The houses were falling apart and weeds clambered over the bamboo fences and up the walls right onto the thinning roofs. The windows were wide open, gaping at them like sightless eyes. There was nothing inside but rotting bamboo and disheveled walls with the sun streaming in. The people did not leave anything, not even a broken pot. The houses had been abandoned for more than a year and houses with no people in them die like humans.
Ba-ac did not want to sleep in the abandoned village; it smelled of disaster, of hoary gloom, and so they moved on, farther up the valley before they would ascend the mountain.
The narrow road that slit through the jungle was slippery; grass and saplings grew wild on both sides and big trees arched above them and shut off the sun, so that although it was morning it seemed as if in this face of the mountain it was early evening. There were sudden breaks of sunlight among the trees, and birds flitted through the small frame of sky. Orchids dangled from branches, some of them in bloom, bouquets of purple and white, but they were high up and only monkeys could climb after them.
One of the children walking out front screamed in horror; he had felt an itch on his calf and when he looked, there was this black abominable thing as big as his thumb, slimy and fat, and he could not remove it.
“Leeches!” Ba-ac said. He went to the child and scraped it off with his bolo. The leech was bloody and full.
Although it had not rained that afternoon, water dripped from the trees. Around their trunks, up to the lofty branches, vines coiled like huge snakes.
It would take more than a day before they would break out into the open country again and know the sun. Istak pointed out to Dalin what they could cat, the tops of ferns which could be cleaned like bamboo shoots and cooked. No one need starve in the forest, he told her.
She asked him how he came to know so much and he said he had been in the forest beyond Tirad. Padre Jose had pointed these out to him and all the other plants that could sustain life. He showed her the fruit of the rattan vine which they could cat and that she already knew. There were other wild fruits and berries—they could all be eaten.
They stopped for their meal in a white patch of sunlight, but did not tarry. They moved on. Bit-tik and An-no were now in the front and Ba-ac was in the rear immediately behind Dalin’s cart. The last cart carried their seed rice and was heavy, so no one rode in it except Ba-ac.
The big solid wheels of wood were creaking noisily, for they had not been oiled for days. It was no longer necessary—they were not going to hide anymore or travel in the night. They had passed the Guardia Civil. Ba-ac felt safer now. A few more miles, then they would break out from the low saddle of the mountain into the plains of eastern Pangasinan.
It was Dalin who first noticed it when she looked back; the cart was following them, but Ba-ac was not in the driver’s seat. Istak called for all of them to stop. He peered inside the cart but the old man was not there either.
“Tatang! Tataaang!” he shouted. The forest echoed his voice.
“Maybe,” Dalin said, “he stopped to defecate.”
“He would have told us,” Istak said. “And he would not let the cart go ahead without him.”
He retraced the trail, shouting his father’s name. Maybe Ba-ac had slipped, or had fallen asleep and toppled off the cart. But he would have awakened and called.
The forest seemed to close inexorably on Istak; he was far from the carts and could no longer see them nor could they hear him, for he had run part of the way.
Birdcalls shrilled from his right. There would be wild boar and deer here—if only he had a chance to hunt, but he could do that only with a gun. “Tatang!” he continued screaming. Still no reply.
He should work out a system by which every man would have to look back occasionally to find out if the carts behind him were secure. He must tell them that at the next stop.
At the turn of the trail, he saw it—this python dangling from a tree, as thick as his own thigh, and it was coiled around the old man, who was no longer moving, his eyes closed as if in sleep. The reptile was tightening its coil, squeezing the life, the blood, out of Ba-ac. For a moment, Istak stood transfixed with fear. Like his brothers and all the menfolk in the caravan, he always had a bolo slung on his waist. He knew what had happened; the reptile had swung down from its coil around one of the low-hanging branches where it had waited, struck his father, then quickly strangled him. As soon as all the bones were crushed, it would swallow its victim slowly.
The python had seen him, but it did not move or relax its tenacious grip. With all the force in his weakened body and praying that he would not miss—God give this wounded arm strength!—Istak struck at the python’s body with his two hands. Immediately the coil loosened but the reptile was not dead; now it lashed around and again Istak struck at it. The shiny skin was now gashed with a deep wound, the white flesh opened, the blood started to spurt. The reptile fell on the ground in a heap, helpless, its great, slick body twisting, weaving. Again and again, with two hands Istak lashed at it, not caring where he hit it. Again and again, from each new and open wound blood spurted out. The reptile was now quivering, a dozen cuts on its long body, its head almost severed. Istak did not stop until it was still. Then he went to his father.
Ba-ac’s body was completely crushed. His bones sticking out of the shapeless shirt wet with blood. Istak sank on his knees and cried. A massive wave of weariness swept over him, drowning him.
An-no and the others found him staring blankly, the python dismembered at his feet, its innards spilled on the wet ground. They carried Ba-ac back to the cart, his body wrapped with the leaves of the anahau palm, which grew along the trail, and tied carefully with twine. They also brought back one of the carts and loaded the python onto it. Its meat was good—like chicken, the Ilokanos always said—and the women cut it up and salted it, for it would not do to dry it; the sun no longer shone regularly as in the season past. The rains were really upon them.
They buried Ba-ac at the edge of the forest. Ahead—perhaps a day or so, past the cogon-covered hills—were the plains of eastern Pangasinan at last. That night, after the prayer which he led, Istak asked his mother if they should go back to Cabugaw. “Father is gone, we need not flee from the Guardia anymore.”
“And if we returned, what will greet us? The ashes of our former homes? A land which we cannot till because it never belonged to us? I am old, my sons; it is you for whom I must live. I will go wherever you want to go.”
“I will go on,” An-no said. “Orang cannot go back. We can start a new life.”
“And you, Istak?”
Somehow, his mind was still cluttered with what Padre Jose had said, a tenuous hope that he could return to the kumbento, to the seminary in Vigan. Dalin had said that he was not a farmer and would never be one, but that he could help the farmer even if he himself never touched the handle of a plow.
“I don’t know, Mother,” he said.
“Ask Dalin,” his mother told him.
It was dusk and on a dry patch of ground they had already placed the stones which they used as stoves, and lighted the firewood. Dalin had gone to the creek down the clearing to fill the water jar. He followed her. She was crouched on the bank and had put sand inside the earthen jar and was scrubbing the insides to remove whatever moss had gathered there. Watching her, he knew that he would not leave her, that he would go with her wherever she wanted to go.
When she was through, she filled the jar with water and ro
lled a piece of cloth which she placed on her head. Istak helped her raise the jar and lift it to her head. Neatly balanced, she carried the jar without holding it although the path was slippery.
They walked up the low incline.
“Will you tell me where you want to go?” he asked.
She did not turn to him; it was difficult to do that with the jar so. “Wherever you want to,” she said.
“You must make the choice and I will follow.”
He could not see her smiling. “It is you, my husband, whom I will follow. Wherever you want to go,” she murmured.
“Tell me then, the valley?”
“I pray that we reach it with nothing setting us apart …”
“Nothing can set us apart now,” he assured her. “Tell me, what is it like there?”
“A plain as far as you can see,” she said solemnly. “And all the land you can clear. I will help you. I will work very hard beside you.”
CHAPTER
8
They did not linger in the towns in the great plain. They kept to the narrow muddy roads. In places, the constant rain had washed away the roadbed and the foundations of stone jutted out, jolting the carts as the caravan labored over them. The new towns looked scraggly and unkempt, and they did not have the stone churches or the big houses of brick that lined the main streets of the Ilokos. It also seemed to them that the Guardia were far away. Among these poor settlers, there was not much booty.
In the near horizon, the Caraballos were a wall of deep blue. They would still have three days of travel before they reached those mountains.
They brought out the salted python meat to dry whenever there was sun; the white strips were laid on flat bamboo baskets balanced atop the carts. They continued to worry about food—they had barely enough to last them through one planting season. But there was always the tobacco they could sell freely now that the monopoly had been lifted.
They met other caravans, Pangasiñenses with woven baskets and salted fish to sell. They overtook farmers who were also looking for land. They were all in a hurry to get to their destinations before the rains really fell—the siyam-siyam that would transform the plain into a vast rimless ocean of brown and the giant river, the Agno, into a rampaging sea.
At night when they bivouacked, sometimes with other settlers, while cooking their meals or just drinking an occasional coconut bowl of basi, Istak came across wisps of his recent past. A squad of Guardia Civil was stalking the caravans, asking questions about those who had come from Cabugaw. He told his brothers and uncles to avoid the other settlers, not to talk with them unless necessary. They now camped by themselves, away from other groups, even though they had also come from the north.
In the mornings, when they started out, there was always something uplifting about the land, the cascade of light everywhere, the brilliant glaze on the leaves of bamboo, on the acacias. Even the razor grass seemed greener in the plain. Indeed, the rains had begun.
There was more variety in their food now. The saluyot shrubs had started growing in the fields and alongside the roads more catuday trees had bloomed, and they gathered the pink and white flowers and cooked them.
Once they encamped along a long, sandy stretch of land near a creek. The place was overgrown with tough ledda grass. Shortly before nightfall, the air was suddenly alive with huge insects. Some clung to Istak’s clothes while others just buzzed about. Dalin called happily from where she was cooking the rice. These are May beetles, she cried, and like a madwoman, she started flailing and catching them, storing them in a fish basket. She called to them to do as she did, and they set about catching as many as they could.
They were northerners and though they ate everything, even the small white larvae of the big red ants and the young green leaves of mangoes—food that was unusual to Dalin then—they had never tasted these beetles. And that evening, they sat down to their first supper of May beetles cooked in cane vinegar and coconut oil. They were not queasy eating it, and they liked the bottom best, the milky, juicy taste of it.
That night, Istak wandered off to the line of shrubs beyond which was the trail that they would follow in the morning. In the distance, the lights of bull carts proceeding on their journey flickered until they dimmed and disappeared completely.
He sat on a tree stump and pondered the riddle of what awaited them, and the pursuers they must elude. Maybe, after they crossed the Agno, they could come upon some anonymous corner where no one had been before.
Others had done it, escaped the clutches of the Spaniards, who called them remontados. They left the security of the towns and sought refuge in the forest, where they cleared land and raised their food, far away from their tormentors. Some were changed, though; they became brigands as well, preying on the poor who could not defend themselves, who would rather have the peace and security “under the bell.” Perhaps, in the new land, they would be left alone without the past rising out of the ashes to threaten them again.
Istak envied the young Igorot friends he had made in the Cordilleras, half-naked, their arms and chests tattooed, their teeth blackened with betel nut. They had listened to Padre Jose’s exhortations, they were even baptized, but they had reverted to their ancient worship once the priest had gone. Up there in the mountains, their lives were complete. But then Istak remembered, too, the skulls which adorned their houses. Any one of those skulls could have been his if he had not gone to them with Padre Jose and his gifts of salt and tobacco and his promises of salvation.
There is no escape, then, from this prison that is living, just as there was no escape from his unquenchable yearning for knowledge.
How did it all start, really? Did it start with his father? With his being in church? It had come to him before, though not as clearly as it did now. It was the harsh living in Po-on, really, more than anything, which had drawn him to the Church, to seek not salvation but a future that was not limned by hunger. It was really for this reason that he would have become a priest, as did most of the Indios who came from the lowest stations. They would overcome the hazards of peasant birth and become teachers if not priests, and thus bring not just comfort to themselves and their families, but a bit of the respectability such as that which Capitán Berong had.
Padre Jose had taught him how to worship, to hold on to the rosary as if it were a sturdy rope which drew him up from the black pit of creation. And this rope gave him a strength that others from Cabugaw or those born like him would never have. It would draw him not only out of the pit but from the putrefaction of the poverty and villainy of the village—out and into a world of abundance and a surfeit of case which the Church gave only to a chosen few. He saw this in Padre Jose and in the other priests—resplendent in their vestments, gorging on the food that people had worked so hard to produce.
Would he transform this rope into a leash?
It was the priest who ruled, who enacted the laws of the Church and of man, and added to such laws the lash of prejudice, for power was always white, Castilian, and not brown like the good earth.
It seemed so long ago now, but even when he was in Cabugaw it was often talked about in whispers, like the dusty whiff of age that whirls up from cupboards and cabinets long shut—the death of those three mestizo priests, Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora—why were they killed? Could they have managed to weaken the Church—just the three of them? The very Church to which they belonged and which they served?
Did the Spanish priests really believe that the Indios—even if they were mestizos—could be equal to the Spaniards, that they could be the highest officials of the Church?
There were always excuses, there was no escaping them, for the power to disagree was not with the Indios, just as it would never be with him. So the Church, then, was Castilian. The Church was not interested in justice, or in the abolition of inequality. The temple, then, was just another pit, and the rosary he held offered no salvation. No God can haul men like him up from the abyss of perdition.
But God, I don’t doub
t You. I can see You in the morning, in the dew on the grass. Should I worship You in silence, without the obeisance and obedience to Your ministers? Should I stop singing and, within me, let my deeds speak of my gratitude and belief in Your greatness?
The men who taught us of Your presence, who opened the doors of Your temple that we might see the light—they are white like You. Are You, then, the god of white people, and if we who are brown worship You, do we receive Your blessings as white men do?
I pray that You be not white, that You be without color and that You be in all men because goodness cannot be encased only in white.
I should worship, then, not a white god but someone brown like me. Pride tells me only one thing: that we are more than equal to those who rule us. Pride tells me that this land is mine, that they should leave me to my destiny, and if they will not leave, pride tells me that I should push them away, and should they refuse this, I should vanquish them, kill them. I knew long ago that their blood is the same as mine. No stranger can come battering down my door and say he brings me light. This I have within mc.
He returned to the cart to find Dalin already asleep. She woke up as he lay quietly beside her. Rain pattered lightly on the palm roof and she drew the old blanket over her legs. He turned on his side and fondled her flat stomach, feeling its smoothness, its warmth.
“Where have you gone?”
“I was by the trail, by myself …”
He had never asked her before, and they had never talked about it, although he had always known that, in her own way, she was religious, crossing herself every morning when she woke up and again when she went to sleep.
“Do you believe in God?”
Though he could not see her face clearly, he could make out her eyes and they were wide open.
“What kind of question is that?” she said, then quietly: “Surely, I believe in God. We are together—this is God’s will.”
He lay on his back again. He wanted to tell her then, but there were things he could not reveal to others; he was not sure now that he still believed.
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