These conditions could not continue forever. In every house and hut in the far-flung barrios where the common man or tao was dehumanized by absentee landlordism, where a peasant had a son who went to school through the sacrifice of his family and who came back with invigorating ideas of social equality and of equal justice before the law, there grew a great conflict that threatened to plunge the Philippines into one of its bloodiest revolutions.
Such were conditions in the Philippines when my brother Macario graduated from high school and started teaching in Binalonan. Since he was an exceptionally bright student, he was appointed to teach in the sixth grade at a monthly salary of fifty pesos. His salary, which amounted to twenty-five dollars, was the highest in our town and therefore the most enviable.
Now my father began to feel at ease despite the fact that we had no more land of our own. The plow became lighter and he followed it gaily through the water and under the stifling heat of the summer sun. The nights became more peaceful and the days of labor shorter and more promising. The burden was off his shoulders at last and now he could relax for the first time in his life.
I remember this period of my childhood vividly because it was the only time that my father and I went hunting together. It was spring and the grass in the plain was young and as green as the pine trees on the mountains where we were going with our dog and a week’s provision of rice. As we walked through the stony village road, I could see the tall talahib grass with its crown of white flowers spreading majestically on the ditches and the soft, windswept cogon grass parting beautifully as the breeze came blowing, as though it were a wave pushed seaward by a gentle inland wind; the murmuring sound sang through the thin, long blades, stopping our dog in its tracks with a puzzled look in its eyes.
When we reached the stony bottom of the river at the edge of Mangusmana, I saw my face in the clear, cool water that stood like a pool of light between two boulders. My father took off his clothes and plunged in; the dog followed him, whimpering in the sudden cold of the spring water. I took off my clothes also and crept slowly to the edge of the pool, holding onto the boulders as I submerged myself. We sat in the fine sand at the bottom of the pool and played with the little fishes that emerged from the crevices between the stones. It was clear and quiet in the water, and we sat side by side as though we were sitting in the sun.
I will never forget the kilins, or mountain bamboo, that we saw on the way up the trail, and how my father made tubes from the young shoots and filled them with shrimps. As soon as we had made a camp, I built a fire between two large stones. My father wrapped the bamboo tubes with banana leaves and put them under the fire.
“This is called doayen, son,” said my father, pushing the burning coals over the tubes. “It is more delicious than the wild boar.”
“How did you learn to make it, Father?” I asked.
“From the Igorots in the mountains of Baguio,” he said. “I lived with them when the revolution was broken in southern Luzon. I fought with them, and we were called guerrillas. Someday you will understand, and maybe when you grow up you will see my Igorot friends. . . .”
To this distant day, I know that my father was right about the doayen. I remember that we caught one alingo, or wild boar, and tried its meat, but it was not as palatable as the doayen. I also remember that we caught a little deer and took it back with us to Mangusmana. I tried to feed it with tender tamarind leaves and marongay flowers, but it refused to eat anything, and our dog would stand for hours facing the wild animal. Finally, it became too weak to stand. I have forgotten, now, what happened to it.
Some weeks after our hunting trip a man came from nowhere to our house and presented my father with a paper purportedly signed by the church people. Because my father could not read the document and there was no man in the village who could read it, he went to town and let my brother Macario explain it to him.
It was midnight when he came back to Mangusmana. I heard him come into the hut, stopping at the door to locate me in the dark. Then he sat on the bench by the window for a long time. I could not see him in the dark, but knew that he was looking out of the window toward our clearing.
When the moon came out at dawn my father awakened me. We went outside and walked side by side to the clearing. There were crickets everywhere in the fields. I remember their tinny chirping and the fine moonlight that was streaming like a flood of silk as far as the eyes could see. Walking with my father in the moonlight was as peaceful as sitting with him in the bottom of the clear mountain pool. When we arrived at the clearing the quails were singing their mating songs between the growing rows of corn. The long, broad leaves were like human arms upraised to heaven in gentle supplication, moving slowly with the night breeze toward the west, as though they were making the sign of the cross and bowing to the wet earth in reverence.
“We will have a good crop this year, Father,” I said.
“It is not our plantation any more, son,” said my father, touching the leaves with the gentleness that he showed toward plants and animals. “It belongs to a man in Manila now. We will have to look for another land tomorrow.”
I could not understand why. “You mean the land does not belong to us any more?” I asked.
“The land never did belong to us,” said my father. “It belonged to the church. But now it belongs to a rich man in Manila.”
“What about our corn?” I asked.
“They paid me for the corn, son,” said my father. “But it is not enough to cover the seeds we have used. I accepted it because they told me that I had no right to plant corn in a land that did not belong to me.”
I did not ask my father again about the agreement between him and the church. It was only fifteen months since we had cleared the land, and we had had a good crop of highland rice; and now we were expecting a good crop of corn. But a strange man appeared from nowhere and claimed that the land belonged to another man in Manila.
This incident was actually the beginning of my father’s struggle to hold onto the land he knew so well, fighting to the end and dying on it like a peasant.
* * *
—
When the clearing was finally taken away from us, my father went to town several times and consulted with my brother Macario on how to get it back. There was nothing he could do; even my brother was desperate because we had no more land left. He had been at his job three months now, but had saved only about a hundred pesos. It was not enough for a first payment on what we owed the moneylender.
In the month of August of that year, when the provincial government was in session, my father filled a sack with rice and fresh vegetables and walked to Lingayen to fight for the repossession of our land. Three weeks later he came back to Binalonan a defeated man. Lingayen was about fifty kilometers away, and when he came back on foot, which was the way he had gone, his feet were bleeding from walking on the rough and stony road. He walked about in great agony, but he went around asking farmers to lend him some land to cultivate. . . .
CHAPTER IV
This family tragedy marked the beginning of my conscious life, when my responses to outward influences grew so acute that I almost wrecked my whole future. I became sensitive in the presence of poverty and degradation, so sensitive that my unexpressed feelings tempered my psychological relation to the world. It was only long afterward in a land far away, long after these conflicts were conquered and forged as a weapon against another chaos that threatened to plunge me into despair and rootlessness, that the full significance of our tragedy burst into a flaming reality and drove me, suddenly and inevitably, into the struggle for the fulfillment of the redeeming qualities which I believed were inherent in me.
It was at this time that my father lost the land we had cleared for the church. Because our own land was still in the possession of the moneylender, there was no longer anything to do in the village. My brother Macario had not yet earned enough money to redeem the four
hectares of land, which were all that was left of the original family property. My father could not find a man who would lend him farming land, and could not even hire himself to a farmer. The villagers were all small farmers, and they had only enough hectares to cultivate for themselves.
For a long time it seemed that my father and I could find nothing to do except to go to some farmer’s rice field and help in the harvesting. But my father was a farmer, not a hired laborer. It humiliated him to hire himself out to someone. Yet he was willing to swallow his pride and to forget the honor of his ancestors.
It was only when my maternal grandmother died that my father was allowed by my uncles on my mother’s side to cultivate the old woman’s little piece of land. But it was stony ground and far from the reach of water, and the grass was stunted and yellowish in color. It was not good for anything, not even camote or sweet potato, but my father was a stubborn man born to dig in the earth. He even said jokingly, when he saw my interest dying, that he would squeeze enough water from the stones to irrigate the land.
I tried to help him cut the tall grass with a broad cutting knife called a palang, but when we started digging a ditch to connect the land with the main waterways, I was shocked to discover that one foot below the surface were large stones and fossils of trees buried by floods many years before. My interest in the project died.
“I think you should go to town and live with your mother,” said my father. “Besides it is high time for you to go to school. I will try to farm alone.”
“I will come back and help you again,” I said.
“I will call you when I need you, son,” said my father.
“I will always be ready,” I said, looking at the boulders and huge roots of trees in the mouths of the caves that we had dug for the irrigation ditch to pass through, looking beyond this nightmare of my childhood into the future and the dark unknown.
“Good-bye, son,” said my father sadly. “Come to the village once in a while, when you feel like helping me.”
“I will, Father,” I said.
But I knew it was the end of my life in Mangusmana, the end of the bitter days of childhood. It was actually the end of my life with my father, the end of my farming life in the Philippines, the end of blinding heat and heavy rains. I was leaving all of my childhood now, leaving forever to face the demands of sudden manhood, and there was no return journey anywhere. I knew I could not go back to Mangusmana, and my father knew it too because he had witnessed it before, when my other brothers went the way I was going, away from him and his earth forever.
* * *
—
When I arrived in Binalonan the overland highway was under construction and a few people of the town were employed. The new road connected Manila in the south with the beautiful summer city of Baguio in the north. Hundreds of men and women were working on it, pounding the gravel into the sand with flattened pieces of wood. At night when there was a bright moon their pounding was like the distant roar of the sea. There was only one crushing machine in the ten-kilometer stretch under construction, but it was used in the daytime for leveling the ground that had been pounded by the men and women working through the night.
I went to the capataz, or foreman, of the construction gang and asked for a job. The work went on for three months; sometimes it rained torrentially and the water washed away the soft shoulders of the road. We wrapped palm raincoats around our bodies and worked furiously to save the road, but the strong rain tore our coverings to shreds. We discarded them and went on working without protection in the total rain. But sometimes it was so extremely hot we could hardly see what we were doing; the heat rose from the sand and stone like steam and hurt our eyes. It made the foreman irritable and angry, so we worked harder only to drop on the road from exhaustion.
But on the moonlit nights the children in the neighborhood came out with rice pestles and helped us without asking for any compensation. It was fun for them to work with us before they went to bed. We worked on toward the river that separates Binalonan and Puzzorobio, until one day the water came rushing upon us. I was swept away into a deep bend of the river and was pasted there against the bank, struggling.
I was told afterward that three men had hung on ropes tied to the huge mango tree near the river and reached for me. When I regained consciousness, I was lying on a soft grass mat in our house. It was two days after the accident, and the road had been finished. The foreman came to our house and gave me my salary, plus a small bonus. I gave it to my mother, and my father took it from her; then putting our earnings together, he went to the moneylender. It was the first payment on our land.
One day my brother Macario came home from school and saw me in bed.
“You should not work too hard at your age, Allos,” he said.
“Did you bring home a book with pictures?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “But you should wait until you are better.”
“I would like to look at the pictures now,” I said.
He went to the kitchen and came back with the oil lamp. He sat on the floor beside me. He started reading the story of a man named Robinson Crusoe who had been shipwrecked in some unknown sea and drifted to a little island far away. My brother patiently explained the struggle of this ingenious man who had lived alone for years in inclement weathers and had survived loneliness and returned safely to his native land.
I was fascinated by the bearded man, and a strong desire grew in me to see his island.
“You must remember the good example of Robinson Crusoe,” my brother said. “Someday you may be left alone somewhere in the world and you will have to depend on your own ingenuity.” Then he pointed to the picture of the lonely man and his faithful dog sitting side by side on an unknown shore. “Maybe you will be thrown upon some unknown island someday with nothing to protect you except your hands and your mind. Now read this line after me, Allos. . . .”
It was the beginning of my intellectual life with Macario, the beginning of sharing our thoughts with each other; and although he went away not long afterward to escape a tragedy that was about to crush him, I found him again in another land where we resumed the friendship we had found long ago at my sickbed.
* * *
—
When I was well again I saw that my mother needed help in her small trading business. It was because I wanted to help keep our family together that I had neglected going to school. My older brothers were all away from home, and I knew that they would not come back to Binalonan except for brief visits. Amado, who had left the village two years before, was now in the province of Bulacan working on a sugar plantation. Only Macario and I were left, and I did not want our family to disperse completely. But circumstances stronger than my hands and faster than my feet were inevitably dividing us, and no matter what I did our family was on its way to final dissolution and tragedy.
My mother’s trading business was very simple and primitive, yet the effort and time we put on it was incalculable. We awakened in the early morning and filled an earthen jar with boggoong, or salted fish, and peddled it in the villages. My mother carried the jar on her head, while I carried a long tube of salt on my shoulder. The villagers had no time to come to town for their supply of salted fish and salt, so we brought it to them once a week, hoping for a little profit.
Boggoong is an essential food to the peasants, for without it their simple fare of rice and leaves of trees is tasteless. They spread it thinly on the rice, if they have nothing else to eat; but most of the time they mix it with vegetables, especially with eggplants and paria, or bitter melon, which they like better than any other vegetable. They are always without money, and if they have saved anything at all, it is only a few centavos wrapped tightly in dirty rags.
My mother and I carried on our trade with the peasants by barter. For one cup of salt we would get three cups of rice, or four cups of beans; but for one cup of salted fish, which wa
s more valuable than salt, we would get five cups of rice or six cups of beans. Sometimes the peasants had no rice or beans, so we willingly accepted chickens or eggs. But my mother gave even to those peasants who had nothing to barter in the hope that when we came around again they would be ready to pay. We were not always able to collect everything we had loaned, but my mother kept on giving our products to needy peasants.
It was during this period that I came to understand my mother’s heart. We had gone to a village where the women made decorative potteries. Most of the women gave us rice and chickens, but there was one woman who had nothing to give except a beautiful drinking jar that she had made out of the red clay in her backyard. My mother was attracted by it instantly, and she gave the woman more than the pot’s value. I had never before known her to appreciate beauty, but perhaps it was because she had had no time to express the finer qualities in her.
It was an unusually successful day. We had sold everything at a good price and our baskets were bulging with rice and beans. My mother carried the basket on her head and the beautiful jar in her left hand. Her right hand was holding the edge of the basket. I walked ahead of her and pushed away the tall grasses, stopping only when the chickens I was carrying made too much noise.
When we reached the Tagamusin River that separates Binalonan and the town of San Manuel, it began to rain and the red clay made the footpath slippery. My mother tucked her skirt between her legs, so that from a distance she looked like a man with short pants. We waded carefully across the murky water with the baskets held high above our heads. But when we reached the rise that led up to the road to town, her feet began to slip. She dug her toes into the mud and held desperately onto the beautiful pot, but she kept slipping back to the water. She was like a woman rolling on a pair of skates, slowly moving downward without losing her balance. Then suddenly she lost her grip on the jar, and it rolled into the water.
America Is in the Heart Page 6