My mother was in bed again with another baby sister, and my father was very happy to have two daughters. When the store was finished Luciano bought some bananas and mangoes from the people in the neighborhood. All day we sat on the bamboo bench in front of the store waiting for customers. The women in the neighborhood came with their few centavos, but mainly they wanted petroleum for their lamps. My brother wanted to sell petroleum, but he did not have enough money to buy a whole can. When a tourist car would break down near the store he would repair it and earn a little money. We watched the automobiles pass by hoping the tires would blow out.
When the moon was out in full my brother would call the boys in the neighborhood and persuade them to wrestle in the empty lot at the back of the store. The ground was softer there than on the highway, where we usually wrestled in the daytime. But when there was no moon he would bring out the oil lamp and watch us wrestle in the faint light. I was not strong enough to be shaken, but my brother told the smallest boy to wrestle with me. It was a good practice, and it taught us to be fair and decent.
Then Luciano began to worry about his pension from the United States government. He lost interest in the store and wanted to go into politics. He was thinner now. He coughed at night, and there was a sad shine in his eyes. I sat in the store waiting for customers, but nobody came. The vegetables and fruits began to rot. Finally we closed the store and sat on the bench waiting for some miracle to happen.
One morning my father came running to my brother.
“The moneylender has taken my land, son,” he said.
“How much more do you owe him, Father?” asked Luciano.
“It is one hundred pesos,” said my father. “I promised to pay in three weeks, but he won’t listen to me. I’d thought that by that time the rice would be harvested and I could sell some of it; then I would be able to pay him. He sent two policemen to Mangusmana to see that I do not touch the rice. It is my own rice and land. Is it possible, son?” My father stopped and looked eagerly into my brother’s eyes. “Can a stranger take away what we have molded with our hands?”
“Yes, Father,” said Luciano. “It is possible under the present government. There are no laws to protect the tao against the unscrupulous practices of wealthy men in our country. I am afraid you will have to give up your land.”
My father could not believe it. Sadly he glanced at his ugly, dark hands, then looked into my brother’s eyes, his face dim with broken hope.
“There is something wrong in our country when a man can take away something that belongs to you and your family,” he said, looking at his hands again and standing silently for a long time.
After a while he noticed me. He put his hand on my head and said, “This is the end, son.” He turned around and walked slowly toward our house.
When he was gone Luciano coughed violently and tears filled his eyes. He went to the store and came out with a handful of sharp nails and threw them into the road. An automobile appeared and burst a tire. My brother ran out with his tools, knelt by the damaged tire, and began fixing it. When it was repaired the man at the wheel gave him ten centavos, and Luciano laughed guiltily when he put it in his pocket.
We used to sit on the bench in front of the store waiting for automobiles. My brother was always ready with the tools. Now and then an automobile came, but we did not earn enough to help my father. Then we gave up waiting for automobiles. My brother went to Mangusmana and planted tobacco, while I stayed in town looking for a job. When his pension finally came he sold his tobacco to a farmer and came back to Binalonan.
“Now I can go into politics,” he said.
“Is it profitable?” I asked.
“Yes, if you care to make a business of it,” he said. “I don’t know what to do yet, but there is fun and glory in it.”
“I like practical results,” I said.
“I am a different person,” he said. “Watch me turn this town into something else.”
Not long afterward he became mayor of Binalonan. But even then he knew that he was dying. I would go to visit him when I was in town, and he would take me to his house to show me his books. I would be coming home from another town where I had found some kind of work, and when I would arrive in Binalonan Luciano would discuss politics with me. It seemed to me then that he was a man of great convictions, that he had great potentialities, and that he hated his narrow environment. It was the only world he knew, and he realized it. But he was determined to use every opportunity he had in that limited place.
“You must never stop reading good books, Allos,” he said.
“My eyes are not good for reading,” I said.
“Go to Manila someday and buy a pair of good glasses,” he said. “Reading is food for the mind. Healthy ideas are food for the mind. Maybe someday you will be a journalist. . . .”
Journalist! What did it mean?
Years afterward I remembered Luciano’s hope. I was in a hospital when the letter came telling me that he had died of tuberculosis. I crept out of the bed and cried in the bathroom, holding my chest for fear the blood would burst out of my own perforated lungs.
It was midnight and the hospital was in total darkness. Far away in the city the lights were flickering like a string of pearls strung on the huge neck of a dark woman. And far away also, in the workers’ republic of Spain, a civil war was going on that a democracy might live. I remembered all my years in the Philippines, my father fighting for his inherited land, my mother selling boggoong to the impoverished peasants. I remembered all my brothers and their bitter fight for a place in the sun, their tragic fear that they might not live long enough to contribute something vital to the world. I remembered my own swift and dangerous life in America. And I cried, recalling all the years that had come and gone, but my remembrance gave me a strange courage and the vision of a better life.
“Yes, I will be a writer and make all of you live again in my words,” I sobbed.
CHAPTER VIII
The land question in Luzon was becoming more acute, and there were rumors of uprisings in the provinces where absentee landlordism was crippling the peasant economy. Rice was the main staple and the peasants could not exist without it, but the rich rice lands were owned by men who never saw them. Each year the landlords demanded a larger share, until it became impossible for the peasants to live.
It was at this time that my father’s land was taken away from him. A stubborn peasant like his ancestors before him, my father had always believed that life should be rooted in the soil. He sold our animals and came to town, and after a day of secret deliberation with my mother he went to Lingayen to fight in the provincial court for the restoration of our farm.
After three weeks my father returned, defeated and broken in spirit. He had walked to the capital of Pangasinan carrying his sack of provisions and when he arrived there had had great difficulty in locating the proper court in which to present his case. When he found the court he could not locate the right people. He went from one clerk to another and from one room to another, pleading in his dialect and cursing his illiteracy, until he had ransacked the entire provincial capital.
He had no money and the wise men at the court spoke to him in Spanish and English. What could a poor and ignorant peasant like my father do in an organization such as the provincial government of Pangasinan? He came back and stayed on in town, sitting around in the house until he was driven to drunkenness.
My mother and I went to the town of Tayug, a rich rice land, and helped in the harvest. Tayug and two other neighboring towns belonged to one family. One could see the flowing expanse of gold in the month of October; but in November and far into the month of January there was a continuous procession of carts hauling harvested rice to the granaries of the landlord. There it was threshed and sold to the rice companies in Manila.
Then my mother went to Binalonan and returned with my sisters. Francisca was now nearl
y four years old, but Marcela was only a baby. They sat in the shade of the umbrella at the end of the long rows, away from the strong sun. My mother stopped now and then to feed Marcela, undoing her rough cotton blouse to her waist and putting her dark, pointed nipple into the baby’s hungry mouth. Then she would put her in a makeshift hammock and go back to work.
Francisca was already beginning to be aware of what we were doing. She stayed in the shade watching Marcela, but she came now and then to where we were working to bring us a jar of cool drinking water. Then she would watch over the baby until the day’s work was done, singing when Marcela became restless and hungry.
In the middle of the season strange men began coming to the rice fields. They distributed leaflets and talked to us. My mother and I were so deeply absorbed in our work that we were not aware of what was going on. A rugged peasant boy made impassioned speeches to the harvesters, but as he was only a simple peasant like themselves they paid no attention to him.
I remember this fanatical peasant boy because years afterward I met him again in America. His name was Felix Razon. One day he came to the field where we were working with several men wearing black armbands. They told us to leave, but we did not understand.
At night we slept in the field. The stars were so near it seemed we could touch them with our hands. Sometimes when I awakened between the tall rice stalks, I could feel the soft breathing of the earth. The sun came like gold, throwing its first beams downward into the immense plain. It lighted a new day of activity for us, and we cooked our breakfast on an improvised stove.
Working with my mother was pleasant, and it gave me an impetus to strive for a better place. It was actually like working with my father in Mangusmana, with only one difference: I was a little older and more experienced. In the village, life was a simple peasant lullaby; we had our animals and our house. In Tayug the work was harder and harsher, and the people were more varied. And I had two little sisters who interrupted our work with delight.
A few days later Felix and the other men came to the rice fields again to persuade us to sell our shares of rice and to leave. Most of the harvesters sold theirs, but my mother sold only a part of ours. We were some distance from the highway when we saw hundreds of men with black armbands walking excitedly toward the town. They were members of the Colorum Party, a fanatical organization of dispossessed peasants that terrorized Luzon. It professed to be semi-religious, but it was actually a vengeful sect of anarchistic men led by a college-bred peasant who had become embittered in the United States.
As soon as Felix came to our part of the field and told us of the impending revolt, my mother tied our share of rice with a rope and carried some of the rice bundles on her head. I carried some of it, too. But she also carried the baby Marcela. Francisca, however, refused to be carried. When we reached the plaza we saw many of the Colorum at the kiosk, falling in line and preparing their attack. The policemen were running excitedly about the presidencia, piling bricks and sandbags outside the windows and doors. They were waiting, ready with their guns.
Then from beyond the presidencia, climbing up the river bank like a stream of black beetles, the Colorum came rushing upon the building, dispersing the few guards who were waiting outside with their antiquated pistols. They fired into the air and leaped behind trees when the police challenged them from behind the barricaded windows.
The caromata ponies at the station started running away in all directions. The bus that was discharging passengers near the schoolhouse turned around and sped toward Binalonan. The attacking band of the Colorum increased; they appeared from everywhere with their black flag and fired upon the men in the presidencia.
My mother grabbed Francisca, and we ran to the tall bushes by the roadside.
“Why are they fighting, Mother?” I asked.
“Why, son?” she said, her ignorant face searching for the words to answer me. “Why? I don’t know, son.”
“Are we not coming back to cut some more rice?” I asked.
“No, son,” she said.
Francisca started to cry, hanging on my mother’s skirt.
“Hush,” said my mother.
We looked toward the presidencia. A policeman came out bravely, but he had not gone far when he was shot in the back. He fell under a flagpole. Another policeman arrived, then another; but five of the Colorum ran after them, shooting as they emerged from the tall acacia trees around the presidencia. They engaged in hand-to-hand fighting behind the coffee shop at the station. The Colorum rushed into the presidencia and after a while their flag appeared at the window. Then there was a respite; except for the jubilant rebels who were pouring into the town hall, the town was deserted. The dead were scattered on the lawn and in the street.
When it began to get dark my mother told us to follow her. We crept through the bushes, dragging the bundles of rice. We came to a wooded place west of town, away from the rice fields. We stopped and looked back. Then the guns began again, sputtering like a speeding motorcycle. The black flag was no longer atop the presidencia.
I saw a mass of men scattering at random, running into the bushes in the plaza and firing. Then the Philippine and American flags appeared on the poles in front of the town hall. The night came on and there was silence.
We walked to Binalonan silently, looking up when a caromata came by. I carried Francisca on my shoulders; sometimes my mother gave the baby to me, and she carried Francisca. We met a detachment of the Philippine constabulary rushing toward Tayug.
When we arrived in Binalonan the news of the uprising was already there, and our neighbors assailed us with many questions; but we could not explain the incident. Eagerly we awaited developments: during four days of unrest the local government of Tayug had changed hands several times a day. Finally, the constabulary conquered the rebels and restored law and order.
But the revolt in Tayug made me aware of the circumscribed life of the peasants through my brother Luciano, who explained its significance to me. I was determined to leave that environment and all its crushing forces, and if I were successful in escaping unscathed, I would go back someday to understand what it meant to be born of the peasantry. I would go back because I was a part of it, because I could not really escape from it no matter where I went or what became of me. I would go back to give significance to all that was starved and thwarted in my life.
CHAPTER IX
Now my father was a pathetic little figure in the house, and he went out only when it was absolutely necessary. He was now a landless farmer; local politics no longer interested him. He was completely broken in spirit. He had none of his animals; even the store by the highway that had been given to him by my brother Luciano was gone. The new presidente had closed it for reasons never clear to any of us. The court had threatened to put my father in jail, so he finally gave it up and sat in the house all day.
Luciano was getting deeper in local politics. He was receiving twenty-four pesos from the United States government, but he spent most of it on his doctor because his lungs were becoming worse. With what he had left he bought cigars and cigarettes for the loafers in the presidencia. He was looking ahead, he informed me. He looked so far ahead that the scavengers had him stripped to his shirt before he finally became mayor of Binalonan.
I was getting restless and fearful of the uncertainty that pervaded our household. I felt like running away—anywhere. I wanted to cast off the sudden gloom that shadowed our family, and I thought the only way to do that was to escape from it. I would also be escaping from my family, and from the bitter memories of childhood.
“I am leaving now, Father,” I said one day.
My father said nothing. He simply looked at me. He was trying hard to hold back the tears that were gathering in his eyes. He was remembering and looking through me into the uncertain future and the dark fate that awaited me there, and his mouth trembled a little because he knew what it was I was forsaking, what I
was plunging into so desperately, because he, too, had been young once and broken by a wall that stood between him and the future.
My mother wept silently. She was a woman who had shed few tears for anyone; but now that her last son was leaving, the reserve that had kept her composed for so long broke down in one disturbing maternal agony. Like my father, she was afraid to foresee what would happen to me now that I was leaving them and would be alone in the world.
My sister Francisca came to the door and touched my bundle. But the baby Marcela was on the floor, pushing my bundle and saying “Manong”—which means “brother” in our dialect. This was almost the only word she knew, and she expressed her grief with it.
I started down the ladder. Francisca put her face on the door and started to cry aloud.
“Allos!” my mother cried. “You are too young to go out into the world.”
I was thirteen years old. Maybe my mother was right, although she believed that it was reasonable for me to work like a man in Binalonan, near them. But to live alone in some unknown place? No! She did not know that doing the work of a full-grown man had matured me beyond my age, that I had outgrown my narrow environment.
My father lifted my bundle and put it on his back. I walked after him without looking back at the house that was my childhood, because that time of my life was gone forever and there was no return. There were fears in that house of childhood, and I was leaving them forever. I was fleeing into manhood, into another struggle against other fears.
We stopped in the presidencia and Luciano came out with a bunch of newspapers and magazines under his arm.
“Where are you going, Allos?” he asked.
“I am going to Baguio,” I said.
“I thought you would wait another year,” he said, putting some money into my pocket.
America Is in the Heart Page 9