Macario found work in a restaurant on North Broadway. He would come home at noon with sandwiches and soup, and leave in the early afternoon to resume his work. It was not easy to make salads and pastries in an Italian restaurant that fed nearly five thousand customers a day.
I wanted to run away so that Macario could pursue his own career. I wanted to lose myself somewhere in the world so that he would be free to live his own life. But I crumpled on the floor when I tried to get up, crawling and moaning until Macario arrived from work.
“You shouldn’t get up, Carlos,” he said lovingly. “Just stay in bed and wait for me. I’ll get you some books tomorrow.”
I felt angry with myself. Why did I have to be sick? I disliked pity and sentiment, yet I was sentimental and always pitying some unfortunate creature. If I could only get up on my feet and run in the sun again!
Once in a while Dora came to read my poems, weeping silently when the lines touched her. I was unhappy when she did not appear for a week. But when she came again there was sadness in her face.
“What is it, Dora?” I asked.
“I’m going to the Soviet Union, Carl,” she said. “I’m going home.”
“Home?” I did not understand her. “What do you mean home?”
“I was born there. I came to the United States with my parents when I was two years old. I’m going back to have my child born in a land without racial oppression.”
“I didn’t know you were going to have a child.”
“It’s Nick’s child. I have always wanted a Filipino child. It wouldn’t have a chance in America, just as Nick has never had a chance.”
How could she again condemn America in one sweeping generalization? Dora Travers went to New York and from there she disappeared from my life.
* * *
—
I was writing poetry in bed, trying to forget the monotony of my life. Then several of my poems appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. I felt it was a great triumph for me, and also a definite identification with an intellectual tradition. Now I could lie in bed and write down all my thoughts.
I received a letter from the editor of the magazine, Harriet Monroe, telling me that she would like to arrange with a university to give me some kind of scholarship. I was overjoyed, but did not tell her about my confinement. I did not explain to her that I did not have the necessary requirements to enter college.
Soon afterward Harriet Monroe went to South America to attend an international convention of the P. E. N. Club, and from there she wrote again that she would pass through Los Angeles and hoped to see me. I was greatly excited. Here was a famous editor who wanted to help me, one who had discovered most of America’s leading poets and writers. I read her magazine and the work of her discoveries. There was something definitely American, something positively vital, in all of them—but more visible in Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, William Faulkner, and also in their older contemporaries, Carl Sandburg, John Gould Fletcher, Vachel Lindsay. I could follow the path of these poets, continue their tradition, and if, at the end of my career, I could arrive at a positive understanding of America, then I could go back to the Philippines with a torch of enlightenment. And perhaps, if given a chance, I could help liberate the peasantry from ignorance and poverty.
It was a bold dream—so big it tore one apart. But shortly afterward, on her way back to the United States, Harriet Monroe died somewhere in the Andes Mountains. It was the death of a dream which did not come to life again for several years.
Before Harriet Monroe left the United States she wrote about me to Jean Doyle, a contributor to Poetry. She came with a young man who was a versatile poet, and reminded me of the time when I had visited her house some years before—when I had been a migratory worker. But she did not remind me of the three hard-boiled eggs and the sandwiches that she had shoved into my pockets when I left, because she knew that I was hungry. I had walked on the dark side of the street then and eaten the sandwiches, and once again the stars had sung in the sky. I had been looking for this side of America; surely this was the real side of living America. . . .
* * *
—
It was at this time that a young woman in Hollywood, a writer of promise, saw my poems and wrote to me. Her name was Alice Odell—a familiar name, because I had seen it under the titles of some fine proletarian short stories. But now, she wrote, she was writing a novel about her starved childhood in Utah, and she would like to show me what she had written.
I was in a quandary. I could not ask her to come to my room, because the landlady would not allow white women in the building. I wrote back telling her that I was leaving town indefinitely. I did not know how I could meet her. But back of it all, I think, was what I thought of as social position. I knew from the way she wrote that she was a person of intelligence and of a more privileged life than the women I had known, and because of this barrier between us I was reluctant to meet her. This fear of the middle classes was deep-rooted: it had sprung from the humiliations of my mother and I suffered when we were selling beans in Binalonan and neighboring towns. It followed me down the years until I became brave enough to fight it.
But Alice Odell was a persistent woman. She had warmth and a genius for arousing warmth. So finally I agreed to meet her at the Los Angeles Public Library. I was too weak to walk. I had been in bed for months, and normal activity was almost impossible. I staggered like an old man into the library, leaning against the brick wall when my knee bothered me. It had never mended and it was the unforgettable souvenir of the vigilantes in San Jose, who had tortured me that night in the woods.
I sat at a table in the Literature Department and watched the clock. At exactly three o’clock an attractive woman with dark brown hair came to the door and swept the room in one fleeting glance. I knew at once that she was Alice Odell and I was not mistaken.
I got up to greet her. But touching her hand, I became self-conscious. I wrote what I wanted to say on a piece of paper, and she also wrote what she wanted to say, so we wrote notes to each other as though we were mutes. She was very kind: she thought I was ashamed to talk to her. But I was only afraid she could not understand me, because my accent was still thick and difficult. I wrote again that we could go out in the sun, so she took my hand and helped me down the stone steps of the library.
I sat beside her on a stone bench. There were little dark birds among the trees, and we looked blankly at them. Where should I begin? Could I tell her about my years of flight? The brutalities and horrors? Maybe we could discuss poetry and current prose writing. Perhaps I could tell her about my family and my childhood in the Philippines. How would I approach a decent white woman? How was I to begin?
Alice was understanding. She was sensitive and lonely. She started talking of herself, revealing the background of an American life. When I showed concern for the development of this life into what it had become—into Alice Odell—she described the terror that had haunted her childhood. Then it came to me that her life and mine were the same, terrified by the same forces; they had only happened in two different countries and to two people.
Alice had been born in a small farming town, but her father’s farm had been ruined by tornadoes. Once, in a desperate year, her father and grandfather planted broom wheat, but a tornado had swept it all away. It was her family’s last attempt to hold onto the land. They moved to Iowa, and Alice watched her father become a gambler.
“My father taught me a trick,” she said softly. “When the gamblers came to our house, I would stand by the table and watch them. Then my father would say, ‘Alice, show the men something cute!’ I would catch the hem of my dress, give a wide grin, and pull it up to my chest. And the men would howl and stamp on the floor, throwing coins into the fold of my dress. I was four—maybe five. But my mother was always away when the gamblers came; she would be working somewhere or visiting friends. My mother—”
She sto
pped, wiping the tears from her eyes.
“I have a mother, too,” I said, remembering, running down the years to my mother, fighting wildly through the mud of Binalonan to reach her as she picked up the scattered beans in the public market of Puzzorobio. “My mother is poor. We are poor peasants in Luzon.”
Alice had been born poor too. But she grew up rapidly and had sent herself through school.
“Then I was a reporter on a small-town paper,” she said. “I helped Eileen, my sister, who was going to high school.”
When Alice talked of her sister it was as though Eileen were her own daughter. But Iowa was becoming smaller every day, driving Alice into a corner until she could no longer breathe. Finally she went to Hollywood and found a job as secretary to a man who had gone bankrupt. And once again Alice was thrown into the world, without work, young and lonely. Then she met a Puerto Rican—a fine man, she said—whom she wanted to love. She went with him to Puerto Rico and lived with him on a large plantation. What happened between them she did not tell me.
But she came back to the United States, to Hollywood, and after a year of working at odd jobs, met a wealthy man who became her lover.
She could send for Eileen now, and she did. Eileen was teaching in a little Nebraska town. But Hollywood was more glamorous, and the splendor of Alice’s new life was tempting.
“Eileen had two pupils last year,” Alice said. “But this year she has only one—a boy.”
I laughed. Only one pupil!
Shortly after Eileen had arrived in Hollywood, Alice’s lover had left her. Left with nothing, she sold a diamond ring and rented an apartment for them. When winter came, Eileen fell ill with tuberculosis. It was a bad year for them, for Alice was attacked by pneumonia.
She had wanted to begin from the beginning: her early responses to life, the influences of various environments. She wanted to say that she had been made stronger and more courageous; that she was not like other women who are afraid to break through the walls of prejudice. But although she felt that way about other women, Alice believed in their essential dignity, because she herself had it, so simply, so strongly.
This, I believe now, was what she actually wanted to say.
* * *
—
The following week, when I was alone in the room, Alice came unannounced, and I wondered how she had escaped the ever-vigilant landlady. She found me in bed, coughing and sweating miserably. When I told her about the progress of my disease, she sat by the bed and comforted me. Then sitting near me, she began to read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.
“This is about a boy who had a great hunger for life,” she told me. “He was a big boy—so big he wanted to acquire all knowledge, see the whole world, embrace all humanity. He was a very unhappy boy. He grew up into manhood and loneliness.”
“I like that passage,” I said when she had finished reading of the mountains in this big boy’s childhood. “We also have mountains in Mangusmana. But no trains.”
Once, fragrant with violets, Alice came with food and fed me. She felt that I had been confined too long. She put my black hat on my head and told me that I needed fresh air. We went out and walked in the late summer afternoon.
We went to the Japanese section and walked in San Pedro Street, stopping in the dark alleys near the factories.
There was a thorn in my heart. I stumbled to a dark little house and sat on the broken wooden steps. Alice followed me, and sat beside me in the gathering dusk. But the occupants of the house, an old man and his wife, came home and told us to leave.
We walked back to the hotel. I was tired and weak, and went eagerly to bed.
I stayed in bed. On the fourth of June, when Victor was coming home from the movie studio where he was working as an extra, an ambulance came to take me to the Los Angeles County Hospital.
I watched the buildings, committing them to memory. I knew that I would not see them for a long time.
* * *
—
My ward was above the hospital jail. It was dark and over-flowing with dying men. The building was old and all the patients had contagious diseases. But I felt happy when Alice Odell came to see me, bringing her youth and vitality.
“I’m leaving tomorrow, Carl,” she said one day.
“Where are you going?” I asked, feeling a weight in my heart.
“East. I have a job in New York. I hope you will get well soon, Carlos.”
From Chicago, she sent me Herbert Gorman’s Herman Melville. Later she sent me Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. And again a pamphlet edition of Frederic Prokosch’s The Asiatics. She was directing my education, I felt, and I read everything she sent me.
I wrote a series of poems and called it, “For the Builders of Cities.” I sent them to Alice. As I was being prepared for the operating table, Alice phoned me from New York and said that she liked my poems. The operation was successful, and I wrote her about it. But when I heard from her again she told me she was on her way to the Soviet Union.
CHAPTER XXXII
When Alice Odell had left California she had asked her sister to visit me. One day Eileen came with several books and a large paper sack full of delicacies. When I saw her emerge from the long hallway, I was surprised to see that she was almost crystalline. She was the exact opposite of her sister: there was no disturbing sensuousness about her. She was tall, erect, and smiling, and, I found later, derided sentimentality. Her objectivity perhaps stemmed from the poverty of her childhood—the same influences that had made Alice rebellious.
I did not know then that I would see Eileen almost every week for three years. I did not know that we would share each other’s thoughts, live each other’s lives. What had been begun by Alice was finding continuance in Eileen, in her intellectual honesty, her almost maternal solicitude.
I was shy when Eileen was near me. But when she had gone, I opened the little bundles of roast meat, celery, tomatoes, and apples. I noticed that each item was carefully wrapped in wax paper. I noticed also that she always gave me many varieties of fruits and vegetables. I discovered later that her affinity for these was the aftermath of their absence in her childhood. And so at last in California, with its abundance, she had developed a taste for vegetables and fruits that was almost animalistic.
I created for myself an illusion of understanding with Eileen, and in consequence, I yearned for her and the world she represented. The grass in the hospital yard spoke of her, and when it rained, the water rushed down the eaves calling her name. I told her these things in poems, and my mind became afire: could I get well for Eileen? Could I walk with her in the street without being ashamed because of my race? Could I see her always without fear?
But she talked but little when she came to see me. When she left, leaving some books, I imagined I read the words she would have spoken. And so from week to week, Eileen came and sat quietly near me, leaving just as quietly. We found intimate conversations in the books she gave me. When I became restless, I wrote to her. Every day the words poured out of my pen. I began to cultivate a taste for words, not so much their meanings as their sounds and shapes, so that afterward I tried to depend only on the music of words to express my ideas. This procedure, of course, was destructive to my grammar, but I can say that writing fumbling, vehement letters to Eileen was actually my course in English. What came after this apprenticeship—the structural presentation of ideas in pertinence to the composition and the anarchy between man’s experience and ideals—was merely my formal search.
* * *
—
One of the numerous books that Eileen gave me, World Politics by R. Palme Dutt, was a revelation of great significance. It gave me a realistic approach to history, for here before my eyes human civilization unfolded in one continuous procession of struggle against tyranny. To go back farther, she gave me Lewis Morgan’s Ancient History, Robert Briffault’s Rational Evol
ution, and Frederic Engels’s Origin of the Family.
I trembled with excitement and a feeling of superiority. Here within my grasp was one of the great discoveries in the life of man. Why was it kept from the world? Perhaps Eileen knew the reason. But when she came the words died in my mouth, for there was only a flow of appreciation. As the months passed a feeling of understanding was cemented between us, and she wept silently when I suffered pain and loneliness.
Eileen’s frugality was also conditioned by the past. She dreaded the approach of winter, the horrors of poverty in Hollywood, where the economic pitch was sky-blown. Yet she managed to send me flowers occasionally, on important holidays. She was undeniably the America I had wanted to find in those frantic days of fear and flight, in those acute hours of hunger and loneliness. This America was human, good, and real.
When I found Eileen I found the god of my youth. I can say that my insatiable hunger for knowledge and human affection were the two vital forces that made my days of great loneliness and starvation a frantic determination to live. In the back of my mind was the parting request of my sister Francisca—that I would go to school in America and return to the Philippines to teach both my sisters to read because they had had no chance in the village. But now it had changed, for I was beginning to think that if I returned to my native land, I would spread a new enlightenment to my whole village—perhaps throughout the Philippines.
America Is in the Heart Page 26