Wedding Dance by Amador Daguio

Wedding Dance
By Amador Daguio
Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the headhigh threshold. Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound that carried him across to the narrow door. He slid back the cover, stepped inside, then pushed the cover back in place. After some moments during which he seemed to wait, he talked to the listening darkness.
“I’m sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it.”
The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house like muffled roars of falling waters. The woman who had moved with a start when the sliding door opened had been hearing the gangsas for she did not know how long. There was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave no sign that she heard Awiyao, but continued to sit unmoving in the darkness.
But Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on all fours to the middle of the room; he knew exactly where the stove was. With bare fingers he stirred the covered smoldering embers, and blew into the stove. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of pine on them, then full round logs as his arms. The room brightened.
“Why don’t you go out,” he said, “and join the dancing women?” He felt a pang inside him, because what he said was really not the right thing to say and because the woman did not stir. “You should join the dancers,” he said, “as if–as if nothing had happened.” He looked at the woman huddled in a corner of the room, leaning against the wall. The stove fire played with strange moving shadows and lights upon her face. She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger or hate.

“Go out–go out and dance. If you really don’t hate me for this separation, go out and dance. One of the men will see you dance well; he will like your dancing, he will marry you. Who knows but that, with him, you will be luckier than you were with me.”
“I don’t want any man,” she said sharply. “I don’t want any other man.”
He felt relieved that at least she talked: “You know very well that I won’t want any other woman either. You know that, don’t you? Lumnay, you know it, don’t you?”
She did not answer him.
“You know it Lumnay, don’t you?” he repeated.
“Yes, I know,” she said weakly.
“It is not my fault,” he said, feeling relieved. “You cannot blame me; I have been a good husband to you.”
“Neither can you blame me,” she said. She seemed about to cry.
“No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have nothing to say against you.” He set some of the burning wood in place. “It’s only that a man must have a child. Seven harvests is just too long to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance before it is too late for both of us.”
This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in. She wound the blanket more snugly around herself.
“You know that I have done my best,” she said. “I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed many chickens in my prayers.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in the terrace because I butchered one of our pigs without your permission? I did it to appease Kabunyan, because, like you, I wanted to have a child. But what could I do?”
“Kabunyan does not see fit for us to have a child,” he said. He stirred the fire. The spark rose through the crackles of the flames. The smoke and soot went up the ceiling.
Lumnay looked down and unconsciously started to pull at the rattan that kept the split bamboo flooring in place. She tugged at the rattan flooring. Each time she did this the split bamboo went up and came down with a slight rattle. The gong of the dancers clamorously called in her care through the walls.
Awiyao went to the corner where Lumnay sat, paused before her, looked at her bronzed and sturdy face, then turned to where the jars of water stood piled one over the other. Awiyao took a coconut cup and dipped it in the top jar and drank. Lumnay had filled the jars from the mountain creek early that evening.
“I came home,” he said. “Because I did not find you among the dancers. Of course, I am not forcing you to come, if you don’t want to join my wedding ceremony. I came to tell you that Madulimay, although I am marrying her, can never become as good as you are. She is not as strong in planting beans, not as fast in cleaning water jars, not as good keeping a house clean. You are one of the best wives in the whole village.”
“That has not done me any good, has it?” She said. She looked at him lovingly. She almost seemed to smile.
He put the coconut cup aside on the floor and came closer to her. He held her face between his hands and looked longingly at her beauty. But her eyes looked away. Never again would he hold her face. The next day she would not be his any more. She would go back to her parents. He let go of her face, and she bent to the floor again and looked at her fingers as they tugged softly at the split bamboo floor.
“This house is yours,” he said. “I built it for you. Make it your own, live in it as long as you wish. I will build another house for Madulimay.”
“I have no need for a house,” she said slowly. “I’ll go to my own house. My parents are old. They will need help in the planting of the beans, in the pounding of the rice.”
“I will give you the field that I dug out of the mountains during the first year of our marriage,” he said. “You know I did it for you. You helped me to make it for the two of us.”
“I have no use for any field,” she said.
He looked at her, then turned away, and became silent. They were silent for a time.
“Go back to the dance,” she said finally. “It is not right for you to be here. They will wonder where you are, and Madulimay will not feel good. Go back to the dance.”
“I would feel better if you could come, and dance—for the last time. The gangsas are playing.”
“You know that I cannot.”
“Lumnay,” he said tenderly. “Lumnay, if I did this it is because of my need for a child. You know that life is not worth living without a child. The man have mocked me behind my back. You know that.”
“I know it,” he said. “I will pray that Kabunyan will bless you and Madulimay.”
She bit her lips now, then shook her head wildly, and sobbed.
She thought of the seven harvests that had passed, the high hopes they had in the beginning of their new life, the day he took her away from her parents across the roaring river, on the other side of the mountain, the trip up the trail which they had to climb, the steep canyon which they had to cross. The waters boiled in her mind in forms of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters tolled and growled, resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the stiff cliffs; they were far away now from somewhere on the tops of the other ranges, and they had looked carefully at the buttresses of rocks they had to step on—a slip would have meant death.
They both drank of the water then rested on the other bank before they made the final climb to the other side of the mountain.
She looked at his face with the fire playing upon his features—hard and strong, and kind. He had a sense of lightness in his way of saying things which often made her and the village people laugh. How proud she had been of his humor. The muscles where taut and firm, bronze and compact in their hold upon his skull—how frank his bright eyes were. She looked at his body that carved out of the mountains five fields for her; his wide and supple torso heaved as if a slab of shining lumber were heaving; his arms and legs flowed down in fluent muscles–he was strong and for that she had lost him.
She flung herself upon his knees and clung to them. “Awiyao, Awiyao, my husband,” she cried. “I did everything to have a child,” she said passionately in a hoarse whisper. “Look at me,” she cried. “Look at my body. Then it was full of promise. It could dance; it could work fast in the fields; it could climb the mountains fast. Even now it is firm, full. But, Awiyao, I am useless. I must die.”
“It will not be right to die,” he said, gathering her in his arms. Her whole warm naked naked breast quivered against his own; she clung now to his neck, and her hand lay upon his right shoulder; her hair flowed down in cascades of gleaming darkness.
“I don’t care about the fields,” she said. “I don’t care about the house. I don’t care for anything but you. I’ll have no other man.”
“Then you’ll always be fruitless.”
“I’ll go back to my father, I’ll die.”
“Then you hate me,” he said. “If you die it means you hate me. You do not want me to have a child. You do not want my name to live on in our tribe.”
She was silent.
“If I do not try a second time,” he explained, “it means I’ll die. Nobody will get the fields I have carved out of the mountains; nobody will come after me.”
“If you fail–if you fail this second time–” she said thoughtfully. The voice was a shudder. “No–no, I don’t want you to fail.”
“If I fail,” he said, “I’ll come back to you. Then both of us will die together. Both of us will vanish from the life of our tribe.”
The gongs thundered through the walls of their house, sonorous and faraway.
“I’ll keep my beads,” she said. “Awiyao, let me keep my beads,” she half-whispered.
“You will keep the beads. They come from far-off times. My grandmother said they come from up North, from the slant-eyed people across the sea. You keep them, Lumnay. They are worth twenty fields.”
“I’ll keep them because they stand for the love you have for me,” she said. “I love you. I love you and have nothing to give.”
She took herself away from him, for a voice was calling out to him from outside. “Awiyao! Awiyao! O Awiyao! They are looking for you at the dance!”
“I am not in hurry.”
“The elders will scold you. You had better go.”
“Not until you tell me that it is all right with you.”
“It is all right with me.”
He clasped her hands. “I do this for the sake of the tribe,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
He went to the door.
“Awiyao!”
He stopped as if suddenly hit by a spear. In pain he turned to her. Her face was in agony. It pained him to leave. She had been wonderful to him. What was it that made a man wish for a child? What was it in life, in the work in the field, in the planting and harvest, in the silence of the night, in the communing with husband and wife, in the whole life of the tribe itself that made man wish for the laughter and speech of a child? Suppose he changed his mind? Why did the unwritten law demand, anyway, that a man, to be a man, must have a child to come after him? And if he was fruitless–but he loved Lumnay. It was like taking away of his life to leave her like this.
“Awiyao,” she said, and her eyes seemed to smile in the light. “The beads!” He turned back and walked to the farthest corner of their room, to the trunk where they kept their worldly possession—his battle-ax and his spear points, her betel nut box and her beads. He dug out from the darkness the beads which had been given to him by his grandmother to give to Lumnay on the beads on, and tied them in place. The white and jade and deep orange obsidians shone in the firelight. She suddenly clung to him, clung to his neck as if she would never let him go.
“Awiyao! Awiyao, it is hard!” She gasped, and she closed her eyes and huried her face in his neck.
The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened, and he buried out into the night.
Lumnay sat for some time in the darkness. Then she went to the door and opened it. The moonlight struck her face; the moonlight spilled itself on the whole village.
She could hear the throbbing of the gangsas coming to her through the caverns of the other houses. She knew that all the houses were empty that the whole tribe was at the dance. Only she was absent. And yet was she not the best dancer of the village? Did she not have the most lightness and grace? Could she not, alone among all women, dance like a bird tripping for grains on the ground, beautifully timed to the beat of the gangsas? Did not the men praise her supple body, and the women envy the way she stretched her hands like the wings of the mountain eagle now and then as she danced? How long ago did she dance at her own wedding? Tonight, all the women who counted, who once danced in her honor, were dancing now in honor of another whose only claim was that perhaps she could give her husband a child.
“It is not right. It is not right!” she cried. “How does she know? How can anybody know? It is not right,” she said.
Suddenly she found courage. She would go to the dance. She would go to the chief of the village, to the elders, to tell them it was not right. Awiyao was hers; nobody could take him away from her. Let her be the first woman to complain, to denounce the unwritten rule that a man may take another woman. She would tell Awiyao to come back to her. He surely would relent. Was not their love as strong as the river?
She made for the other side of the village where the dancing was. There was a flaming glow over the whole place; a great bonfire was burning. The gangsas clamored more loudly now, and it seemed they were calling to her. She was near at last. She could see the dancers clearly now. The man leaped lightly with their gangsas as they circled the dancing women decked in feast garments and beads, tripping on the ground like graceful birds, following their men. Her heart warmed to the flaming call of the dance; strange heat in her blood welled up, and she started to run. But the gleaming brightness of the bonfire commanded her to stop. Did anybody see her approach?
She stopped. What if somebody had seen her coming? The flames of the bonfire leaped in countless sparks which spread and rose like yellow points and died out in the night. The blaze reached out to her like a spreading radiance. She did not have the courage to break into the wedding feast.
Lumnay walked away from the dancing ground, away from the village. She thought of the new clearing of beans which Awiyao and she had started to make only four moons before. She followed the trail above the village.
When she came to the mountain stream she crossed it carefully. Nobody held her hand, and the stream water was very cold. The trail went up again, and she was in the moonlight shadows among the trees and shrubs. Slowly she climbed the mountain.
When Lumnay reached the clearing, she cold see from where she stood the blazing bonfire at the edge of the village, where the wedding was. She could hear the far-off clamor of the gongs, still rich in their sonorousness, echoing from mountain to mountain. The sound did not mock her; they seemed to call far to her, to speak to her in the language of unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their gratitude for her sacrifice. Her heartbeat began to sound to her like many gangsas.
Lumnay thought of Awiyao as the Awiyao she had known long ago– a strong, muscular boy carrying his heavy loads of fuel logs down the mountains to his home. She had met him one day as she was on her way to fill her clay jars with water. He had stopped at the spring to drink and rest; and she had made him drink the cool mountain water from her coconut shell. After that it did not take him long to decide to throw his spear on the stairs of her father’s house in token on his desire to marry her.
The mountain clearing was cold in the freezing moonlight. The wind began to stir the leaves of the bean plants. Lumnay looked for a big rock on which to sit down. The bean plants now surrounded her, and she was lost among them.
A few more weeks, a few more months, a few more harvests—what did it matter? She would be holding the bean flowers, soft in the texture, silken almost, but moist where the dew got into them, silver to look at, silver on the light blue, blooming whiteness, when the morning comes. The stretching of the bean pods full length from the hearts of the wilting petals would go on.
Lumnay’s fingers moved a long, long time among the growing bean pods.

The God Stealer by F. Sionil Jose

The Ifugao rice terraces in Mountain Province, built by primitive natives through the centuries, are considered by many Filipinos as the Eight Wonder of the world.
-Philippine tourist folder

They were the best of friends and that was possible because they worked in the same office and both were young and imbued with a freshness in outlook. Sam Christie was twenty-eight and his Filipino assistant, Philip Latak, was twenty-six and was- just as Sam was in the Agency before he assumed his post-intelligent and industrious.
“That is to be expected,”the official whom Sam replaced explained, “because Philip is Ifugao and you don’t know patience until you have seen the rice terraces his ancestors built.”
“You will find”’ sam Christie was also told,”That the Igorot, like the Ilocanos, no matter how urbanized they are, entertain a sense of inferiority. Not Philip.He is proud of his being Ifugao. He tells all about it first chance he gets.”
Now, on this December dawn, Sam Christie was on his way to Ifugao with his native assistant. It was his last month in the Philippines and in a matter of days he would return to Boston for that leave which he had not had in years.
The bus station was actually a narrow side street which sloped down to a deserted plaza, one of the many in the summer capital. Sam could make out the shapes of the stone building huddled,it seemed. In the cold, their narrow windows shuttered and the frames advertising Coca-cola above their doorways indistinct in the dark.
Philip Latak seemed listless.They had been in the station for over half an hour and still there was no bus.”That boy in the hotel gave us bum dope,”he grumbled and zipped his old suede jacket up to his neck.It had been four years that he had lived in Manila and during all these years he had never gone home.Now the cold of the pine-clad mountains seemed to bother him.He turned to Sam and with a hint of urgency-“One favor, Sam. Let me take a swig.”
Sam Christie said, “Sure, you are welcome to it. Just make sure we have some left when we got to Ifugao.”He stopped, brought out a bottle of wine Label-one of four- from the bag which also contained bars of candy and cartons of cigarettes and matches for the natives.He removed the tinfoil and handed the bottle to his companion.
Phil raised it to his lips and made happy gurgling sounds.”Rice wine-I hope there’s still a jar around when we get to my grandfather’s. He couldn’t be a seriously sick as my brother wrote. As long as he has wine he will live.Hell, it’s not as potent as this but it can knock out a man too.”
Sam Christie kidded his companion about the weather. They had arrived in the summer capital the previous day and the bracing air and the scent of pine had invigorated him. “It’s like New England in the spring, ”he said.”In winter, when it really gets cold, I can still go around quite naked by your standards. I sent home a clipping this week, something in the Manila Papers about it being chilly. And it was only 68! My old man will get a kick out of that.”
“But it’s really cold!”Philip Latak said ruefully. He handed the bottle back to Sam Christie, who took a swig too.”You don’t know how good it is to have that along. Do you know how much it costs nowadays? Twenty-four bucks?”
“It’s cheaper at the commissary,” Sam Christie said simply. He threw his chest out, flexed his lean arms and inhaled. He wore a white, Dacron shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“I’m glad you didn’t fall for those carvings in Manila,”Phil said after a while.
“A Grecian urn, a Japanese sword, a Siamese mask- and now an Ifugao god.The Siamese mask,”Sam spoke in a monotone, “it was really a bargain. A student was going to Boston. He needed the dollars,so I told him he could get the money from my father. Forty dollars- and the mask was worth more than that.”
Now, the Gray Building around emerged from the dark with white shapes. The east was starting to glow and more people had arrived with crates and battered rattan suitcases. In the chill most of them were quiet. A coffee shop opened along the street with a great deal of clatter and in its warm, golden light Sam Christie could see the heavy faces, their happy anticipation as the steaming cups were pushed before them.
The bus finally came and Sam Christie, because he was a foreinger, was given the seat of honor, next to the driver. It was an old bus, with woven rattan seats and side entrances that admitted not only people but cargo, fowl and pigs. They did not wait long for the bus filled up quickly with government clerks going to their posts and hefty Igorots, in their bare feet or with canvas shoes, who sat in the rear, talking and smelling of earth and strong tobacco.
After the bus has started, for the first time during their stay in Baguio, sam Christie feltsleepy. He dozed, his head knocking intermittently against the hard edge of his seat and in that limbo between wakefulness and sleep he hurtled briefly to his home in Boston, to the basement study his father had tidied up, in it the mementoes of his years with the Agency. Sam had not actually intended to serve in the Agency but had always wanted to travel and, after college, a career with the agency offered him the best chance of seeing the world.
Soon it was light. The bus hugged the thin line of a road that was carved on the mountainside. Pine trees studded both sides of the road and beyond their green, across the ravines and the gray rocks, was the shimmery sky and endless ranges also draped with this mist that swirled, pervasive and alive, to their very faces. And Sam Christie, in the midst of all this whiteness and life, was quiet.
Domeone in the bus recognized Philip and he called out in native tongue, “Ip-pig!”The name did not jell at once and the man shouted again. Philip turned to the man and acknowledge the greeting and to Sam explained:”That’s my name up here-and that’s why I was baptized Philip.”
Sam Christie realized there were many things he did not know about Phil.”Tell me more about your grandfather,” he said.
“There isn’t much worth knowing about him,” Philip said.
“How old is he?”
“Eighty or more.”
“He must be a character,” Sam Christie said.
“And the village doctor,” Philip said.”Mumbo-jumbo stuff, you know .I was taken ill when I was young-something I ate, perhaps I had to go to the Mission hospital- and that evening he came and right there in the ward he danced to drive away the evil spirit that had gotten hold of me.”
“And the doctor?”
“He was broadminded,” Philip said still laughing.”They withstood it, the gongs and the stomping.”
“It must have been quite a night.”
“Hell, I was never embarrassed in my life,”Philip Latak said, shaking his head.”Much later thinking of it,” his voice become soft and a smile lingered in his thick-lidded eyes,”I realized that the old man never did that thing again for anyone, not even when his own son-my father-lay dying”.
Now they were in the heart of the highlands. The pine trees were bigger, loftier than those in Baguio, and most were wreathed with hoary moss. Sunflowers burst on the slopes, bright yellow against the grass. The sun rode over the mountains and the rocks shone – and every everything the mist as fine as powder, danced.
The bus swung around the curves and it paused, twice or thrice to allow them to take coffee. It was past noon when they reached the feral fringes of Ifugao country. The trip had not been exhausting ,for there was much to see. Sam Christie, gazing down at the ravines. At the geometric patterns of the sweet-potato patches there are the crystal waters that cascaded down the mountainsides and the streams below remembered the Alpine roads of Europe and his own New England-and about these he talked effusively.” See how vegetation changes, The people too. The mountains,”Sam Christie said,”breed independence.Mountain people are always self-reliant.”
Then, at the turn of a hill, they came, without warning, upon the water-filled rice terraces stretched out in the sun and laid out tier upon shining tier to the very summit of the mountains. And in the face of that achievement Sam Christie did not speak.
After a while he nudged Philip.”Yeah, the terraces are colossal.”And he wished he had expressed his admiration better, for he had sounded so empty and trite.
The first view of rice terraces left in Sam’s mind a kind of stupefaction which, when it had cleared, was replaced by a sense of wastefulness. He mused on whether or not these terraces were necessary, since he knew that beyond these hand- terraces carved genealogical monuments were plains that could be had for the asking.”And you say that these terraces do not produce food enough for the people?”
Philip Latak turned quizzically to him.”Hell, if I can live here, would I go to Manila?”
Their destination was no more than a cluster of houses beyond the gleaming tiers. A creek ran through the town, white with forth around the rocks, across the creek, beyond the town, was a hill, on top of which stood the Mission- four red-roofed buildings, the chapel, the school, the hospital and the residence.
“That’s were I first lerned about Jesus Christ and scotch,”Philip Latak said.”They marked me for success. Another peal of laughter.
The bus shuddered into the first gear as it dipped down the gravel road and in a while they were in the town, along its main street lined with wooden frame houses. It conformed with the usual small town arrangement and was properly palisaded with stores, whose fronts were plastered with impieties of soft-drink and patent-medicine signs. And in the stores were crowds of people, heavy-jowled Ifugaos in G-string and tattered Western coats that must have reached them in relief packages from the United States. The women wore the gay native blouses and skirts.
The two travelers got down the bus and walked to one of the bigger houses, a shapeless wooden building with a rusting tin roof and cheap printed curtains. It was a boarding house and a small curio store was in the ground floor, together with the usual merchandise of country shops: canned sardines and squid,milk, soap, matches, kerosene, a few bolts of cotton and twine.
The landlady, an acquaintance of Philip Latak, assigned them a bare room, which overlooked the creek and the mountain terraced to the very summit.
“We could stay in my brother’s place,”Philip Latak reiterated apologetically as they brought their things up,” but there is no plumbing there.
Past noon, after a plenteous lunch of fried highland rice and venison, they headed forth that broke from street and disappeared behind a turn of hillside. The walk to Philip Latak’s village itself was not far from the town and wherever they turned the terraces were sheets of mirror that dogged them.
The village was no more than ten houses in a valley, which were different from the other Ifugao homes. They stood on stilts and all their four posts were crowded with circular rat guards.A lone house roofed with tin stood at one end of the village.”My brother’s”Philip said.
“Shall I bring the candies out now?”Sam asked.He had, at Phil’s suggestion, brought them along,together with matches and cheap cigarettes, for his “private assistance program”.
Sadek, Philip’s brother was home.”You have decided to visit us after all,”he greeted Philip in English and with tinge of sarcasm. He was older and he spoke with authority. “I thought the city had won you so completely that you have forgotten this humble people.”
Then, turning to Sam, Sadek said,” I must apologize, sir, for my brother ,his bringing you to this poor house. His deed embarrasses us…”
“We work in the same office,” Sam said simply, feeling uneasy at hearing the speech.
“I know,sir,” Sadek said.
Philip Latak held his brother by the shoulder.”You see, Sam,”he said, “my brother dislikes me. Like my grandfather, he feels that I shouldn’t leave this place, that I should rot here. Here, everyone knows the terraces are good for the eye,but they can’t produce enough for the stomach.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,”Sam said warily, not wanting to be drawn into a family quarrel.
“ But it’s true,”Philip Latak said with a nervous laugh.”My brother dislikes me. All of them here dislikes me. They think that by living in Manila for a few years I have forgotten what it is to be an Ifugao. I can’t help it, Sam.I like it down there. Hell, they will never understand. My grandfather- do you know that on the day I left he followed me to the town, to the bus, pleading with me at the same time scolding me? He said I’d get all his terraces.But I like it down there, Sam,” he threw his chest out the yawned.
Unmindful of his younger brother’s ribbing Sadek dragged in some battered chairs from within the house and set them in the living room. He was a farmer and the weariness of working the terraces showed in his massive arms, in his sunburned and stolid face. His wife, who was an Ifugao like him, with high cheekbones and firm dumpty legs, came out and served them Coca-cola which was not cold.sam Christie accepted the drink, washed it down his throat politely, excruciatingly, for it was the first time that he took warm Coke and it curled his tongue.
Sadek said,” Grandfather had a high fever and we all thought the end was near.I didn’t want to bother you, but the old man said you should come.He is no longer angry with you for leaving, Ip-pig. He has forgiven you…”
“There’s nothing to forgive, my brother,”Philip Latak said, “but if he wants to he can show his forgiveness by opening his wine jar.Is he drinking still?”
“He has abandoned the jar for some time now ,” Sadek said,” but now that you are here he will drink again.”
Then the children started stealing in, five of them with grime on their faces, their feet caked with mud, their bottoms bare, their bellies shiny and disproportionately rounded and big. They stood, wide-eyed, near the sagging wall. The tallest and the oldest a boy of thirteen or twelve, Sadek pointed out as Philip’s namesake.
Philip bent down and thrust fistful at his nephews and nieces. They did not move. They hedged closer to one another, their brows, their simple faces empty of recognition, of that simple spark that would tell him, Ip-pig, that he belonged here. He spoke in the native tongue, but that did not help either. The children held their scrawny hands behind them and stepped back until their backs were pressed to the wall.
“Hell, you are all my relatives, aren’t you? He asked. Turning to Sam, “Give it to them. Maybe they like you better”.
His open palm brimming with the tinsel-wrapped sweets, Sam strode to the oldest, to Philip’s namesake, and tousled the youngster’s black, matted hair. He knelt, pinced the dirty child next to the oldest and placed a candy in his small hand. In another moment it was all noise, the children scrambling over the young American and about the floor,where the candy spilled.
Philip Latak watched them, and above the happy sounds, the squeal of children, Sadek said, “ You see now that even your relatives do not know you, IP-pig.You speak our tongue, you have our blood-but you are a stranger nevertheless.”
“See what I mean, Sam?”Philip said.”My brother does not like me”.He strode to the door.Beyond the betel-nut palms in the yard, up a sharp incline, was his grandfather’s house. It stood on four stilts like all the rest and below its roof where the bleached skulls of goats, dogs, pigs and carabaos which the old man had butchered in past feasts. He had the most number of skulls in the village to show that he had social position. Now the new skull would be added to this collection.
“Well, he will recognize me and I won’t be a stranger to him.Come,” Philip Latak turned to his friend,” let us see the old man.”
They went down, toiled up the hill, which was greasy although steps had been gouged out on it for easier climbing. Before going up the slender rungs of the old house Philip Latak called his grandfather twice. Sam Christie waited under the grass marquee that extended above the doorway. He could not see what transpired inside and there was no invitation for him to come up. However, Sam could hear Philip speaking in his native tongue and there was also a cracked, old voice, high-pitched with excitement and pleasure. And listening to the pleasant sounds of homecoming, he smiled and called to mind the homecomings he, too, had known and he thought of how the next vacation would be, his father and his mother at the Black Bay station, the luggage in the backseat, and on his lap this wooden idol he now sought. But after a while, the visitors he conjured were dispelled. The effusion within the hut had subsided into some sort of spirited talking and Philip was saying, ”Americano-Americano”. Sam heard the old man raised his voice, this time in anger and not in pleasure. The silence, a rustling within the house, the door stirring and Philip easing himself down the ladder, on his face a numbed, crestfallen look. And, without another word, he hurried down the hill, the American toiling behind him.
Philip Latak explained later on the way back to the town:”I had asked him where we could get a god and he said he didn’t know. And when I told him it was for an American friend he got mad. He never liked strangers, Sam.He said they took everything away from him-tranquility; me. Hell, you can’t do anything to an old man, Sam.We shouldn’t have bothered with him at all. , Now tell me, have I spoiled your first day here?
Sam objected vehemently.
“The old man wants a feast tomorrow night-my bienvenida of course.”
“You’ll be a damned fool if you don’t go,”Sam said.
“I’m thinking about you. You shouldn’t come, Philip said.It will be a bore and ghastly night.
But Sam Christie’s interest had been piqued and even when he realized that Philip Latak really did not want him to come he decided that this was one party he would not miss.
They visited the Mission the following day after having hiked to the villages.As Philip Latak had warned, their search was fruitless. They struggled up terraces and were met by howling dogs and bare-bottomed children and old Ifugaos, who offered them sweet potatoes and rice wine. To all of them Sam Christie is impeccably polite and charitable with his matches and his candies.And after the initial amenity that Philip would start talking and always sullen silence would answer him, and he would turn to Sam, a foolish, optimistic grin on his face.
Reverend Doone, who managed the Mission, invited them for lunch. He was quiet pleased to have a fellow American as guest. He was a San Franciscan and for him one consolation of this assignment was its meager similarity to San Francisco.
“In the afternoons,”he said with a wisp of nostalgia,” when the mist drifts in and starts to wrap the terraces and the hills, I’m reminded of the ocean fog which steals over the white hills of San Francisco-and then I feel like I’m home.”
They had finished lunch and we’re on the living room of the Mission, sipping coffee, while Philip latak was in the kitchen, where he had gone to joke with old friends. Sam’s knowledge to san Francisco is limited to the drizzly afternoon at the airport, an iron cold rain and a nasty wind that crept under the top coat, clammy and gripping, and he kept quiet while Reverend Doone reminisced. The missionary was a short man with a bulbous nose and heavy brows and homesickness written all over his pallid face.
Then it was Sam’s turn and he rambled upon the places he had seen-Greece and the marble ruins glinting in the sun, the urn;Japan, the small green country, and the samurai sword. And now, an Ifugao god.
Reverend Doone, reiterated what Philip had said.”You must understand their religion,”he said,”and if you understand it, then you’ll know why its difficult to get this god.Then you’ll know why the Ifugaos are so attached to it.It’s a religion based on fear, retribution. Every calamity or every luck which happens to them is based on this belief.A good harvest means the gods are pleased.A bad one means they are angered.”
“It’s not different from Christian then,”Sam said.”Christianity is based on fear too-fear of hell and the Final Judgement.”
Reverend Doone drew back,laid his cup of coffee on the well-worn table and spoke sternly.Christianity is based on love.That’sthe difference.You are in the Agency and you should know the significance of this distinction.”Reverend Doone bcame thoughtful again. “beside,”he said,”Christianity is based on the belief that man has a soul and that this soul is eternal.
“What happens when a man loses his soul? Sam asked.
“I wish I could answer that,”Reverend Doone said humbly.”All I can say is that man without a soul is nothing. A pig in the sty that lives only for food.Without a soul…”
“Does the Ifugao believe in a soul?”
Reverend Doone smiled gravely. “His gods- he believes in them”.
“Can a man lose his soul?” Sam insisted.
“You have seen examples,” Reverend Doone smiled wanly.”In the city –people corrupted by easy living, the pleasures of the senses and the flesh,the mass corruption that is seeping into government and everything.A generation of soulless men is growing up and dictating the future…”
“How can one who loses his soul regain it?” Sam came back with sudden life.
“It takes a catalycsm, something tragic to knock a man back to his wits,to make him realize his loss…”
“And the Ifugaos, they never lose their souls?”
“They are all human beings. But look what is in the mountain locked country. It is poor- let there be no doubt about it. They don’t make enough to eat, but there is less greed and pettiness here. There are no land-grabbers, no scandals.”
Going down the hill, Sam decided to bare his mind to Philip who was below him, teetering on the slippery trail. He said with finality, “Phil, I must not leave Ifugao without that god. It’s more than just a souvenir. It will remind me of you, of this place. The samurai sword-you should have seen the place where I got it and the people I had to deal with get it. It’s not just some souvenir, mind you. It belonged to a soldier who had fought in the South Pacific and had managed somehow to save the thing when he was made prisoner. But his daughter –it’s a sad story – she had to go to college, she was majoring in English and she didn’t have tuition money.”
In the comfort of their little room back in the town, Sam brought out his liquor. “Well”, he said as he poured a glass for Philip.”At least the hike did me good. All that walking and all those people-how nice they were, how they offered us wine and potatoes.”
“You get a lot better in cocktail parties, ”Philip Latak said.”How many people in Manila would feel honored to attend the parties you go to?”
“They are a bore,” Sam said.”And I have to be there “.
Phil was silent. He emptied the glass and raised his muddy shoes to wooden sheet on his cot. Toying with his empty glass, he asked the question Sam loathed most:”Why are you with the Agency, Sam?”
He did not hesitate.” Because I have to be somewhere ,just as you have to be somewhere. It’s that simple.”
“I’m glad you are in the Agency, Sam .We need people like you.”
Sam emptied his glass, too, and sank into his cot. Dusk had gathered outside. Fireflies ignited the grove of pine on the ledge below the house and farther, across the creek, above the brooding terraces ,the stars shone.
After a while Philip Latak spoke again:”We will be luckier tomorrow, I know. You’ll have your god, Sam. There’s a way. I can steal one for you.”
Sam stood up and waved his lean hands.”You can’t do that,” she said with pain, same with the owner. But he can always make another. It’s not so difficult to carve a new one. I tried it when I was young, before I went to the Mission.”
“You cannot steal a god, not even for me,” Sam said.
Philip laughed.”Let not be bullheaded about this. It’s the least I can do for you. You made this vacation possible-and that raise. Do you know that I have been in the agency for four years and I never got a raise until you came?”
“You had it coming. I’ts that simple.”
“You’ll have your god,” Philip Latak said gravely.
They did not have supper at the boarding house because in a while sadek arrived to fetch them. He wore an old straw hat, a faded flannel coat and old denim pants. He was barefoot. “The butchers are ready and the guest are waiting and grandfather has opened his wine jar.”
It was useless for Philip to argue with Sam who had stood up with his bag of candies and matches.
The hike in the village was not as difficult as it had been the previous day. Sam had become an expert in scaling the dikes, in balancing himself on the strips of slippery earth that formed the terrace embankment, in jumping across the conduits of spring water that continuously gushed from springs higher up in the mountain to the terraces. When they reached they reached the village many people had already gathered and on the crest of the h8ill, on which the old man’s house stood, a huge fire bloomed and the flames crackled and threw quivering shadows upon the betel palms.In the orange light Sam could discern the unsmiling faces of men carrying walking spears, the women and the children and beyond the scattered groups, near the slope, inside a bamboo corral, were about a dozen squealing pigs, dogs and goats, all ready for the sacrificial knife.
Philip Latak acknowledge the greetings, then breaking away from the tenuous groups, he went to his grandfather’s hut. Waiting outside, sam heard the same words of endearment. A pause,then the wooden door opened and Philip peeped out.”It’s okey, Sam. Come up.
And Sam, pleased with the prospect of being inside an Ifugao house for the first time, dashed up the ladder.
The old man really looked ancient and, in the light of the stove fire that lived and died again in one end of the one-room house, Sam could see the careworm face, stoic and unsmiling. Sam took in everything: the hollow cheeks, the white, scraggly hair, the horned hands and the big-boned knees. The patriarch was half-naked, like the other Ifugaos, but his loin cloth had a belt with circular home embellishments and around his neck dangled a necklace of bronze. To and Sam took it and lifted Sam the old man extended a bowl of rice wine it to his lips, savored the gentle tang and acridness of it.
He then sat down on the mud-splattered floor. Beyond the open door, in the blaze of the bonfire, the pigs were already being butchered and someone had started beating the gongs and their deep, sonorous whang rang sharp and clear above the grunts of the dying animals.
The light in the hut became alive again and showed the few artifacts within: an old gray pillow, dirty with use, a few rusty-tipped spears, fish traps and a small wooden trunk. The whole house smelled of filth, of chicken droppings and dark earth, but Sam Christie ignored these smells and attended only to the old man, who had now risen, his bony frame shaking, and from a compartment in the roof, brought out his black and ghastly –looking god not taller than two feet and set it before the fire in front of his grandson.
Someone called at the door and thrust to them a wooden bowl of blood. Philip Latak picked it up and gave it to the old man, who was kneeling. Slowly, piously, the old man poured the living frothy, blood on the idol’s head and the blood washed down the ugly head to its arms and legs, to its very feet, and as he poured the blood, in his cracked voice, recited a prayer.
Philip turned to his American friend and, with usual levity, said “My grandfather is thanking his god that I’m here. He says he can die now because he has seen me again.”
Outside, the rhythm of the gongs quickened and fierce chanting started, filled the air, the hut, crept under the skin and into the subconscious. The old man picked up the idol again and, standing, he returned it to its niche.
“Let’s go down, ”Philip said. They trod their way to the iron cauldrons, where rice was cooking, and to the butcher’s table, where big chunks of pork and dog meat were being distributed to the guests. For some time, Sam Christie watched the dancers and the singers, but the steps and the tune did not have any variation and soon he was bored-completely .the hiking that had preoccupied them during the day began to weigh on his spirits and he told Philip Latak, who was with the old man before the newly opened rice jar, that he would like to return to the boarding house. No, he did not need any guide. He knew the way, having gone through the routine thrice. But Sadek would not let him go alone and, after more senseless palaver, Sam finally broke away from the party and headed for the town with Sadek behind him.
That evening was cool, as all nights in the Ifugao country are, and that evening, as he lay on his cot, he mused. In his ears the din of the gongs still rang, in his min’ds eye loomed the shrunken, unsmiling face of the old Ifugao. He saw again the dancers, their brown, sweating bodies whirling before the fire, guttural voices rising as one, and finally, the wooden god, dirty and black and drenched with blood. And, recalling all this in vivid sharpness, he thought , he smelled, too, that peculiar odor of blood and the dirt of many years that had gathered in the old man’s house.sam Christie went to sleep with the wind soughing in the pines, the cicadas whirring in the grass.
He had no idea what time it was, but it must have been past midnight. The clatter woke him up and, without rising, he groped for the flashlight under his pillow. He lifted the mosquito net and beamed the light at the dark from which he had paused at the door.It was Philip Latak, swaying and holding on to a black, bloody mass. Sam let the ray play on Phil’s face, at the splotch on his breast- the sacrificial blood-and, finally , on the thing.
“I told you I’d get it,”Philip Latak said with drunken triumph. “I told you I’d steal a god,” and, staggering forward, he shoved his grandfather’s idol at his friend.
Sam bolted up and held him by the shoulder.” You’ll be waking everyone up. Go to bed now and we will talk in the morning.”
Philip Latak sank back into his cot. The air around him was heavy with the smell of sweat, rice wine and earth.” he will be surprised,” he repeated.”He will be surprised- and when he does he will perhaps get drunk and make a new one. Then there will be another feast to celebrate the new god- and another god to steal…”
“You are lucky to have someone love you so much. And you did him wrong,” Sam said sullenly. He sat on the edge of his cot and looked down at the dirty thing that lay at his feet.
“He did himself wrong”, Philip said, “He was wrong in being so attached to me who no longer believes in these idols. Sadek- you have seen his house. It’s different. And not because he has the money to build a different house. It’s because he doesn’t believe in the old thing anymore. He cannot say that aloud.”Phil whacked his stomach. “No while he lives with a hundred ignorant natives.”
“It’s a miserable thing to do,”Sam said.” Take it back tomorrow.”
“Take it back?” Phil turned to him with a mocking leer. “Now, that’s good of you.Hell, after all my trouble…”
“Yes, Sam said.”Take it back.” But there was no conviction in him, because in the back of his mind he was grateful that Philip Latak had brought him this dirty god, because it was real, because it has significance and meaning and was no cheap tourist bait, such as those that were displayed in the hotel lobbies in Manila.
“I won’t,”Philip said resolutely, ”If I do, I’d look bad. That would be the death of my grandfather.”
“I’ll take it back if you won’t”, Sam said almost inaudibly.
“He will kill you.”
“Don’t frighten me.”
“Hell, I’m just stating a fact,” Phil said. Do you think he would be happy to know that his god had been fondled by a stranger?”
“It’s no time for jokes,” Sam said, lying down. “That isn’t funny at all.” And in his mind’s resolute eye there crowded again one irrefrangible darkness and in it, like light, was the old man’s wrinkled face, dirtied with the mud of the terraces, the eyes narrow and gleaming with wisdom, with hate. He wished he knew more about him, for to know him would be to discover this miserly land and the hardiness (or was it foolhardiness?) which it nourished. And it was these thoughts that were rankling in his mind when he heard Philip Latak snore, heard his slow, pleasant breathing and, reaching with his hand, Sam picked with his hand, Sam picked up the taper and quashed its flame.
AT THE TIME Sam Christie woke up it was already daylight and the sun lay pure and dazzling on the rough pine sidings of the room.It was Philip Latak who had stirred him, his voice shrill and grating. Sam blinked, then sat up and walked to the door, where Philip was talking with a boy.. “I’m sorry I woke you up,” he said, turning momentarily to him. “My nephew,” a pause. “It’s grandfather.” His voice was no longer drunken. “I have to leave you here.”
“Anything the matter?”
Philip had already packed his things and the boy held them, the canvas bag and the old suede jacket.”My is dying , Sam. He collapsed- an attack-!”
When Sam found words again, all he could ask was, “Why…how…”
Hell, that should be no riddle,” Philip said.” The feast last night. The dancing and the drinking. It must have been too much for this heart. And at his age…”
“I’m sorry…”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can but don’t wait, whatever your plans are.”
After the two had gone, Sam returned to the room and picked up the idol. In the light he saw that the blood had dried and had lost its color. The idol was heavy, so Sam quickly deduced that it must be made of good hardwood. It was crudely shaped and its proportions were almost grotesque. The arms were too long and the legs were mere stumps. The feet, on the other hand, were huge. It was not very different, Sam concluded lightly, from the creations of sculptors who call themselves modernists. And wrapping it up in an old newspaper, he pushed it under his cot near his mud-caked shoes.
The next day Sam Christie idled in the town and developed the acquaintance of the Chief of Police, a small man with a pinched anonymous face that got its character only when he smiled, for then he bared a set of buckteeth reddened with betel-nut chewing. He was extremely hospitable and had volunteered to guide him to wherever he wanted to hike. They had tried the villages farther up the mountains. It was early afternoon when they returned and the mist, white as starch in the sun, had been very helpful almost to the point of obsequiousness and Sam asked him to come up for a drink. After the Chief had savored every drop in his glass he declaimed,” Indeed I am honored to taste this most wonderful hospitality, which should be reserved only for important people…”
The party could have gone further, but it was at this moment that Sadek arrived.
Philip’s brother did not waste words. “It’s about my brother,” he said. He looked down self-consciously at his shoes- they were a trifle big and Sam saw immediately that the pair was not Sadek’s but Philip’s. He saw, too, that the jacket which Sadek wore was Philip’s old suede. And, as if Sam’s unspoken scrutiny bothered him, Sadek took the jacket off and held it behind him.
“How is he?” Sam asked. He did not wait for an answer.”Come, let’s have a drink. He held the Ifugao by the arm, but Sadek squirmed free from his grasp.
”I still have a half bottle of scotch,”Sam said brightly.
“It’s the best in the world,”Sadek said humbly, but he did not move.”Nothing but the best for Americans.”
Sam did not press.”When is Phil coming back?”he asked.
“There was nothing we could do,”Sadek said. He did not face the young American and a far-away gaze was in his eyes.”Our grandfather…”
“He is dead?”
Sadek nodded.
Sam took the news calmly. He did not find it, its finality, depressing and he was surprised even that the death of someone who was dear to a friend had not affected him at all. In the back of his mind he even found himself thinking that perhaps it was best that the old man had died, so that his passing would seal, forever, as far as Philip Latak was concerned, the family’s concern with the idol’s dubious grace.
“And Phil?” Sam asked.
“He isn’t going back to Manila,” Sadek said simply, smiling again that meaningless grin of peasants.
“And why not?”
Sadek did not speak.
Tell me more,”Sam insisted.”Does his decision have something to do with the burial customs and all that sort of thing?”
“It’s not a matter of custom, sir”.
“I must see him”.
Sadek faced the American squarely now.”Mr. Christie, you cannot do anything now. You must go back to Manila.”And wheeling round, the Ifugao walked out into the street.
Sam followed him, riled by the unexpected show of rudeness. “I cannot leave like this, Sadek. I’m sorry about what happened to your grandfather. In a time of grief I should at least be able to express my… my condolence.”
“You have done that already, sir.”
Sadek paused again. “All right then,” he said sharply.”Do come,” then softly, supplicatingly,” Please, please don’t think we are being unreasonable- and don’t make me responsible for what will happen.”
Sam Christie was now troubled. “How did the old man die?” That was the one question he wanted to ask and when he did it seemed as if the words were strangled from his throat.
Walking slowly, Sadek glanced at the stranger keeping step beside him.”It happened on the morning after the feast. He had a lot of wine.”
“Of course, of course,”Sam said.”I saw him gulp it like water.A man his age shouldn’t have indulged in drinking anymore.”
“But it wasn’t the drink that did it, sir,”Sadek said emphatically.”It was the lost of the god.It was stolen.”
“It was not the god,”Sam said aloud and the words were not for Sadek alone, but for himself,to reassure himself that he was not involved, that his hands were unsoiled. And a pang of regret, of sadness, touched him. “No”, he said. It wasn’t the god. It couldn’t be as simple as that. The liquor, the dancing, the exertion –these did it.”
Near the hill on which stood the old man’s house Sadek paused again.”We buried him there,” he pointed to a new digging on the side of the hill,” and we held another feast this morning. Two feasts in so short a time. One was a welcome to a youth gone astray, the other a farewell to him who gave us the blood in us…”
At the edge of the hilltop the open pits which had served as stoves s still smoked and the dried blood of the butchered animals stained the earth. Sadek faced Sam. My brother… he will not starve here, but he will no longer have the pleasures that he knew. Will that be good for him, Mr. Christie?”He did not wait for an answer and he droned,” As long as he works…but he is no longer a farmer and his muscles are now soft like a girl’s. Me- my family, all of us will be all right , of course. We are not learned like him and we have never been to Manila. But my brother…” and, shaking his head as if great weight had fallen on his shoulders, sadek left the young American.
Now there was nothing to do but go up the Ifugao hut, this flimsy thing of straw that had survived all of time’s ravages, this house that was also granary and altar, which had retained its shape through hungry years and was, as it stood on this patch of earth, everything that endured.
As he approached it Sam Christie found himself asking why he was here, among these primitive monuments, when he could very well be in his apartment in Manila enjoying his liquor and his books and, maybe, a meztiza thrown in too.
“Phil?” Sam Christie stood in the sun, crinkling his brow and wondering if he had spoken a bit too harshly or too loudly to disturb the silence within. “Phil, are you there?”
No answer.
“Phil”, he repeated, raising his voice.
“I heard you,” Philip Latak’s from within the hut was abrupt and gruff.
“I thought you would forget. Remember, tomorrow morning, we are leaving.”I’ve already packed and I was waiting. You didn’t even send a word. We will still shop. Phil. And that woven stuff and the utensils-do you know if we can get them before we leave tomorrow?”
“I’m not going back to Manila, Sam,”Phil called. ”You can do your shopping yourself. Isn’t that idol enough?”
Now from within the hut came the sound of chopping and scraping of wood.
“You can’t mean what you say.”Sam said. Come on, we still have many things to do. But if it’s against the custom – that is if you have to stay here for more weeks after the burial…”
The words exploded from the hut with a viciousness that jolted Sam: “Damn it. I’m not coming!” It was no longer Phil’s voice. It was something elemental and distressing.I’m not going back, do you hear? You can bring the whole mountain with you if care. The gid, my grandfather’s god- isn’t it enough payment for your kindness?”
The words, their keenness, their meaning, bit deeply. “Let us be reasonable, “Sam Christie said, his voice starting to quiver.”I didn’t want you to steal the idol, Phil.” “You would have gotten it anyway,” the voice quieted down, “because you are always Curious and determined. I could forgive myself for having stolen it, but the old man-he had always been wise, Sam. He knew from the very start that it was I who did it. He wanted so much to believe that it wasn’t I, but he couldn’t pretend and neither could I. I killed him, Sam. I killed him because I wanted to be free from these…these cursed terraces , because I wanted to be grateful. I killed him who loved me most…” a faltering and a stifled sob.
“Don’t blame me, Phil”. Sam choked on the words. “I didn’t wanrt you to steal it. Remember, I even wanted it to return? Besides, I could have gone searching until I found one I could buy…”
“That’s it!” the voice within the hut had become a shriek. “That’s it! You’ll always find a way because you have all the money. You can buy everything, even gods.”
His face burning with bewilderment and shame, Sam Christie moved towards the ladder. “Phil, let’s talk this over. We are friends, Phil”, he said in a low, anguished voice.
“You are not a friend,” the voice within the grass hut had become wail. “If you are you wouldn’t have come here searching for gods to buy”.
“We are friends,” Sam insisted, toiling up the ladder, and at the top rung, he pushed aside the flimsy bamboo door...
In the semi-darkness, amid the poverty and the soot of many years, Sam Christie saw Philip Latak squatting before the same earthen stove, aglow with embers. And in this glow Sam Christie saw his friend – not the Philip Latak with the suede jacket but a well-built Ifugao attired in the simple costume of the highlands, his broad flanks uncovered, and around his waist was a black-and red breech cloth with yellow tassels. From his neck dangled the bronze necklace of an Ifugao warrior.
Philip Latak did not, even once, face Sam. He seemed completely absorbed with his work and, with the sharp blade in his hands, he started scraping again, the block of wood which he held tightly between his knees.
“Leave me alone, Sam,”Philip Latak said softly, as if all grief had been squeezed from him. “I have to finish this and it will take some time.”
Sam Christie’s over-observant eyes lingered on the face. Where had he seen it before? Was it in Greece – or in Japan – or in Siam?
The recognition came swiftly, savagely; with watery legs and trembling hands, he stepped down and let the door slide quietly back into place. He knew then that Philip Latak had really had hard work to do and it would take some time before he could finish a new god to replace the old one, the stolen idol which he was bringing home to America to take its place among his souvenirs of benighted

The Day the Dancers Came by Bienvenido Santos

AS soon as Fil woke up, he noticed a whiteness outside, quite unusual for the November mornings they had been having. That fall, Chicago was sandman's town, sleepy valley, drowsy gray, slumberous mistiness from sunup till noon when the clouds drifted away in cauliflower clusters and suddenly it was evening. The lights shone on the avenues like soiled lamps centuries old and the skyscrapers became monsters with a thousand sore eyes. Now there was a brightness in the air land Fil knew what it was and he shouted, "Snow! It's snowing!"

Tony, who slept in the adjoining room, was awakened.

"What's that?" he asked.

"It's snowing," Fil said, smiling to himself as if he had ordered this and was satisfied with the prompt delivery. "Oh, they'll love this, they'll love this."

"Who'll love that?" Tony asked, his voice raised in annoyance.

"The dancers, of course," Fil answered. "They're arriving today. Maybe they've already arrived. They'll walk in the snow and love it. Their first snow, I'm sure."

"How do you know it wasn't snowing in New York while they were there?" Tony asked.

"Snow in New York in early November?" Fil said. "Are you crazy?"

"Who's crazy?" Tony replied. "Ever since you heard of those dancers from the Philippines, you've been acting nuts. Loco. As if they're coming here just for you.

Tony chuckled. Hearing him, Fil blushed, realizing that he had, indeed, been acting too eager, but Tony had said it. It felt that way--as if the dancers were coming here only for him.

Filemon Acayan, Filipino, was fifty, a U.S., citizen. He was a corporal in the U.S. Army, training at San Luis Obispo, on the day he was discharged honorably, in 1945. A few months later, he got his citizenship papers. Thousands of them, smart and small in their uniforms, stood at attention in drill formation, in the scalding sun, and pledged allegiance to the flat and the republic for which it stands. Soon after he got back to work. To a new citizen, work meant many places and many ways: factories and hotels, waiter and cook. A timeless drifting: once he tended a rose garden and took care of a hundred year old veteran of a border war. As a menial in a hospital in Cook Country, all day he handled filth and gore. He came home smelling of surgical soap and disinfectant. In the hospital, he took charge of row of bottles on a shelf, each bottle containing a stage of the human embryo in preservatives, from the lizard-like fetus of a few days, through the newly born infant, with its position unchanged, cold and cowering and afraid. He had nightmares through the years of himself inside a bottle. l That was long ago. Now he had a more pleasant job as special policemen in the post office.

He was a few years younger than Tony-Antonio Bataller, a retired pullman porter but he looked older in inspite of the fact that Tony had been bedridden most of the time for the last two years, suffering from a kind of wasting disease that had frustrated doctors. All over Tony's body, a gradual peeling was taking place. l At first, he thought it was merely tiniaflava, a skin disease common among adolescent in the Philippines. It had started around the neck and had spread to his extremities. His face looked as if it was healing from sever burns. Nevertheless, it was a young face much younger than Fil's, which had never looked young.

"I'm becoming a white man," Tony had said once, chuckling softly.

It was the same chuckle Fil seemed to have heard now, only this time it sounded derisive, insulting.

Fil said, "I know who's nuts. It's the sick guy with the sick thoughts. You don't care for nothing but your pain, your imaginary pain."

"You're the imagining fellow. I got the real thing," Tony shouted from the room. He believed he had something worse than the whiteness spreading on his skin. There was a pain in his insides, like dull scissors scraping his intestines. Angrily he added, "What for I got retired?"

"You're old, man, old, that's what, and sick, yes, but not cancer," Fil said turning towards the snow-filled sky. He pressed his faced against the glass window. There's about an inch now on the ground, he thought, maybe more.

Tony came out of his room looking as if he had not slept all night. "I know what I got," he said, as if it were an honor and a privilege to die of cancer and Fill was trying to deprive him of it. "Never a pain like this. One day, I'm just gonna die."

"Naturally. Who says you won't?" Fil argued, thinking how wonderful it would be if he could join the company of dancers from the Philippines, show them around walk with them in the snow, watch their eyes as they stared about them, answer their questions, tell them everything they wanted to know about the changing seasons in this strange land. They would pick up fistfuls of snow, crunch it in their fingers or shove it into their mouths. He had done just that the first time, long, long ago, and it had reminded him of the grated ice the Chinese sold near the town plaza where he had played tatching with an older brother who later drowned in a squall. How his mother had grieved over that death, she who has not cried too much when his father died, a broken man. Now they were all gone, quick death after a storm, or lingeringly, in a season of drought, all, all of them he had loved.

He continued, "All of us will die. One day. A medium bomb marked Chicago and this whole dump is tapus, finished. Who'll escape then?"

"Maybe your dancers will," Fil answered, now watching the snow himself.

"Of course, they will," Fil retorted, his voice sounding like a big assurance that all the dancers would be safe in his care. "The bombs won't be falling on this night. And when the dancers are back in the Philippines..."

He paused, as if he was no longer sure of what he was going to say. "But maybe, even in the Philippines the bombs gonna fall, no?" he said, gazing sadly at the falling snow.

"What's that to you?" Tony replied. "You got no more folks over 'der right? I know it's nothing to me. I'll be dead before that."

"Let's talk about something nice," Fil said, the sadness spreading on his face as he tried to smile. "Tell me, how will I talk, how am I gonna introduce myself?"

He would go ahead with his plans, introduce himself to the dancers and volunteer to take them sight-seeing. His car was clean and ready for his guests. He had soaped the ashtrays, dusted off the floor boards and thrown away the old mats, replacing them with new plastic throw rugs. He had got himself soaking wet while spraying the car, humming, as he worked, faintly-remembered tunes from the old country.

Fill shook his head as he waited for Tony to say something. "Gosh, I wish I had your looks, even with those white spots, then I could face everyone of them," he said, "but this mug."

"That's the important thing, you mug. It's your calling card. It says, Filipino. Countrymen," Tony said.

"You're not fooling me, friend," Fil said. "This mug says, Ugly Filipino. It says, old-timer, muchacho. It says Pinoy, bejo."

For Fil, time was the villain. In the beginning, the words he often heard were: too young, too young; but all of a sudden, too young became too old, too late. What happened in between, a mist covering all things. You don't have to look at your face in a mirror to know that you are old, suddenly old, grown useless for a lot of things land too late for all the dreams you had wrapped up w ell against a day of need.

"It also says sucker," Fil answered, "but who wants a palace when they can have the most delicious adobo here ands the best stuffed chicken... yum...yum..."

Tony was angry, "Yum, yum, you're nuts," he said, "plain and simple loco. What for you want to spend? You've been living on loose change all your life and now on dancing kids who don't know you and won't even send you a card afterwards."

"Never mind the cards," Fil answered. "Who wants cards? But don't you see, they'll be happy; and then, you know what? I'm going to keep their voices, their words and their singing and their laughter in my magic sound mirror."

He had a portable tape recorder and a stack of recordings, patiently labeled, songs and speeches. The songs were in English, but most of the speeches were in the dialect, debates between him and Tony. It was evident Tony was the better speaker of the two in English, but in the dialect, Fil showed greater mastery. His style, however, was florid, sentimental, poetic.

Without telling Tony, he had experimented on recording sounds, like the way a bed creaked, doors opening and closing, rain or sleet tapping on the window panes, footsteps through the corridor. He was beginning to think that they did. He was learning to identify each of the sounds with a particular mood or fact. Sometimes, like today, he wished that there was a way of keeping a record of silence because it was to him the richest sound, like snow falling. He wondered as he watched the snow blowing in the wind, what took care of that moment if memory didn't. Like time, memory was often a villain, a betrayer.

"Fall, snow, fall," he murmured and, turning to Tony, said, "As soon as they accept my invitation, I'll call you up. No, you don't have to do anything, but I'd want to be here to meet them."

"I'm going out myself," Tony said. "And I don't know what time I'll be back."Then he added. "You're not working today. Are you on leave?"

"For two days. While the dancers are here." Fil said.

"It still don't make sense to me," Tony said. "But good luck, any way."

"Aren't you going to see them tonight? Our reserved seats are right out in front, you know."

"I know. But I'm not sure I can come."

"What? You're not sure?"

Fil could not believe it. Tony was indifferent. Something must be wrong with him. He looked at him closely, saying nothing.

"I want to, but I'm sick Fil. I tell you, I'm not feeling so good. My doctor will know today. He'll tell me." Tony said.

"What will he tell you?"

"How do I know?"

"I mean, what's he trying to find out?"

"If it's cancer," Tony said. l Without saying another word, he went straight back to is room.

Fil remembered those times, at night, when Tony kept him awake with his moaning. When he called out to him, asking, "Tony, what's the matter?" his sighs ceased for a while, but afterwards, Tony screamed, deadening his cries with a pillow against his mouth. When Fill rushed to his side, Tony dove him about the previous night, he would reply, "I was dying," but it sounded more like disgust overt a nameless annoyance.

Fil has misgivings, too, about the whiteness spreading on Tony's skin. He had heard of leprosy. Every time he thought of that dreaded disease, he felt tears in his eyes. In all the years he had been in America, he had not has a friend until he meet Tony whom he liked immediately and, in a way, worshipped, for all the things the man had which Fil knew he himself lacked.

They had shared a lot together. They made merry on Christmas, sometimes got drunk and became loud. Fil recited poems in the dialect and praised himself. Tony fell to giggling and cursed all the railroad companies of America. But last Christmas, they hadn't gotten drunk. They hadn't even talked to each other on Christmas day. Soon, it would be Christmas again.

The snow was still falling.

"Well, I'll be seeing you," Fil said, getting ready to leave. "Try to be home on time. I shall invites the dancers for luncheon or dinner maybe, tomorrow. But tonight, let's go to the theater together, ha?"

"I'll try," Tony answered. He didn't need boots. He loved to walk in the snow.

The air outside felt good. Fil lifted his face to the sky and closed his eyes as the snow and a wet wind drench his face. He stood that way for some time, crying, more, more to himself, drunk with snow and coolness. His car was parked a block away. As he walked towards it, he plowed into the snow with one foot and studied the scar he made, a hideous shape among perfect footmarks. He felt strong as his lungs filled with the cold air, as if just now it did not matter too much that he was the way he looked and his English way the way it was. But perhaps, he could talk to the dancers in his dialect. Why not?

A heavy frosting of snow covered his car and as he wiped it off with his bare hands, he felt light and young, like a child at play, and once again, he raised his face to the sky and licked the flakes, cold and tasteless on his tongue.


When Fil arrived at the Hamilton, it seemed to him the Philippine dancers had taken over the hotel. They were all over the lobby on the mezzanine, talking in groups animatedly, their teeth sparkling as they laughed, their eyes disappearing in mere slits of light. Some of the girls wore their black hair long. For a moment, the sight seemed too much for him who had but all forgotten how beautiful Philippine girls were. He wanted to look away, but their loveliness held him. He must do something, close his eyes perhaps. As he did so, their laughter came to him like a breeze murmurous with sounds native to his land.

Later, he tried to relax, to appear inconspicuous. True, they were all very young, but there were a few elderly men and women who must have been their chaperons or well-wishers like him. He would smile at everyone who happened to look his way. Most of them smiled back, or rather, seemed to smile, but it was quick, without recognition, and might not have been for him but for someone else near or behind him.

His lips formed the words he was trying to phrase in his mind: Ilocano ka? Bicol? Ano na, paisano? Comusta? Or should he introduce himself---How? For what he wanted to say, the words didn't come too easily, they were unfamiliar, they stumbled and broke on his lips into a jumble of incoherence.

Suddenly, he felt as if he was in the center of a group where he was not welcome. All the things he had been trying to hide now showed: the age in his face, his horny hands. He knew it the instant he wanted to shake hands with the first boy who had drawn close to him, smiling and friendly. Fil put his hands in his pocket.

Now he wished Tony had been with him. Tony would know what to do. He would harm these young people with his smile and his learned words. Fil wanted to leave, but he seemed caught up in the tangle of moving bodies that merged and broke in a fluid strangle hold. Everybody was talking, mostly in English. Once in a while he heard exclamations in the dialect right out of the past, conjuring up playtime, long shadows of evening on the plaza, barrio fiestas, misa de gallo.

Time was passing and he had yet to talk to someone. Suppose he stood on a chair and addressed them in the manner of his flamboyant speeches recorded in his magic sound mirror?

"Beloved countrymen, lovely children of the Pearl of the Orient Seas, listen to me. I'm Fil Acayan. I've come to volunteer my services. I'm yours to command. Your servant. Tell me where you wish to go, what you want to see in Chicago. I know every foot of the lakeshore drive, all the gardens and the parks, the museums, the huge department stores, the planetarium. Let me be your guide. That's what I'm offering you, a free tour of Chicago, and finally, dinner at my apartment on West Sheridan Road--pork adobo and chicken relleno, name your dish. How about it, paisanos?"

No. That would be a foolish thing to do. They would laugh at him. He felt a dryness in his throat. He was sweating. As he wiped his face with a handkerchief, he bumped against a slim, short girl who quite gracefully, stepped aside, and for a moment he thought he would swoon in the perfume that enveloped him. It was fragrance, essence of camia, of ilang-ilang, and dama de noche.

Two boys with sleek, pomaded hair were sitting near an empty chair. He sat down and said in the dialect, "May I invite you to my apartment?" The boys stood up, saying, "Excuse us, please," and walked away. He mopped his brow, but instead of getting discouraged, he grew bolder as though he hand moved one step beyond shame. Approaching another group, he repeated his invitation, and a girl with a mole on her upper lip, said, "Thank you, but we have no time." As he turned towards another group, he felt their eyes on his back. Another boy drifted towards him, but as soon as he began to speak, the boy said, "Pardon, please," and moved away.

They were always moving away. As if by common consent, they had decided to avoid him, ignore his presence. Perhaps it was not their fault. They must have been instructed to do so. Or was it his looks that kept them away? The though was a sharpness inside him.

After a while, as he wandered about the mezzanine, among the dancers, but alone, he noticed that they had begun to leave. Some had crowded noisily into the two elevators. He followed the others going down the stairs. Through the glass doors, he saw them getting into a bus parked beside the subway entrance on Dearborn.

The snow had stopped falling; it was melting fast in the sun and turning into slush.

As he moved about aimlessly, he felt someone touch him on the sleeve. It was one of the dancers, a mere boy, tall and thin, who was saying, "Excuse, please." Fil realized he was in the way between another boy with a camera and a group posing in front of the hotel.

"Sorry," Fill said, jumping away awkwardly.

The crowd burst out laughing.

Then everything became a blur in his eyes, a moving picture out of focus, but gradually, the figure cleared, there was mud on the pavement on which the dancers stood posing, and the sun throw shadows at their feet.

Let them have fun, he said to himself, they're young and away from home. I have no business up their schedule, forcing my company on them.

He watched the dancers till the last of them was on the bus. The voices came to him, above the traffic sounds. They waved their hands and smiled towards him as the bus started. Fil raised his hand to wave back, but stopped quickly, aborting the gesture. He turned to look behind him at whomever the dancers were waving their hands to. There was no one there except his own reflection in the glass door, a double exposure of himself and a giant plant with its thorny branches around him like arms in a loving embrace.

Even before he opened the door to their apartment, Fil knew that Tony had not yet arrived. There were no boots outside on the landing. Somehow he felt relieved, for until then he did not know how he was going to explain his failure.

From the hotel, he had driven around, cruised by the lakeshore drive, hoping he could see the dancers somewhere, in a park perhaps, taking pictures of the mist over the lake and the last gold on the trees now wet with melted snow, or on some picnic grounds, near a bubbling fountain. Still taking pictures of themselves against a background of Chicago's gray and dirty skyscrapers. He slowed down every time he saw a crowd, but the dancers were nowhere along his way. Perhaps they had gone to the theater to rehearse. He turned back before reaching Evanston.

He felt weak, not hungry. Just the same, he ate, warming up some left-over food. The rice was cold, but the soup was hot and tasty. While he ate, he listened for footfalls.

Afterwards, he lay down on the sofa and a weariness came over him, but he tried hard not to sleep. As he stared at the ceiling, he felt like floating away, but he kept his eyes open, willing himself hard to remain awake. He wanted to explain everything to Tony when he arrived. But soon his eyes closed against a weary will too tired and weak to fight back sleep--and then there were voices. Tony was in the room, eager to tell his own bit of news.

"I've discovered a new way of keeping afloat," he was saying.

"Who wants to keep afloat?" Fil asked.

"Just in case. In a shipwreck, for example," Tony said.

"Never mind shipwrecks. I must tell you about the dancers," Fil said.

"But this is important," Tony insisted. "This way, you can keep floating indefinitely."

"What for indefinitely?" Fil asked.

"Say in a ship... I mean, in an emergency, you're stranded without help in the middle of the Pacific or the Atlantic, you must keep floating till help comes..." Tony explained.

"More better," Fil said, "find a way to reach shore before the sharks smells you. You discover that."

"I will," Tony said, without eagerness, as though certain that there was no such way, that, after all, his discovery was worthless.

"Now you listen to me," Fil said, sitting up abruptly. As he talked in the dialect, Tony listened with increasing apathy.

"There they were," Fil began, his tone taking on the orator's pitch, "Who could have been my children if I had not left home-- or yours, Tony. They gazed around them with wonder, smiling at me, answering my questions, but grudgingly, edging away as if to be near me were wrong, a violation in their rule book. But it could be that every time I opened my mouth, I gave myself away. I talked in the dialect, Ilocano, Tagalog, Bicol, but no one listened. They avoided me. They had been briefed too well: Do not talk to strangers. Ignore their invitations. Be extra careful in the big cities like New York and Chicago, beware of the old-timers, the Pinoys. Most of them are bums. Keep away ;from them. Be on the safe side--stick together, entertain only those who have been introduced to you properly.

"I'm sure they had such instructions, safety measures, they must have called them. What then could I have done, scream out my good intentions, prove my harmlessness and my love for them by beating my breast? Oh, but I loved them. You see, I was like them once. I, too, was nimble with my feet, graceful with my hands; and I had the tongue of a poet. Ask the village girls and the envious boys from the city--but first you have to find them. After these many years, it won't be easy. You'll have to search every suffering pace in the village gloom for a hint of youth and beauty or go where the grave-yards are and the tombs under the lime trees. One such face...oh, God, what am I saying...

"All I wanted was to talk to them, guide them around Chicago, spend money on them so that they would have something special to remember about us here when they return to our country. They would tell their folks: We melt a kind, old man, who took us to his apartment. It was not much of a place. It was old-like him. When we sat on the sofa in the living room, the bottom sank heavily, the broken springs touching the floor. But what a cook that man was! And how kind! We never thought that rice and adobo could be that delicious. And the chicken relleno! When someone asked what the stuffing was--we had never tasted anything like it, he smiled saying, 'From heaven's supermarket' touching his head and pressing his heart like a clown as if heaven were there. He had his tape recorder which he called a magic sound mirror, and he had all of us record our voices. Say anything in the dialect, sing, if you please, our kundiman, please, he said, his eyes pleading, too. Oh, we had fun listening to the playback. When you're gone, the old man said, I shall listen to your voices with my eyes closed and you'll be here again and I won't ever be alone, no, not anymore, after this. We wanted to cry, but he looked very funny, so we laughed and he laughed with us.

"But, Tony, they would not come. They thanked me, but they said they had no time. Others said nothing. They looked through me. I didn't exist. Or worse, I was unclean. Basura. Garbage. They were ashamed me. How could I be Filipino?"

The memory, distinctly recalled, was a rock on his breast. He grasped for breath.

"Now, let me teach you how to keep afloat," Tony said, but is was not Tony's voice.

Fil was alone and gasping for air. His eyes opened slowly till he began to breathe more easily. The sky outside was gray. He looked at his watch--a quarter past five. The show would begin at eight. There was time. Perhaps Tony would be home soon.

The apartment was warming up. The radiators sounded full of scampering rats. He had a recording of that in his sound mirror.

Fil smiled. He had an idea. He would take the sound mirror to the theater, take his seat close to the stage, and make tape recordings of the singing and the dances.

Now he was wide-awake and somehow pleased with himself. The more he thought of the idea, the better he felt. If Tony showed up now... He sat up, listening. The radiators were quiet. There were no footfalls, no sound of a key turning.


Late that night, back from the theater, Fill knew at once that Tony was back. The boots were outside the door. He, too, must be tired, and should not be disturb.

He was careful not to make any noise. As he turned on the floor lamp, he thought that perhaps Tony was awake and waiting for him. They would listen together to a playback of the dances and songs Tony had missed. Then he would tell Tony what happened that day, repeating part of the dream.

From Tony's bedroom came the regular breathing of a man sound asleep. To be sure, he looked into the room and in the half-darkness, Tony's head showed darkly, deep in a pillow, on its side, his knees bent, almost touching the clasped hands under his chin, an oversized fetus in the last bottle. Fill shut the door between them and went over to the portable. Now. He turned it on to low. At first nothing but static and odd sounds came through, but soon after there was the patter of feet to the rhythm of a familiar melody.

All the beautiful boys and girls were in the room now, dancing and singing. A boy and a girl sat on the floor holding two bamboo poles by their ends flat on floor, clapping them together, then apart, and pounding them on the boards, while dancers swayed and balanced their lithe forms, dipping their bare brown legs in and out of the clapping bamboos, the pace gradually increasing into a fury of wood on wood in a counterpoint of panic among the dancers and in a harmonious flurry of toes and ankles escaping certain pain--crushed bones, and bruised flesh, and humiliation. Other dances followed, accompanied by songs and live with the sounds of life and death in the old country; I go rot natives in G-strings walking down a mountainside; peasants climbing up a hill on a rainy day; neighbors moving a house, their sturdy legs showing under a moving roof; a distant gong sounding off a summons either to a feast for a wake. And finally, prolonged ovation, thunderous, wave upon wave...

"Turn that thing off!" Tony's voice was sharp above the echoes of the gongs and the applause settling into silence.

Fil switched off the dial and in the sudden stillness, the voices turned into faces, familiar and near, like gesture and touch that stayed on even as the memory withdrew, bowing out, as it were, in a graceful exit, saying, thank you, thank you, before a ghostly audience that clapped hands in silence and stomped their feet in a such emptiness. He wanted to join the finale, such as it was, pretend that the curtain call included him, and attempt a shamefaced imitation of a graceful adieu, but he was stiff and old, incapable of grace; but he said, thank you, thank you, his voice sincere and contrite, grateful for the other voices and the sound of singing and the memory.

"Oh, my God..." the man in the other room cried, followed by a moan of such anguish that Fil fell on his knees, covering the sound mirror with his hands to muffle the sounds that had started again, it seemed to him, even after he had turned it off.

Then he remembered.

"Tony, what did the doctor say? What did he say?" he shouted and listened, holding his breath, no longer able to tell at the moment who had truly waited all day for the final sentence.

There was no answer. Meanwhile, under his hands, there was Tony saying? That was his voice, no? Fil wanted to hear, he must know. He switched dials on and off, again and again, pressing buttons. Suddenly, he didn't know what to do. The spool were live, they kept turning. His arms went around the machine, his chest pressing down on the spools. In the quick silence, Tony's voice came clear.

"So they didn't come after all?"

"Tony, what did the doctor say?" Fil asked, straining hard to hear.

"I knew they wouldn't come. But that's okay. The apartment is old anyhow. And it smells of death."

"How you talk. In this country, there's a cure for everything."

"I guess we can't complain. We had it good here all the time. Most of the time, anyway."

"I wish, though, they had come. I could..."

"Yes, they could have. They didn't have to see me, but I could have seen them. I have seen their pictures, but what do they really look like?"

"Tony, they're beautiful, all of them, but especially the girls. Their complexion, their grace, their eyes, they were what we call talking eyes, they say, things to you. And the scent of them!"

There was a sigh from the room soft, hardly like a sigh. A louder, grating sound, almost under his hands that had relaxed their hold, called his attention. The sound mirror had kept going, the tape was fast unraveling.

"Oh, no! he screamed, noticing that somehow, he had pushed the eraser.

Frantically, he tried to rewind and play back the sounds and the music, but there was nothing now but the full creaking of the tape on the spool and meaningless sounds that somehow had not been erased, the thud of dancing feet, a quick clapping of hands, alien voices and words: in this country... everything... all of them... talking eyes... and the scent... a fading away into nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming, senseless kind of finale detached from the body of a song in the background, drums and sticks and the tolling of a bell.

"Tony! Tony!" Fil cried, looking towards the sick man's room, "I've lost them all."

Biting his lips, Fil turned towards the window, startled by the first light of the dawn. He hadn't realized till then the long night was over.

DEAD STARS by Paz Marquez Benitez

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.
"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"
"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."
Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."
"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.
"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"
"In love? With whom?"
"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--"
Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much engaged to Esperanza.
Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.
"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.
"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"
Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.
"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.
Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.
He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.
The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.
Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now--
One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.
A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.
He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.
To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I had once before."
"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.
"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"
He laughed with her.
"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without help."
"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"
"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."
Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.
He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doña Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.
On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.
Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring."
He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."
She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman.
That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.
It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.
"Up here I find--something--"
He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"
"No; youth--its spirit--"
"Are you so old?"
"And heart's desire."
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery."
"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.
"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"
"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."
"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
"I could study you all my life and still not find it."
"So long?"
"I should like to."
Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments.
Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She and Doña Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit to her father; how Doña Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.
After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young coconut looked like--"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"--while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving beach.
Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps, narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.
When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.
"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.
"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach."
There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.
"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can visit."
"The last? Why?"
"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."
He noted an evasive quality in the answer.
"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"
"If you are, you never look it."
"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."
"But--"
"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.
"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.
She waited.
"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."
"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely
"Who? I?"
"Oh, no!"
"You said I am calm and placid."
"That is what I think."
"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."
It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.
"I should like to see your home town."
"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes squashes."
That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him.
"Nothing? There is you."
"Oh, me? But I am here."
"I will not go, of course, until you are there."
"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"
"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."
She laughed.
"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."
"Could I find that?"
"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.
"I'll inquire about--"
"What?"
"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."
"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."
"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.
"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."
"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"
"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"
"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--"
"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.
"Exactly."
"It must be ugly."
"Always?"
Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned gold.
"No, of course you are right."
"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.
"I am going home."
The end of an impossible dream!
"When?" after a long silence.
"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at home."
She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."
"Can't I come to say good-bye?"
"Oh, you don't need to!"
"No, but I want to."
"There is no time."
The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.
"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."
"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."
"Old things?"
"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.
Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.
Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye."

II
ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart of the town--heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convento, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts. Came too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes, heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device.
Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints' platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.
The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look unaware, and could not.
The line moved on.
Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life.
Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.
The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again, where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.
At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.
A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home.
Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening" and fell into step with the girl.
"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was both excited and troubled.
"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."
"Oh, is the Judge going?"
"Yes."
The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As lawyer--and as lover--Alfredo had found that out long before.
"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you."
Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.
"For what?"
"For your approaching wedding."
Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?
"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about getting the news," she continued.
He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice--cool, almost detached from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.
"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly
"When they are of friends, yes."
"Would you come if I asked you?"
"When is it going to be?"
"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.
"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony.
"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"
"Why not?"
"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"
"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.
"Then I ask you."
"Then I will be there."
The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill. There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home.
"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose between something you wanted to do and something you had to do?"
"No!"
"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such a situation."
"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.
"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"
"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him."
"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all."
"Doesn't it--interest you?"
"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."
Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.
Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.
He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which he tried to control.
She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.
She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.
"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out bad."
What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?
"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.
"But do you approve?"
"Of what?"
"What she did."
"No," indifferently.
"Well?"
He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is that it is not necessarily wicked."
"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that."
"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she is not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not."
"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.
"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.
"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?
"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will say." Her voice trembled.
Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say--what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of the wedding?
"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to his lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare--"
"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man."
Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack on Julia Salas?
"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere man word such a plea?
"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are tired of me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.
The last word had been said.

III
AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to find that elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.
He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.
Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.
The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat--slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted.
"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"
"What abogado?" someone irately asked.
That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.
It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy--Tandang "Binday"--that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house."
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her."
San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him. It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.
Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the water.
How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelas making scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness.
How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished prayer.
A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.
Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.
"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.
"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"
"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.
"Won't you come up?"
He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last--he was shaking her hand.
She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.
Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly interested him.
The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.

This is the 1925 short story that gave birth to modern Philippine writing in English.