Egmidio Enriquez wrote “The.Doll” which won a prize in the Philippine Free Press annual competition. He showed lots of promise but I don't know if he wrote many more stories later.
1.THE DOLL
by Egmidio Enriquez
HE was christened Narciso and his mother called him Sising. But when be took a fancy to his mother’s old rag dolls which she preserved with moth balls for the little girls she had expected to have, his father decided to call him Boy. His father was excessively masculine, from the low broad forehead and the thick bushy brows to the wide cleft chest and the ridged abdomen beneath it; and the impotence of his left leg which rheumatic attacks had rendered almost useless only goaded him to assert his maleness by an extravagant display of superiority.
“We’ll call him Boy. He is my son. A male. The offspring of a male.” Don Endong told his wife in a tone as crowy as a rooster’s after pecking a hen. “A man is fashioned by heredity and environment. I’ve given him enough red for his blood, but a lot of good it will do him with the kind of environment you are giving him. That doll you gave him—”
“I didn’t give him that doll,” Doña Enchay explained hastily. “He happened upon it in my aparador when I was clearing it. He took pity on it and drew it out. He said it looked very unhappy because it was naked and lonely. He asked me to make a dress for it—”
“And you made one. You encouraged him to play with it,” he accused her.
Doña Enchay looked at her husband embarrassedly. “I had many cuttings, and I thought I’d make use of them,” she said brushing an imaginary wisp of hair from her forehead. It was still a smooth forehead, clean swept and unlined. It did not match the tired look of her eyes, nor the droop of her heavy mouth.
Don Endong saw the forehead and the gesture, took in the quiver of the delicate nostrils and the single dimple on her cheek. “You are such a child yourself, Enchay,” he told her. “You still want to play with dolls. That is why, I suppose, you refuse to have your son’s hair cut short. You’ll make a sissy out of him!” His eyes hardened, and a pulse ticked under his right ear. “No, I will not allow it,” he said struggling to his feet with his cane and shouting, “Boy! Boy! Boy!”
His wife leapt forward to assist him, but as he steadied himself on his cane she couldn’t touch him. Even in his infirmity she could not give him support. His eyes held her back, melted her strength away, reminded her she was only a woman—the weaker, the inferior, the dependent. She felt like a flame in the wind that had frantically reached out for something to burn and having found nothing to feed itself on, settled back upon its wick to burn itself out. She watched him struggle to the window.
When he had reached it and laid his cane on the sill, she moved close to him and passed an arm around his waist. “The curls will not harm him, Marido,” she said. “They are so pretty. They make him look like the little boys in the story books. Remember the page boys at the feet of queen? His hair does not make him a girl. He looks too much like you. That wide thin-lipped mouth and that stubborn chin, and that manly chest—why you yourself say he has a pecho de paloma.”
Don Endong’s mouth twitched at one corner, looking down at her, he passed an arm across her back and under an arm. His hand spread out on her body like a crab and taking a handful of her soft flesh kneaded it gently. “All right, mujer,” he said, “but not the doll!” And he raised his voice again. “Boy! Boy! Boy!”
The boy was getting the doll ready for bed in the wigwam of coconut fronds he had built in the yard below. The doll was long, slender, rag-bodied with a glossy head of porcelain. He had pulled off its frilly, ribbon trimmed dress, and was thrusting its head into a white cotton slip of a garment that his mother had made and was a little too tight. His father’s stentorian voice drew his brows together. At whom was his father shouting now? His father was always shouting and fuming. He filled the house with his presence, invalid though he was. How could his mother stand him?
“Boy! Boy! Boy!” came his father’s voice again.
Ripping the cotton piece from the head of the doll where the head was caught, he flung the little garment away, and picking up the doll walked hastily towards the house.
His father and mother met him at the head of the stairs. He looked at his father’s angry face and said without flinching: “Were you calling me, Father? My name is not Boy!”
“It is Boy from now on,” his father told him. “That will help you to remember that you are a boy. A boy, understand?”
His father looked ugly when he was mad, but he was not afraid of him. He never beat him. He only cursed and cursed. “I don’t understand, why?” he asked.
“Because little boys don’t play with dolls,” Don Endong thundered at him, “that’s why!” And snatching the doll from the boy, Don Endong flung it viciously to the floor.
Boy was not prepared for his father’s precipitate move. He was not prepared to save his doll. One moment it was cradled snugly in the crook of his arm. The next it was sprawled on the floor, naked, and broken, an arm twisted limp beneath it, another flung across its face. as if to hide the shame of its disaster. Suddenly it was as if he were the doll. There was a broken feeling within him. The blood crept up his face and pinched his ears. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move. He could only stare and stare until his mother taking him in her arms cradled his head between her breasts.
ONE day in May his mother came home from a meeting of the “Marias” at the parish rectory in a flurry of excitement. Our Lady of Fatima was coming to town. The image from Portugal was making a tour of the Catholic world and was due in town the following week. Doña Enchay had been unanimously elected chairman of the reception committee. ‘‘What shall I do? What shall I do?” she kept saying.
“To be sure, mujer, I don’t know,” Don Endong told her. “Ask the Lady herself. She’ll tell you. maybe.
“Endong! you mustn’t speak that way of Our Lady of Fatima.” she told him in as severe a tone as she dared. “She’s milagrosa. haven’t you heard how she appeared on the limb of a tree before three little children—”
“Oh, yes! Also the countless novenas you have said in my behalf.”
“Ah,. Endong, it is your lack of faith, I’m sure. If you would only believe! If you would at least keep your peace and allow Our Lady to help you in her own quiet way, maybe—” She sighed.
He couldn’t argue with her when she was suppliant. There was something about feminine weakness which he couldn’t fight. He kept his peace.
But not the boy.
It was like the circus coming to town and he had to know all about the strange Lady. He and his mother kept up an incessant jabber about miracles and angels and saints the whole week through. Boy easily caught his mother’s enthusiasm about the great welcome as he tagged along with her on her rounds every day requesting people living along the route the procession was to take from the air port to the cathedral to decorate their houses with some flags, or candles. or paper lanterns… She fondly suggested paper buntings strung on a line across the street. “Arcos” she called them.
“Don’t deceive yourself,” Don Endong told her. “You know they’re more like clothes-lines than anything else. Does the Lady launder?”
“Que Dos te perdone, Endong!” Doña Enchay exclaimed, crossing herself and looking like she was ready to cry.
Boy wondered why his father loved to taunt his mother about her religious enthusiasm. Sometimes he himself could not help but snicker over the jokes his father made. Like when Mr. Wilson’s ice plant siren blew the hour of twelve and the family was having lunch. His mother would bless herself and intone aloud: “Bendita sea la Hora en que Nuestra Señora del Pilar vino en carne mortal a Zaragoza,” and begin a Dios te Salve. His father would ostentatiously bend over the platter of steaming white rice in the center of the table and watch it intently until someone inquired, “What is it?” Then he would reply, “I want to see by how many grains the rice has increased in the platter.” If Boy had not seen his father’s picture as a little boy dressed in white with a large silk ribbon on one arm and a candle twined with tiny white flowers in one hand, he would think maybe, he was a protestante—like that woman his mother and he happened upon one day on their rounds.
The woman had met them on the stairs of her house and said to his mother: “The Lady of Fatima did you say, Ñora? You mean some woman like you and me, or your little girl here,” pointing at him, “with such pretty hair, who can talk, and walk. and laugh. and cry?” His mother retreated fanning herself frantically and flapping the cola of her black saya. “To be sure she can’t, but she stands as the symbol of one who can!” she explained with difficulty as though a fish bone was caught in her throat. He hated the woman for making his mother feel that way, and on the last rung of the steps vindictively spat her error at her: “I am not a girl. I’m a boy! A boy! You don’t know anything!”
When they arrived home he told his mother he wanted his hair cut short. “1 don’t want the Lady of Fatima to mistake me for a girl like the Protestant woman,” he told his mother.
“But Our Lady knows you are a boy. Her Son tells her. Her Son is all knowing.” But Boy threw himself on the floor and started to kick. “I want my hair cut! I want my hair cut!” he screamed and screamed.
THE Lady came on a day that threatened rain. The brows of the hills beyond the rice fields were furious with clouds. The sun cowered out of sight and the Venerable Peter dragged his cart across the heavens continuously drowning all kinds of human utterances—religious, profane, ribald, humorous, sarcastic-from the milling crowd gathered at the air port to see the Lady of Miracles arrive. There were the colegialas in their jumpers and cotton stockings, the Ateneo band and cadets in khaki and white mittens, the Caballeros de Colon with their paunches and their bald heads, the Hijas de Maria with their medals, the Apostolados with their scapulars, the Liga de Mujeres with their beads… there was no panguingue, nor landay, nor poker sessions anywhere in town; nor chapu, nor talang, nor tachi in the coconut groves, for even the bootblacks and the newsboys and the factory boys were there to see the great spectacle. Even Babu Sawang, the Moro woman who fried bananas for the school children. was there, for was not Our Lady of Fatima a Mora like herself, since Fatima was a Moro name?
But when the heavens broke open and rain came tearing down, the people scampered for shelter like chickens on the approach of a hawk. All but a few old women and the priests and the bishop and Doña Enchay and Boy hung on to the Lady on her flowered float intoning hymns and repeating aves.
The bishop laid a hand on Boy’s head and Boy immediately shot up into manhood. His chest filled out, his arms grew thick, and his strides stretched as long as the giant’s of the seven-league boots. He felt a thousand eyes leveled at him, and he gathered those eyes and wore them on his breast as a hero wears his medals in a parade. “You are a brave little boy,” the bishop told him. “Our Lady must be well pleased with you.
Boy took a look at the Lady. She was smiling brightly through tears of happiness. Her eyes spilled water of love, her lips dropped freshets of sweetness. And her checks—they were dew-filled calyxes of kindly care. Suddenly, he was seized with a great thirst. His lips felt cracked and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. An urgent longing to drink possessed him. He felt he should drink, drink. drink-of the Lady’s eyes, of the Lady’s lips, of the Lady’s cheeks…
AS he grew older his thirst intensified. He felt he should drink also from the cup of her breast, from the hollow of her hands, from the hem of her trailing white gown, from the ends of each strand of her long brown tresses. But when he approached his Lady at various shrines in the town chapel, whether she had a serpent at her feet, a child in her arms, or beads in her hands, his cracking lips climbed no higher than her pink and white toes and his thirst was quenched.
When he was nineteen and graduated from high school, he told his mother he wanted to take Our Lady for a bride. “Que dicha!” his mother said. “To wed the Mother of God. To be a priest and sing herglorias forever. Que dicha!”
But his father said: “A priest? Is that all you will amount to—a sissy, a maricon, a half-man? I’d rather you died. I’d rather I died!”
It was night, and late, when the household was making ready to turn in. The feeble light of a single electric bulb lit the veranda where Boy stood facing his father in his wicker chair; but the yellow light was flat on the boy’s face and Don Endong saw that it was a dead mask except for the eyes which held a pointed brilliance. The boy’s voice was as taut as the string of an instrument that is about to snap. “The priesthood is the noblest profession on earth. Father,” he said. “It is the most manly, too. One who is master of himself, who can leash the lust of his loins to the eye of the spirit. is indeed the man! A man is not measured by the length of his limbs and the breadth of his chest or the depth of his voice, but by the strength of his mind, the depth of his courage, the firmness of his will!”
“God gave you the body of a male to do the functions of a male—not to hide under a skirt!” Don Endong goaded him.
Boy gripped the back of a chair until the knuckles turned white. Sweat broke out on his forehead and a trembling seized his frame.
“Strike! Strike your father! Raise your hand against the man who was man enough to give you the figure of a man!”
“Boy! Boy!” His mother’s voice pierced through his clouding mind, unnerving him, leaving him strengthless. Suddenly, he couldn’t look his father in the face. His mother’s wail followed him as he fled into the night.
ON the little deserted and unlighted dock where the wind was carefree and all was still except for the muffled cry of a hadji in the distant Moro village and the mournful beat of an agong, Boy faced the night and the sea He flung his eyes to the stars above and gave his body up to the wind to soothe…
Fingers touched him lightly on the shoulder, a little nervously, like birds about to take flight at the least sign of danger. Fingers dipped into his sensitive flesh, and melted into the still pounding rivers of his blood. A strong. sweetly pungent scent invaded his nostrils, and his heart picked tip the beat of the distant agong.
“What do you want with me?” he asked the woman without turning around. He had not sensed her coming. She could have sprung like Venus from the foam of the sea—but there she was, and her perfume betrayed her calling.
Her hand dropped from his shoulder to the bulge of his biceps. “You are a large man. You are very strong. And you are lonely,” she said.
Her voice was cool as water from a jar and soft as cotton. And it had a sad tingle. He checked a rough rebuke. Who was he to condemn her for what she was? Had not Christ said to the men outside the city walls who were about to stone the adulterous woman, ‘‘Let him among you that is without sin cast the first stone”?’
He looked up into her face. Stars were beating in her eyes. And on her wet lips were slumbering many more. Her arms were long and white and slender like fragrant azucenas unfolding in the night…
“Yes, I am strong, and I’m lonely,” he said. “And I’m a man. A big man,” he added almost angrily, “am I not?”
“Oh, but of course,” she said. “I can see that. and I can feel that!”
And fragrant azucenas folded about him in the night.
HE opened his eyes in total darkness. He couldn’t see his hand before him, but the air was thick around him, and he had a feeling he was trapped in a narrow place. He flung an arm out and the body of a woman slithered under his arm. She turned toward him and her breath pushed into his face. He raised himself on his elbow for air. The woman stretched herself awake, and slowly a long clammy coil like the sinuous body of the serpent at the feet of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in her shrine in the town church began to close around his neck. His flesh crawled. With a quick movement he caught the coil in a strong grip, twisting it.
The hoarse cry of a woman lashed out and cracked the stillness of the night. A mouth found his shoulder and sharp vicious teeth sank into his flesh. The stinging pain sent a shiver through the length of his long frame. but he hung on to the squirming limb, squeezing and twisting it… until the clamor of angry voices, and a splintering crash, and a sudden flood of light burst upon him…
Lying at his feet before him was a woman, naked and broken. But a short while before, under the sheet of night, she was cradled in his arms, receiving the reverence of his kisses. Now, under the eye of light, she was but a limp mass of woman flesh, sprawled grotesquely on the floor, an upper limb twisted behind her another flung across her face as if to hide the shame of her disaster.
Two men grabbed him and dragged him out into the street. Angry cries and curses followed him. But as he felt the clean air of morning sweep against his face, his chest filled out, his arms grew thick, and his sturdy legs stretched long like the giant’s of the seven-league boots.
2.THE CENTIPEDE
by Rony V. Diaz
by Rony V. Diaz
WHEN I saw my sister, Delia, beating my dog with a stick, I felt hate heave like a caged, angry beast in my chest. Out in the sun, the hair of my sister glinted like metal and, in her brown dress, she looked like a sheathed dagger. Biryuk hugged the earth and screamed but I could not bound forward nor cry out to my sister. She had a weak heart and she must not be surprised. So I held myself, my throat swelled, and I felt hate rear and plunge in its cage of ribs.
I WAS thirteen when my father first took me hunting. All through the summer of that year, I had tramped alone and unarmed the fields and forest around our farm. Then one afternoon in late July my father told me I could use his shotgun.
Beyond the ipil grove, in a grass field we spotted a covey of brown pigeons. In the open, they kept springing to the air and gliding away every time we were within range. But finally they dropped to the ground inside a wedge of guava trees. My father pressed my shoulder and I stopped. Then slowly, in a half-crouch, we advanced. The breeze rose lightly; the grass scuffed against my bare legs. My father stopped again. He knelt down and held my hand.
“Wait for the birds to rise and then fire,” he whispered.
I pushed the safety lever of the rifle off and sighted along the barrel. The saddle of the stock felt greasy on my cheek. The gun was heavy and my arm muscles twitched. My mouth was dry; I felt vaguely sick. I wanted to sit down.
“You forgot to spit,” my father said.
Father had told me that hunters always spat for luck before firing. I spat and I saw the breeze bend the ragged, glassy threads of spittle toward the birds.
“That’s good,” Father said.
“Can’t we throw a stone,” I whispered fiercely. “It’s taking them a long time.”
“No, you’ve to wait.”
Suddenly, a small dog yelping shrilly came tearing across the brooding plain of grass and small trees. It raced across the plain in long slewy swoops, on outraged shanks that disappeared and flashed alternately in the light of the cloud-banked sun. One of the birds whistled and the covey dispersed like seeds thrown in the wind. I fired and my body shook with the fierce momentary life of the rifle. I saw three pigeons flutter in a last convulsive effort to stay afloat, then fall to the ground. The shot did not scare the dog. He came to us, sniffing cautiously. He circled around us until I snapped my fingers and then he came me.
“Not bad,” my father said grinning. “Three birds with one tube.” I went to the brush to get the birds. The dog ambled after me. He found the birds for me. The breast of one of the birds was torn. The bird had fallen on a spot where the earth was worn bare, and its blood was spread like a tiny, red rag. The dog scraped the blood with his tongue. I picked up the birds and its warm, mangled flesh clung to the palm of my hand.
“You’re keen,” I said to the dog. “Here. Come here.” I offered him my bloody palm. He came to me and licked my palm clean.
I gave the birds to my father. “May I keep him, Father?” I said pointing to the dog. He put the birds in a leather bag which he carried strapped around his waist.
Father looked at me a minute and then said: “Well, I’m not sure. That dog belongs to somebody.”
“May I keep him until his owner comes for him?” I pursued.
“He’d make a good pointer,” Father remarked. “But I would not like my son to be accused of dog-stealing.”
“Oh, no!” I said quickly. “I shall return him when the owner comes to claim him.”
“All right,” he said, “I hope that dog makes a hunter out of you.”
Biryuk and I became fast friends. Every afternoon after school we went to the field to chase quails or to the bank of the river which was fenced by tall, blade-sharp reeds to flush snipes. Father was away most of the time but when he was home he hunted with us.
BIRYUK scampered off and my sister flung the stick at him. Then she turned about and she saw me.
“Eddie, come here,” she commanded. I approached with apprehension. Slowly, almost carefully, she reached over and twisted my ear.
“I don’t want to see that dog again in the house,” she said coldly. “That dog destroyed my slippers again. I’ll tell Berto to kill that dog if I see it around again.” She clutched one side of my face with her hot, moist hand and shoved me, roughly. I tumbled to the ground. But I did not cry or protest. I had passed that phase. Now, every word and gesture she hurled at me I caught and fed to my growing and restless hate.
MY sister was the meanest creature I knew. She was eight when I was born, the day my mother died. Although we continued to live in the same house, she had gone, it seemed, to another country from where she looked at me with increasing annoyance and contempt.
One of my first solid memories was of standing before a grass hut. Its dirt floor was covered with white banana stalks, and there was a small box filled with crushed and dismembered flowers in one corner. A doll was cradled in the box. It was my sister’s playhouse and I remembered she told me to keep out of it. She was not around so I went in. The fresh banana hides were cold under my feet. The interior of the hut was rife with the sour smell of damp dead grass. Against the flowers, the doll looked incredibly heavy. I picked it up. It was slight but it had hard, unflexing limbs. I tried to bend one of the legs and it snapped. I stared with horror at the hollow tube that was the leg of the doll. Then I saw my sister coming. I hid the leg under one of the banana pelts. She was running and I knew she was furious. The walls of the hut suddenly constricted me. I felt sick with a nameless pain. My sister snatched the doll from me and when she saw the torn leg she gasped. She pushed me hard and I crashed against the wall of the hut. The flimsy wall collapsed over me. I heard my sister screaming; she denounced me in a high, wild voice and my body ached with fear. She seized one of the saplings that held up the hut and hit me again and again until the flesh of my back and thighs sang with pain. Then suddenly my sister moaned; she stiffened, the sapling fell from her hand and quietly, as though a sling were lowering her, she sank to the ground. Her eyes were wild as scud and on the edges of her lips,. drawn tight over her teeth, quivered a wide lace of froth. I ran to the house yelling for Father.
She came back from the hospital in the city, pale and quiet and mean, drained, it seemed, of all emotions, she moved and acted with the keen, perversity and deceptive dullness of a sheathed knife, concealing in her body that awful power for inspiring fear and pain and hate, not always with its drawn blade but only with its fearful shape, defined by the sheath as her meanness was defined by her body.
Nothing I did ever pleased her. She destroyed willfully anything I liked. At first, I took it as a process of adaptation, a step of adjustment; I snatched and crushed every seed of anger she planted in me, but later on I realized that it had become a habit with her. I did not say anything when she told Berto to kill my monkey because it snickered at her one morning, while she was brushing her teeth. I did not say anything when she told Father that she did not like my pigeon house because it stank and I had to give away my pigeons and Berto had to chop the house into kindling wood. I learned how to hold myself because I knew we had to put up with her whims to keep her calm and quiet. But when she dumped my butterflies into a waste can and burned them in the backyard, I realized that she was spiting me.
My butterflies never snickered at her and they did not smell. I kept them in an unused cabinet in the living room and unless she opened the drawers, they were out of her sight. And she knew too that my butterfly collection had grown with me. But when I arrived home, one afternoon, from school, I found my butterflies in a can, burned in their cotton beds like deckle. I wept and Father had to call my sister for an explanation. She stood straight and calm before Father but my tear-logged eyes saw only her harsh and arrogant silhouette. She looked at me curiously but she did not say anything and Father began gently to question her. She listened politely and when Father had stopped talking, she said without rush, heat or concern: “They were attracting ants.”
I RAN after Biryuk. He had fled to the brambles. I ran after him, bugling his name. I found him under a low, shriveled bush. I called him and he only whimpered. Then I saw that one of his eyes was bleeding. I sat on the ground and looked closer. The eye had been pierced. The stick of my sister had stabbed the eye of my dog. I was stunned. ,For a long time I sat motionless, staring at Biryuk. Then I felt hate crouch; its paws dug hard into the floor of its cage; it bunched muscles tensed; it held itself for a minute and then it sprang and the door of the cage crashed open and hate clawed wildly my brain. I screamed. Biryuk, frightened, yelped and fled, rattling the dead bush that sheltered him. I did not run after him.
A large hawk wheeled gracefully above a group of birds. It flew in a tightening spiral above the birds.
On my way back to the house, I passed the woodshed. I saw Berto in the shade of a tree, splitting wood. He was splitting the wood he had stacked last year. A mound of bone-white slats was piled near his chopping block When he saw me, he stopped and called me.
His head was drenched with sweat. He brushed away the sweat and hair from his eyes and said to me: “I’ve got something for you.”
He dropped his ax and walked into the woodshed. I followed him. Berto went to a corner of the shed. I saw a jute sack spread on the ground. Berto stopped and picked up the sack.
“Look,” he said.
I approached. Pinned to the ground by a piece of wood, was a big centipede. Its malignantly red body twitched back and forth.
“It’s large,” I said.
“I found him under the stack I chopped.” Berto smiled happily; he looked at me with his muddy eyes.
“You know,” he said. “That son of a devil nearly frightened me to death”
I stiffened. “Did it, really?” I said trying to control my rising voice. Berto was still grinning and I felt hot all over.
“I didn’t expect to find any centipede here,” he said. “It nearly bit me. Who wouldn’t get shocked?” He bent and picked up a piece of wood.
“This wood was here,” he said and put down the block. “Then I picked it up, like this. And this centipede was coiled here. Right here. I nearly touched it with my hand. What do you think you would feel?”
I did not answer. I squatted to look at the reptile. Its antennae quivered searching the tense afternoon air. I picked up a sliver of wood and prodded the centipede. It uncoiled viciously. Its pinchers slashed at the tiny spear.
“I could carry it dead,” I said half-aloud.
“Yes,” Berto said. “I did not kill him because I knew you would like it.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“That’s bigger than the one you found last year, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s very much bigger.”
I stuck the sliver into the carapace of the centipede. It went through the flesh under the red armor; a whitish liquid oozed out. Then I made sure it was dead by brushing its antennae. The centipede did not move. I wrapped it in a handkerchief.
My sister was enthroned in a large chair in the porch of the house. Her back was turned away from the door; she sat facing the window She was embroidering a strip of white cloth. I went near, I stood behind her chair. She was not aware of my presence. I unwrapped the centipede. I threw it on her lap.
My sister shrieked and the strip of white sheet flew off like an unhanded hawk. She shot up from her chair, turned around and she saw me but she collapsed again to her chair clutching her breast, doubled up with pain The centipede had fallen to the floor.
“You did it,” she gasped. “You tried to kill me. You’ve health… life… you tried…” Her voice dragged off into a pain-stricken moan.
I was engulfed by a sudden feeling of pity and guilt.
“But it’s dead!” I cried kneeling before her. “It’s dead! Look! Look!” I snatched up the centipede and crushed its head between my fingers. “It’s dead!”
My sister did not move. I held the centipede before her like a hunter displaying the tail of a deer, save that the centipede felt thorny in my hand.
3. THE DINNER PARTY
THE evening before he killed himself, Virgilio Serrano gave a dinner party. He invited five guests—friends and classmates in university— myself included. Since we lived on campus in barracks built by the U.S. Army, he sent his Packard to fetch us.
Virgilio lived alone in a pre-war chalet that belonged to his family. Four servants and a driver waited on him hand and foot. The chalet, partly damaged, was one of the few buildings in Ermita that survived the bombardment and street fighting to liberate Manila.
It had been skillfully restored; the broken lattices, fretwork, shell windows and wrought iron fence had been repaired or replaced at considerable expense. A hedge of bandera española had been planted and the scorched frangipani and hibiscus shrubs had been pruned carefully. Thus, Virgilio’s house was an ironic presence in the violated neighborhood.
He was on the porch when the car came to a crunching halt on the graveled driveway. He shook our hands solemnly, then ushered us into the living room. In the half-light, everything in the room glowed, shimmered or shone. The old ferruginous narra floor glowed. The pier glass coruscated. The bentwood furniture from the house in Jaen looked as if they had been burnished. In a corner, surrounded by bookcases, a black Steinway piano sparkled like glass.
Virgilio was immaculate in white de hilo pants and cotton shirt. I felt ill at ease in my surplus khakis and combat boots.
We were all in our second year. Soon we will be on different academic paths—Victor in philosophy; Zacarias in physics and chemistry; Enrique in electrical engineering; and Apolonio, law. Virgilio and I have both decided to make a career in English literature. Virgilio was also enrolled in the Conservatory and in courses in the philosophy of science.
We were all in awe of Virgilio. He seemed to know everything. He also did everything without any effort. He had not been seen studying or cramming for an exam in any subject, be it history, anthropology or calculus. Yet the grades that he won were only a shade off perfection.
HE and I were from the same province where our families owned rice farms except that ours was tiny, a hundred hectares, compared to the Serrano’s, a well-watered hacienda that covered 2,000 hectares of land as flat as a table.
The hacienda had been parceled out to eleven inquilinos who together controlled about a thousand tenants. The Serranos had a large stone house with a tile roof that dated back to the 17th century that they used during the summer months. The inquilinos dealt with Don Pepe’s spinster sister, the formidable Clara, who knew their share of the harvest to the last chupa. She was furthermore in residence all days of the year.
Virgilio was the only child. His mother was killed in a motor accident when he was nine. Don Pepe never remarried. He became more and more dependent on Clara as he devoted himself to books, music and conversation. His house in Cabildo was a salon during the years of the Commonwealth. At night, spirited debates on art, religion language, politics and world affairs would last until the first light of dawn. The guests who lived in the suburbs were served breakfasts before they drove off in their runabouts to Sta. Cruz, Ermita or San Miguel. The others stumbled on cobblestones on their way back to their own mansions within the cincture of Intramuros.
In October, Quezon himself came for merienda. He had just appointed General MacArthur field marshal of the Philippine Army because of disturbing news from Nanking and Chosun. Quezon cursed the Americans for not taking him in their confidence. But like most gifted politicians, he had a preternatural sense of danger.
“The Japanese will go to war against the Americans before this year is out, Pepe,” Quezon rasped, looking him straight in the eye.
This was the reason the Serranos prepared to move out of Manila. As discreetly as possible, Don Pepe had all his personal things packed and sent by train to Jaen. He stopped inviting his friends. But when the Steinway was crated and loaded on a large truck that blocked the street completely, the neighbors became curious. Don Pepe dissembled, saying that he had decided to live in the province for reasons of health, “at least until after Christmas.”
Two weeks later, he suffered a massive stroke and died. The whole town went into mourning. His remains were interred, along with his forebears, in the south wall of the parish church. A month later, before the period of mourning had ended, Japanese planes bombed and strafed Clark Field.
Except for about three months in their hunting lodge in the forests of Bongabong (to escape the rumored rapine that was expected to be visited on the country by the yellow horde. Virgilio and Clara spent the war years in peace and comfort in their ancestral house in Jaen.
Clara hired the best teachers for Virgilio. When food became scare in the big towns and cities, Clara put up their families in the granaries and bodegas of the hacienda so that they would go on tutoring Virgilio in science, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy and English. After his lessons, he read and practiced on the piano. He even learned to box and to fence although he was always nauseated by the ammoniac smell of the gloves and mask. Despite Clara’s best effort, she could not find new boxing gloves and fencing equipment. Until she met Honesto Garcia.
Honesto Garcia was a petty trader in rice who had mastered the intricate mechanics of the black market. He dealt in anything that could be moved but he became rich by buying and selling commodities such as soap, matches, cloth and quinine pills.
Garcia maintained a network of informers to help him align supply and demand—and at the same time collect intelligence for both the Japanese Army and the Hukbalahap.
One of his informers told him about Clara Serrano’s need for a pair of new boxing gloves and protective gear for escrima. He found these items. He personally drove in his amazing old car to Jaen to present them to Clara, throwing in a French epée that was still in its original case for good measure. He refused payment but asked to be allowed to visit.
Honesto Garcia was the son of a kasama of the Villavicencios of Cabanatuan. By hard work and numerous acts of fealty, his father became an inquilino. Honesto, the second of six children, however made up his mind very early that he would break loose from farming. He reached the seventh grade and although his father at that time had enough money to send him to high school, he decided to apprentice himself to a Chinese rice trader in Gapan. His wage was a few centavos a day, hardly enough for his meals, but after two years, he knew enough about the business to ask his father for a loan of P60 to set himself up as a rice dealer. And then the war broke out.
Honesto was handsome in a rough-hewn way. He tended to fat but because he was tall he was an imposing figure. He was unschooled in the social graces; he preferred to eat, squatting before a dulang, with his fingers. Despite these deficiencies, he exuded an aura of arrogance and self-confidence.
It was this trait that attracted Clara to him. Clara had never known strong-willed men, having grown up with effete persons like Don Pepe and compliant men like the inquilinos who were always silent in her presence.
When Clara told Virgilio that Honesto had proposed and that she was inclined to accept, Virgilio was not surprised. He also had grown to like Honesto who always came with unusual gifts. Once, Honesto gave him a mynah that Virgilio was able to teach within a few days to say “Good morning. How are you today?”
The wedding took place in June of the second year of the war. It was a grand affair. The church and the house were decked in flowers. The inquilinos fell over each other to, supply the wedding feast. Carts and sleds laden with squealing pigs, earthen water jars filled with squirming river fish, pullets bound at the shank like posies, fragrant rice that had been husked in wooden mortars with pestles, the freshest eggs and demijohns of carabao milk for leche flan and slews of vegetables and fruit that had been picked at exactly the right time descended on the big house. The wives and daughters of the tenants cooked the food in huge vats while their menfolk roasted the suckling pigs on spluttering coals. The quests were served on bamboo tables spread with banana leaves. The war was forgotten, a rondalla played the whole day, the children fought each other for the bladders of the pigs which they blew up into balloons and for the ears and tails of the lechon as they were lifted on their spits from the fire.
The bride wore the traje de boda of Virgilio’s mother, a masterpiece confected in Madrid of Belgian lace and seed pearls. The prettiest daughters of the inquilinos, dressed in organza and ribbons, held the long, embroidered train of the wedding gown.
Honesto’s family were awe-struck by this display of wealth and power. They cringed and cowered in the sala of the big house and all of them were too frightened to go to the comedor for the wedding lunch.
Not very long after the wedding, Honesto was running the hacienda. The inquilinos found him more congenial and understanding. At this time, the Huks were already making demands on them for food and other necessities. The fall in the Serrano share would have been impossible to explain to Clara. In fact, the Huks had established themselves on Carlos Valdefuerza’s parcel because his male children had joined the guerilla group.
Honesto learned for the first time that the Huks were primarily a political and not a resistance organization. They were spreading a foreign idea called scientific socialism that predicted the takeover of all lands by the workers. Ricardo Valdefuerza, who had taken instruction from Luis Taruc, was holding classes for the children of the other tenants.
Honesto was alarmed enough to take it up with Clara who merely shrugged him off. “How can illiterate farmers understand a complex idea like scientific socialism?” she asked.
“But they seem to understand it,” Honesto expostulated “because it promises to give them the land that they farm.”
“How is that possible? Quezon and the Americans will not allow it. They don’t have the Torrens Title,” Clara said with finality.
“Carding Valdefuerza has been saying that all value comes from work. What we get as our share is surplus that we do not deserve because we did nothing to it. It rightly belongs to the workers, according to him. I myself don’t understand this idea too clearly but that is how it is being explained to the tenants.”
“They are idle now. After the war, all this talk will vanish,” Clara said.
When American troops landed in Leyte, Clara was four months with child.
THE table had been cleared. Little glasses of a pale sweetish wine were passed around. Victor pushed back his chair to slouch.
“The war has given us the opportunity to change this country. The feudal order is being challenged all over the world. Mao Tse Tung has triumphed in China. Soon the revolution will be here. We have to help prepare the people for it.” Victor declared.
“Why change?” Virgilio asked. “The pre-war order had brought prosperity and democracy. What you call feudalism is necessary to rebuild the country. Who will lead? The Huks? The young turks of the Liberal Party? All they have are ideas; they have no capital, no power.”
The university was alive with talk of imminent revolutionary change. Young men and women, most of them from the upper classes, spoke earnestly of redistributing wealth.
“Nothing will come of it” Virgilio said, sipping his wine.
“Of all of us, you have the most to lose in a revolution,” Apolonio said. “What we should aim for is orderly lawful change. You might lose your hacienda but you must be paid for it. So in the end, you will still have the capital to live on in style.”
“You don’t understand,” Virgilio said. “It is not only a question of capital or compensation. I am talking of a way of life, of emotional bonds, of relationships that are immutable. In any case, we can do nothing one way or the other so let us change the subject.”
“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “We can influence these events one way or another.”
“You talk as it you have joined the Communist Party,” Virgilio said. “Have you?”
But before I could answer, he was off on another tack.
“You know I have just been reading about black holes,” Virgilio said addressing himself to Zacarias. “Oppenheimer and Snyder solved Einstein’s equations on what happens when a sun or star had used up its supply of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally, disappears from view and remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into a gravitational pit without end.
“What a marvelous idea! Such ideas are art in the highest sense but at the same time, the decisive proof of relativity,” Virgilio enthused.
“Do you know that Einstein is embarrassed by these black holes? He considers them a diversion from his search for a unified theory,” Zacarias said.
“Ah! The impulse towards simplicity, towards reduction. The need to explain all knowledge with a few, elegant equations. Don’t you think that his reductionism is the ultimate arrogance? Even if it is Einstein’s. In any case, he is not succeeding,” Virgilio said.
“But isn’t reductionism the human tendency? This is what Communism is all about, the reduction of human relationships to a set of unproven economic theorems,” I interjected.
“But the reductionist approach can also lead to astounding results. Take the Schröedinger and Dirac equations that reduced previous mysterious atomic physics to elegant order,” Enrique said.
“What is missing in all this is the effect on men of reductionism. It can very well lead to totalitarian control in the name of progress and social order,” Apolonio ventured.
“Let me resolve our debate by playing for you a piece that builds intuitively on three seemingly separate movements. This is Beethoven’s Sonata, Opus 27, No. 2.” Virgilio rose and walked gravely to the piano while we distributed ourselves on the bentwood furniture in the living room.
He played the opening Adagio with sensitive authority, escalating note to note until it resolved into the fragile D-flat major which in turn disappeared in the powerful rush of the concluding Presto, the movement that crystallized the disparate emotional resonances of the first two movements into an assured and balanced relationship.
When the last note had faded, we broke into cheers. But at that moment, I felt a deep sadness for Virgilio. As the Presto flooded the Allegretto, I knew that he was not of this world.
Outside, through the shell windows, moonlight softened the jagged ruins of battle.
4. THE INVESTIGATION
ON July 14, 1950, in the evening, Virgilio killed himself in his bedroom by slitting his wrists with a straight razor and thrusting them into a pail of warm water.
His body was not found until the next morning.
He did not appear for breakfast at eight. At eight-thirty, Josefa, the housemaid, knocked on the door of Virgilio’s bedroom. Getting no response, she asked Arturo, the driver, to climb up the window to look inside.
The three maids panicked. Arturo drove off at once in the Packard to get me. After leaving a note for the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, we stopped at the police station near General Luna to report the suicide.
Two police officers were immediately assigned to investigate. They came with us in the car to the house in Ermita.
They started interrogating me in the car.
“Who are you?” Police Officer No. 1 asked.
“Why are you involved?”, Police Officer No. 2 demanded.
I was somewhat nervous but as calmly as I could be, I answered.
“My name is Nestor Gallego. I am a second-year student at University of the Philippines. Virgilio Serrano, the deceased, and I come from the same town, Jaen, in Nueva Ecija. I have known Virgilio since 1942 and I think he considers me his closest friend in university. That is the reason the driver came to me.”
The policemen brought together the household staff. “Did you touch, move or remove anything in the bedroom? Did any of you go out of the house after the driver left for the university?”
To both questions, the maids answered, No, whereupon they were told to stay within the premises for separate interviews later in the morning.
Police Officer No. 1 went out to the yard presumably to look for clues. Police Officer No. 2 made a sketch of the scene and then searched the bedroom systematically. He opened the drawers of the tallboy carefully, he felt around the linen and underwear. The wardrobe and the aparador were also examined. But it was on the contents of the rolltop desk that No. 1 concentrated. The notebooks, a diary, and address book were all neatly arranged around a Remington typewriter.
He was looking for a letter, a note even, to give him a clue or lead to the motive for the suicide.
On the first page of one of the notebooks were the “Down There” and then “To my friend and confidant, Nestor Gallego, with affection.” Although unsigned, it was in Virgilio’s spidery hand.
“You know anything about this?” No. 1 said in a low, threatening voice. He handed it to me.
I leafed through the pages. It looked like a long poem that had been broken down into thirteen cantos.
“No,” I said. “I have not seen this before.”
“But it is for you. What does it say?”
“I don’t know, I have to read it first,” cuttingly.
My sarcasm rolled off him like water on a duck. “Well then—read,” he ordered, motioning me to the wooden swivel chair.
A frisson ran up my spine. My hands trembled as I opened the notebook and scanned the poem. There were recognizable names, places and events. There were references to his professors in university and his tutors in Jaen. The names of some of his inquilinos appeared again and again. But the longest sections were about Honesto and Clara Garcia and Ricardo Valdefuerza.
From the tone and the words, it was a satire patterned closely after Dante’s Inferno. Virgilio, like Dante, had assigned or consigned people to different circles “down there.” It ended with a line from Valery, “A l’extrême de toute pensée est un soupir.”
“I cannot say truthfully that I understand it. I know some of the people and places referred to but not why they appear in this poem.”
“I will have to bring this back for analysis,” No. 1 said, giving it to No. 2 who put it carelessly in a plastic carryall.
“When you are done with it, can I have it back? I have a right to it since it was dedicated to me.” I wanted desperately to read it because I felt that it concealed the reason for Virgilio’s suicide.
They spent another hour talking to the household help and scribbling in grimy notebooks.
Before they left past one o’clock, No. 1 said: “It is clearly a suicide. There was no struggle. In fact, it was a very neat suicide.” He made it sound as if it was a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. I hated him.
I went with Arturo to the post office to send a telegram to Jaen. “Virgilio dead stop please come at once.”
The undertaker took charge thereafter, informing us that by six o’clock, the remains would be ready for viewing. He asked me to select the clothes for the dead. I chose the white de hilo pants and the white cotton shirt that Virgilio wore the other day.
“It is wrinkled,” the undertaker said. “Don’t you want to choose something else.”
“No,” I shouted at him. “Put him in these.”
5. THE FUNERAL
FATHER Sean O’Donovan, S.J., refused to say Mass or to bless the corpse. “Those who die by their own hand are beyond the pale of the Church,” he said firmly.
“Let us take him home,” Clara said. She asked me to make all the arrangements and not to mind the cost.
The rent for the hearse was clearly exorbitant. I bargained feebly and then agreed. Victor, Zacarias, Enrique, Apolonio and myself were to travel in the Packard. Honesto and Clara had driven to Manila in a new Buick.
The hearse moved at a stately 30 kilometers per hour while a scratchy dirge poured out of it at full volume. The Garcias followed in their Buick and we brought up the rear.
The rains of July had transformed the brown, dusty fields of Bulacan and Nueva Ecija into muddy fields. We passed small, nut-brown men, following a beast and a stick that scored the wet earth; dithering birds swooped down to pluck the crickets and worms that were turned up by the plow.
The beat of sprung pebbles against the fender of the car marked our passage.
The yard of the big house was already full of people. In the sala, a bier had been prepared. The wives of inquilinos were all in black. Large yellow tapers gave off a warm, oily smell that commingled with the attar of the flowers, producing an odor that the barrio folk called the smell of death.
Then the local worthies arrived, led by the congressman of the district, the governor of the province, the mayor of Jaen, the commander of the Scout Rangers who was leading a campaign against the Huks, with their wives and retainers. They were all on intimate teams with Honesto and Clara. Except for the colonel who was in full combat uniform, they were dressed in sharkskin and two-toned shoes. They wore their hair tightly sculpted with pomade against their skulls and on their wrists and fingers gold watches and jeweled rings glistened.
They all knew that Honesto had political ambition. It was not clear yet which position he had his sights on.
With the death of Virgilio, the immense wealth of the Serranos devolved on Clara and on Honesto and on their 5-year old son, Jose Jr. Both the Nacionalista and Liberal Parties have been dangling all manner of bait before Honesto. Now, there will be a scramble.
Honesto shook hands with everyone, murmuring acknowledgments of their expressions of grief but secretly assessing their separate motives. Clara was surrounded by the simpering wives of the politicians; like birds they postured to show their jewels to best advantage.
They only fell silent when Father Francisco Santander, the parish priest, came to say the prayer for the dead and to lead the procession to the Church where Virgilio’s mortal remains would be displayed on a catafalque before the altar before interment in the south wall side by side with Don Pepe’s.
I left the sala to join the crowd in the yard. My parents were there with the Serranos’ and our tenants.
There was a palpable tension in the air. A number of the kasamashad been seized by the Scout Rangers, detained and tortured, so that they may reveal the whereabouts of Carding. They were frightened. From what I heard from my parents, most of the tenants distrusted Honesto who they felt was using the campaign against the Huks to remove those he did not like. The inquilinos were helpless because Clara was now completely under the sway of Honesto.
I walked home. When I got there, Restituto, our caretaker, very agitated, took me aside and whispered. “Carding is in the house. He has been waiting for you since early morning. I kept him from view in your bedroom.” He looked at me, uncertain and obviously frightened. “What shall we do?
“Leave it to me. But do not tell anyone—not even my parents. He shall be gone by the time they return.” I put my arm around Restituto’s shoulder to reassure him.
Carding wheeled when I walked in, pistol at the ready. He was dressed in army fatigues and combat boots. A pair of Ray-Ban glasses dangled on his shirt. He put the pistol back in its holster.
“You shouldn’t be here. There are soldiers all around.”
“They will not come here. They are too busy in the hacienda,” Carding said.
The shy, spindly boy that I knew during the war had grown into a broad muscular man. His eyes were hooded and cunning.
“I have to talk to you. Did Virgilio leave a last will and testament?”
“Not that I know of. He left a notebook of poems.”
“What is that?” Carding demanded, startled.
“A notebook of verses with the title ‘Down There.’ You are mentioned in the poem. But the police has it,” I answered.
“Did it say anything about the disposition of the hacienda in case of his death?”
“I did not have a chance to read it closely but I doubt it. Aren’t such things always done up in legal language? There certainly is nothing like that in the notebook. What are you leading up to?”
Carding sighed. “In 1943; Virgilio came to see me. He had heard from Honesto that I have been talking to the tenants about their rights. Virgilio wanted to know himself the bases of my claims. We had a long talk. I told him about the inevitability of the triumph of the peasant class. Despite his wide reading, he had not heard of Marx, Lenin, or Mao Tse Tung. He was visibly shaken. But when I told him of the coming calamity that will bring down his class, he asked ‘What can I do?’ and I said: ‘Give up. Give up your land, your privilege and your power. That is the only way to avoid the coming calamity’.
“He apparently did not have any grasp of social forces. He kept talking of individual persons—tenants that he had known since he was a child, inquilinos who had been faithful to his father until their old age, and all that nonsense. ‘The individual does not matter,’ I yelled at him. ‘Only the class called the proletariat.’
“But even without understanding, he said that he will leave the hacienda to the tenants because it was probably the right thing to do. But Clara should not be completely deprived of her means of support. It was exasperating, talking to him, but he did promise that in his will the tenants would get all.
“Obviously, he changed his mind.” Carding said in a low voice. “That is too bad because now we have to take his land by force.”
I was speechless. In university, talk of revolution was all the rage but this was my first encounter with a man who could or would try to make it happen.
“When I get back the notebook, I will study it to see if there is any statement that will legally transfer the Serrano hacienda to you and the other tenants,” I said weakly.
“I will be in touch,” Carding said. He walked out the door.
The day of the funeral was clear and hot. Dust devils rose from the road. In the shadow of the acacia trees in the churchyard, hundreds of people of all ages crowded to get away from the sun. Inside the church, even the aisles were packed.
“Introibo ad altare Dei” Father Santander intoned.
“Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,” I answered.
The mass for the dead began.
My heart was racing because I knew the reason for Virgilio’s suicide. But nobody would care, save me.
