Cliched and Corny

Chapter 2 of Villa Magdalena a novel by Bienvenido N. Santos [1/3]

2011-09-03T02:47:00.000-07:00

Villa Magdalena is Bienvenido N. Santos’ first novel and it was first published by Erehwon in 1965. The foreword of the book describes the story as “ideal for film because of its rich visual scenes and realistic portrayal of Philippine society…[I]t was in a large sense way ahead of its time. Critics called it the first Filipino novel to deal with the wealthy and landed class of Philippine society, and the first to explore sex and human passion as a theme for Philippine fiction. .. [Villa Magdalena] appears to be the least read of Santos’ novels…”

On Amador T. Daguio

2011-04-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

I have found it a bit difficult to find information on Amador T. Daguio, best known in this blog as the author of the story "Wedding Dance". I recently discovered that the page (a page in the National Commission for Culture and the Arts site) I linked to for information on Mr. Daguio is no longer working. I found the same article, but the link address is now different. I will reference directly the NCCA article by Gemino Abad entitled "Amador T. Daguio: A Turning-point in Filipinio Poetry from English".

Mr. Daguio was a writer. He was a poet who wrote pieces like "To Those of Other Lands", "The Hordes", "Mountain People", and "Man of Earth". As stated in his article's title, Dr. Abad describes Mr. Daguio's poetry as a "turning-point in Filipino verses from English" because "the verse...is English but the poetry...is Filipino". But Mr. Daguio also writes fiction and the "Wedding Dance" is one of his most popular pieces. He translates literary works. He was also a teacher.

Charlson Ong's "Another Country" [4/4]

2011-04-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

There are many kinds of love--some toxic and consuming, like drugs that induce dependence. This work displays love in its most destructive yet beguiling form: passionate and without reason nor consideration. The main character Arthur is a man whose longing for his home country is transformed into an uncontrollable misplaced love for Aurora. There are the older generation of the Chinese embodied by Nancy and Arthur's father whose longing for their home country became a lifelong obsession slowly being emptied of hope. As they cling on to the home that is slowly being transformed by cultural revolution, their devotion to their China becomes a tacit racism.

This piece by Filipino-Chinese writer Charlson Ong was taken from the book "A Tropical Winter's Tale and Other Stories". The back cover of the book quotes the writer Ronald Baytan on Ong:

"There have been many Chinese writers writing in English... perhaps as early as the 1960s. No one else has achieved the status attained by Ong. In a way, it is his entry into the mainstream Philippine Literature that has forced the critics to acknowledge the presence of a dynamic and growing body of writings by the Chinese... Pain juxtaposed with a certain wry humor governs Ong's fictional worlds, and Chinese or not, the charaacters are endowed with an ironic and laughing voice that hits home only because their laughter is synonymous with grief."

"Another Country", according to the Acknowledgements contained in the book, won 3rd prize in the Carlos Palanca Awards in 1987 and 2nd prize in the Asiaweek Short Story Competition in 1988. This story is set in 1987. It is set in a Taiwan that is recovering from the massive earthquake of 14 November 1986.

Despite the earthquake, under the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist) government, Taiwan is still thriving, developing rapidly as one of the four Asian economic tigers (with Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore). In contrast, the Philippine economy is floundering after the corrupt Marcos regime and under the tumultuous beginnings of the first Aquino administration. People Power had just happened and yet no change was felt by the Filipino people. Hoping to get a piece of the development in the tiger economies, many Filipinos tried their luck in those countries. Flor Contemplacion and Delia Maga are familiar names who were part of this exodus for financial gain. On the other hand, mainland China is also in economic turmoil. Economic reforms imposed by the Communist Party of China led to double-digit inflation rates, abuse of the system by well-connected people, and, slowly, to the 1989 Tianamen Square massacre. Many mainland Chinese fled to other states for refuge or for a better life. Perhaps because of its Chinese mestiza president, the Philippines was one of their destinations.

There are so many layers to this story that can only be appreciated upon fully reading it. It starts off a bit slow, but I do hope you enjoy it. The entirety of the piece is well worth the read. - paris

"You're mad, Arthur!" Daryll was paler than a corpse. "Listen, it's pretty expensive but I think it's time we visited those Brazilian pussies Lin Yaw's been telling us about. It'll take some heat off you. The cum's seeping into your brain!"

I tried being a picture of logic and sincerity, "I love her, Daryll. Say what you want."

Charlson Ong's "Another Country" [3/4]

2011-04-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

This piece by Filipino-Chinese writer Charlson Ong was taken from the book "A Tropical Winter's Tale and Other Stories". The back cover of the book quotes the writer Ronald Baytan on Ong:

"There have been many Chinese writers writing in English... perhaps as early as the 1960s. No one else has achieved the status attained by Ong. In a way, it is his entry into the mainstream Philippine Literature that has forced the critics to acknowledge the presence of a dynamic and growing body of writings by the Chinese... Pain juxtaposed with a certain wry humor governs Ong's fictional worlds, and Chinese or not, the charaacters are endowed with an ironic and laughing voice that hits home only because their laughter is synonymous with grief."

Despite the earthquake, under the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist) government, Taiwan is still thriving, developing rapidly as one of the four Asian economic tigers (with Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore). In contrast, the Philippine economy is floundering after the corrupt Marcos regime and under the tumultuous beginnings of the first Aquino administration. People Power had just happened and yet no change was felt by the Filipino people. Hoping to get a piece of the development in the tiger economies, many Filipinos tried their luck in those countries. Flor Contemplacion and Delia Maga are familiar names who were part of this exodus for financial gain. On the other hand, mainland China is also in economic turmoil. Economic reforms imposed by the Communist Party of China led to double-digit inflation rates, abuse of the system by well-connected people, and, slowly, to the 1989 Tianamen Square massacre. Many mainland Chinese fled to other states for refuge or for a better life. Perhaps because of its Chinese mestiza president, the Philippines was one of their destinations.

There are so many layers to this story that can only be appreciated upon fully reading it. It starts off a bit slow, but I do hope you enjoy it. The entirety of the piece is well worth the read. - paris

Mrs. Wang flashed her imperturbable all-weather smile. I'd never felt so weak and defenseless before her. The incident had run the round of the dailies and Cover's editor-in-chief was an old Kuomintang crony of hers. "Have you had dinner?" she asked as I took my seat. It was six o-clock p.m., my usual check-in time. She was being civilized about the matter and making things worse for me. But as her wont, Nancy Wang didn't go right into the Main Event. "Aurora spoke to me about her visa; it's expired."

Jay Onsiangko's Story in "Champion, Mentor, Friend"

2011-04-09T01:52:00.000-07:00

One of the first stories I posted here was "Visitation of the Gods", which was about the love of a teacher for both her profession and her care for her students. It was a fictional tale told by an uninvolved narrator. In contrast, this story--one of the entries in the book "Profiles Encourage"--is about the love a mentor has for his craft and his students told in a manner that showcases the love and respect a student has for his mentor. It is a recounting of Jay Onsiangko--which the book describes as an "Ear, Nose, Throat, Head, and Neck Surgeon doing private and charity practice in Manila through the Makati Medical Center, the Seaman's Hospital, Manila, and the San Juan Medical Center"--of his relationship with the boxer Al Asuncion. Everybody now knows Manny Pacquiao, now a congressman and arguably the greatest boxer that ever lived. There is no question that Rep. Pacquiao's achievements are great and deserving of acknowledgement and praise. These days, Nonito Donaire, also one of the best in the world, is often mentioned in the news. Names like Rolando Magbanua, Luisito Espinosa, and Gerry Penalosa pepper the news. The older readers may remember Mansueto Velasco who became Vic Sotto's sidekick as an amateur boxer/Olympian. Even Gabriel "Flash" Elorde has his name mentioned, albeit for comparison with these more recent champions. And champions they all are. They've done the country well, being good in their craft. But for me, Al Asuncion seems greater. The man doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, but instilling life lessons to young people feels like a better alternative to seeking fame and fortune on the ring. Mang Al, who passed on in May 2006, was truly (to quote the book subtitle) an "ordinary Filipino making an extraordinary difference".

"Profiles Encourage" is a book that tells the "stories of people who were relatively unknown, or at least deserved to be known to more citizens of our country and the world." Mang Al made a difference through "a lifetime of random acts of kindness". Some of the other stories in the book are about people who have done more dramatic things. All stories are encouraging. All stories are inspirational. All should be read. But, the book itself was written to make a difference and proceeds from its sales will go to the Library Renewal Partnership. I wouldn't want to steal from that. So I hope you enjoy this story and, because of that, buy this book. - paris

"To a better Philippines!"
- Edi Sian in his dedication to me on my copy of Profiles Encourage
Contributor to Profiles Encourage

Frank Hilario's "The Boy who Broke his own Heart"

2011-04-07T22:48:00.000-07:00

The author of this story is a friend of mine. I "met" him when I asked for a copy of "A Damaged Culture" and the rest is history. He writes for the American Chronicle and his profile there reads

Based in Manila, for a Filipino, has mastery of the English language that's unprecedented. Freelance, a one-man band as writer, editor, desktop publisher, blogger, copywriter. At 71, writes faster, fuller, and funnier than at 61, or 51, or 41. A super writer, Dr Antonio C Oposa calls him. He's unbelievable; he's real.

To me, he's a very interesting person who can sometimes infuriate and sometimes elucidate, but always with an eloquence that is lost to people from our generation. The image link below goes to a picture he referred to in this piece. Perhaps, after reading this, you can check it out. This is a narrative about himself, which he briefly summarizes within the text. It is a journal entry. It is his confession in his own words. If you enjoy this story--as I hope you will--you might want to visit his blog.

- paris

'There Is No Greater Agony' by Mazelle (flickr.com/)

Published in ‘My Reuter Almanac’ (myreuteralmanac.wordpress.com/). May be reproduced without permission as long as credit is given.

18 March 2007 – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: In agony, our Lord looked up at the silent sky and said: ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’ When you feel abandoned, remember Our Lord was lonely, too.

Charlson Ong's "Another Country" [2/4]

2011-03-29T23:11:00.000-07:00

This piece by Filipino-Chinese writer Charlson Ong was taken from the book "A Tropical Winter's Tale and Other Stories". The back cover of the book quotes the writer Ronald Baytan on Ong:

"There have been many Chinese writers writing in English... perhaps as early as the 1960s. No one else has achieved the status attained by Ong. In a way, it is his entry into the mainstream Philippine Literature that has forced the critics to acknowledge the presence of a dynamic and growing body of writings by the Chinese... Pain juxtaposed with a certain wry humor governs Ong's fictional worlds, and Chinese or not, the charaacters are endowed with an ironic and laughing voice that hits home only because their laughter is synonymous with grief."

There are so many layers to this story that can only be appreciated upon fully reading it. It starts iff a bit slow, but I do hope you enjoy it. The entirety of the piece is well worth the read. - paris

Cops are the bane of overstaying aliens in Taiwan. The country hasn't head of an immigration bureau. Tourists with expired visas are deemed a police problem. Sgt. Lin Yaw and his buddies like to patrol the premises of St. Christopher Catholic Church on Sunday mornings. The place is usually packed with Filipina devotees eight out of ten whom are police problems. They hie away the pack, or those they can corner, to the station where Sister Adelaide would come to negotiate for the temporary release of those whose cases can still be "reconsidered". The less fortunate are sent home.

Charlson Ong's "Another Country" [1/4]

2011-03-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

This piece by Filipino-Chinese writer Charlson Ong was taken from the book "A Tropical Winter's Tale and Other Stories". The back cover of the book quotes the writer Ronald Baytan on Ong:

"There have been many Chinese writers writing in English... perhaps as early as the 1960s. No one else has achieved the status attained by Ong. In a way, it is his entry into the mainstream Philippine Literature that has forced the critics to acknowledge the presence of a dynamic and growing body of writings by the Chinese... Pain juxtaposed with a certain wry humor governs Ong's fictional worlds, and Chinese or not, the charaacters are endowed with an ironic and laughing voice that hits home only because their laughter is synonymous with grief."

The night we met, the city was in pain. A powerful quake had rocked Taipei at dawn, felling an old suburban commercial building-turned-residence killing at least fourteen people and injuring scores while a two-year-old skyscraper had been tilted. It was the first major national disaster in years and in a country where the death of a seventy-five-year-old zoo elephant made front-page news, this was grist for the media grill to grind for weeks. I had to keep posted at my rewrite desk awaiting the latest figures--"nightoff" or no nightoff. And Aurora simply had to wait until we had put the China Tribune to bed.

It was my fourth month in town; I'd answered the ad for an unmarried English language journalist, knowledgeable in Chinese which the Trib had placed in Manila. The occasional features I did on UFOs and movie extras wasn't much in the way of mainstream journalism but somehow, someone in Taipei found my English "good though not excellent", and my Chinese "passable". I suspected that the someone may have been my cousin Daryll Chua who moved to Taipei two years ago, and had been with the Trib for a year, or someone very open to his recommendations. I got my roundtrip ticket within two weeks of the application and found myself facing a "mongrel" word processor and a pile of Chinese language press releases to translate. I was to be news writer, features writer, economist, and part-time editorial writer to boot, during my six months probation since I still had a load to "learn about China".

"If I wanted to learn about china, I'd have gone to China!" I fumed wordlessly at the septuagenarian "woman warrior" of a publisher. Nancy Lin-Wang was a massive woman of seventy-two, with a perfect set of teeth which she bared to display anything from displeasure to approval--you just had to catch on to the nuances--double eyelids, patrician nose, and a healthy crop of dirt-grey bobbed hair betraying traces of a mandarin, if faded beauty.

A native of Honan province, she founded her paper in Shanghai during the late '30s after a stint at Harvard. She'd joined the Kuomintang party as a youngster and became a confidante of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Mrs. Wang fled with what remained of her family to Taiwan with the Kuomintang loyalists in '49 following the communist victory in the mainland and had been in "temporary exile" ever since, shuttling between Taipei and Los Angeles.

"Learning about China" consisted mainly of listening to Nancy Wang reminisce about how the two-faced, poison-tongued commies stabbed he legitimate democratic government of the Republic of China on the back and on how the pragmatic whiz kids of Chiang had transformed this tiny island of 20 million into an economic wonder with US$50 billion in reserves--a lasting testament to Sun Yat-sens's Three Principles of the People--in stark contrast to the quagmire Mao and his cohorts had made of the mainland.

It's not easy arguing against US$50 billion and the publishes of the only English-language daily in "Free" China. She who once upon a war-torn evening interviewed Chou En-lai in a communist mountain lair and silenced Mao's righthand man with her enumeration of leftist fallacies--this, according to her, still to be published memoirs. I'd began to suspect whether our frequent one-on-one "learn about China" powwows didn't have something to do with the final draft of those memoirs. But arguing history with the woman required a much stealthier mettle than I could muster. I usually resorted to our mutually agreeable conclusion--"It was fate".

The China Tribune news and editorial staff was an eight-person affair. The Trib's nine-story building housed a skeletal operation. The daily had seen the glory days, or so I'd heard--when Taipei was still the capital of the Republic of China, permanent member of the UN Security Council, host to hundreds of foreign embassies. Then, what the country had to say still mattered somehow to the rest of the world, and diplomats and correspondents read the Trib for the latest. Since most countries had shifted recognition to the mainland government, Taiwan's political isolation had meant a grossly reduced profile for the Tribune--an independent but pro-government daily. The China Tribune was now little more than a trade paper for businesses trying to woo foreign capital markets, or English language majors polishing their prose with letters to the editor--which I had to screen--about improving traffic conditions.

It was the only daily I knew of functioning sans reporters. We relied on cutouts from the over twenty Chinese language papers and the foreign wire services. The publishers seemed to have given up the battle against the massive resources of the Chinese dailies with their large local circulation.. Although by no means a "quitter", Nancy Lin-Wang seemed desperate. After fifty years her paper was suddenly grasping at a reason for being.

Most of the staffers struck me as being in the same quandary--displaced drifters trying to make sense of their days in this city fast being torn down and a new on put up. There was out Wasp copy editor Mark Mathieson marooned in Taipei for the past five years who hated the city as much as Iowa; Chinese-American Bruce Lu trying to relearn the language of his elders to land a job as far east correspondent for Time; Daryll who'd lived in five cities in seven years; Ben Gomez, also from Manila, who worked the foreign wires and didn't know enough Chinese to order a decent meal; the motley assortment of mainlanders who joined the '49 exodus and couldn't construct a passable sentence in English after twenty years with the Trib; and the gang of fresh journalism graduates, doing their practicum, trying to earn the right credentials and idioms for Columbia or UCLA. Everyone seemed in "temporary exile", in transit for a last leg somewhere. Though most appeared headed for Canada or the US rather than "storming back to retake the mainland" as the president would have it in his annual National Day address.

And me? Well, US$600 a month wasn't exactly peanuts for the people-powered global superstar but economically screwed-up city I came from. The media outfit I worked for had closed shop and most everyone had been so caught in the wave of emotion that carried the "widow" to power, that a little distance might provide a clearer perspective once the fairy tale ended and the realpolitik persists. But above all else I wanted to find out if coming here would amount to any sort of "homecoming". I waned to figure out why Father always "went home" to Taiwan whenever he'd gone on business trips--just as he'd wanted to "go home" to Amoy, China--I could take that since it was his birthplace after all. And why, contrary to most accepted international conventions, a rational individual like himself should continue to swear by the Republic of China in its "temporary bastion" in Taiwan. We had our spats about the "legitimate" rulers of China--making me, perhaps, forswear committing a similar grave error with Mrs. Wang--which always ended with his harangue: "What do you young people know?! You're fed all these red lies by Americans. I lived through it."

Father was his usual unflappable self when he heard about my Taipei job. But I could catch the glimmer in his eyes and the mute satisfaction--"now you're finally doing something with yourself". I'd been in Taiwan several years back, but that was a three-week tour not long enough for anything to sink in. I could see father toasting his band of Overseas Chinese WWII Veteran's League, pride brimming from his face--his son "going home"to work for the China Tribune. And the congratulations and exaltations as the rest of the guys lament the destinies of their own kids who, despite M.B.A.'s and M.D.'s have lost all sense of their ancestry. "At least his one is saved," I could hear the verdict, "not going to be another huanna (may be read as 'barbarian')."

It was almost 1:00 a.m. when Daryll came up to remind me about Aurora. The woman had worked as a masseuse in one of downtown Manila's classier joints and had been Daryll's "regular" before he went to Taipei. Daryll had spotted Aurora shopping for winter clothes in downtown Shimenting and had arranged for the three of us to meet in Aurora's studio room which she shared with other Pinays.

"Come on, you need this as much as I do." Daryll tugged desperately at my jacket. I'd been up for twenty-two straight hours and not even the prospect of sex could lure me away from sleep. Taipei's sex scene, or what we knew of it at least, left us both celibate most nights. It was a choice between the last remaining legalized prostitution alleys in the old district of Wanhua where one could get laid dirt cheap--even by Manila standards--by aboriginal teenagers who literally dragged you into cubicles with life-sized portraits of syphillitic organs staring down at you or second-class hotels where you got ripped off by charming ladies of the night who would shed their tender smiles as fast as their Parisian clothes and wouldn't even pretend to be enjoying their thirty minutes much less faking a couple of orgasms. Where, oh, where were the gentle, accommodating whores of Manila? The homely harlots who'd settle for half their regular fee after the wilting rose you bought them? Who'd even sleep-in for the night when you're too drunk to drive? There wasn't any middle ground here. No haggling. Prices were set as if by some regulatory commission. And most nights we'd simply drown our lust in stale Taiwanese beer with Sgt. Lin Yaw, the local patrolman Daryll had befriended. The guy had been promising us some "interesting French coeds" for weeks bet could not even show us a poodle. Lin Yaw's wife, a sometime travel agent, had left him for a Japanese tourist, so he didn't have much else to spend his nights with, save listen to our stories about Manila erotica.

So it was that Aurora came like a blessing to Daryll. A promise of sensuality in the lethargy of his Taipei days. "She's probably keeping house for some Irish diplomat in Yangmishan," I quipped. There were over ten thousand Filipinas working as domestics in Taiwan according to the latest conservative estimates, most of them overstaying tourists.

"I told you, Arthur, she was numero uno in 'Paradise', superstar. she'd be playing house with your Irish if I knew the lady. And there are four of them! Man, four wild tropical lasses! We might even get to manage."

"Domestics, Daryll. The competition here's too stiff; I'll bet my monthly wages they're tsimays."

"No harm looking in."

Aurora, Letty, Donna, and May shared a quaint, half-furnished studio room in a middle-class district. From all appearances I'd won my bet with Daryll. Aurora didn't look anything like the insatiable bitch Daryll had painted her. She wore thin make-up and spoke with a measured timidity not unlike physicians' secretaries politely showing you the bill--"it's P200 per consultation sir". I tried to imagine her demurely asking a satiated customer for her "tip" but could simply find nothing vaguely erotic about the woman.

She must have been in her early thirties although women in her profession seem to age faster once they "retire". Cooped up in the darkness of their massage cubicles they look ageless, unchanging--at least to drunken customers/ But once exposed to sunlight, their skins seemed wounded and on the verge of breaking, like those of exposed vampires in old Hollywood horror flicks. Many seasons, a thousand customers, hundreds of faked orgasms, and tens of thousands of miles away, I could see a petite charmer with almond black eyes and soft lips. But the years have taken away the soul from her face.

"You're very pretty," I blurted in Tagalog drawing an awkward glance from Aurora and sniggles from her roommates. It had been quite awhile since I'd spoken a line of straight Tagalog. Daryll and I conversed in a hodgepodge of Fukienese-English-Tagalog as most Filipino-Chinese of our generation do, while Ben Gomez was so acerbic that I avoided him like the plague.

"You've been seeing so many Chinese, anything else looks out-of-this-world," she retorted. "That guy at the airport was asking all sorts of questions just to get to first base. Detained us for over an hour, but Au wouldn't even give him a kiss. He ended up believing we were actually booked at the Grand Hotel." Letty's disclosure brought a shade of crimson to Aurora's pale brown cheeks.

"Shut up, Letty. If you don't stop telling those airport stories they'll pick us up in no time at all."

Daryll knocked his knees uneasily. Aurora's unexpected countenance bothered him; he didn't think it would be so difficult to "propose". "So, what beings you here?" He finally asked.

"What else? Maids here make a lot more than teachers back home. A school-teacher friend of mine managed to send home enough money to buy her folks a piece of land after two years. Why not? I thought. Have to send my boy through high school and college pretty soon."

Daryll forced a smile. "Sure. But you know where the real money is, don't you?"

The women looked curiously at him unsure whether to flash conspirational smiles or frown at his audacity. "No, we don't," Aurora answered in a hard tone. "We've been here less than a month, and we need to work soon before our funds dry up. But we're decent women." She spoke with an unnerving clarity.

Daryll fidgeted. He knew he was powerless to use her past in any way against the woman. She was the sole master of her destiny and for a moment, Daryll with his 5 ft. 8 in. 175-pound athlete's frame wrapped in autumnal cotton shirt and slacks looked rather puny.

"There's this Filipina nun, Sister Adelaida, who might be of some help. She's spiritual adviser to many Pinoys working here." I wanted to save the meeting.

"Yes, we've been in touch," May, the smallest of them, said.

"How are your papers?" I asked.

An unsteady silence came over our hostesses; they looked at each other listlessly. "Expired," Aurora quipped, having been given tacit permission to speak for the rest. "We were all issued two-week tourist visas. We're overdue by a few days."

Daryll came to life. "No problem," he declared. "What are kababayans (fellow countrymen) for?"

"Kababayans my ass," I muttered under my breath. Daryll would be the last person alive to admit to holding a Philippine passport. Twice in his sojourns he'd been singled out from the arrival line in some foreign airport and grilled for his "real reasons for traveling". Despite his "pure-bred" Chinese ancestry, the guy's tropical sunbaked complexion and passe Jimi Hendrix getups marked him as some itinerant musician or Manila pimp.

"We'll take on any work," Aurora whispered, "so long as it's decent"--this time the word sounded almost morbid.

"Come to think of it, our boss at the Tribune, Mrs. Wang, used to have a Filipina aide, Agnes. She went home to get married; might not come back. Mrs. Wang is interested in employing a new girl, she likes Filipinas. What do you think, Daryll?"

Daryll was a mass of nerves. I couldn't tell whether he was peeved or frustrated. It was clear, though, that he was unprepared for the situation. I, who had met Aurora for the first time, could readily accept what I saw--another woman trying to keep her wits, her dignity, and what remained of her prime while seeking redemption in another country. And what I saw in Aurora strangely reminded me of the first time I met Nancy Lin-Wang. The same unnerving quality of voice. A confidence bordering on arrogance. Yet you knew none of it was a facade. Nothing in her past could ever haunt her. Everyone else she came across was a mere footnote to some epic personal history she was creating. It struck me that they would make a good tandem. I resolved to broach the idea to Mrs. Wang once I got the chance and bade the women good night.

Frequently Asked Questions and Readers' Answers on Daguio's "Wedding Dance"

2011-03-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

I think Amador Daguio's "Wedding Dance" is often assigned as required reading for students. I understand why. It's a lovely story and it showcases an aspect of Philippine culture we hardly appreciate. The strongly Hispanized and very Catholic pueblo-folk would probably be shocked by the events in the story. Divorce, wedding dances, and the traditional courtships; these are all foreign to the baptized majority in the largely Christian Philippines.

A Note to the Students: Dear students who wish to find a quick answer to their problems, read the story once. Before asking any more questions, go through the comments and the answers. Then, read the story again. Only if after that are you still befuddled should you post a comment to ask a question. It's really frustrating to have to keep telling commenters to 'scroll up'.

Joey A. Velasco's "The Dangerous Life of a Child-warrior" [PG-13]

2011-03-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

This story is an excerpt from the chapter "Bruises of Itok" of the book They Have Jesus: The Stories of the Children of Hapag by Joey Velasco. The painting Hapag ng Pag-asa (Supper of Hope) is a rendition of the popular Last Supper theme by Velasco. In his version, Velasco replaced the apostles with street children. Velasco, who died from kidney cancer at the age of 43 on July 20, 2010, picked up both the pen and the paintbrush late in his short life. Velasco was dubbed a 'heArtist' because his works are poignant images of reality. The stories in his book are exactly like his paintings.

I chose this story because there is nothing in this story that showcases love. It is a showcase of the absence of it. This is very different from most stories in this blog because it is real. It is hardly uplifting.

Love is a beautiful emotion that enables us to feel the joys and the pains of the ones we love. Thus, one aspect of love is compassion.

This story was written to awaken our compassion for others, by painting a picture of a world without it.

In this entry, I have only posted English translations of the boy's interview. I modified them slightly because the English translations in the book don't always seem correct. I removed some of the commentaries, which I felt detracted from Itok's tale as well. The beginning of the story is from the start of the chapter. It gives us a setting and context. As you read, keep in mind that this is the interview of a child. A boy child who has not even experienced his puberty growth spurt. I do hope you will read it to the end. - paris

"Putang ina mo!" (Literally, "Your mother's a whore!") Linda yelled at her son Itok.

"Eh di Nanay...puta ka pala?" ("Then Mother... you're a whore?") he brutally barked back at his mother.

Striking a raw nerve, his mother grabbed Itok by the hair and they wrestled like animals until she pinned him down.. Raging with anger, she challenged him to repeat.

"What was that?"

"Aren't you my mother?...You said putang ina mo, then you're a whore. You were the one who said that, weren't you?" the boy snorted back.

This was the exchange that transpired between mother and her 11-year old son before Itok was wrung in chains in their house. It was a show of force by a desperate mother in her desire to transform him before he becomes the next-generation criminal of Metro Manila. Rage filled the house. Broken glass. Broken dreams...

A year ago, Itok was my model for the glutton boy who was right next to Christ. He didn't have to act or play that part because he only had to be himself. He was literally so hungry that time that he didn't care about what was happening around him. He didn't know all along that it was just a role and that they were posing for a modern Last Supper in the slums. I wasn't able to talk to him at all too because I was so preoccupied with the total composition and balance of the figures plus the alert capturing of the expressions on their faces. It was as if we were doing a million-dollar production of Les Miserables. I served them all-you-can-eat "Lucky Me" pancit canton and bottomless juice prepared by my cook Cecille. We set the table which was made of scrap wood palette and let it stand on empty drums and other improvised materials like second hand tires. We used the old dented aluminum casseroles and pots to give a semblance of a poor people's dinner. All these were unnoticed by Itok because he was too engrossed with satisfying his hunger. In my few glances at him, I saw him literally devouring the food. He just swallowed it like an empty gas tank being loaded with crude oil. After his amplified burps, he wiped his face in the same manner as he would wipe the windshields of cars during traffic.

Mustering quite a great deal of courage, I tore off to the cage-like house of Itok one day. They said it was a rough and dirty place. Thugs really looked mean. Their place was called 'La Dakila' (the honorable). Contrary to its name, it was the hub of villains and murderous gangs that the police or politicians hire for a delicate job they code as "operation".

Estokwa, Itok's 23-year old uncle who was a scavenger, guided me to the house of terror. Before my very eyes, I couldn't believe such a gruesome sight. With both hands shackled in a door chain, this little child Itok was growling and gawking like a young captured lion possessed by an evil spirit. He was salivating and his red eyes were sharply piercing through. There was not a single tear in those brave eyes. His hands and wrists were bleeding and his fists where clenched in fury. It just made me sick to my stomach to know the cruelty he had gone through.

I begged her, whom Estokwa called 'Hitler', to release her son. It was her only known form of discipline for a son who got involved early in robbery. According to his mother, he got hooked with three firends and was detained in the local station a couple of months ago, but he was able to escape twice using a hair pin and 'fluid'. He feared nothing on this earth. Recently, his mother was able to prevent him from another imminent detention due to alleged stealing of six sacks of palette wood from an abandoned warehouse a few nights back.

"That animal of a whore's child has a hard head...!" The mother cried while unshackling the chains entangling her son's widespread hands. She narrated to me how her son often got involved in perilous affairs. His group became well known for the juvenile violence in their place.

"You don't do anything besides playing bingo and tong-its (a card game) all day... Father, meanwhile, acts as if he always has boils under his feet." Itok retorted like a hungry Rottweiler.

"What's your name again?" I verified calmly.

"Itok. Itok Garganera po." ('po' is a word in Filipino often used to show respect. Itok does not use this when speaking to his mother, but in fact uses it frequently when addressing Joey Velasco.)

"His real name's Jessie," Estokwa said.

"What happened to him?"

"It's because of one of our companions here, Simon. He invited my nephew, then they enjoyed it... they were caught stealing palettes. Thre sacks of palettes. Itok was almost sent to jail."

I would like to believe that this very young child was hardened by the violence around him and by the events that transpired in his every day life. A boy fails to see rightly because of a clouded mind and a huge pile of life's bruises and ugliness. While walking towards the street corner to buy squid balls (flavored flour balls which are sold as street food), we were calming down after he had been tied up like an animal. Itok hopped so nonchalantly like a freed slave.

Itok started telling his own piece of story.

"I trade junk.

"I started when I was 8.

"My parents do not have work. My mother drinks and gambles. Tong-its (a card game) and bingo.

"I'm the second among five. I'm the only one who works.

"By morning, I am walking to Payatas; then I scavenge. I don't even get to eat breakfast anymore. At night, I collect stuff from the garbage until nine o'clock (PM). I wake up at five o'clock (AM)."

"What is your ambition in life?"

"I want to be a lawyer so that I can help... it seems Jesus did not make us equally."

"Do you go to school?"

"I should be in grade 5. I'm sad because my life now is difficult. I force myself to work so that we would have something to eat. If I don't work, I am hit with a 2x2 [piece of wood], sometimes with wire. Cut wires. Sometimes I get cut, sometimes not."

"How much do you earn?"

"In one day, I earn 80 pesos.

"I buy half a kilo of rice. Sometimes, sweet potato with sugar will be our viand."

He spoke fast with his mouth filled with a herd of fish balls wrestling against each other mixed with an ocean of hot sauce and flour.

"I use a kariton (a wooden cart). Sometimes, I can't find anything. I exert more effort at night if I can't find anything in the morning; I collect stuff from the garbage. Sometimes, I get caught. I am imprisoned for two days. I've been in jail a number of times."

It has always annoyed me to talk to people who sprinkle me with saliva as they spoke. This time, it was really worse. He was narrating his life while he picked his nose two inches deep as if extracting a slug of a .45 caliber form the cut of a soldier fatally wounded in battle. He didn't care if he damaged his blood vessels inside his double barreled nose with his claws just to pull out those calcified plaques. When he failed, he applied pressure by covering one of the barrels, and like a cannon would throw a solid mass faster than the speed of light. I thought his brains were spattered out too.

What do you do in jail?

"The other prisoners talk to me. They punch me. The bump my face [against objects] and then make me eat cockroaches.

"They held me and crushed my hand. Don't you steal anything, they said. They even tried to rape my butt. It's a good thing that I shouted. Then the police came."

He spoke with so much fury and anger, his eyes sharply piercing through again. In his young age, he was fluent with the street lingo. His body movement spoke like that of a bull fighter as though he wanted to strangulate a foe.

"Some of those I go with snatch (steal by snatching). Many of us here at La Dakila have parents who dispatch jeeps.

"When I am in prison, the police hurt me. Most of the time, we go to sleep starving. I pray at night saying that I wish He would take me...life is so difficult."

He cried profusely and found it hard to breathe. I began to realize that "the warrior was a child..."

"All my siblings have defects. One of my siblings, my older brother, has a head that grows in size, Rudolph, on the other hand, was run over, he can't walk. Ryan, meanwhile, was born without an anus. His feces come out of his stomach. His stomach was operated on. Then my youngest sibling, Neneng, fell into the toilet bowl. She was affected between the legs. A vein was pinched. She is able to walk now. Limping.

"I steal from junk shops. I steal metals. Sometimes I get caught by the owner of the junk shop over there, outside of Payatas. Sometimes, I reach San Mateo. Heat, rain, I've even been hit by a jeep. I even have stitches on my stomach. Video karera and basketball are my father's games. He beats me powerfully. I have a cut on my head. I was hit by the metal [buckle] of the belt by my father."

He has some nerve to beat you up, doesn't he?

"One time he was going to cut my finger with pliers. Crush it. Especially when we tried to open the video karera. He locked me inside the man's video karera. One time he was going to drown me in the drum [of water]. That was when I was with them in front of the apartelle."

He picked up a sharp stick from the plastic container and started piercing the bloated deep-fried fish balls himself again as if catching small fish from the river. He ate eight sticks in all. He asked me if the interview was over so that he could leave with his uncle for a second junk hunting round. It was dark when we parted. I gave him some money and he grabbed it with his sticky hand. I was left with the vendor to settle the payment.

"Do you know him? Why did you talk to him?" Inquired the fish ball man who was computing silently the amount I was supposed to pay.

"No reason. I just wanted to know about his life. He was punished by his parents earlier, that's why he was sweating profusely." I casually replied.

"He's the terror amongst the children here. This is the only time his mother got angry with him because he was almost jailed again. Usually, his mother is on his side."

"Ha?... Looks like you know very well?"

"He's very famous here, that Itok. At a very young age, he's already pushing drugs. Only eleven years old. His father's a former policeman. He learned to handle money. He's really anxious to get a hold of money. He's been caught and jailed a number of times. We're surprised because even the padlock of his cell, he can open. The padlock of the jewelry shop, he can open. He's merciless, that child. The jeep of the councilman here, he can open. If he sees coins in a car expect it. If he passes by there, those coins will disappear, he will lift them from the car. He always carries some wire, that boy, a hairpin. There are stories in the city that he broke into a jewelry shop. He didn't get any gold. Cash, he got a lot. Even the combination padlocks, he knows how to open. He's a smart boy. Then the big padlocks, he knows how to make them explode. They just put fluid in and light it up and it opens by itself. Even if he's jailed, he escapes. He scavenges, as well. The guards don't let them into the subdivisions. He just needs to move a bit and he's already inside. That boy's amazing. He has really quick hands, that boy."

"Do you think he still has a chance?"

He answered like a sage. "It depends on how life goes, whether that boy has a chance. That boy is something else. He messes with cigarettes, alcohol, money, he takes them all. Eggs. The next day, they sell those at another store. One time they were caught inside a store, they were eating inside. They've taken a liking to that. He'll become a hoodlum when he grows up. Certainly."

"He climbs to the top of electric posts and cutes even live [electric cables]. The wires explode. They cut the wires and sell the copper of the wire."

After giving me the change, the vendor walked away tired with a few pieces of the uncooked squid balls and quikiam left in his plastic bag. He was whistling with contentment for a full day's work.

It was an exhausting experience to witness the unimaginable harsh and bitter existence of a boy. It was a depressing sight. To enter a place which was like hell's gate, was an easier task than to enter a hardened boy's heart. Any ounce of optimism will easily be waned. I was vexed with some questions that nagged my mind. Could he have been an outstanding student if he were in school? If he was at La Salle Greenhills or Xavier, could he have been good in Math? With his strength and agility, could he have been a varsity player? If he was fed with Promil when he was a baby, could he have been a gifted child? A wonder kid? This mirage is just part of wishful thinking. We all know that it is not reality...because he was born poor.

Lola Basyang's "The Forgotten Princess" by Severino Reyes

2011-03-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

I was very young when the show "Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang" was on air. While I wasn't naive enough to believe that the Lola Basyang character on TV was the real Lola Basyang, I did imagine that there was really an old lady writer/storyteller named Basyang. It was only in high school that I learned that Lola Basyang was, in fact, a character made by a man named Severino Reyes. Reyes wrote the Lola Basyang stories for Liwayway magazine and produced hundreds of manuscripts. The stories are written in Tagalog and incorporate themes from a time we already call 'history'. Some of the plot lines and characters we may have seen in foreign fairy tales, and these will make the historical more familiar to us. The translated (and slightly abbreviated and annotated) version that I'm posting is by Gilda Cordero-Fernando and taken from the book "The Best of Lola Basyang: Timeless Tales for the Filipino Family" which has the original author at the byline. Bienvenido Lumbera, a respected figure in Filipino Literature, was the one who selected the 12 stories featured in the book. My heart echoes Lumbera's words in the book's introduction:

"In the age of many competing tales and technologies, may the new readers coming to Lola Basyang for the first time receive the old seeds and feel new flowers spring from them." - B. Lumbera

"The Forgotten Princess" is, for me, a typical Filipino love story. There is great anguish that spans many years and causes many tears to be shed. But, of course, true love still triumphs over all. It is a fairy tale with an almost soap operatic feel. I hope you enjoy it.

A long time ago there lived a weakling king named Kretaus. After his wife died he married another woman named Sidira.

Sidira was a strong-willed woman with a heart of ice, and it wasn't long before she had the timid king in the palm of her hand. It was no secret throughout the kingdom that King Kretaus spent his days scurrying here and there, granting the selfish queen her every whim.

Now Kretaus had a daughter by his first marriage named Ogarta. Ogarta was good and kind, and so lovely that ardent suitors--many of them princes from other lands--waited in line outside the palace gates just for a glimpse of her.

The queen delighted in meddling in the princess' affairs. Everywhere Ogarta turned, Sidira loomed like a monstrous shadow. Nothing pleased the queen more than to thwart her stepdaughter's every desire.

The young princess suffered all this in silence. Even if Sidira was terribly abusive or cruel, Ogarta did not run to her father for help. She knew that her father was too weak to stand up to his overbearing wife.

One morning, while Ogarta was rearranging the plants on the balcony outside her parents' royal chamber, she happened to overhear her father and stepmother talking. As usual Sidira was complaining to Kretaus: "That daughter of yours is stubborn and ungrateful. She has never done a thing to please me."

"Come now, dear," replied the king. "Ogarta has been nothing but good and kind to everyone. No one in the palace has ever spoken a bad word against her."

"There you go, defending her again," Sidira snorted.

"I'm not taking sides, my love," said the king. "But I know my daughter has a good heart."

"To you she's all sweetness and light," Sidira said. "But she has never shown me any real respect, perhaps because I am not her real mother."

"I asked her to love and obey you from the very start," said the gentle king. "But if what you say is true, then please be patient and I will talk to her."

Sidira laughed a malicious laugh.

"What a foolish king you are. Can't you see that your daughter and I are like oil and water? We will never get along. No, my King, this kingdom isn't big enough for Ogarta and me. The best thing is for us to live in separate kingdoms."

"What do you mean?"

"I won't ask you to punish your daughter but I think it's time that Ogarta be on her own. I feel that among her many suitors Prince Orlok is the best candidate. He's madly in love with her! It would be wise to marry the two as soon as possible. This way Ogarta won't have to feel that I'm interfering with her life."

A wrinkle grew on King Kretaus's brow as he considered his wife's proposal. This was not the first time that Sidira had expressed an interest in marrying off the young princess.

"I just don't know," the king hesitated. "Prince Orlok is a fine young man. But does Ogarta love him?"

"Kretaus, what an incurable romantic you are! It's not your concerns whether she loves him or not. It's up to us to choose a suitable husband for Ogarta. Besides, we owe Orlok's father a great deal. Why, this gold crown that I'm wearing is from him. And the vast lands west of here where we ride and hunt are gifts from Orlok's grandfather. Have you forgotten your debt of gratitude to Orlok's family? Orlok is crazy for Ogarta. It will be a terrible disgrace if he does not have her as his bride."

Again the king hesitated.

Finally the queen spoke, this time in a voice cold as steel. "All right, I've tried to reason with you, but somehow you can't manage to get it through that pea-brain of yours. The real reason why I'd like to get Ogarta married to the prince is because...she's fallen in love with someone else."

King Kretaus looked up in surprise.

"She has? With whom?"

"A commoner, my King."

"A commoner? Impossible! I will never allow my daughter to marry a nobody. Who is this man?"

"I'm not sure. One of my huntsmen saw Ogarta in the company of a good-looking young man about five miles from the palace. He didn't appear to be a person of high stature. In fact he was dressed rather shabbily."

This upset the king terribly.

"I will speak to Ogarta about this at once," he said.

Queen Sidira smiled. Surely now her malicious plot to marry off the young princess would succeed.

II.

The ground shuddered as Ogarta's beautiful brown horse galloped past the palace gates. As was her habit, the princess was taking her daily afternoon ride.

Ogarta dug in her spurs and steered her horse toward the foot of the mountain where her loved lived. For what the queen had said was true. Ogarta and a young farmer named Limpo had been sweethearts for a long time.

Although Limpo was poor and unschoold, he had a fine character. He was handsome and strong, and loved the princess more than everything in the world put together.

That day Limpo watched the princess from afar. He had never seen her riding that fast before! The princess dismounted before her hrose even came to a halt.. The farmer and princess embraced.

Limpo tied the horse to a tree. They walked to their favorite spot near a running brook surrounded by flowering trees. They sat down on the soft, thick grass.

"Tell me why you are troubled, my love," asked Limpo.

Ogarta took his hand in hers and nodded.

"This morning I overheard my stepmother talking to my father. She wants me to marry Prince Orlok, whom she's long been trying to force on me."

"And what did your father say?"

"He said it was not for him to decide who I am to marry."

Limpo felt relieved. "Well, thank heavens for that."

"But, my darling," Ogarta said gravely. "My stepmother knows about the two of us. She told my father."

The young farmer was frightened. He knew that if King Kretaus found out about them, he would surely lose Ogarta. Wrose, he could also lose his own life.

"Who could have told her?" asked Limpo.

"You know the queen/ She has spies everywhere."

"What will we do now?" Limpo asked helplessly.

"No matter what happens I'll never give you up," Ogarta replied. "You are the only man I'll ever love. I swear to love you forever."

"But your father will not have it..."

"I have a right to decide things for myself."

"He will punish you...."

"It doesn't mat--"

Ogarta stopped in mid-sentence. For there, standing right behind them, was King Kretaus! He had instructed one of his guards to trail the princess as she rode out of the palace gates. The guard had led the king to the foot of the mountain.

Now the king loomed behind the lovers, his face knotted in fury. Without warning he raised his riding whip and struck the young farmer. "If you ever see my daughter again, you will be shot!" he shouted.

Tears streamed down Princess Ogarta's face as she was led away. Limpo thought his world would collapse. For him the thought of never seeing his sweetheart again was worse than a death sentence.

Ogarta returned to the palace with her father. The king immediately ordered the princess locked up in a room in the palace, with a guard posted outside at all times. "From now on," said the king harshly, "you will be a prisoner here. You will not be set free unless you agree to the queen's wish that you marry Prince Orlok."

"Then you may as well have a coffin built for me," the princess declared. "For I will never marry Prince Orlok!"

"Now you can see for yourself how hard-headed she is," scoffed the queen.

From that day forth the beautiful Ogarta became a prisoner in her own castle. She lived in solitude in a room behind a locked door. All her needs--her food and clothing--were left at the door.

No one knew it, but the princess was pregnant. After several months she secretly gave birth to a healthy son. She would not let her baby cry out for fear that the king and queen would take him away from her.

As soon as Ogarta was strong enough to get up, she wrapped her child in a warm blanket. Then she went to the door and called for the guard. Now this guard had been assigned to palace since Ogarta was a child. She knew he would have helped her escape a long time ago if she only asked him. But the princess was too considerate to put him at risk. She knew that were she to escape, the guard would pay with his life.

The princess looked around to make sure no one else could hear them.

"Do you wish to help me?" she asked the guard.

"Have no doubt, beloved Princess," he answered. "If only for the dear memory of your late mother, I would gladly give up my life to serve you."

"I am deeply grateful," Ogarta answered. "I want to confide in you. Last night I gave birth to a baby boy. His father is the farmer Limpo, the only man I ever loved."

The guard was touched by the princess' words. He was also stunned that a baby boy had been born in the room without his knowledge.

"You must not tell a soul," warned Ogarta. "If you want to help me, then take the child to his father. He lives at the foot of the mountain. I'm scared to death that if the baby stays one more day in this room my stepmother will find out."

"You can trust me," said the guard. "I will leave at nightfall. The child will be in his father's arms before daybreak."

That night the princess breastfed her baby for the last time. Then she gently wrapped him in a blanket and handed him over to the guard. Holding the infant tightly against his bosom, the faithful guard began his perilous journey toward Limpo's mountain.

III

Years passed. The princess was growing old. Her world remained bound by the iron-grilled windows and the cold floor of her prison cell.

She refused to marry Prince Orlok, who was even more determined to marry her. Each time she was asked, her answer was the same--she would never love him.

Meantime Ogarta's child grew up in Limpo's care. The famer named him Oskar.

Oskar was gifted with unusual strength and daring. He was an expert with the tabak (a large, slightly curved blade). Oskar could chop a tree into firewood faster than anyone. No one was a more skilled marksman than Oskar. He was a perfect shot. Together, father an son earned a decent living from hunting game in the mountains.

Limpo had told Oskar tha his mother had died when he was very young. Yet the young man never stopped asking about her. One day Limpo decided to tell him the truth.

"Now that you're old enough," said Limpo with great sorrow, "I will tell you the whole story. Your mother is not dead. She is a princess. Because of her love for me, a commoner, she's been imprisoned in a room in the palace for sixteen years. If her stepmother, the queen, had her way, your mother would never leave her prison cell alive."

"My mother-- a princess?" said Oskar in wonder. "And she livess in the palace? Imprisoned in a room?"

"Yes," his father answered. "Princess Ogarta is the most beautiful person I have ever known. But she remains a prisoner to this day. You were born and sent to me in secret because she didn't want you to fall into the hands of the king and his cruel wife."

Oskar sighed deeply. "Are you sure, Father, that my mother is still being held prisoner?"

"Yes, the guard who watches over your mother's cell is a faithful and loyal servant. He keeps me informed of everything that happens to her."

Stricken with grief, Oskar left his father and went deep into the forest to reflect on what he had just learned.

One day, as Limpo was walking home, he was surprised to see his son and a group of men waiting for him in front of his hut. Oskar had brought with him the strongest, most able young men of the mountains. All of them were carrying tabaks.

"Take us to the palace and show me where my mother is being held," Oskar demanded. "I swear I wills set her free and punish her tormentors!"

Limpo marveled at his son's courage. He had long wanted to put together a fearless army that could storm the castle and free his beloved Ogarta. Now father and son led the way.

Word of their mission spread. Oskar's army grew with every village they passed. More and more men joined them to avenge Princess Ogarta.

By th time they entered the capital, Oskar had thousands of followers. All of them were fed up with the evil queen and her powerful hold over the weakling king.

Before King Kretaus had time to react, the palace was besieged by knife-wielding invaders. Oskar's men poured like ants into the palace, easily overwhelming the palace guards.

It didn't take long before Oskar and his men broke into Kretaus royal chamber and found the king.

"Who are you and what do you want?" demanded King Kretaus.

"I have come to free my mother," said the young man.

"What are you talking about? Who is your mother?"

"The Princess Ogarta."

"And who is your father?"

"Here he is," said Oskar, motioning toward his father.

Oskar said, "Do you remember the man you lashed with a riding whip many years ago? The man who was your daughter's sweetheart? Don't you recognize Limpo, the poor mountain farmer who loved Princess Ogarta with all his heart?"

The king felt faint.

"Bring my mother to me now!" Oskar ordered his grandfather. "How dare you imprison her all these years for not obeying your hateful wife?"

The king considered the many knives pointed at him. Fearfully he ordered that Princess Ogarta be brought to them. In a short while she arrived, walking slowly behind the guards.

Limpo let out a short gasp as he took in the sight of his long-lost sweetheart. After years in prison the once young and beautiful Ogarta now looked old and thin and had dark circles under her eyes. But how he loved her still! "Oh my beloved," he sobbed.

"This can't be happening...." Ogarta murmured, not quite sure whether she was dreaming. "Limpo, have you come at last?"

"Yes, I have. Your brave son Oskar has come to set you free."

Mother and son gazed at each other for a long time. Pride and love surged through the princess' veins as she embraced the son she had last seen so many years before.

"Mother, my poor, poor mother," said Oskar, kissing her tear-stained cheeks. Ogarta opened her arms to include Limpo, the only man she had ever loved and suffered so much for.

"My business here isn't finished. Where is the cruel Queen Sidira?" Oskar demanded.

Though the king was afraid to reveal the queen's hiding place, he was even more afraid of what might befall him if he did not.

"She's hiding under the dining table," he said.

Swiftly, Oskar strode to the heavy table and shoved it aside. Beneath it, quivering in mortal fear, was the queen.

"Stand up or I'll spear you like the animal that you are," said Oskar.

Sidira got to her feet.

"Both of you will rot in prison forever," said Oskar to the king and queen. "I will lock you up in the same cell where you kept my mother so that you will suffer the way she did."

The king knelt before Ogarta and begged for mercy.

Sidira's pitiful cries echoed throughout the palace. She crawled across the floor and kissed Oskar's feet.

Oskar was moved with pity and said, "I will forgive my grandfather for he is old and weak. But I can't forgive a queen who hates all and who all hate. She will remain a prisoner for as many years as my mother."

"Have pity on me!" begged the heartless queen.

"No mercy for those who have none," said Oskar. "Now go!" The soldiers, who were only too glad to oblige, grabbed the detestable queen and dragged her away.

From that day forth Oskar lived in the palace with his parents and grandfather. Ogarta soon regained her strength and the beauty of a woman still in her prime. It was not too late for the princess and her long-lost sweetheart to lvie happily ever after.

In time the king passed his crown to Oskar, who turned out to be a strong and just ruler, loved and admired by all.

A Fleeting Moment [PG-13]

2010-08-23T10:54:00.000-07:00

Another writing exercise. I just had to write out a fantasy. It's been awhile since I wrote anything beyond work-related stuff. I hope this reads well.

I was a princess for a week. I pampered myself with hair treatments. I bought new clothes, particularly new underwear. I waxed my legs, my armpits, and shaved myself clean "down there". I watched my diet, hoping to lose a few more extra pounds. But, what was most royal was how every time I looked in a mirror, I saw a beautiful princess looking back. She was radiant, skin glowing with excitement and eyes sparkling with anticipation.

Things had been very different the week before. I rushed to complete all my deliverables for the month to ensure a light schedule in the days that followed. I constructed simple lies laced with enough truth to be believable. I prepared excuses and practiced them in my head. I was a nervous wreck back then. My entire being wracked with guilt and still I performed every task with determination.

All this because we are meeting today.

One day, you said, out of the many years I have spent with him. Could I be yours for one day? Not even a day. An afternoon, perhaps. Yes, that would be enough. Thank you, you said. That was two months ago. It had taken me a long time to agree. I debated with myself. I wanted to give you something you could treasure in your heart. I wanted to be selfish about it. I wanted to forget everyone else and everyone else's expectations.

And so, here we are. In a place where nobody knows us. My heart is pounding as you take me into your arms. You greet me with an almost innocuous peck on the forehead. I feel the heat radiating from your aroused body. It is the first time you kissed me. We chat happily, like friends, as you lead me into the motel. I watch as you retrieve our key. As you guide me into the elevator, I hesitate a moment before reminding myself that there is no turning back. I make inane comments about the hallways, trying to drive away my anxiety. You patiently reply while scanning for our room. It didn't take you long to find our door and you open it. I memorize the number. 602. It is a number that will hopefully forever be in my memories. I walk into the foyer and feel for the light. You push me against the wall and kiss me roughly on the lips, as the door slid shut. I barely have the sense to make my hand graze the light switch.

In a few short minutes, the clothes I had chosen for you, the underwear I had specifically bought for you, are all on the floor. You appreciate each piece as you remove it. You take in every inch of my skin with hunger. You burn me with your gaze. Your hands are hot against my naked flesh. All this and still I shiver underneath you. I fully understood the cliche as you wrapped my body with pleasure. You are my pleasurable mistake.You are my life's correction and my life's greatest sin.

Our eyes are locked as you unite with me. You are such a wonderful creature. It truly is unfair that you are preoccupied with a woman who cannot completely explore your wonders.

Before the passion completely melted away into the afterglow, my mobile phone sounds off an alert. Time is up. The moment has passed. It takes all of my willpower not to beg you to hold me for a moment longer. I see in your eyes that you are not satisfied, as well. What should have quelled our lust simply stoked its fire. I pull on my clothes without any grace. I am no longer a princess. We talk as if nothing happened. We return to the lobby and you pay for our sacred haven. I treat you to dinner and we talk about work

It's the end of the day, you casually comment as you stare at the setting sun.

I nod and note that the day passed too quickly like all fleeting moments.

Bata Mama and Bata Bahi, a tale from Bukidnon as retold by Carmen Ching Unabia

2009-12-15T18:48:00.000-08:00

This is a story about the love between siblings. Particularly, in the case of Bata Mama, who, despite his young age, braved difficult odds and frightening circumstances in order to take care of his little sister, Bata Bahi. It is a picture of the importance of familial relationships to many Filipino cultures and how families should stick together.

This story was taken from the book Treasury of Stories - Filipino Myths and Folktales by E. Arsenio Manuel and edited by Gilda Cordero Fernando. The book was illustrated by Carlos Valino, Jr. In his foreword, Manuel describes this book as "a collection of thirty-three Philippine-Asian traditions that have come down from the remote past. It was written in the hope that a new generation...may discover the charm, the depth, and the variety of these ancestral narratives." The story itself is classified under "Tales with a Moral Message" and is described by Arsenio in the section introduction in the following manner:

Bata Mama and Bata Bahi (Little Boy and Little Girl), the Bukidnon Hansel and Gretel, is a rather unique one. more beautiful than any of the European versions cited by Aarne-Thompson (1963). Aside from its literary quality, the story gives us an insight into an unexplained aspect of FIlipino psychology: the antipathy, bordering on hatred, of step parents for step-children. In Philippine creative literature, such unkindiness/cruelty to children elicits an intensely protective behavior from the blood kin.
A detail that should be noted in Bata Mama and Bata Bahi is the use of a knife embedded in a fruit. Another is the planting of the crab's claws in the earth as in the Filipino version of Cinderalla first noted by Fansler (1921, 1965). These are Philippine motifs contributed by the Bukidnon to the folktale. The identification of native elements should merit closer attention from folklorists and scholars.

The storyteller, Carmen Ching Unabia, has written books on Bukidnon folk literature and is a former Dean of the Central Luzon State University.

Bata Mama and Bata Bahi were brother and sister, seven and two years old. When their kind father, the first datu died, their mother married his brother, the second datu. The stepfather was cruel and punished the children for everything they did.

One day, the stepfather said, "Dear wife, let us move to another place and leave the children behind for it is difficult to feed and raise them."

"But they are too young to live on their own," the mother protested. "Once in a while, Bata Bahi still suckles my breast."

"Whether you like it or not," the datu said, "we are leaving them. Or would you rather that I had them killed?" The mother wept but she was afraid of her husband so she quickly packed their belongings.

The datu called Bata Mama and Bata Bahi. "Take this basket to the fields and fill it with (gabi) leaves," he ordered them. "Do no come home until the basket is full, otherwise I shall hang you upside down." As soon as the children left, the datu said to his wife, "Cook our food, dear wife--let us have chicken for our last meal."

Silently, the mother prepared the meal. While they were eating, the datu warned his wife not to leave any food for the children and to put out the fire in the stove. When the datu was not watching, however, the mother hurriedly wrapped some food in banana leaves. She pressed her breasts and filled a bottle with milk. Together with a small knife, she buried the chicken and bottle in the ashes of the stove.

The datu and his wife set out on their journey. While they walked, the mother secretly unrolled a skein of abaca threads on their trail. The datu did not notice this, for women walk behind their husbands.

In the wide gabi field, the children had already gathered all the young leaves they could find. Still the basket was not full. "What shall we do now?" said Bata Mama to Bata Bahi. "There is nothing more we can find." They sat down. They could not go home for fear of their stepfather hanging them upside down.

After a long time, Bata Bahi began to cry. "I am hungry," said Bata Bahi, "Let's go home." Bata Mama pitied his little sister so he said, "Let's go home, then, even if we get hung."

As the two children entered the yard, they falt that it was unusually quiet. There was no one in the house. Not an object, not even a piece of cloth was left behind. "Where is mother?" said Bata Bahi, "I want to suck milk," and she cried and cried.

Bata Mama tried to look for something to eat. He went to the stove, but there was not even a live ember. Bata Mama leveled the ashes with a stick. He found some chicken pieces wrapped in banana leaves, the bottle of milk, and the knife. "Come Bata Bahi, here is some food mother left for us to eat." As they could not finish all of it, they buried the remaining food in the ashes again. They waited for their mother to arrive, but the sun set and evening fell and still there was no one.

At midnight, Bata Bahi began to feel afraid and started to cry. "Bata Mama, the witches will come to eat us."

"Let us just sleep here," said Bata Mama, "Anyway, the witches will find us anywhere we sleep." They decided to lie down across the door in a straight line. Their heads were in opposite directions, and the soles of the two feet were touching. It was very dark.

In the middle of the night, they heard the witch's footsteps. Bata Bahi trembled with fear. "Do not cry," said Bata Mama, "The witch will surely find us if you do."

They heard the footsteps climbing up the ladder. They kept very still. Bata Mama kept close to his sister, the knife held securely in his hand.

It was pitch dark and the witch's clammy hands began to touch the children's bodies. He said, "This is the head and these are the legs--what long legs! This is indeed a long one! And then it has--another head!" The witch was puzzled. "This must be the true witch!" he cried, moving back. Immediately, Bata Mama stood up and screamed as fiercely as he could, "I will eat you!" And the witch fled.

Morning came. "Where shall we find our mother?" asked Bata Bahi. As they crossed the yard, Bata mama noticed a trail of abaca fibers leading to the road. "They must have gone this way," said Bata Mama. "Let us follow the abaca wherever it goes." Bata Bahi was too young to walk a great distance, so Bata Mama had to carry her on his shoulders. Now and then, they would come upon a spot where the datu and his wife had cooked and they would always find some food and milk in the ashes.

After a long time, the trail of the abaca fibers ended. Then began a trail of ashes. The children felt the ashes and they were still warm. "Let us walk faster for they must be near," said Bata Mama. But after following the ashes for a long while, the children go lost. Aimlessly, they wandered in the thick forest. Finally, they came upon a balangas tree. A lot of its fruits had dropped to the ground. Bata Mama noticed that there were footprints of wild pigs on the ground around the tree, so he said, "Let us climb up the tree and eat there in case the wild pigs return."

As soon as they reached the higher branches, a herd of wild pigs of different sizes arrived. They fed on the fruit on the ground and left, all except one, the biggest and fattest of them all.

Bata Mama though hard how he coudl kill the pig. He selected the biggest and ripest fruit and stuck his knife into it, then he dropped the fruit. The wild pig immediately snapped it up. The knife got stuck in its throat. Squealing horribly, the pig died. "Now we got a big pig," said Bata Mama to Bata Bahi, "How do we cut it up and cook it?"

"Bata Bahi, stay here while I look for someone to help us with the pig," said Bata Mama, "There must be some people living nearby. Don't try to follow or you will get lost."

So Bata Mama went to look. In the distance, he saw a wisp of smoke and went towards it. Upon reaching the house, he called out, but no one answered; so he climbed up the ladder and peered inside. In the hut was a sleeping giant snoring loudly. Bata Mama took a stone and struck the giant's forehead. "Wake up, Apu!" he said, "For I am here."

The giant got up. "Ah, so that's why I was having such a nice dream of eating a young datu," said the giant. Bata Mama replied, "Do not eat me, Apu, for I have a big fat pig under a tree which I cannot butcher. And I need fire."

The giant got up and followed the boy to where the pig and his sister were. Bata Mama and the giant brought the dead pig to the river bank. The giant began to cut up the pig and throwing all the meat into the river. "These parts are no good," he explained.

The children watched the giant quietly. They noticed that ever time the giant threw some meat into the water, a big crab came to take the pieces away to its hole under the rock. When all the meat had been thrown into the river, the giant took the intestines and told Bata Mama, "Wash this--it is the only part that is fit to eat. I have to go downriver for I have other things to do."

The giant left. Bata Mama was washing the intestines and Bata Bahi was playing in the water when suddenly the crab bit the little girl's finger and she cried. Bata Mama got angry. "You foolish crab!" he said, "why did you bite my sister?"

"I want you both to come to my house," said the crab, "for when the giant returns, he will eat you both. He just went downriver to see if the pig's flesh he threw away has been caught in his trap."

The children entered the crab's house, which was very beautiful. "You will never be hungry here," the crab said, "for I have so much food. You are safe from the giant in my house."

The giant reached his trap and found nothing. "Where did the meat go?" he wondered, retracing his steps, but he could not find the slices of meat. So he thought, "I'd better eat the children."

When he reached the place where they had sliced the pig, the children were no longer there. He sniffed here and there, then under the rocks. He said, "So that's where you're hiding. I'll get you out."

He put his arm into the hole of the crab. Immediately, the crab cut it off with her sharp claws. The giant was shocked. "Well, don't I have another arm?" he said, reaching in with his other arm. The crab cut that arm, too. The giant said, "Well, don't I have feet?" and he placed one foot in the hole. The crab cut the foot. He placed the remaining foor inside and the crab snapped that off, too. Then, the giant said, "I'd better put my head inside and eat them right there." So he pushed his head inside the hole. Quickly, the crab cut his head and the giant died.

When the giant failed to come home, his wife sent their son after him. "He must have gotten plenty of food and couldn't carry it," thought the giant's wife. And so, the son went to look for his father. When the son reached the river, he saw that the giant was dead and so he ate his father's body. Then, he sensed the children. "There must be human beings here," he said. He smelled them under the rock. The son put his arm inside the crab's house and the crab cut it. The giant's son placed his other arm in and the same thing happened. He stuck in his feet, then his head, and then he died.

The giant's wife became tired of waiting for her husband and son, so she decided to go herself. "Perhaps they ate everything right there, that is why they could not return," she thought. When she reached the river, she found the body of her son and ate it. Then, she smelled the children under the rock. She reached under the stone with her arm and the same thing happened to her. The crab cut off her arms, her feet, and her head. So the wife of the giant died.

"Bata Mama and Bata Bahi," the crab said to the children. "For the meantime, live here with me. You may continue to search for your parents when you are grown up." The children lived with the crab until they grew up.

One day, after many years, the crab said, "Now Bata Mama and Bata Baha, we must leave this place, for I shall soon die. I will go to the source of the river and await my death there." The children were filled with sadness for the crab had been like a mother. "But before I go, I will leave you my claws. Plant the claws wherever you decide to live and a tree will grow. The tree will give you everything you need. One of the things it will provide you with is a set of powerful gongs. As for your parents, they will come to you one day. And you will know it is the, for there will be a very heavy rain." After these words the old crab took off its claws and, following the crab's instructions, they continued the search for their parents.

The brother and sister asked at the house of an old woman whether anyone had passed that way. The old woman replied that a datu and his wife had, but that it had been a long time ago. "They went in the direction you are facing," the old woman said. The children thanked her and went on. One week after, Bata Mama said, "Bata Bahi, let us build our house here." So they planted the claws of the crab. A big kingdom came to be. They climbed up the beautiful palace and found all they needed in it. There were gongs of different sizes and clothes fit for a prince and a princess. Then and there, they became Donya Maria and Don Juan.

The people living across their palace were surprised. "Who is this powerful datu who was able to build a palace in one day?" the asked each other. And they decided to visit the dwellers. Among the many visitors were the wicked datu and the mother of Bata Mama and Bata Bahi.

When Don Juan saw all the people marching towards the palace. he beat the gongs. The people were welcomed with all kinds of delicious food and gong music. As soon as the datu and his wife were within sight of the house, however, a heavy downpour began. The rain was so strong that it created a big hole in the ground. Don Juan and Donya Maria exclaimed, "They must be our mother and our stepfather!"

Don Juan continued beating the gongs. It rained harder and harder. The wicked datu was blinded with rain. He could hardly struggle through the mud. The children's mother, however, did not find any difficulty getting to the palace. She quickly reached the stairs although she was very wet. Donya Maria welcomed her mother with elegant warm clothes. When the mother learned that Don Juan and Donya Maria were her children, she embraced the tearfully.

Meanwhile, the datu had stumbled in the rain and crawled in the thick mud. He could hardly make it. Walking on his hands and knees, the datu finally reached the gate and fainted. They found him shivering in the mud, sobbing with fear. Don Juan stopped beating the gong and the rain ceased. Donya Maria gave the datu warm water to drink and he kissed the hem of her skirt and asked for forgiveness. After that, they all lived happily together.

Ayesah Abubakar's "A Malaysian Hariraya"

2009-08-31T19:53:00.000-07:00

Technically, this is an essay. I know that. It's from the book Children of the Ever-Changing Moon: Essays by Young Moro Writers edited by Gutierrez Mangansakan II. But, sometimes, things are best pictured, not through fiction but by the retelling of an actual experience.

The book describes the writer, Ayesah Abubakar in the following manner:

[The writer] was born in Davao City. She is proud of her Chinese and Spanish roots from the small town of Cateel, Davao Oriental, and her Maguindanao heritage from Kidapawan, Cotabato... [She] is not based in Penang Island in Malaysia, where she lives with her husband...[She] continues to pursue her aspirations for freedom and peace for the Bansamoro and the peopls of Mindanao through her work as a peace scholar and practicioner.
In his introduction, the editor of the book says this about his work:

"This anthology presents new voices that offer a glimpse into the life of a people whose opinion, history, and circumstance have somehow been stifled, giving them an important and distinct place in our national imagination."

The feelings may not be apparent while you read the essay, as it seems almost like a report. But, the amount of detail, which is reminiscent of how an excited child would tell a story, speaks of an underlying pride and joy which stems from how much one loves his or her cultural heritage. At the same time, there appears to be a feeling of wonder from the writer, a kind of awe at the Hariraya, she had always wanted. Personally, I see this as a story of the natural esteem we have for the beliefs that molded us and the innate yearning in all of us to be accepted simply for who we are.

-

This is the third Ramadan that I am spending in Malaysia. On the first occasion, I was lucky enough to be joined by another Moro girl who was doing her internship in the university where I work. Our Eid'l Fitr, the culminating celebration day of the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, was a little melancholic since we were missing home, stuck in our apartment with no families and friends to celebrate with. During last year's Eid, however, I was more than glad to have gone home to Manila, supposedly on time for the big masjid prayers; but it turned out that my family and the entire Muslim community in the Philippines convened for the congregational prayer just the day before I arrived.

The celebration of Hariraya, a local term for Eid'l Fitr, is done with little fanfare in Manila as compared here in Malaysia. Still, Muslim families in the Philippines take great importance in attending the Eid prayers at the local masjid. We would go home after prayers and enjoy a "special little meal than normal" that my mother prepared for that day. We would get together with other families and visit relatives and do house-hopping. It is unfortunate, though, that the rest of our family lives in Mindanao. We content ourselves with spending the occasion as really more of a family "quiet time" at home. Sometimes, I would celebrate it with a number of Muslim friends who are in the vicinity of Metro Manila.

My Ramadan and Eid'l Fitr is a very important occasion this year since I am doing my fasting together with my husband. We are a new couple. Mak and Aba, my parents-in-law, have joined us in welcoming the celebrations in our new home. My husband wanted this to be special for me. Early this month he decorated our apartment balcony with "Raya lights" similar to the Christmas light in the Philippines, as well as other ornaments to dress up our home.

My husband and I are always proud of the breathtaking view from our apartment building here in Penang Island. From our balconies and windows, one can see clearly the Penang Bridge and the mainland peninsular Malaysia. The small flickering light bulbs from our balconies add to the festive ambience in the evenings.

We indulge in the motions of "Raya shopping" that involve buying new furniture and other household items, and baju--traditional clothes of kebaya and baju-kurong, prayer clothes, and the modern clothes as well.

Apart from the material acquisitions, the Raya culture invokes the spirit of sharing among people. Muslims contribute zakat and sadaqa to their respective masjid where they would attend prayers. During Ramadan, it is usual for people to go to the masjid for their buka puasa that is often sponsored by the masjid out of the zakat and sadaqa contributions, and attend the tarawih prayers that could last for more than two hours each night. There are also those who would jointly organize sahur for the less privileged.

Beside the activities in the masjid, Muslims in Malaysia are also active in charity work. Among groups of friends, they can make contributions for a sickly person or help a Muslim minority from a neighboring Southeast Asian country who could be studying in one of the universities here. This year, I am grateful that a small group of lawyers helped me in raising money to buy Islamic children's books which I have sent to a masjid in my hometown Kidapawan. It's a small project, but it's really the Raya spirit of sharing all the way to Mindanao that is making it very special.

We are only two days from Raya day, Insha Allah. Still busy signing Raya cards, just like Christmas cards, to friends and families, shopping for the traditional kuih to be served during Eid, and making schedules when-to-invite-who and when-to-visit-who in the next month or so as the Hariraya spirit envelopes the whole of Malaysia.

Come Raya day, I will be doing the traditional ritual of asking for forgiveness from elders on my bended knees, in this case, my parents-in-law, and saying the words "Maaf zahir batin" meaning "Please forgive me for the things I have done wrong". On the other hand, my husband's younger cousins, nieces and nephews would have to be doing the same to me. And with it, I would have to give them a duit Raya or Raya money (similar to the Chinese ampaw tradition).

Having been brought up in a non-Muslim community like Manila, i am pleasantly enjoying the celebration of Ramadan in Malaysia. I remember what it was like as an envious child watching our neighbors celebrate Christmas with much festivity. This Malaysian Hariraya is making me like a child again. It must be the same joyful and excited feeling for boys and girls especially during Christmas in the Philippines. At the same time, however, I am starting to miss that "quiet time" with my family on this comine Eid.

On Daguio's "Wedding Dance" and Manuel's "Son of Wood": A Comparison of Tales

2009-08-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

This is in response to the many comments about the theme of Amador Daguio's Wedding Dance. I must reiterate that I am, by no means, a literary or cultural expert and the contents of this post are my personal thoughts and opinions.

Compared to the other stories, a lot of attention is being given to Wedding Dance, most probably because it is a glimpse of an old tradition from a more modern perspective. Because E. Arsenio Manuel's narrative the Son of Wood is a traditional story from the same setting, I thought it would be useful to compare and contrast the two tales.

Before going on about the actual stories, it is pedagogical to compare the styles of the two narratives. Wedding Dance is a short story, which is more character-centered while Son of Wood is part of an epic, which is more culture-centered. The character-centered short story is more interested in the development of the character and the human experience. On the other hand, the epic tale is a reflection of the traditions and customs of the people that told it and is more interested in passing on ideologies and beliefs to another generation. It has been said in so many words that today's self-centered world cannot produce any epics, unlike the community-centered past, and the difference between the two perspectives are very clear in these two stories.

To me, both stories focus on two things: the continuity of heritage and love. The importance of producing an heir and having someone to inherit the properties and reputation of the family is stressed in both Awiyao's need to marry anew and Amtalaw's creation of Aliguyon. Love, on the other hand, the recurring theme on this site, is a side theme in both stories as Awiyao and Lumnay's reluctance to part and as Gumigid's faithfulness to Amtalaw and Bugan's loyalty to Aliguyon. The stories handle and prioritize these themes differently.

On the point of the importance of continuity of heritage; both stories describe extreme measures being done in order to produce a son. Amtalaw gave up his life while Awiyao and Lumnay gave up their marriage. But the storyteller's treatment of these "extreme measures" as displayed by the characters' actions and reactions are very different. The most apparent disparity is in the responses of Lumnay and Gumigid to their husband's desire to have an heir. It is useful to stress at this point that Awiyao and Lumnay are not Romeo-and-Juliet-esque star-crossed lovers; they are two people separated by what is customarily right. Lumnay's refusal to attend the wedding feast and hence, refusal to give her blessing to Awiyao and Madulimay's marriage, conflicts with the traditional belief that not having children is a sign that their union is not blessed and a good reason to divorce, even if a couple has not lost any love. Lumnay's dilemma is not strange to us who live in a country where importance is given to sons because sila ang nagdadala ng pangalan (they carry on the name of the family, pertaining to how women take on the name of their husbands). This can be sharply contrasted against Gumigid's suggestion that Amtalaw look for an heir amongst his former lovers' homes. To Gumigid, she sees that an heir is needed and, if she cannot provide one, it was perfectly acceptable for Amtalaw to look to other women. It may seem unacceptable to us who live in a Christianized country (although looking at the story of Abraham and Sarah, we see that it's not entirely an alien concept to Christians), but to Gumigid, it is just the way things are and she shows no bitterness towards it because it is her way of life, as well as Amtalaw's. Lumnay, on the other hand, sees something wrong with the practice, submits to it, anyway, but with great pain. Lumnay's defiance is a reflection of Daguio's view of the practice that the Ifugao people have always accepted as norm.

On the matter of love, on the other hand, I decided to use the symbolism of the beads in both stories. Awiyao's gift of his grandmother's beads to Lumnay is a sign of his love. This parallels with how Bugan did not protest Aliguyon's taking of her beads. When Awiyao told Lumnay to keep his grandmother's beads, it is a symbol that Awiyao's love and favor will always be with Lumnay. In a similar manner, as Aliguyon was dying, he held on to Bugan's beads, showing that he cared and loved her and thought about her even as he turned to wood. Both depictions of love, coupled with the reiteration of Gumigid's faithfulness to Amtalaw, show that ideals about love and relationship between husbands and wives are startlingly similar, despite the difference in priority. Characteristics like faithfulness and loyalty have remained part of the ideal loving relationship. Beads, being important possessions in the Ifugao culture, could also mean that giving up important things is a part of love, a concept which is not alien to us today.

But, as I have mentioned before, there is a difference in priority when it comes to love. In Wedding Dance, Awiyao and Lumnay defied custom by being absent from the wedding feast. I interpret this as giving more importance to love than to tradition and tribe. The couple put their own sufferings above the "well-being" of the community. Amtalaw's attendance to Aliguyon and Bugan's wedding feast, despite his nearing death, paints the poignant picture that despite his own suffering, he would put his son and his people first.

Whichever perspective is correct depends on the culture of the reader. Whether personal happiness or the community's good is more important could be debated upon forever. But, it will always be interesting to see how our forefathers were different from us, and yet we cannot deny the resemblance.

Son of Wood, An Ifugao Tale

2009-08-20T17:22:00.000-07:00

This story is primarily a story of a father's love for his son and a son for his father. But, even so, it also describes the love of a woman for her beloved, the faithfulness of a wife, and it is a reflection of idealized relationships in this culture.

From the chapter introduction, the story, itself, is discussed by Manuel as follows:

"An adaptation of an Ifugao epic song and part of an epic cycle...Son of Wood is a prose rendition of a hudhud... It is outstanding and unique in the primitive literature of Northern Luzon....More touching, perhaps, is the human feeling and deep emotion evoked by the story in the same large way Pinocchio has affected humanity everywhere. Ifugao's wooden boy...was not known outside the area until it was publicized in 1975. Still, I am almost certain that [it] antedates by many hundreds of years the Italian Pinocchio, now a recognized children's classic... The artistic sensitivity in the tale must have taken years of singing to achieve. Only a highly gifted bard could have composed such a song. Nowhere is primitive fatherly love shown in such a memorable manner, for the old man to breathe half of his little remaining life in order to make his song of wood live. The son reciprocates with equal intensity and the conflicting emotions inside him can almost be felt."

Note that epic cycles are part of oral tradition, a series of epics that are sung together and retold as a series. As the stories are retold, they are "distilled" or purified, removing elements, adding details, and slowly creating a story that emphasizes what its culture holds important, true, and moral. This story can be related to Amador Daguio's Wedding Dance, as the two stories are from the same region and display the same cultural norms.

The old man, Amtalaw, whose fame was still on the lips of every villager, sat on his hagabi[1] bench, feeling very lonely. For weeks now, he had looked stolidly at the skulls decorating the beams of his house, mementos of the old days when fighting was the law of the mountains [2]. He looked in the distance at the rice terraces and at the shoulders of ridges where other villages perched. Beyond the mountains, Amtalaw could glimpse communities that he had raided in his youth and villages where he had courted girls in their ulog[3] dormitories. Every spot for kilometers around was familiar to the old man--every waterfall, rivulet and pond, thicket and mountain path.

Without a word, Amtalaw sat, brooding. He had lost his two sons in battle and now there was no one to inherit the rice paddies, the house of hard wood, and his past glories. His wife, Gumigid, ever faithful and industrious, was too old to give him another child. The granary was full, the chickens were multiplying, the ducks filled every water hold and their eggs were scattered all over the yard. But there was no son to talk to, no one to listen to his stories of heroism and to pass on all that wealth.

Sensing Awiyao's sadness, and having listened to all his tales of girls in dormitories in other villages, his wife, Gumigid said, "Maybe you have an offspring with someone in some village that you do not remember."

"Maybe," was all Amtalaw could say.

Sometimes, Amtalaw would recont to his wife his lineage. "I am probably in the line of descent of the great god Kabunyian. One of our ancestors somewhere down the line, I am sure, must have found himself in a similar predicament. And it is not unlikely that he could have created for himself a successor out of wood. Or clay. And was able to breathe life into it."

The next morning, after a breakfast of glutinous rice and duck, Amtalaw decided to go up to the mountains. He did not heed his wife's precautions to take his spear and shield. He merely belted on his bolo, put betelnut-chew in his hip bag, several chisels, a hammer, and a small knife.

Once up in the mountain, he walked around the thicket, scrutinizing the big trees. Amtalaw spotted a very tall tree. He climbed up its thick trunk and, after cutting many small branches, he worked his way up to the top. At that dizzying height, he began to carve the end of the highest branch into the figure of the little boy he so desired.

He worked intently, without stopping. After several hours, the face and limbs emerged, and soon enough its other features. He continued carving. Soon, the headdress and the little loincloth emerged. It was a proper Ifugao boy! Amtalaw looked lovingly at his handiwork. Then, he lopped the figure swiftly off the branch. With the wooden boy tucked under his arm, Amtalaw slid down the tree.

When Amtalaw touched earth, he placed the wooden figure in front of him. He looked up at the sky and prayed to the gods. Then, he inhaled deeply. He put his mouth to the nostrils of the little wooden boy. And, as he prayed, he breathed half his remaining life into the figure.

Reeling from the effort, Amtalaw fell back. Soon, the wooden form on the grass began to show signs of life. First, the two eyebrows twitched. Then, the eyelids began to quiver and the two eyes flew open. The wooden boy's shoulders moved, he bent his elbow, he flexed his fingers. Then, the wooden boy sprang up on his own two feet. Soon the new son was frisking about on the grass and on the rocks and all around Amtalaw. The old man wept with joy.

The son of wood was an active boy. "Let us go down to the village," said Amtalaw, carrying the little boy. After only a short distance, the old man felt the boy getting heavier and heavier.

"Let me walk," said the child.

Holding on to his father's hand, the little boy walked. His pudgy legs could hardly reach the stepping stones. As they walked on, however, Amtalaw was amazed to notice that the boy's strides were getting longer and longer. Soon, the wooden boy's steps were matching Amtalaw's own. The boy was growing up before his eyes! Going up and down the rice terraces, father and son cut through one village after another, so much in a hurry was Amtalaw to reach his home.

"I told you, you must have a son somewhere," said his wife Gumigid over supper of boiled chicken. "What shall we call him?"

"Aliguyon," replied the beaming father.

The following day, Amtalaw was up early, eager to teach his son Aliguyon the mountain boys' favorite sport--spinning a top. He showed the wooden boy how to carve his own top, which would shine and spin the longest. He also taught how Aliguyon could twist twine into string for the top.

The following day, father and son were wrestling, the old man showing the young one the art of balance and proper use of strength. At the end of the day the father said, "Aliguyon, I know that you are now stronger than I, why didn't you throw me to the ground?"

"No one would do that to a father one loves," said Aliguyon.

Everyday, Amtalaw passed on a new experience to the son of wood. The old man taught him the sport of arm bending, the thigh slapping[4] game, spear throwing, and many others. Aliguyon mastered all of them.

In less than a year, Aliguyon had also become interested in visiting the other villages. His mother made him a fitting loincloth, a smart headpiece, and a hipbag[5]. Aliguyon was now fully a young man and Amtalaw proudly watched him disappear into the distance.

In the neighboring villages, Aliguyon engaged the young men in the traditional games of skill. No one could beat him. The young women cast longing glances at him, coveting Aliguyon for a mate and offering him betel-chew[6]. In the evening, he would go to an ulog dormitory and charm the girls into letting him in for the night.

It came to pass that Aliguyon fell in love with a young girl named Bugan[7]. Aliguyon took her necklace from her basket and put it in hid hipbag. Bugan did ot object. It meant that she was accepting his proposal. Aliguyon told the girl Bugan that they would soon have a wedding. During the day, Aliguyon helped Bugan's family in the rice terraces and the family looked upon Aliguyon as a good acquisition.

One day, while working in the field, Aliguyon felt himself gasping for breath. Quickly, he explained to his betrothed that he had to go home at once. Besides, he would have to inform his parents that he was going to marry. "I will be back soon," he said.

On the way home, he felt weaker and weaker, and Aliguyon knew the reason. The half-of-his-life that Amtalaw had bequeathed him was coming to an end. Near a stream, Aliguyon rested wearily on the stone. He washed his feet in the running water and an eel surfaced. The eel asked Aliguyon what was wrong, and the young man told the eel how his half-a-life was almost gone, that he was dying. "Why don't you just ask Amtalaw for the remainder of his life? Surely he would not mind sacrificing it for you," said the eel.

The young man would not hear of it. He loved his father, who had given him everything, even the life in his body. It would be cruel to ask the old man for anything more.

Aliguyon continued walking. After awhile, he had to sit again on a log to regain his strength. A frog leaped in front of him and advised the young man, "Amtalaw has led a full life. He should give you what is left of it. Besides, he needs a successor."

Aliguyon shook his head. His pulse was growing fainted and fainter, but Aliguyon continued on his journey. He walked with a heavy heart, for now he knew that he would turn into wood once more. What would happen to poor Bugan?

Back home, Amtalaw and his wife Gumigid never wondered at the wooden son's length absence. They thought he was still trying the ulog of the different villages just like his father used to do in his younger days.

Weakly, Aliguyon made his way to the place where he often sat with Bugan and loitered there for a while. Gasping painfully, he climbed the selfsame mountain where his father had carved him from a tree. He found the top of the tree lopped off. Aliguyon removed his belt and bolo and let them drop to the ground. With supreme effort, he climbed the great tree from whence he had come. With his last gasp, he rejoined the cut branch and became a part of the tree once more.

When many days passed and Aliguyon had not returned to her, his sweetheart Bugan became worried. She asked permission from her parents to look for him. She walked the path that Aliguyon had taken and rested on the very stone and the very log that Aliguyon had sat on. The eel and the frog told Bugan not to waste time, to hurry on, for something tragic could have overtaken her sweetheart. And they gave her directions to the mountains.

Bugan reached the mountain. It was a steep climb. She struggled up the slope and soon found herself in the woods. She saw many colorful birds flitting about in the forest. Below the giant tree, Bugan found Aliguyon's belt and bolo. Her heart was pounding. "He must have climbed the tree," thought Bugan. The tree was so high that just looking at it made her feel dizzy. She knew she would never be able to climb it.

Bugan called on all the colorful birds in the forest for help. They alighted at her feet. Bugan begged them for feathers to cover herself. The birds wanted to know why she wanted to cover her beauty and plucked off their colorful feathers for the girl, and Bugan was transformed into the most beautiful bird of all[8].

Immediately, Bugan flew to the top of the tallest tree where Aliguyon was. She immediately recognized Aliguyon, although he had become a part of the tree, because his hipbag bulged. Her necklace in the bag had not yet completely turned to wood. The bird Bugan alighted on top of the tree, clinging firmly to what would have been Aliguyon's head. And she never moved from her perch.

The villagers gathering firewood in the forest soon noticed the beautiful bird perched motionless on the top of the tree. Everyone wanted to own it. One after another, they climbed the tree in order to lure the bird. But it stayed fast. It could not be detached from its position.

For days, people gathered around the tree pointing out the bird. A rich man even made a canyao, sacrificing a chicken on the mountain. But when he climbed the tree, the beautiful bird could not be pried loose. Determined to own the bird, the rich man returned with a pig and offered it, again without success. Challenged, he continued sacrificing until he had but a few animals left. And still, the beautiful bird would not be coaxed to come down.

The beautiful colored bird on the tree was soon known far and wide. One day, even Amtalaw and his wife went up to the mountain to view the famous bird. The old man immediately saw that it was the same tree from which he had carved his son. The old man, who by now had become very worried about Aliguyon's disappearance, thought his son might be up on the tree top. But he knew that he was now too old to climb the tree.

When Amtalaw and his wife Gumigid reached home, the found a stranger waiting for them. It was a young man who resembled Aliguyon so much that people had to take a second look. The young man said that he was passing through the village. He was from Banawe. He had stopped by only on a chance that he would meet his father whom he had never seen. How often his mother had described Amtalaw to him and how exactly the old man fitted the description! The young man, who looked like Aliguyon, gave Amtalaw the name of his mother and Amtalaw recognized the boy as his son.

"What is your name?" asked the old man, and the young man's startling answer was:

"Aliguyon."

Gumigid, his wife, could hardly take her eyes off the new Aliguyon, so much like their own son of wood was he.

Amtalaw had a scheme. If the second Aliguyon's appearance could fool them, then surely, others too would take him for the first Aliguyon. And so, the following morning, they brought the young man to the mountains to view the colored bird. As usual, the people form many neighboring villages were milling below the tree, wondering about the beautiful bird that refused to be brought down. Amtalaw asked the second Aliguyon if he would like to climb the tree and try his luck.

The young man consented. With great ease, he climbed the tall tree, and soon he was on the highest branch. For the first time, the bird turned its head at the sight of the second Aliguyon. The young man stretched out a hand, and the bird, dazzled by what she mistook to be her sweetheart, willingly perched on his shoulder. The young man saw the wooden carving of a boy at the end of the branch, and thinking it to be such beautiful work, cut it off at the feet. The second Aliguyon, with the son of wood under his arm and the bird clinging tamely to his shoulder, slowly descended.

The watching crowd applauded. As soon as he reached the ground, the young man put the bird on his outstretched arm and begn to dance with it. The people made a space for him, beating in time with their clapping. The bird fully believed that he was her sweetheart and transformed into Bugan, the woman. Bugan looked at the young man intently. "You are not my sweetheart, Aliguyon," she told him, although she continued dancing.

"My name is Aliguyon," said the young man, "but I am not your sweetheart."

The people who were watching them dance were urging Bugan to take the new Aliguyon. "Would you rather have a sweetheart made of wood than one of flesh and blood?" they asked. But Bugan said it was the man of wood that she loved.

Amtalaw, by the time, had picked up the wooden figure that was his creation. Gathering all his strength, he exhaled his remaining life into the nostrils of his beloved son. Immediately, the first Aliguyon sprang up to life and tearfully embraced his father. The faithful Bugan recognized him immediately and joined them.

A wedding feast was held immediately. During the festivities, the old man was gasping heavily, he could hardly breathe. He thanked the second Aliguyon who had made the reunion possible. The young man was glad to have met his father at last. But he had to be on his way to the next village. He left with everybody's blessings.

Amtalaw died on the third day of the wedding feast of Aliguyon, the son of wood whom he loved so much.

Notes: Some of these notes were taken from the book, others are from my high school classes. Please send me an email or comment on the story if you find any errors in any of the stories.

[1] hagabi - The long Ifugao couch carved of a single tree trunk. Only rich families can possess a hagabi as it is costly to make.

[2] In those days, the Ifugao had rival tribes, and headhunting was common practice. The skulls of the enemies defeated were kept as trophies and often displayed as signs of valor and skill in battle.

[3] ulog - the girl's dormitory in Bontok and neighboring communities where marriageable and pre-pubescent girls sleep at night.

[4] thigh-slapping - a savage game to test the strength and endurance of the men. Common only amount the mountain peoples of Northern Luzon.

[5] hip bag - complimentary article to the Igorot cap. Indispensible for carrying small articles.

[6] betelnut/betel chew - a combination of the areca nut and betel leaves, it has anticeptic properties and may have served as a breath freshener of the time. It figures prominently in Malayan/Southeast Asian cultures. Offering to and chewing betel-chew with another person is a sign of acceptance and friendship.

[7] Bugan is a common name in the north. Many stories feature a woman named Bugan, because Bugan is often characterized as the embodiment of the ideal woman. Beneficial female dieties are called Bugan.

[8] Animals helping heroes and heroines are a common theme in Philippine folk stories. Birds, in particular, are often shown helping women in trouble or in need. It is not uncommon to find stories wherein birds lend their feathers to women or to find women who can transform themselves into birds.

Not Forgotten

2009-01-15T19:44:00.000-08:00

This is a very short experimental piece. Dedicated to those who are taken for granted or have taken someone for granted.

Apo - grandchild; sometimes used by older Filipinos to refer to a much younger individual.
Langit Lupa - a children's game akin to tag.
Kuya - address for older brothers.

-

Mama's voice always brightened with recognition whenever she heard my voice over the phone. And it never failed. She always asked questions I didn't want to answer.

"Apo, will you be coming over for lunch?"

I frowned at the telephone as I glanced over at my father who was getting ready for church. "Dad, it's mama," I called out to him, irritably tugging at the itchy petticoat my mother loved to make me wear. My pigtails bobbed as I skipped away from the phone to catch a glimpse of Super Book.

"Apo, will you be staying over while your parents are away?"

I suppressed a sigh and covered the mouthpiece as I turned to my mother who was packing bags. "Mom, mama wants to talk to you," I said to her before running out to the street to play Langit Lupa with the neighborhood kids.

"Apo, will you be playing mahjong with us today?"

I shrugged mutely and waved at my brother who was studying the computer screen intently. "Kuya, mama is asking you something," I informed him before going back to the mountain of homework that high school students tend to accumulate over the weekends.

"Apo, who are you?"

I frown slightly and suppress a sigh. There is a spark of recognition in her tone as though her ears remember the sound of my voice. But her question belied that her dimming mind had already forgotten me. Squaring my shoulders, and breathing again, I begin to speak to my grandmother with the hope that her brain would remember what her ears did.

"Mama, it's Tintin, your son's daughter. You know, the teacher? We're coming over for lunch today and we could play mahjong, if you're up to it."

I try hard not to choke on my own words. It never failed. Mama always asks questions I didn't want to answer.

Gilda Cordero-Fernando's "The Visitation of the Gods"

2009-01-08T07:16:00.000-08:00

While this is not the conventional love story like the other stories here, I thought it was a good addition to this blog. Loving one's job is a love that is also noteworthy. One's dedication and passion for his or her chosen profession is as noble as love felt for other people. Ms. Noel's principles and decisions show her dedication not only to her job, but to her students, as well. This is sharply contrasted against the facade that her co-teachers are putting up and the jaded opinions of Mr. Sawit. It is a good story that is a true and unforgiving reflection of the culture in public schools and a must-read for those who are considering teaching as a profession.

Perhaps it's because the theme is close to my heart that I found this story moving. But, perhaps, Cordero-Fernando's writing is also to blame. Read about the author here.

-

The letter announcing the visitation (a yearly descent upon the school by the superintendent, the district supervisors and the division supervisors for "purposes of inspection and evaluation") had been delivered in the morning by a sleepy janitor to the principal. The party was, the attached circular revealed a hurried glance, now at Pagkabuhay, would be in Mapili by lunchtime, and barring typhoons, floods, volcanic eruptions and other acts of God, would be upon Pugad Lawin by afternoon.

Consequently, after the first period, all the morning classes were dismissed. The Home Economics building, where the fourteen visiting school officials were to be housed, became the hub of a general cleaning. Long-handled brooms ravished the homes of peaceful spiders from cross beams and transoms, the capiz of the windows were scrubbed to an eggshell whiteness, and the floors became mirrors after assiduous bouts with husk and candlewax. Open wood boxes of Coronas largas were scattered within convenient reach of the carved sofa, the Vienna chairs and the stag-horn hat rack. The sink, too, had been repaired and the spent bulbs replaced; a block of ice with patches of sawdust rested in the hollow of the small unpainted icebox. There was a brief discussion on whether the French soap poster behind the kitchen door was to go or stay: it depicted a trio of languorous nymphs in various stages of deshabille reclining upon a scroll bearing the legend Parfumerie et Savonerie but the woodworking instructor remembered that it had been put there to cover a rotting jagged hole - and the nymphs had stayed.

The base of the flagpole, too, had been cemented and the old gate given a whitewash. The bare grounds were, within the remarkable space of two hours, transformed into a riotous bougainvillea garden. Potted blooms were still coming in through the gate by wheelbarrow and bicycle. Buried deep in the secret earth, what supervisor could tell that such gorgeous specimens were potted, or that they had merely been borrowed from the neighboring houses for the visitation? Every school in the province had its special point of pride - a bed of giant squashes, an enclosure or white king pigeons, a washroom constructed by the PTA. Yearly, Pugad Lawin High School had made capital of its topography: rooted on the firm ledge of a hill, the schoolhouse was accessible by a series of stone steps carved on the hard face of the rocks; its west windows looked out on the misty grandeur of a mountain chain shaped like a sleeping woman. Marvelous, but the supervisors were expecting something tangible, and so this year there was the bougainvillea.

The teaching staff and the student body had been divided into four working groups. The first group, composed of Mrs. Divinagracia, the harassed Home Economics instructor, and some of the less attractive lady teachers, were banished to the kitchen to prepare the menu: it consisted of a 14-lb. suckling pig, macaroni soup, embutido, chicken salad, baked lapu-lapu, morcon, leche flan and ice cream, the total cost of which had already been deducted from the teachers' pay envelopes. Far be it to be said that Pugad Lawin was lacking in generosity, charm or good tango dancers! Visitation was, after all, 99% impression - and Mr. Olbes, the principal, had promised to remember the teachers' cooperation in that regard in the efficiency reports.

The teachers of Group Two had been assigned to procure the beddings and the dishes to be used for the supper. In true bureaucratic fashion they had relegated the assignment to their students, who in turn had denuded their neighbors' homes of cots, pillows, and sleeping mats. The only bed properly belonging to the Home Economics Building was a four-poster with a canopy and the superintendent was to be given the honor of slumbering upon it. Hence it was endowed with the grandest of the sleeping mats, two sizes large, but interwoven with a detailed map of the archipelago. Nestling against the headboard was a quartet of the principal's wife's heart-shaped pillows - two hard ones and two soft ones - Group Two being uncertain of the sleeping preferences of division heads.

"Structuring the Rooms" was the responsibility of the third group. It consisted in the construction (hurriedly) of graphs, charts, and other visual aids. There was a scurrying to complete unfinished lesson plans and correct neglected theme books; precipitate trips from bookstand to broom closet in a last desperate attempt to keep out of sight the dirty spelling booklets of a preceding generation, unfinished projects and assorted rags - the key later conveniently "lost" among the folds of Mrs. Olbes' (the principal's wife) balloon skirt.

All year round the classroom walls had been unperturbably blank. Now they were, like the grounds, miraculously abloom - with cartolina illustrations of Parsing, Amitosis Cell Division and the Evolution of the Filipina Dress - thanks to the Group Two leader, Mr. Buenaflor (Industrial Arts) who, forsaken, sat hunched over a rainfall graph. The distaff side of Group Two were either practicing tango steps or clustered around a vacationing teacher who had taken advantage of her paid maternity leave to make a mysterious trip to Hongkong and had now returned with a provocative array of goods for sale.

The rowdiest freshman boys composed the fourth and discriminated group. Under the stewardship of Miss Noel (English), they had, for the past two days been "Landscaping the Premises," as assignment which, true to its appellation, consisted in the removal of all unsightly objects from the landscape. That the dirty assignment had not fallen on the hefty Mr. de Dios (Physics) or the crafty Mr. Baz (National Language), both of whom were now hanging curtains, did not surprise Miss Noel. She had long been at odds with the principal, or rather, the principal's wife - ever since the plump Mrs. Olbes had come to school in a fashionable sack dress and caught on Miss Noel's mouth a half-effaced smile.

"We are such a fashionable group," Miss Noel had joked once at a faculty meeting. "If only our reading could also be in fashion!" -- which statement obtained for her the ire of the only two teachers left talking to her. That Miss Noel spent her vacations taking a summer course for teachers in Manila made matters even worse - for Mr. Olbes believed that the English teacher attended these courses for the sole purpose of showing them up. And Miss Noel's latest wrinkle, the Integration Method, gave Mr. Olbes a pain where he sat.

Miss Noel, on the other hand, thought utterly unbecoming and disgusting the manner in which the principal's wife praised a teacher's new purse of shawl. ("It's so pretty, where can I get one exactly like it?" - a heavy-handed and graceless hint) or the way she had of announcing, well in advance, birthdays and baptisms in her family (in other words, "Prepare!"). The lady teachers were, moreover, for lack of household help, "invited" to the principal's house to make a special salad, stuff a chicken or clean the silverware. But this certainly was much less than expected of the vocational staff - the Woodworking instructor who was detailed to do all the painting and repair work on the principal's house, the Poultry instructor whose stock of leghorns was depleted after every party of the Olbeses, and the Automotive instructor who was forever being detailed behind the wheel of the principal's jeep - and Miss Noel had come to take it in stride as one of the hazards of the profession.

But today, accidentally meeting in the lavatory, a distressed Mrs. Olbes had appealed to Miss Noel for help with her placket zipper, after which she brought out a bottle of lotion and proceeded to douse the English teacher gratefully with it. Fresh from the trash pits, Miss Noel, with supreme effort, resisted from making an untoward observation - and friendship was restored on the amicable note of a stuck zipper.

At 1:30, the superintendent's car and the weapons carrier containing the supervisors drove through the town arch of Pugad Lawin. A runner, posted at the town gate since morning, came panting down the road but was outdistanced by the vehicles. The principal still in undershirt and drawers, shaving his jowls by the window, first sighted the approaching party. Instantly, the room was in a hustle. Grimy socks, Form 137's and a half bottle of beer found their way into Mr. Olbes' desk drawer. A sophomore breezed down the corridor holding aloft a newly-pressed barong on a wire hanger. Behind the closed door, Mrs. Olbes wriggled determinedly into her corset.

The welcoming committee was waiting on the stone steps when the visitors alighted. It being Flag Day, the male instructors were attired in barong, the women in red, white or blue dresses in obedience to the principal's circular. The Social Studies teacher, hurrying down the steps to present the sampaguita garlands, tripped upon an unexpected pot of borrowed bougainvillea. Peeping from an upstairs window, the kitchen group noted that there were only twelve arrivals. Later it was brought out that the National Language Supervisor had gotten a severe stomach cramp and had to be left at the Health Center; that Miss Santos (PE) and Mr. del Rosario (Military Tactics) had eloped at dawn.

Four pairs of hands fought for the singular honor of wrenching open the car door, and Mr. Alava emerged into the sunlight. He was brown as a sampaloc seed. Mr. Alava gazed with satisfaction upon the patriotic faculty and belched his approval in cigar smoke upon the landscape. The principal, rivaling a total eclipse, strode towards Mr. Alava minus a cuff link. "Compañero!" boomed the superintendent with outstretched arms.

"Compañero!" echoed Mr. Olbes. They embraced darkly.

There was a great to-do in the weapons carrier. The academic supervisor's pabaon of live crabs from Mapili had gotten entangled with the kalamay in the Home Economics supervisor's basket. The district supervisor had mislaid his left shoe among the squawking chickens and someone had stepped on the puto seco. There were overnight bags and reed baskets to unload, bundles of perishable and unperishable going-away gifts. (The Home Economics staff's dilemma: sans ice box, how to preserve all the food till the next morning). A safari of Pugad Lawin instructors lent their shoulders gallantly to the occasion.

Vainly, Miss Noel searched in the crowd for the old Language Arts supervisor. All the years she had been in Pugad Lawin, Mr. Ampil had come: in him there was no sickening bureaucracy, none of the self-importance and pettiness that often characterized the small public official . He was dedicated to the service of education, had grown old in it. He was about the finest man Miss Noel had ever known.

How often had the temporary teachers had to court the favor of their supervisors with lavish gifts of sweets, de hilo, portfolios and what-not, hoping that they would be given a favorable recommendation! A permanent position for the highest bidder. But Miss Noel herself had never experienced this rigmarole -- she had passed her exams and had been recommended to the first vacancy by Mr. Ampil without having uttered a word of flattery or given a single gift. It was ironic that even in education, you found the highest and the meanest forms of men.

Through the crowd came a tall unfamiliar figure in a loose coat, a triad of pens leaking in his pocket. Under the brave nose, the chin had receded like a gray hermit crab upon the coming of a great wave. "Miss Noel, I presume?" said the stranger.

The English teacher nodded. "I am the new English supervisor - Sawit is the name." The tall man shook her hand warmly.

"Did you have a good trip, Sir?"

Mr. Sawit made a face. "Terrible!"

Miss Noel laughed. "Shall I show you to your quarters? You must be tired."

"Yes, indeed," said Mr. Sawit. "I'd like to freshen up. And do see that someone takes care of my orchids, or my wife will skin me alive."

The new English supervisor gathered his portfolios and Miss Noel picked up the heavy load of orchids. Silently, they walked down the corridor of the Home Economics building, hunter and laden Indian guide.

"I trust nothing's the matter with Mr. Ampil, Sir?"

"Then you haven't heard? The old fool broke a collar bone. He's dead."

"Oh."

"You see, he insisted on doing all the duties expected of him - he'd be ahead of us in the school we were visiting if he felt we were dallying on the road. He'd go by horseback, or carabao sled to the distant ones where the road was inaccessible by bus - and at his age! Then, on our visitation to barrio Tungkod - you know that place, don't you?"

Miss Noel nodded.

"On the way to the godforsaken island, that muddy hellhole, he slipped on the banca - and well, that's it."

"How terrible."

"Funny thing is - they had to pass the hat around to buy him a coffin. It turned out the fellow was as poor as a churchmouse. You'd think, why this old fool had been thirty-three years in the service. Never a day absent. Never a day late. Never told a lie. You'd think at least he'd get a decent burial - but he hadn't reached 65 and wasn't going to get a cent he wasn't working for. Well, anyway, that's a thorn off your side."

Miss Noel wrinkled her brow, puzzled.

"I thought all teachers hated strict supervisors." Mr. Sawit elucidated. "Didn't you all quake for your life when Mr. Ampil was there waiting at the door of the classroom even before you opened it with your key?"

"Feared him, yes," said Miss Noel. "But also respected and admired him for what he stood for."

Mr. Sawit shook his head smiling. "So that's how the wind blows," he said, scratching a speck of dust off his earlobe.

Miss Noel deposited the supervisor's orchids in the corridor. They had reached the reconverted classroom that Mr. Sawit was to occupy with two others.

"You must be kind to us poor supervisors," said Mr. Sawit as Miss Noel took a cake of soap and a towel from the press. "The things we go through!" Meticulously, Mr. Sawit peeled back his shirt sleeves to expose his pale hairless wrists. "At Pagkabuhay, Miss What's-her-name, the grammar teacher, held a demonstration class under the mango trees. Quite impressive, and modern; but the class had been so well rehearsed that they were reciting like machine guns. I think it's some kind of a code they have, like if the student knows the answer he is to raise his left hand, and if he doesn't he is to raise his right, something to that effect." Mr. Sawit reached for the towel hanging on Miss Noel's arm.

"What I mean to say is, hell, what's the use of going through all that palabas? As I always say," Mr. Sawit raised his arm and pumped it vigorously in the air, "Let's get to the heart of what matters."

Miss Noel looked up with interest. "You mean get into the root of the problem?"

"Hell no!" the English supervisor said, "I mean the dance! I always believe there's no school problem that a good round of tango will not solve!"

Mr. Sawit groped blindly for the towel to wipe his dripping face and came up to find Miss Noel smiling.

"Come, girl," he said lamely. "I was really only joking."

As soon as the bell rang, Miss Noel entered I-B followed by Mr. Sawit. The students were nervous. You could see their hands twitching under the desks. Once in a while they glanced apprehensively behind to where Mr. Sawit sat on a cane chair, straight as a bamboo. But as the class began, the nervousness vanished and the boys launched into the recitation with aplomb. Confidently, Miss Noel sailed through a sea of prepositions, using the Oral Approach Method:

"I live in a barrio."

"I live in a town."

"I live in Pugad Lawin."

"I live on a street."

"I live on Calle Real…"

Mr. Sawit scribbled busily on his pad.

Triumphantly, Miss Noel ended the period with a trip to the back of the building where the students had constructed a home-made printing press and were putting out their first school paper.

The inspection of the rest of the building took exactly half an hour. It was characterized by a steering away from the less presentable parts of the school (except for the Industrial Arts supervisor who, unwatched, had come upon and stood gaping at the French soap poster). The twenty-three strains of bougainvillea received such a chorus of praise and requests for cutting that the poor teachers were nonplussed on how to meet them without endangering life and limb from their rightful owners. The Academic supervisor commented upon the surprisingly fresh appearance of the Amitosis chart and this was of course followed by a ripple of nervous laughter. Mr. Sawit inquired softly of Miss Noel what the town's cottage industry was, upon instructions of his uncle, the supervisor.

"Buntal hats," said Miss Noel.

The tour ended upon the sound of the dinner bell and at 7 o'clock the guests sat down to supper. The table, lorded over by a stuffed Bontoc eagle, was indeed an impressive sight. The flowered soup plates borrowed from Mrs. Valenton vied with Mrs. De los Santos' bone china. Mrs. Alejandro's willoware server rivalled but could not quite outshine the soup tureens of Mrs. Cruz. Pink paper napkins blossomed grandly in a water glass.

The superintendent took the place of honor at the head of the table with Mr. Olbes at his right. And the feast began. Everyone partook heavily of the elaborate dishes; there were second helpings and many requests for toothpicks. On either side of Mr. Alava, during the course of the meal, stood Miss Rosales and Mrs. Olbes, the former fanning him, the latter boning the lapu-lapu on his plate. The rest of the Pugad Lawin teachers, previously fed on hopia and coke, acted as waitresses. Never was a beer glass empty, never a napkin out of reach, and the supervisors, with murmured apologies, belched approvingly. Towards the end of the meal, Mr. Alava inquired casually of the principal where he could purchase some buntal hats. Elated, the latter replied that it was the cottage industry right here in Pugad Lawin. They were, however, the principal said, not for sale to colleagues. The Superintendent shook his head and said he insisted on paying, and brought out his wallet, upon which the principal was so offended he would not continue eating. At last the superintendent said, all right, compañero, give me one or two hats, but the principal shook his head and ordered his alarmed teachers to round up fifty; and the ice cream was served.

Close upon the wings of the dinner tripped the Social Hour. The hosts and the guests repaired to the sala where a rondalla of high school boys were playing an animated rendition of "Merry Widow" behind the hat rack. There was a concerted reaching for open cigar boxes and presently the room was clouded with acrid black smoke. Mr. Olbes took Miss Noel firmly by the elbow and steered her towards Mr. Alava who, deep in a cigar, sat wide-legged on the carved sofa. "Mr. Superintendent," said the principal. "This is Miss Noel, our English teacher. She would be greatly honored if you open the dance with her."

"Compañero," twinkled the superintendent. "I did not know Pugad Lawin grew such exquisite flowers."

Miss Noel smiled thinly. Mr. Alava's terpsichorean knowledge had never advanced beyond a bumbling waltz. They rocked, gyrated, stumbled, recovered, rolled back into the center, amid a wave of teasing and applause. To each of the supervisors, in turn, the principal presented a pretty instructor, while the rest, unattractive or painfully shy, and therefore unfit offering to the gods, were left to fend for themselves. The first number was followed by others in three-quarter time and Miss Noel danced most of them with Mr. Sawit.

At ten o'clock, the district supervisor suggested that they all drive to the next town where the fiesta was being celebrated with a big dance in the plaza. All the prettier lady teachers were drafted and the automotive instructor was ordered behind the wheel of the weapons carrier. Miss Noel remained behind together with Mrs. Divinagracia and the Home Economics staff, pleading a headache. Graciously, Mr. Sawit also remained behind.

As Miss Noel repaired to the kitchen, Mr. Sawit followed her. "The principal tells me you are quite headstrong, Miss Noel," he said. "But then I don't put much stock by what principals say."

Miss Noel emptied the ashtrays in the trash can. "If he meant why I refused to dance with Mr. Lucban…"

"No, just things in general," said Mr. Sawit. "The visitation, for instance. What do you think of it?"

Miss Noel looked into Mr. Sawit's eyes steadily. "Do you want my frank opinion, Sir?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well, I think it's all a farce."

"That's what I've heard - what makes you think that?"

"Isn't it obvious? You announce a whole month ahead that you're visiting. We clean the schoolhouse, tuck the trash in the drawers, bring out our best manners. As you said before, we rehearse our classes. Then we roll out the red carpet - and you believe you observe us in our everyday surrounding, in our everyday comportment?"

"Oh, we know that."

"That's what I mean - we know that you know. And you know that we know that you know."

Mr. Sawit gave out an embarrassed laugh. "Come now, isn't that putting it a trifle strongly?"

"No," replied Miss Noel. "In fact, I overheard one of your own companions say just a while ago that if your lechon were crisper than that of the preceding school, if our pabaon were more lavish, we would get a higher efficiency rating."

"Of course he was merely joking. I see what Mr. Olbes meant about your being stubborn."

"And what about one supervisor, an acquaintance of yours, I know, who used to come just before the town fiesta and assign us the following items: 6 chickens, 150 eggs, 2 goats, 12 leche flans. I know the list by heart - I was assigned the checker."

"There are a few miserable exceptions…"

"What about the sweepstakes agent supervisor who makes a ticket of the teacher's clearance for the withdrawal of his pay? How do you explain him?"

Mr. Sawit shook his head as if to clear it.

"Sir, during the five years that I've taught, I've done my best to live up to my ideals. Yet I please nobody. It's the same old narrow conformism and favor-currying. What matters is not how well one teaches but how well one has learned the art of pleasing the powers-that-be and it's the same all the way up."

Mr. Sawit threw his cigar out of the window in an arc. "So you want to change the world. I've been in the service a long time, Miss Noel. Seventeen years. This bald spot on my head caused mostly by new teachers like you who want to set the world on fire. In my younger days I wouldn't hesitate to recommend you for expulsion for your rash opinions. But I've grown old and mellow - I recognize spunk and am willing to give it credit. But spunk is only hard-headedness when not directed towards the proper channels. But you're young enough and you'll learn, the hard way, singed here and there - but you'll learn."

"How are you so sure?" asked Miss Noel narrowly.

"They all do. There are thousands of teachers. They're mostly disillusioned but they go on teaching - it's the only place for a woman to go."

"There will be a reclassification next month," continued Mr. Sawit. "Mr. Olbes is out to get you - he can, too, on grounds of insubordination, you know that. But I'm willing to stick my neck out for you if you stop being such an idealistic fool and henceforth express no more personal opinions. Let sleeping dogs lie, Miss Noel. I shall give you a good rating after this visitation because you remind me of my younger sister, if for no other reason. Then after a year, when I find that you learned to curb your tongue, I will recommend you for a post in Manila where your talents will not be wasted. I am related to Mr. Alava, you know."

Miss Noel bit her lip in stunned silence. Is this what she had been wasting her years on? She had worked, she had slaved - with a sting of tears she remembered all the parties missed ("Can't wake up early tomorrow, Clem"), alliances forgone ("Really, I haven't got the time, maybe some other year?") the chances by-passed ("Why, she's become a spinster!") - then to come face to face with what one has worked for - a boor like Mr. Sawit! How did one explain him away? What syllogisms could one invent to rub him out of the public school system? Below the window, Miss Noel heard a giggle as one of the Pugad Lawin teachers was pursued by a mischievous supervisor in the playground.

"You see," the voice continued, "education is not so much a matter of brains as getting along with one's fellowmen, else how could I have risen to my present position?" Mr. Sawit laughed harshly. "All the fools I started out with are still head-teachers in godforsaken barrios, and how can one be idealistic in a mudhole? Goodnight, my dear." Mr. Sawit's hot trembling hand (the same mighty hand that fathered the 8-A's that made or broke English teachers) found its way swiftly around her waist, and hot on her forehead Miss Noel endured the supreme insult of a wet, fatherly kiss.

Give up your teaching, she heard her aunt say again for the hundredth time, and in a couple of months you might be the head. We need someone educated because we plan to export.

Oh, to be able to lie in a hammock on the top of the hill and not have to worry about the next lesson plan! To have time to meet people, to party, to write.

She remembered Clem coming into the house (after the first troubled months of teaching) and persuading her to come to Manila because his boss was in need of a secretary. Typing! Filing! Shorthand! She had spat the words contemptuously back at him. I was given a head so I could think! Pride goeth… Miss Noel bowed her head in silence. Could anyone in the big, lighted offices of the city possibly find use for a stubborn, cranky, BSE major?

As Miss Noel impaled the coffee cups upon the spokes of the drainboard, she heard the door open and the student named Leon come in for the case of beer empties.

"Pandemonium over, Ma'am?" he asked. Miss Noel smile dimly. Dear perceptive Leon. He wanted to become a lawyer. Pugad Lawin's first. What kind of a piker was she to betray a dream like that? What would happen to him if she wasn't there to teach him his p's and f's? Deep in the night and the silence outside flickered an occasional gaslight in a hut on the mountain shaped like a sleeping woman. Was Porfirio deep in a Physics book? (Oh, but he mustn't blow up any more pigshed.) What was Juanita composing tonight? (An ode on starlight on the trunk of a banana tree?) Leon walked swiftly under the window: in Miss Noel's eyes he had already won a case. Why do I have to be such a darn missionary?

Unafraid, the boy Leon stepped into the night, the burden of bottles light on his back.

After breakfast the next morning, the supervisors packed their belongings and were soon ready. Mr. Buenaflor fetched a camera and they all posed on the sunny steps for a souvenir photo: the superintendent with Mr. and Mrs. Olbes on either side of him and the minor gods in descending order on the Home Economics stairs. Miss Noel was late - but she ran to take her place with pride and humility on the lowest rung of the school's hierarchy.

Mae Astrid Tobias' "Sweet and Tender Hooligans"

2008-12-18T07:01:00.000-08:00

This is a story from the book Bagets: An Anthology of Young Adult Fiction edited by Carla M. Pacis and Eugene Y. Evasco. It was published by the UP Press. The book is a little bourgeois for my taste. Most stories have a very distinct “conyo” flair that is not necessarily absent from the other works posted here.

This story by Tobias is a bittersweet story about young love very little different from my own work “100 Days to Graduation”. Rene Villanueva's commentary on the back of the book reads:
Here, finally, is a collection of short stories written in both English and Filipino for Filipino teenagers that discuss their issues and concerns in well-told narratives that are funny, poignant, cautionary, and even a bit risque.

"Nagkakagulan na ang Kuting. Lalong humuhusay ang pagkukuwento ng lahat para sa kabataang mambabasa na nagkakaedad na rin."
Tobias' profile in the book reads

"[Tobias] graduated with a degree in English (Creative Writing) from UP Diliman and is currently taking her MA in English Creative Writing. She is the author of the book My Forest Friends, the first in the Happy to be Free series by Haribon. She is also the bureau manager of the Kabataan News Network (KNN) Manila Bureau. She was a fellow in the 1st Barlaya Writing for Children Workshop and the 43rd UP National Writers' Workshop. She received honorable mention in the 2002 PBBY--Alfredo Navarro Salanga Writers Prize for her narrative poem, "Ang Gulong ni Bong." In the 2003 Palanca Awards, she won second prize in the Maikling Kuwentong Pambata category for her story "Bayong ng Kuting". Astrid was president of the Kuwentista ng mga Tsikiting (KUTING) from 2004-2006.

Ann Louise arranged it so conveniently Tita Christy hardly asked any questions.

"You don't have to worry, Mom," she said. "Kuya Martin will pick me up here at six and bring me back home around midnight. You and Dad can enjoy a nice evening out."

"I'm not worried, dear," Tita Christy said. "But isn't it a bit inconvenient for you, Martin?"

I shook my head and smiled. "It's fine."

"You've always been so patient with Ann Louise," Tita Christy said. "Your Tito Bot and I would never know what do without you."

"Kasi, Tita, you should allow Ann Louise to have a boyfriend na, so someone can take care of her," I kidded. Ann Louise quickly turned to me and made a face. Shut up! Shut up! she mouthed.

"Hay naku, Martin! Not until she's thirty! You know I want Ann Louise to be a lawyer. Boyfriends will distract her. E, paano kung mabuntis 'yan?"

"Mom!" Ann Louise interrupted.

"I'm not stupid, Ann Louise. I know what you kids are up to. I went through the same things."

Then Tita Christy continued on and on about her own high school experiences. I kept my smile plastered on my face and nodded occasionally, pretending I was listening intently to her diatribe on today's generation. Ann Louise just shook her head at me. She was telepathically telling me, "I told you to shut up."

I was only one year older than Ann Louise, but when we were a lot younger, we were best friends. Tita Christy called us hooligans, though I had no idea what the word meant at that time. We menaced the neighborhood with our pranks and mischief. Together, we climbed our neighbor's fates to pick gumamela flowers to make bubbles. Pots and pans disappeared from our kitchens and found their way to the clubhouse Ann Louise and I built on the vacant lot at the end of the street. We even bathed naked under the monsson rains of August.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

As the years passed, we saw less and less of each other. We would bump into each other at the chapel after attending mass or at the neighborhood sari-sari store. It was only when I entered college that I saw Ann Louise almost regularly again.

Almost every day, I passed the co-ed science high school Ann Louise attended. Sometimes, on my way to the university, I gave Ann Louise a lift. That was when we would catch up on old times.

"I'm on the cheerleading squad," she said.

"Captain?"

"No, but it's okay. They only took me in because I was tiny. You know, so they can carry and toss me around. Besides, I'm the lightest so I get to climb the top of the pyramid."

"Is it scary?"

"At first, yeah. I used to get this funny feeling in my stomach when I stood on top of the boys' shoulders, but you get used to it."

"There are boys in the squad?"

"Of course! You know what? You should watch us sometime. I'll give you our schedule." Ann Louise rummaged through her knapsack and tore a page from her notebook. She quickly scribbled down her schedule. "We usually rehearse in your gym."

♥♥♥♥♥♥

One afternoon, I passed Ann Louise's high school, having made it part of my route home. The students were already dismissed and huddled by the entrance. I slowed down to let them cross the street. A young couple standing by the sidewalk caught my attention. The guy worse a baseball jersey and cap with the number 9 emblazoned in front. An enormous duffel bag was slung over his shoulder. The handle of a baseball bat stuck out. I almost didn't recognize the girl beside him--it was Ann Louise. She wore dark blue jogging pants and a tight white shirt with the school's name written across the chest. They just stood there. Not talking. They didn't cross the street or make any motion to hail the passing jeepneys. I honked my horn as I drove in front of them. I rolled down the window on the side of the passenger seat.

"Ann Louise! Where are you going? May I give you and your friend a lift?"

Ann Louise seemed startled. She looked at me, then at Baseball Guy, and back at me.

"Are you going home?" she asked.

I nodded.

"Okay," Ann Louise opened the door and got in. She looked back at her companion, but said nothing.

"Ikaw?" I asked him.

"Okay lang po," he said.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

As I drove away, Ann Louise kept looking back at the sidewalk. From my rearview mirror, I saw Baseball Guy cross the street and hail a passing jeepney.

"Boyfriend?"

"Don't tell Mom, okay?"

♥♥♥♥♥♥

Ever since I picked her up that day, I made it a point to pass by her school every afternoon. Often, I saw her on their campus, hanging out with Baseball Guy. If I didn't pass them standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a rise home, I slowed down hoping to find them somewhere around the campus. I spotted them sitting on the stone benches or walking on the grass. Baseball Guy carried Ann Louise' knapsack on his shoulder while Ann Louise held her books tightly to her chest. Their elbows barely brushed against each other. I hardly noticed any animated conversation between them. Sometimes, they just looked at opposite directions, seemingly conscious they were being watched.

There were afternoons when the campus yielded no sign of them. I would imagine them roaming the hallways of their building. I often wondered what they did or what they talked about when they were away from prying eyes.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

Each time I gave Ann Louise a lift to or from school, she told me bits and pieces about her Baseball Guy.

"His name's Greg. He's a pitcher in the baseball team," she said. "We've always been classmates, but I never noticed him until we became lab partners last year in Chemistry. DUring one experiment, he wondered out loud if drinking silver nitrate would give him mutant powers. I told him that, to be a mutant, he has to have been born with his own powers. That got us talking about the X-men movie, and I told him how I liked the old comics better. Come to think of it, Greg sometimes reminds me of you. I still have your old comics, you know that? I borrowed them way, way back, but I never got around to returning them. But don't worry, I'll return them."

I had forgotten all about those comics. I didn't care about them anymore.

"It's okay, you can have them," I said.

"Really? Thanks! Anyway, don't tell Mom, okay? But this weekend, after practice, we're going to catch the X-men movie again. Wanna come? Bring a date?"

♥♥♥♥♥♥

I accepted Ann Louise' invitation. That Saturday, I showed up at the gym to pick her up. Baseball Guy was supposed to meet us at the mall, since he lived only one jeepney ride away. WHen I arrived, they were finishing up the pyramid routine. I sat on the bleachers to watch them. Ann Louise waved at me just before she clambered up the shoulders of the male cheerleaders. THe rest of the team clapped to the beat being banged on a gigantic bass drum. When Ann Louise finally reached the top, she flashed a civtorious smile at me and raised her arms up high to form the letter V. Then, she jumped. As she fell, I almost stood up form my seat. Something in me wanted to run to the floor to try to catch her. My heart beat louder and faster than the bass drum. But that was only for a moment. Her small frame quickly distappeared in a bed of arms laid out by her compnions. She bounced back on her feet. Everyone in the gym cheered and applauded. I felt my hands turn clammy, and I wiped the beads of sweat which formed on my forehead.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

When we arrived at the cinema, there was a long line at the ticket booth. Baseball Guy arrived early and already bought two tickets for balcony seats. Ann Louise seemed ot have forgotten to mention to Baseball Guy that I was tagging along. I took my place at the end of the line while Ann Louise introduced us to each other. "Greg, Kuya Martin. Kuya Martin, Greg." I extended my hand to give him a handshake, but Baseball Guy only nodded.

"Why don't you guys go ahead and save me a seat?" I suggested. "I won't take long."

♥♥♥♥♥♥

Getting my ticket, a quick trip to the men's room, and lining up for popcorn and soda took longer than I expected. By the time I entered the cinema, the lights had been dimmed. I waited at the top of the stairs for my eyesight to adjust to the dark. The balcony seats were barely occupied. A group of high school students took the center seats. A middle-aged woman sat by herself. Through the light of the flickering screen, I thought I saw them. They chose the farthest corner of the farthest row. Their arms locked in an embrace. Their faces pressed against each other. I could almost hear a low moan coming from their direction. The usher shone his flashlights at the seats to show me the way. The couple disengaged. At the other end of the row, I saw Ann Louise waving frantically at me. I scurried in the dark and cut across the seats. The movie was about to start.

I took the seat nearest to the aisle. Ann Louise was sandwiched between Baseball Guy and me. Ann Louise held the popcorn, Baseball Guy drank the soda. I pretended to watch the movie. From the corner of my eye, I watched Baseball Guy and his hands. I might have missed a couple of action scenes where the X-men were in battle, but I made sure Baseball Guy's fingers didn't go crawling beyond the boundaries of the armrest.

I didn't know how Ann Louise managed to convince me to play along, but I did. Together, we arranged conspiracies to hide her relationship with Baseball Guy from her mother. Every time they arranged to go out, I would be her cover. "Mom, Kuya Martin is going with us to the movies." Tita Christy always agreed.

Kuya Martin was there. No need to worry. So they managed to hide their relationship for months.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

And then the prom came. The plan was quite simple, and I was in on it. The deal was like this: I pick her up, tell Tita Christy I was her date and drive her to school where Baseball Guy would be waiting. I was the chauffer who took the Princess to her Prince.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

"It's a dumb idea," I told her. "Sooner or later, you will have to tell your parents about Greg. I can't keep your secret for long."

"I will," she promised. "But you know how they are. THey would never let me go to the prom if they knew. They'd rather let me die an old maid!"

♥♥♥♥♥♥

I ironed my best shirt extra carefully. It was the same shirt I wore to my own prom. I also gave my shoes an extra layer of wax. As I rummaged through my father's drawer for a suitable tie, he walked in.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

"Hot date, I see," he said. "Here, let me help you with that tie."

"It's not what you think," I mumbled. "I'm going to the prom."

"Really? I thought you graduated from high school last year?"

"It's Ann Louise's."

"That's sweet, son. Taking your childhood sweetheart to the prom. Have fun."

Ann Louise was still getting ready when I arrived at their residence. Tito Bot was there to welcome me while Tita Christy assisted her in the room.

"Nervous?" Ann Louise' dad asked. He handed me a glass of soda to drink.

"Not really. I've done this before. I mean, going to the prom and all."

"I guess you couldn't get enough of it, huh?" he chuckled and jabbed me on my rib.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

When Ann Louise emerged from her room, I stood up and handed her a corsage for props. She allowed me to attach the flower to her dress. I fumbled while I tried to pin the corsage where the spaghetti strap met the rest of her gown.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

This was the closest I had ever been to Ann Louise. THere was electricity when I touched her skin. I felt intoxicated by her fragrance. It reminded me of flowers and how it used to be when we were kids. During the month of May, Ann Louise and I joined all the kids in the neighborhood to offer flowers to the Virgin Mary. We roamed the streets in search of flowers to pick. We clambered the walls stealing santan and sampaguita from the bushes which grew on the other side. THe thorns of the bougainvillea pricked our fingers. Then, there were afternoons when Tita Christy wouldn't let Ann Louise out, until she took her nap. I was left alone to search for the flowers. When it was time to go to the chapel, I fetched Ann Louise in her house, clutching my loot close to my chest. I gave Ann Louise all the flowers I found. My hands, caked in dried blood and mud, had the sweet scent of the ilang-ilang I had picked.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

The parking lot was swarming with Ann Louise's classmates, all dressed and made up. Girls in their pink and baby blue gowns flowed out of the parked vans. They giggled and praised one another's gowns. They kept looking at their compact mirrors. More girls flocked near the restrooms, chattering loudly. A group of boys, newly bathed and well-combed, assembled together around the stone benches. They clutched long-stemmed roses for their dates. Some tapped their feet nervously as they took quick puffs on a lighted cigarette they tried to conceal behind their backs. As soon as she got out of the car, Ann Louise craned her neck in search of her escort.

"I guess he hasn't arrived, yet," she whispered to herself.

"I'll take you to your friends, okay?"

♥♥♥♥♥♥

Ann Louise and I followed the string of yellow, red, and green blinking lights that lit the school corridors and led us to the gymnasium. Once we entered, Ann Louise squealed with childish delight and shook my arm vigorously.

"There he is!" she pointed. I looked around and spotted Baseball Guy huddling together with his friends beside the buffet table. Ann Louise waved. He waved back, but made no indication of coming to meet us. She has to pull me towards him.

"Greg!" she called out. He smiled and pulled out a long-stemmed rose from behind him. He bent over to whisper something in Ann Louise' ear. She smiled demurely and pressed her nose closely to the flower.

I frowned.

"I'll be okay, Kuya Mart," she reassured me. "I'll see you at twelve, okay?"

♥♥♥♥♥♥

I didn't know what overcame me. The next thing I knew, I held on to Ann Louise's hand and leaned over to kiss her cheek.

"Kuya Martin, what are you doing?" Ann Louise pulled back. Her face was as red as the rose Baseball Guy just handed to her. Baseball Guy stiffened but didn't make any move. I turned to make a quick exit, but not quick enough to overhear Baseball Guy's snickering friends. I could feel Ann Louise's embarrasment. I suddenly felt sorry for what I did.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

The movie I decided to watch ended earlier than expected. So I found myself in the school parking lot an hour before midnight. The prom was not yet over. Dance music was stillblaring from the direction of the gymnasium. I maneuvered my car around the lot in search of a spot. The lot was already full. It seemed some parents didn't leave after dropping off their children. I finally found a suitable place on the unlit open field adjacent to the parking lot. In the morning, I would see students playing soccer there. But tonight, there were only shadows. The car wheels embedded tread marks on the mud; the grass was flattened under their weight. Under the light of a makeshift lamp, drivers of the other vehicles huddled for a game of tong-its.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

I retraced my way to the gymnasium. I followed the mismatched Christmas lights I saw earlier and the staggering flow of couples coming out of the gym. The long corridor to the gym branched out into the dark classroom pavillions. I found myself exploring them, instead of going straight to the gym. Anyway, I was early, I thought.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

My long figure cast a long shadow on the corridors. My footsteps exhoed as I turned to the pavillions. They all looked identical. Each had a series of doors, bulletin boards, and a long hallway which seemed to vanish into nowhere. I only ventured into the parts where there was still a shimmer of light. Occasionally, I paused to read the notices posted on the boards. There was something in the darkness that made me uncomfortable. Something made me feel I wasn't alone in the pavillions. Maybe it was the display cases of the students' projects in the science pavilion. They had a collection of freaky objects. In what seemed to be the Biology wing, stuffed parrots and cats stared at me with amber eyes. Butterflies, pinned by their wings, laid flat on a bed of cotton. Aborted fetuses of various animals floated lifelessly in bottles filled with formalin. I recognized a human fetus inside one of them. A chill ran up my spine. I moved quickly to the next display case, where molecule models were on display.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

Music from the gym could be heard in the pavilions. It had changed from dance to slow. The lights must have been turned dimmer. The students must have broken up into pairs. I could imagine Ann Louise and Baseball Guy doing a slow dance. Her cheek resting on his chest. His arms wrapped around her tiny waist. Her waist--I could probably measure it by the size of my two hands.

I shook my head violently, trying to erase the image from my mind.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

After looking at the molecule display, I turned to return to the main corridor. As I passed the Biology display, something made me stop. U heard hushed voices. I looked hard into the darkness, but I couldn't see any movement. I edged nearer the display until the voices became more audible. They came from inside the lab. I extended my hand to turn the doorknob only to grip thin air. Instead, I found a round gaping hole, letting me see through. I peeked. Light from an open window illuminated portions of the classroom. It looked like an ordinary science laboratory. The voices quieted down, probably because they heard my footsteps approaching. I held my breath and waited.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

"We have to go," a voice whispered. Then a grunt. I took off my shoes and tiptoed as fast as I could to the main corridor. The prom was already winding down. I could hear the voice of an emcee thanking the students for coming. I hurred to go back to the parking lot, but not before taking a last glimpse at the science pavilion. Two figured were emerging from the dark.

It took me a while before I could find Ann Louise and Baseball Guy from the wave of students coming out of the gym. I waved as soon as I saw her. Ann Louis wore Baseball Guy's coat over her gown. She said she was cold, but beads of sweat had formed around her forehead. Baseball Guy escorted us both back to the car, where Ann Louise gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

"Had fun?" I asked.

"Super!" she replied, then she continued to smooth her rumpled gown and comb her hair with her fingers.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

At the stroke of midnight, I was parked right in front of Ann Louise's doorstep. She was about to open her door when I stopped her.

"You should use my coat instead," I said. I switched on the light in my car so I could grab my coat in the back seat. Ann Louise removed Baseball Guy's coat and revealed her bare shoulders. Just beneath her throat, I spotted a slight red mark.

"Is that what I think it is?" I said.

Ann Louise blushed. She whispered, "Don't tell Mom, okay?"

Before she could pull away, I grabbed Ann Louise by her arm. I must have held her too tightly, because she winced. I loosened my grip. Welts seemed to appear where my fingers held her.

"Did he hurt you? Did he make you do anything you didn't want?" I asked.

"What are you talking about, Kuya Martin? I had fun!" Ann Louise put on my coat, pulling it tightly around her throat and then bounced out the car.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

I waited until Ann Louise disappeared behind her door. She left Baseball Guy's coat with me. Crushed beneath it was my corsage. The orchid hung limply by its pin.

One Hundred Days to Graduation: Unrequited

2008-11-17T18:13:00.000-08:00

Because love and infatuation are things that easily cloud our minds by making us hyper-aware of our hearts. Because even the most straightforward love story easily becomes plagued with plot twists that a rational person would laugh at. Because the stupid situations we all get into when we are in love makes us want to ask just where the splendor is. And because high school love is the most deliciously confusing of all, I present to you the "One Hundred Days to Graduation" series.

Author's note: The stories are fictional, but still based on my experiences as a high school student. Any similarities with real life are probably intentional, so there. =p

Unrequited
Part Two

Just below diamonds and chocolates and right alongside her journal, dorm roommate, and cellular phone, gossip is a girl-in-love’s best friend. Milette knew that and this was why she was strategically located within earshot of a group of girls she would never, in a normal high school day, hangout with. They weren’t part of her regular clique, but being part of Daemon’s classes, they were a treasure trove of information.

She just needed her proverbial “Open sesame.”

"Have you bought a dress, yet?” an accessory girl that need not be named asked.

Milette inwardly cheered. Prom talk, boy talk, and gossip about boys were inextricably bound to each other. Her task was going to go much quicker than she anticipated. She sharpened her hearing and programmed her brain to think of some way to join in the conversation and push it slightly towards the right direction.

Emily Castro, the charming young lady in the middle of the group who happened to be the Corps Commander of that year’s Citizens’ Army Training Class, shook her head. As she did, her wavy brown hair bobbed around her face. “Isn’t it a bit early for that? It’s not like it’s our first prom,” she responded with a small smile.

Milette didn’t really find Emily very attractive, especially with the style of glasses that she chose to wear, but Emily had gotten much prettier over the four years they had spent in high school. Her becoming the Corps Commander added points to her popularity and Cadet Officer training had molded what used to be a skinny frame into a more athletic and admittedly sexier body. As ‘popular’ seemed to be generally equivalent to ‘attractive’ and a sexy body was one of the best assets to beguile the hormonally charged male population, in the alternate universe known as high school, Emily was a formidable opponent in the battle for Daemon’s heart.

Not that Milette was scoping out the competition.

"We’ll pick the dress later, then,” the accessory girl relented, but there was a mischievous tone to her voice that made both Milette and Emily raise an eyebrow. “But, have you chosen who you want to go with?”

"Adrian has asked you, hasn’t he?” another girl piped up. Emily nodded slowly, almost contemplatively.

Milette made a mental note of that. Adrian Sandoval was another popular figure in their school. He was rich, nice, and had dark good looks that made his bit of extra-padding easy to overlook. Milette knew a lot of girls who were praying to be the one that Adrian asked to the prom, and quite frankly, she couldn’t blame them.

So Emily was going with Adrian, right? That meant one less competitor for Daemon.

They’re not going together,” accessory girl replied. “Emily’s waiting for someone who is sure to ask her.”

"He hasn’t asked, yet,” Emily responded. Was that a blush?

Oh, so Emily wasn’t going with Adrian. So, who hadn’t asked yet?

"I’m not sure he will,” Emily protested softly.

"He’ll definitely ask you! Just wait a little bit longer.”

Milette frowned. She was becoming more and more curious. Who were they so sure would ask Emily out?

"I already went to the Junior Prom with a date, I thought it would be more fun to go with friends this time,” Emily reasoned out further. Milette also recognized the underlying reason of not wanting to make Adrian’s rejection any more painful by going out with another guy. Emily was really sweet that way.

"So, you’ll reject him if Daemon asks?”

Daemon?

Milette’s world suddenly constricted and closed. The last words she heard from the group were accessory girl’s reassurances that Daemon really did like Emily and that they made a good pair if Emily would only wait for him. She felt the all-too-familiar pinpricks of tears threatening to fall, but she controlled herself. She needed to be rational about this whole thing.

It made perfect sense that Daemon would like Emily, right? When Milette really thought about it, Emily was pretty while Milette was, at best, above average. Emily was smart and popular and in Daemon's class. Milette got by with industry, was known only in certain circles, and was only present in Daemon's mobile phone inbox. Emily had long left behind the gawky and awkward freshman to bloom into the icon she was right now, while Milette pretty much stayed Milette.

No. The didn't make her feel any better.

Deciding to take action, Milette rose from where she was and began a determined search for the one person that could clear the whole matter up.

-

People in love are quite unwittingly selfish creatures, easily forgetting that the world does not revolve around them and the current love-of-their-life-and-light-of-their-world-until-further-notice. For this reason, Elise found it easy to forgive Milette when she was dragged away from a less-important-than-love discussion with her co-creative director and fellow production manager/designer about the school musical that was set to be performed less than two months from that time.

"Daemon's asking Emily to the prom," Milette gasped out, as if she had been holding her breath since she found out about the earth-shaking news a little over an hour prior.

Elise raised an eyebrow, almost believing that her friend really had held her breath for that long, before calling up what mental data she had on dealing with smitten girls on the verge of, in her opinion, unnecessary heartbreak. "And you found this out, how?" she inquired slowly.

Sensing that her answer was, in Elise's twisted mind, not satisfactory, Milette sighed in frustration. "He's going to ask her, Elise. He likes her!" she cried out, opting to use volume instead of an explanation.

Elise let the lack of an answer pass, though it did not go unnoticed. The lack of an explanation oftentimes yields as much information as spoken one. "One does not necessarily equate with the other," she pointed out matter-of-factly, even if she knew that at their age the contrary was more often true. But, comforting Milette was a priority at that time. "Besides, are you sure that your information is accurate?"

Gossip was gossip, after all. As a journalist, Milette knew that verification of facts was crucial.

"Isn't it about time you began talking to Daemon?”

A ray of hope appeared in Milette’s life and suddenly, Elise’s ideas, ridiculous as they were, began to make sense. “But I can’t just ask him!”

Elise called up the tiny file she had on Daemon in her head and briefly scanned through it before replying. “He’ll tell you,” she reassured her friend with an encouraging grin. “He studies right off the walkway beside the school building that runs from the dorms to the gate. He should be there until around five.”

"Thanks, Elise.” And, as fast as she came, Milette disappeared.

Elise rubbed the part of her neck right below the base of her ponytail and looked up at the endless sky. “Shouldn’t You start paying me for my services?” she asked with no small amount of mirth. Then, she pulled out her cellular phone and began creating a short message.

-

stil in skul?

Milette barely had the patience to wait for an answer. How long did it take to reply 'yes' or 'no'? In the minute it took her to calculate in her head that it shouldn't take more than a minute, she received an affirmative reply.

yes. at my usual spot.

Milette cheered in that stifled manner that allowed a small amount of giddiness to bubble up and become an excited squeak and a goofy grin. She ran... no, walked briskly to the “spot” which Elise had described earlier. She had walked so briskly that by the time Daemon was in view, she was short of breath and her heart rate was well above the recommended level for her age. She felt her face burning and her legs and arms went numb. As she stood there, she felt as though her body was hesitating for her. It was only then that she had a moment of necessary clarity.

Milette took out her mobile and shakily punched in a message.

cn i mit you?

She looked up and stared at Daemon for a moment, unable to find the courage to send the message. As realization washed over her, she was quick to erase the newly composed words. What was Elise thinking? Her muscles clenched as she prepared to make her move.

Without a second thought, Milette walked back to the dorms where she knew things were logical, reasonable, and right in the world.

One Hundred Days to Graduation: Unrequited

2008-01-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

hi. cre 2 txt?

And Daemon replied and the rest, according to this story, is history that is far too mundane to tell and was only worth mentioning in passing because that was how everything began.

Now, the real problem began the way all love stories begin: with a twinge. Milette felt it when she first saw Daemon and she continued to feel it, albeit with increasing intensity, as she and Daemon developed a friendship that wouldn't have been possible had the social marvel that is text messaging not been invented, yet. When she found herself literally dropping her pen while writing an important article for the school paper to jump for her phone and read what she knew would be Daemon's "goodnight", Milette decided that she was falling in love. So, once again, she did the pragmatic thing. She sent text messages to her trusted friends, asking them to meet her for lunch the next day and brooded the night away.

High school current events were always less important than high school love.

Sicily dLR's My Favorite Regret [1/2]

2007-07-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Sicily is a dear friend of mine. She writes better than I ever would. Ah, yes, and also, welcome to the angst.

----------

He was bound to be another could-have-been.

She would welcome the morning of every weekday with the prospect of seeing him again. She would come in 30 minutes early and stare momentarily at the empty workstation behind hers with an unexplainable tinge of longing coursing through her veins. He would arrive and fill that space later, with an occasional tap on her back to greet her a good morning. She would mask her gladness by throwing him a casual “Hey..”, he would either tap her again with more force or shake the backrest of her chair in acknowledgement.

She would inhale sharply to steady her nerves, which curiously still happened after half a year of closely working with him. He would spend the first hour answering emails and phone calls and instant messages that immediately popped into his computer screen the moment he switches it on. She would be overly aware of the sound of his nimble fingers typing away on his keyboard and would be stealing glances at him through the reflection on her monitor.

He would call her a dozen horrendous nicknames during the eight and usually more hours they spent together, one after the other. She would respond to these names then realize it, and she would pretend to be angry at him, looking sideways at him with daggers flying out of her eyes. He would be amused with her reaction and laugh at her while coughing out his apologies. She would take one glance at his face and forget she was starting to get annoyed. And they would laugh together for a few minutes, not really understanding what the other was saying but completely aware of what was happening – the laughter was forging a stronger bond between them, beyond the professional partnership that started everything.

She would be busy reviewing UNIX codes, accepting impromptu requests from their partner team, and modifying the same reports for hours on end. He would be running around in meetings, attending to “immediate” issues, and talking with people on his mobile phone. After five, their teammates would leave one by one and soon they would be alone, staring at their computer screens, working in complete silence.

He would break the silence every time, sometimes with a question or with another nickname for her or with an invitation to eat dinner in the canteen downstairs. More than a few times she would diss going home early just to hear him say, “Let’s eat!” He would start small talk, usually with more teasing, then move on to more serious topics which mostly had something to do with her personal life. She would laugh at his curiosity, but would avoid looking at him in the eyes for fear of giving him more information than she would have wanted to be known.

He would offer to drive her home on the nights they had to stay late for official business. She would decline at first, but after a few pleas from him she would find herself sitting beside him inside his car. He would sit back comfortably, she would be still and silent but restless and nervous. She would feel her pulse racing from the moment he opened the car door to let her in up to the moment she closed her bedroom door when she arrived safely home.

He would call her up in the most unlikely times to ask about trivial things which may or may not involve work. She would store his text messages in her inbox long after she first read them, most of which contained nonsense and ramblings but would be precious to her just the same. He would jokingly blame her when something went wrong and would mockingly repeat some of the things she said which he found amusing. She, on the other hand, would take every chance she could get to bash his vanity and shelteredness.

He would always have that effect on her, she knew. He would talk softly, she would listen attentively and remember every single word which came out of his lips. He would sit unnecessarily close to her when they discussed something, she would get intoxicated with his fresh, clean scent. His hand would brush against hers, she would be almost certain that he let his fingers purposely linger a few split-seconds longer than what was necessary. He would sincerely ask her to smile when he saw her frowning, she would take one look at his boyish expression and all seemed a little better.

He would joke about missing her, falling for her, and she would immediately switch to another topic, turning away from him to conceal her flushed cheeks and suppressed smile. He would repeat those words over and over again, over and over again she would convince herself that it was more than just another teasefest. And in those moments when they were alone, sitting next to each other just talking or in absolute silence, smiling or laughing, she knew that there had to be some truth behind his jestful tone.

But it wouldn’t matter. He would continue opening doors for her, making up more grotesque nicknames, acting upon ingenious ways to annoy her for anything under the sun. He would perhaps even get past dropping not-so-subtle hints and move on to telling her straight out what the real deal was, no jokes, no punch lines. But she wouldn’t change. She would struggle to act normal around him, brush off any of his comments about caring for her as part of another joke, and turn away from him whenever his eyes got too intense, burning right into hers.

Because whenever she looks at him, she would be reminded that another soul was longing to have her close and look into her eyes while whispering the same three words that she would hear from him only in his punch lines. Whenever he says he misses her, she would hear another voice, sincere and sweet, without any trace of jest. And whenever she saw his beautiful, beautiful face smiling back at her, images of another’s sad tear-stained face would flash in her mind and that would be enough to bring her back to her senses.

Yes, he would be another could-have-been. And although she would always be wondering about what could have happened if they met when she was still a free soul, she would choose to stay and cherish the beauty of what already is.

Paz Marquez Benitez's "Dead Stars" [3/3]

2007-07-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

I actually had this all typed up when I posted the second part. I don't know why I waited so long before I posted it. Laziness, I suppose.

Read about the author of this story, Paz Marquez Benitez, here and the book "Fourteen Love Stories" here.

-

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 Santa 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 backbreak, 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 circumstances 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, insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw strange 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 uptilted town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snub-crested 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 form the crowd assembled to meet the boat—slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lakeshore 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.

“Salazar.”

That must be the presidente, he thought and went down to the landing.

It was a policeman, a tall pockmarked 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 woman’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 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 restlessness 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, faraway 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 light 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 l=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 thoughtful into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the hometown, 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 into 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.

He 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, why had he obstinately clung to that dream from the weariness of actuality? And now, more actuality had robbed him of the dream.

So all these years—since when?—he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed place 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.

Paz Marquez Benitez's "Dead Stars" [2/3]

2007-07-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

The wonders of changing monitors and desks increased my typing speed two-fold so I was able to post this much sooner than I thought.

Read about the author of this story, Paz Marquez Benitez, here and the book "Fourteen Love Stories" here.

-

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, or indolent drugstores 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 of the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convents, 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 jeweled band studded with glittering clusters where 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 was striking and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart yet had not 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 it circuitous route away from the church and then back again, where, according to the old proverbs, 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 though 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 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 a 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 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 wedding interesting to you?” he finally broke out quietly.

“When they are of friend, 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 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 will 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 of 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 have had that experience; then you could understand a man 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 downwards in 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 goodbye, 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 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 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 talk like an—immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that.”

“My ideas?” he retorted, goaded by 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 right 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.” He 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, differently, 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 shortcoming, and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, out of my place, to find a man.”

Did she mean this irrelevant remark that it was he who had sought her; or was it 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

Paz Marquez Benitez's "Dead Stars" [1/3]

2007-07-08T10:34:00.001-07:00

This is a story that I encountered way back in high school. A friend asked me to post this here. It was a lot longer to type than I had anticipated and getting down the first five pages took me almost an hour. Like the "Wedding Dance", I got this from the book "Fourteen Love Stories" edited by Jose Dalisay Jr. and Angela R. Lacuesta.

This is a story written way back in 1925, and declared as the first Filipino modern short story in English. The author had only two published short stories, but that didn't stop her from becoming an icon in Philippine literary history.

However, the reason why I chose to post this story is not because it is an icon, but rather, because I found that it touched the hearts of people--some of them, quite dear to me. Even as it was written in a time when culture still restrained affection and passions were still frowned upon, there is something about it that is distinctly Filipino that a lot of us can relate to despite the difference in time.

Read about the author of this story, Paz Marquez Benitez, here and the book "Fourteen Love Stories" here.

-

Through the open window, the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very though. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of his life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush—they lost concreteness, diffused into formal 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 decisive, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired of 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, punching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. “Papa, do you not remember how much in love he was?”

“I 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, not yet of the mind, a craving that had seized him with one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees on 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 what 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 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 prolog 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 for 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 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 thing 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 a 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 whish he left swinging back and forth, not opening, now closing on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by a Madre de 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-shriveled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.

Six weeks ago, that house meant nothing to him save that I was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge de 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 h 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 he 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 mood altered. He listened and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she has 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 a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows and delicately molded lips—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 invariable 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.

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 possible love another woman.

The 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 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 there, I find—something—”

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, she laughed, womanlike, 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.”

“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 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 the discussing the likable 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 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 perfervid 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 notable 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 thoughtful sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness, which is sauce to the 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 the 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 you hometown.”

“There is nothing to see—little crooked streets, yunut 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 as for Miss del Valle,” she smiled teasingly.

“I’ll inquire about—”

“What?”

“The house of the prettiest girl in 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?”

“Reinforcing 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 crimson gold.

“No, of course, you are right.”

“Why did you say this 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 goodbye?”

“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 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 out them on the wind.

Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but heard her voice say very low, “Goodbye.”

From Other Authors

2007-07-08T10:09:00.001-07:00

"The Visitation of the Gods" by Gilda Cordero-Fernando
"Sweet and Tender Hooligans" by Mae Astrid Tobias
"Wedding Dance" by Amador T. Daguio
"Dead Stars" by Paz Marquez Benitez

"My Favorite Regret" by Sicily dLR

Part One
Part Two

"Son of Wood, an Ifugao Tale" by E. Arsenio Manuel
"Bata Mama and Bata Bahi, a tale from Bukdinon " retold by Carmen Ching Unabia

My Stories

2007-07-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

High School Reunion (completed: 27 March 2007)

4 Days in Manila - summary only
The Book of Sinners - storyline being revised, off site
Dance (completed)
Ending (completed: 24 June 2007)
WTF?! (completed: 2 July 2007)
Not Forgotten (completed: 1 July 2007)
100 Days to Graduation

Unrequited: Daemon and Milette

A Fleeting Moment [PG-13: Contains sexual themes] (completed: 23 August 2010)

Amador T. Daguio's "Wedding Dance"

2007-07-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

From "Fourteen Love Stories" edited by Jose Dalisay Jr. and Angela R. Lacuesta

From the introduction of the book, this story is described as such:

"Set in the northern highlands, "Wedding Dance" by Amador Daguio is the most hurtful of these stories to read, starting on a pang of pain and never quite letting go"

Read about the author of this story, Amador Daguio, here and the book "Fourteen Love Stories" here.
Now, in order to gain a better understanding of this story, one must know something about Ifugao tribal law. Mr. Wasing Sacla, former vice-mayor of the Benguet Provincial Government writes (in this article):

"A couple who wish to divorce due to infertility of either one of the partners is allowed by the law. A husband who divorces a wife without any valid reason will have to leave all properties to the children and the wife, this is another law."

The importance of having children is reiterated in local lore, but, as the story name escapes me, at the moment, I am unable to give you the title.

-

Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the head-high threshold. Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound that carried him across to the narrow door. He slid back the cover, stepping 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 didn't know how long. The sudden rush of the rich sounds when the door opened was like a sharp gush 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 his fingers, he stirred the covered smoldering embers and blew into them. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of pinewood on them, then full round logs as big as his arms. The room brightened.
"Why don't you go out," he said, "and join the dancing women?" He felt a pang inside of him, because what he said was really not the right thing to say and because the woman did not talk or stir. "You should join the dancers," he said, "as if--as if nothing has 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 light 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 the 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 last, she talked: “You know very well that I don’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.

“You, 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 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 snuggly around herself.

“You know that I have done my best,” she said. “I have prayed to Kabuniyan 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 Kabuniyan, because, like you, I wanted so much to have a child. But what could I do?”

“Kabuniyan does not see fit for us to have a child,” he said. He stirred the fire. The sparks rose through the crackles of the flames. The smoke and soot went up to 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 gongs of the dancers clamorously called in her ears 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 in 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 face. The next day, she would not be his anymore. 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 mountain 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 long 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 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. They have mocked me behind my back. You know that.”

“I know it,” she said. “I will pray that Kabuniyan 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 foams of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters rolled and growled, resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the steep cliffs; they were far away now but loud still and receding; the waters violently smashed down from somewhere on the tops of the other ranges, and they 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 were 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. She took away the blanket that covered her. “Look at me,” she cried. “Look at my body. Then it was full of promise. It could dance; it could work fast in the field; it could climb the mountains fast. Even now, it is firm, full. But, Awiyao, Kabuniyan never blessed me. Awiyao, Kabuniyan is cruel to me. 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 breast quivered against his own; she clung now to his neck, and her head 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 never have another 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 don’t 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 that I have carved out of the mountains; nobody will come after me.”

“If you fail—if you fail this second time—,” she said thoughtfully. Then her 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 form far-off times. My grandmother said they came from way 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 a 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 was pained him to leave. She had been wonderful to him. What was it that made man wish for a child? What was it in life, in the work in the fields, in the planting and harvest, in the silence of the night, in the communing of 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 half 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 corned of their room, to the trunk where they kept their worldly possessions—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 day of their marriage. He went to her, lifted her head, put 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 buried her face in his neck

The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened and he hurried 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 upon 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 in the village? Did she not have the most lightness and grace? Could she not, alone among all the 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 the 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 break the dancing of the men and women. 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 men leaped lithely 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 flaming 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, 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 hands, 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 could see from where she stood the blazing bonfire at the edge of the village, where the dancing was. She could hear the far-off clamor of the mountain. The sound did not mock her; they seemed to call far to her, speak to her in the language of unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their clamor, almost feeling that they were telling to her 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 sough and 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 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 time among the growing bean pods.

Endnotes: Before hitting the comment button and asking questions, do scroll through the previous comments. I've tried to answer what I could. Also, for a better perspective on the setting, check out Son of Wood. I also tried to write about my thoughts on the theme of the story in this essay. I do hope all this will be a help to you.http://mush-festival.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-amador-t-daguio.html

WTF?!

2007-07-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

A/N: Some of the lines here were taken from The Most Complete and Most Useless Collection of Pick-Up Lines. So, kudos to the guy who compiled them. And, no, I didn't go to that site for reference. Honest! I didn't!

-

"My name is Karl, but you can call me 'lover'."

That was the first pick-up line that came to mind when I saw the pretty little thing with sad doe eyes. I glanced at the girl quietly nursing her--what the hell? Is that mineral water? Who the heck drinks water in a damn bar without puking or passing out beforehand?--water while staring blankly out the large windows and into the street.

Really, how stupid can a pick-up line get? Not to mention dangerous. If that cutie turned out to be a tranny, then he'd know my name and he would easily be able to say that Karl tried to pick him up. I'd go to hell and back before I let my name be involved with some gender-confused mental case again (I'd rather not discuss it). I'm pretty well known around these circles and I don't need something like that ruining my rep. Don't get me wrong. I don't usually mind people like that, what bugs me is the idea of people like that with--in the less common, but more meaningful sense of the word--me.

So no name dropping before hearing the mineral water girl's voice, at least. I need something as direct, but not revealing of my identity.

"I am a magical being, take off your bra." Sure. I'll use that when I want to get slapped. No. Back to the drawing board.

"Do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again?" Too romantic. I don't need something that cheesy. Besides, I'm not romantic at all, so I wouldn't be able to back that up.

Maybe I should work with something more basic. "Hey, you come here often?" Yeah, that would probably work. I know she's not a regular at the bar scene, else I would have seen her before and she wouldn't be drinking damn-lame-ass mineral water. I mean, seriously, who does that? I could tell her that if she was uneasy, I could introduce her to some of the girls. I could tell her which drinks are good. I had several options in case the line worked.

Really, beyond the pick-up line, things pretty much work out the same way. I had everything mapped out in my head.

As I sauntered over to the bar and to her side, I reassessed my options for the best pick-up line and decided that simple and basic was still good. But, it wasn't my night. The moment I got close to her, she stood up and turned, glass of water in hand, and bumped right into me. The water splashed all over my shirt and pants.

"What the fuck?!" were my first words to her. Smooth, Karl, real smooth. What the heck kind of a first impression is that?!

She frantically reached for bar napkins with one hand as she raised the other as an attempt at pacification. "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry, mister! Sorry. Sorry. Sorry," she repeated her apology several times as she handed me the napkins so I could wipe myself dry. As the bits of the napkin clung to my shirt, I realized that drying myself was about as useless as my pathetic attempt at choosing a pick-up line.

"I'm sorry. I was being such a spaz," she said more slowly, more sincerely, turning her pretty doe eyes at me. In the darkness of the bar, they were black as night, making me think of dark places and secrets and secrets that take place in dark places.

"It's okay," I assure her, balling up the useless paper mulch in my hands and tossing it over to the counter. The bartender frowned at me when the napkin wad bounced into his work area.

She looked at the general direction of the door, "I was about to leave. I really don't belong in this place," she explained softly. "So, if you're sure it's okay..."

Now, when you're dealing with women, one must really pay attention to the little details. Girls like it when you notice the hints they drop, whether consciously or unconsciously. I took advantage of her words. "How can you not belong in this place? It's a bar. Everyone belongs in a bar. It's a place to belong."

Okay, so that didn't come out the way it was supposed to.

She blinked up at me, confused. Dammit, she's using those pretty eyes against me. "It's really not my thing," she tried to answer.

"Lifestyles like this are like people, you have to get to know them a bit before you decide whether or not you like them," I philosophized. Where did I get that crap? I'm not really sure. I think a guidance counselor told me that, but I think he was talking about Citizen's Army Training or college or something mundane like that.

She smiled at me brilliantly. She really is very pretty. The smile makes me want to hug her just to check if she really is as warm as her smile makes her out to be.

"Oh, I see..."

She seemed genuinely thoughtful for a moment, and then she looked me in the eye with those pretty doe eyes of hers. "You come here often?" she asked.

WTF?!

"Yeah. My name is Karl, but you can call me 'lover'."

And then, she laughed and shook my hand.

-

Something that has a relatively happier ending than usual. ;-)

Ending

2007-06-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

Really, he shouldn't have been surprised by it.

It was like reading a fairy tale. He should have known that, at some point, the words "and they lived happily ever after. The End." would come up. That story had been going on at a monotonous and boring pace, for lack of witches and dragons and evil stepmothers, for almost seven years. But still, somehow, Mister Silang found it in himself to look mystified when his co-faculty, Miss Sinag wordlessly handed him the large dove gray envelope and a small white card. Mister Silang found himself backtracking through the four years he had known the couple and ten years he had known the groom, searching for the quintessential climax that should have preceded this inevitable conclusion. Catching himself, he thanked her and buried himself back into his work and wondering why he even bothered to wonder. As he mechanically ticked away at the test papers that he promised himself he would have graded by that afternoon, he found his thoughts constantly looping back towards princes and princesses and missing adventures.

There was a buzz in the room even after Miss Sinag had left, and the dull hum of the chatter of his fellow teachers suddenly felt suffocating. Mister Silang found himself packing up his papers and mentally searching the school for a quiet place to work. As he stood up, he directed all attention towards himself, and he found himself being crushed by the stares of the other people in the office.

"So, will you be going, Mister Silang?" Miss Villanueva's eyes shone under her thick-lensed tinted reading glasses. It was like she was living the role of the starry-eyed fairy tale princess through the much younger Miss Sinag. She was a nice lady who had her fair share of sad love stories to tell, so in her old age, she was more than content to giggle with misplaced giddiness.

Mister Silang frowned. He may have just been paranoid, but Miss Villanueva's voice appeared laced with unspoken implications. "I can't make any promises at the moment," he replied.

"But, you're not just Miss Sinag's co-faculty," Mister Maligalig pointed out as he leaned back on his chair. He was looking pointedly at the white card Mister Silang had amongst the things in his arm. Now, the implications that seemed to be in Miss Villanueva's voice made themselves clearer in Mister Maligalig's double entendre comment, which Mister Silang dared not answer. "You're also both a close friend of Miss Sinag and a dear childhood friend of her fiance, are you not?"

"That was a long time ago," Mister Silang retorted to both the implicit and explicit questions. He gathered his thoughts and excused himself before he suffered further scrutiny. He began to make his way to the library, filling his mind with thoughts of partial points and bonus quizzes. He had just barely succeeded in pushing the princess who delighted in sitting prettily in the maze of his consciousness to the proverbial gutter, when Murphy's Law decided to apply itself to his internal battles with fairy tales.

"Mister Silang, are you busy?"

"I'm on my way to the library, Miss Sinag," he responded, hiding the exasperation that was probably clearly painted on his face by not turning to face the one who called him.

The volume of Miss Silang's next words seemed softer, "It..."

It won't take long.

In Mister Silang's mind, she was slightly flushed at the effort of saying those words. She hesitated, and she twiddled her fingers uncomfortably. He was making her uncomfortable, and, for some odd reason, he found himself feeling triumphant at that.

"I just wanted to know if you'd read the card," Miss Sinag's voice came out a lot more steady than Mister Silang had anticipated.

"No."

Snappish. Cold. Uninterested. Those were only a few of the ways to describe Mister Silang's tone. This deterred the female teacher and she was quick to say that she had other matters to deal with and would Mister Silang be so kind as to respond to her note before the wedding, thank you very much.

And, after that encounter, the princess that had previously been rudely shoved into the side streets of his thoughts came dancing back onto the main road, laughing haughtily at him. Even as he sat in the library which was quickly emptying at that late hour, Mister Silang found his mind wandering back towards the white card Miss Sinag had obviously been talking about. Before opening it, he speculated about its contents, trying to find courage he didn't realize he was missing.

"My Dearest Bryan,"

What bold beginnings for a woman about to be married!

"Do you still love me?

I still love you..."

The princess in his head giggled girlishly, shyly, embarrassed by her own boldness. Mister Silang took her hand and kissed it.

"Just say the word and I won't marry him."

And the prince in his head wept bitterly at the sight of his princess stolen by a mere teacher. But, who was the prince in the face of true love? He was just a prince, after all. And even princes can get their hearts broken.

"I want to be with you for the rest of my life."

Perhaps another happily ever after was to be read, but this time, not with the prince. And just as Mister Silang was about to ride off on his white steed, he read the card in his hand.

"Bryan,
Would you be Roy's groomsman?
He wants you by his side at the wedding.
Just as he wants you to be our friend for the rest of our lives."

Mister Silang closed the card and tucked it into his pocket. In his mind, the prince and princess were riding off on their white horse to Happily Ever After. The princess seemed to be smiling at him rather smugly.

Mister Silang picked his things up and went to find Miss Sinag to give his response. He would not make any promises. He could not.

Part Five: Conclusion

2007-03-27T05:04:00.000-07:00

He rubbed the nape of his neck. “Well, no,” he replied. “I almost did, but I couldn’t.” By that time, I couldn’t speak anymore. The first tear fell, and then the flow could not be stemmed. He didn’t make any move to comfort me, the way I had seen him do with Chloe and the other female friends who had cried in his presence. I added that to my list of things I wanted to ask him why he did not do. He knew the questions I could no longer pronounce so he continued to talk. “You didn’t see your own beauty so you’re not capable of appreciating it. You didn’t love yourself. You still don’t. You rely on other people to love you for you.”

I sobbed. My chest felt like it was going to explode. I tried to rub my eyes dry of tears, but they stayed traitorously wet. His words hurt. I didn’t want to hear them anymore. I pressed on the remote of my car alarm and felt for the door handle again because my blurred vision made finding it by sight a bit difficult.

Terrence didn’t move to stop me. He didn’t move at all. He just kept talking. “I couldn’t fall in love with you because you needed someone who could love you for the both of you. I don’t have that much love inside me, Alice.”

I finally managed to open the car door and I collapsed onto the driver’s seat. My legs were numb and I couldn’t bring them into the car, so I stayed seated with my feet firmly on the pavement. “If you find me awful, then just say it. Don’t try to sugarcoat things with philosophical words.”

“Do you love Max?” Terrence asked.

I nodded. It was a dumb question. Of course I did.

“So you give him everything

I nodded again.

“He has to give you twice as much, because he has to give you what you don’t give yourself. Do you understand, now?”

I shook my head, despite the fact that I understood full and well. Understanding is different from knowing in your heart, because ‘knowing’ requires both understanding and believing. I couldn’t believe him. That was the big difference.

“You’ve no loose ends with me, we tied those up when we left high school and told ourselves high school was over. You’ve loose ends with yourself that you’ve had since high school and those are the ones that are aching to be tied up.”

Terrence left me in my car, crying my eyes out. By the time I managed to exhaust the Pacific Ocean of a reservoir in my tear ducts, I was exhausted and could do little more than get myself into my car, lock the door and lean back onto my seat. I promptly passed out and was only awakened half an hour later by the ringing of my mobile phone.

Max was calling to ask me how my reunion was turning out.

And all I could tell him was that it went well. “So well, in fact that, I have no reason to ever come back.”

Part Four: Confrontation

2007-03-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

He leaned against my car, informing me that he was not going anywhere. “You were one of my dearest friends, despite everything.”

“That’s so cliché,” I laughed, but it sounded hollow and fake. “Drama doesn’t suit you.”

Terrence smiled. “Yeah, you’ve always been the dramatic one.”

I turned to him. The lamppost behind him flickered to life, as if on cue, and I came face to face with the very image from fifteen years ago that marked the first time I discovered romance. I was back in my freshman year of high school again and was once again melting at the sight of that boyish grin. The only thing missing was the cheesy music that we had been dancing to during the freshman acquaintance party where I first fell in love. Yes, as always, as if some heavenly director had called out an instruction, someone opened the door to the gymnasium and left it that way allowing David Pomeranz to filter out to the parking lot.

“We danced to that song,” I murmured when I recognized the sentimental lyric. “That was my first real slow dance.”

He chuckled. “You really can’t help but be dramatic, can you?” I must have made some negative reaction that I wasn’t aware of, because he amended by holding out his hand. “Care to dance?”

“That’s just stupid,” I grumble stubbornly.

He draws his hand back. “That’s true.” He stares at me quizzically. “Why do you remember that dance?”

“You don’t easily forget your firsts,” I explained.

“If I remember correctly, I cut in from Ronald. Ronald was your first dance,” Terrence corrected me.

I absently replied, “I wasn’t talking about dancing.” Now, Terrence isn’t stupid like me, so he quickly got the hint and didn’t ask what I was talking about. There was a short silence, and then I found the right time to ask the right question. “Am I really such a difficult person to fall in love with?”

“You’re smart and you’ve so many talents,” he appeared to be lost in thought. “You were cute back then and you’re fun to hang around with.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I dragged him back to reality.

He met my inquisitive gaze. “No. You’re not a difficult person to fall in love with.”

The dam of pent up frustration from unasked questions and unrequited emotions, insecurities, and uncertainties broke and I began to speak without second thought. “So why didn’t you?” Tears were welling up in my eyes and the lump in my throat was beginning to make me sound like a frog, but my voice kept on going. “Why couldn’t you fall for me the way you fell for so many other girls in the span of fifteen years? I’m not good enough for you?”

Terrence took a deep breath, like the one you take before diving into a cold swimming pool on a cold day. “I never said I didn’t fall for you, Alice.”

The lump grew in size, and my words were choked out, “Did you?”

Part Three: Prelude

2007-03-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

Even by the time I decided to leave my high school reunion, the parking lot was still filled with cars of the many alumni who wanted to get in touch with old friends, catch up on the goings on in the life of those they had spent their socially formative years with, and all that jazz. It was already dark, but the time was at that cusp when the lights of the sky were just about to completely fade and the street lights had yet to come on.

As I walked through the parking lot, the voice in my head said, “All that bullshit isn’t for you, Alice.” The voice at the back of my mind promptly retorted, “That’s just the bitterness talking.”

Before getting into my car, I found myself pausing to reminisce about the past and why I never really liked reliving it in my memories. I didn’t give myself a long time to muse about bygones, lest Chloe find me and drag me back inside.

It wasn’t Chloe who found me, though. Terrence was getting something from his car when I deactivated the car alarm with its remote. The “toot-toot” that confirmed my alarm deactivated got his attention and he walked over to me. “You’ve tied those loose ends?”

“I said I didn’t want to, Terrence,” I reminded him as I walked over to the driver’s side of my car and reached for the door handle.

“What do you want to say to me?” Terrence called after me. I froze short of opening my door. “It’s pretty obvious that there’s something you want to tell me. Anyone can tell.”

My hand fell away from the door handle. It was really embarrassing to be such an idiot as to be so transparent. “Well, aren’t you the most humble person on the planet?” I snapped. “You’re the last person I want to talk to.”

“That may be true,” he admitted, smirking triumphantly. He knew he had pressed the right buttons. “But, I’m the one you need to talk to.”

The automatic activation of my car alarm informed me with a high-pitched “toot” that I had been to slow in getting into my car. Terrence just kept watching me, waiting. I kept fumbling. I kept searching. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because it’s about time,” he responded. He stared me down and I began to loose all resolve.

Dance

2007-03-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

This is an old story from an older blog. I just found it funny for some reason.

-

In the candlelight, her eyes were hazy as if she was dreaming. Her head swayed slightly, in time with the music played by the band. She watched the couples dancing with a small smile and a longing gaze.

There was no one there to dance with her but me.

"Do you want to dance?" I ask her as she snaps out of her daydream long enough to pick her goblet of water by the stem. She looks surprised and wordlessly holds holds out her hand to me. I heard the music shift to a slower pace. The song couldn't have been more appropriate.

I guide her to the dance floor. Now, she looks confused, so I place her left hand on my shoulder and take her right hand into my left. Last to take its position was my right hand on her waist. She hesitates a bit as I gently prod her movements. "I haven't danced in a long time..." she murmurs as she follows my lead. She's blushing. It's easy to see since she opted not to wear make up tonight. "This is nice." Her voice is soft in my ears as she sings the lyrics in chorus with the band's lead singer.

"You give your hand to me, and then you say 'Hello'..."

The lights choose that moment to dim. I look down on her to read her reaction, but instead, I come face to face with her who has chosen to check on my facial expression as well. Our eyes meet and we stare at each other unabashedly for a moment that should have lasted forever. I see so many things in her eyes and my heart skips a beat when I come to terms with what those things were telling me.

"And I can hardly speak, my heart is beating so..."

There is happiness in those eyes. I see so much happiness and an overflowing love. She is happy being with someone she cares about deeply. I strikes me as odd that she could be happy that way while dancing with me. And then, the reality dawns on me. She loves me.

And then, there was sadness. There was a deep sadness that speaks of dreams that could never be fulfilled.

I subconsciously pull her closer. She leans her head on my shoulder. I feel her hands tightening their grip on my shoulder and hand. It's almost like she doesn't want to let go. I push the small of her back so she is even closer to me. I murmur my feelings, half hoping she wouldn't understand, and half wishing she would, "I love you."

She lifts her head from my shoulder and meets my gaze. Our faces are so close that they could touch with only a slight movement. I see the understanding in her eyes. "I know." Then, the sadness overwhelms the happiness, but it cannot overwhelm the love.

The song ends and a familiar tune plays. Someone has a thing for "My Bestfriend's Wedding". There is no other explanation as to why "The Way You Look Tonight" immediately followed "You Don't Know Me".

I remember her telling me how much she loves that song. How she would love to hear it sung to her. She closes her eyes and sways to the music, enthralled.

Just as the lyrics begin, a hand taps my shoulder lightly. "May I cut in?"

Gods, no! I remove my hand from her waist and pass her hand to the newcomer. "Of course," I graciously step back as her arms instinctively wrap themselves around his neck after they lost contact with me.

I see the look in her eyes.

She is happy. She is as happy to be with him as she was happy to be with me. There is a love in her eyes that matches the love that she showed as she stared up at me only minutes before. The sadness I detect is carefully masked. A sadness of dreams that would never be fulfilled.
I step back even further. I take my seat on the table I will share with them later. I see them. They are perfect. People watch them and dream. They are the dream that has been fulfilled.
And, yes, that is how I will remember her. That is how I will think about her. The way she looks when she is in his arms.

I sing the last few bars of the song.

"Just the way you look tonight."

Part Two: Talking

2007-03-08T07:21:00.000-08:00

Though I was expecting him to leave—and not a small part of me wanted him to—my spirits rose a bit when I saw him still sitting there. But, whatever happiness I felt was quickly extinguished when I read the expression on his face. It hurt me to no end when I saw only undisguised pity painted on his features. “I thought Greg was calling you. Aren’t you going to him?”

“You came here to talk, didn’t you?” Terrence summoned a waiter to refill his cup. “But you keep on talking without saying anything,” he said pointedly. “How are things with you?”

My mind ground to a screeching halt. In the twelve years we had spent not talking to each other, so many things had happened, and yet my mind was drawing a blank. “Okay, I guess,” I began. “Karen’s mom died sometime back, her family’s coping well now, but they’re having financial problems, but I think that’s normal and—”

“I wasn’t asking about Karen,” Terrence cut in. “I asked about you.”

I considered waving my arm and calling on Greg to get Terrence away from me, but I couldn’t find the will. I wanted this conversation as much as I couldn’t bring myself to make it progress. Even though Terrence was regarding me as one would regard a three-year-old who couldn’t tell left from right, I knew what I needed to be saying. I was just too big of a wimp. “Well,” I suppressed a sigh of frustration. “My boyfriend, Max, and I are thinking of getting married.” He looked somewhat mystified by the thought of someone like me managing to snag a member of the male species, but at least he was listening. “Max’s salary is pretty good and together, we have a pretty stable income. Max is thinking of going back to school to take up computer science. He’s already scouting for a good school with a good curriculum.” I stopped again when I noticed that I didn’t have a captive audience.

Terrence was becoming a bit annoyed. “I didn’t ask about Max, Alice,” he snapped. “I didn’t ask about Chloe or Karen or any of our other friends. I’m asking about you. Or is this really the reason you decided to sit with me: to feed me random facts that I’d forget before the night comes to a close?”

Why did I sit with Terrence, anyway? Why did I want to talk to him? I bit my lip and tasted the lipstick I had applied on a whim. Why did I do that? I never wear make up. “No, that’s not it. It’s okay. It’s nothing. I’m sorry for wasting your time.” I said this so quickly and softly, that I doubt he understood a word. My cup was empty and I gathered my things, getting ready to stand up and leave.

“You’re getting engaged. Don’t you want to tie up loose ends?” it was almost as if he knew what had been going on in my head for the past twelve years. He had hit the oldest and sorest spot in the gigantic sore spot of my insecurity with regards to relationships.

I slipped the strap of my bag over my shoulder. “High school happened so long ago. The loose ends I want to tie up are so far back in the past, that I couldn’t reach them anymore.”

Like in the movies, Greg and Terrence’s other friends came up to our table at that red-letter moment, interrupting our conversation. Along with my momentum went my courage and my resolve so I hastily mumbled my excuses and left to search for a corner to mope and angst in.

Part One: Awkward Beginning

2007-03-08T07:09:00.000-08:00

I didn’t think I’d find the courage to attend a high school reunion, but somehow, my best friend Chloe managed to drag me to one. There wasn’t anything special about that particular year—just that it was the time Chloe managed to hire the most wanted criminal in the city to threaten me and make me choose between a slow and excruciatingly painful death and going to the reunion.

As I sat in front of one of the boys from high school, I began to seriously contemplate the logic of the choice I made. Suddenly, getting my head blown off didn’t seem so bad. Getting my limbs torn off one by one seemed much less painful than sitting in uncomfortable silence with my first love and heartbreak with no real accomplishment in my life so far going for me. I had only recently gotten a job and was a complete amateur at it. I was still living with my parents and they still gave me an allowance every week. It was embarrassing for me to admit, but the only up side in my life was the wonderful man, Max, who decided to work with the lost cause that was me.

But, I was already at that situation.

“So...” I started, looking around to see if there was anything interesting to open a conversation with. What did people talk about during reunions other than their wonderful lives? I imagine that making a comment about our former teen queen’s frighteningly quick weight loss wouldn’t be a positive opener; although, by the looks of it, her new emaciated image could not, by any means, be healthy. I would have brought up some interesting tidbit about our common friends had I actually kept in touch with them post graduation. I wanted to ask about him and his fiancée, but I didn’t want to seem too prying. Since I could hold the single-syllable word for only so long, the next thing that came to mind decided to slide past the meager security system of my tact and went straight to my mouth. “...Terrence, have you talked to Chloe recently? She’s contemplating resigning from her job.” You’re a wonderful friend for saving my butt, Chloe, sorry for using you like this.

Terrence lifted an inquisitive eyebrow. “She told me about that.”

“And what did you tell her?” I inquired, trying to look interested, though I knew that he knew that I already knew what advice he gave Chloe. When he didn’t respond, I continued. “I told her that if she really wants to leave such a stable job, she should reassess her entire situation then plan what she’s going to do next.” I spent the next few minutes babbling inanely about Chloe and how I hoped she would find her niche and things like that. Terrence wasn’t even feigning interest and I was quickly running out of words. “So...” I stopped for a moment and then found myself stuck with that damned syllable again. But, I had an easy escape this time. “...What do you think?”

“I think I have to go,” his gaze was focused on a buddy of his who had just walked through the door. He gulped down the last of the coffee he had nursed during the short few minutes we spent together.

I smiled, trying to look relieved and understanding at the same time. “I see,” I said as I followed his line of vision. “Say hi to Greg for me,” after forcing all the cheer I had left, I quickly took a sip from my cup to hide the frustration and disappointment that was welling up inside of me. I closed my eyes, pretending to relish the bitter drink. When I heard the scraping of the legs of the chair against the concrete gym floor, I pictured him standing up and walking away from our table with his hand raised to call the attention of his friend. I wasn’t just mildly surprised when I opened my eyes to find him still seated there, watching me quietly.

4 Days in Manila: Summary

2007-03-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

Noel, an OFW vacationing in Manila, receives a call from his childhood friend Alex informing him that Selene is coming in to see him. Selene, is Alex's fiancee and Noel's first love. The two boys took care of Selene and her twin brother Cesar during the twins' high school days in Manila. Noel and Alex were already in college by then. It happened during Selene and Cesar's graduation ball, when Cesar decided to ask a girl he had been courting to be his date, Selene was asked by both Noel and Alex. Selene went stag after admitting to Cesar that she couldn't decide which invitation to accept. When Cesar revealed this to the two older boys, Noel and Alex have a long conversation about not having to force Selene to choose between them. It was after this conversation that Noel decided to accept a scholarship and job abroad.

Back to the phone call, Alex tells Noel that Selene wanted to talk to him about certain matters including why Noel had suddenly cut Selene off.

Teaser: Regret

2007-03-04T19:16:00.000-08:00

Selene stared obstinately at the cup of hot tea in front of her. The distinct curve of her lips said she was moderately annoyed by what had just been revealed to her. But the deep sadness in her eyes spoke of an effect of Noel's words that was much more powerful than she wanted to admit. "The day you left without telling me was right after you and Alex talked about my future?" she spoke as if unable to digest the information properly.

"Why?" Noel's tone made Selene want to look up to meet his gaze, but she forced herself to focus on everything else other than her childhood friend. "Do you regret the choice we made for you, Selene?" there was a note of accusation there that bothered Selene to no end. "Do you regret being with Alex?"

"You're taking things out of context!" Selene's voice rose in frustration. She loved Alex. She wanted to marry Alex. She had no doubt that she would love to be his wife, the mother of his children, and his companion for life. She mellowed her tone, but it remained colder than Noel had ever heard. "Don't you dare imply that I don't love Alex. That isn't fair."

"So what's your problem?" Noel asked, raising his eyebrow, as if to challenge. "Why are you so upset?"

Selene looked like she wanted to cry. "You can't possibly understand, Noel. You're fixated on the idea that you made the right choice for me--for the three of us."