Tio Benito had a companion—a woman. She looked at least twenty years older than he. Tio Benito was middle-aged, but he did not have any of the wrinkles that lined the woman’s face. I told myself, of course, that she must be just a business associate and not someone toward whom he had amorous intentions; after all those blondes in America, such a thought was unthinkable.
Not that she was ugly; she was brown—very—and she had classic Ilokano features: a broad forehead, a small nose, and lips that were quite thick. What struck me were her upper teeth, which were all set in gold so that when she smiled it seemed as if her mouth was on fire. From snatches of conversation while they were talking with Father in the sala, I learned that the woman lived three towns away, that she had come to pay my very surprised and very amused father the fifty pesos that Tio Benito owed him plus whatever interest there was. But more than this, she also wanted to talk to all of us about a very urgent matter “concerning salvation and the soul.”
“Yes,” Father said. “This is very good to hear. But let us eat first.”
We stood up and went to the dining room, and when Sepa saw Tio Benito, she told him he was lucky, for she had prepared dinardaraan, his favorite dish. It consisted of pork and the innards of the pig stewed in its own blood and in vinegar. The day before, a neighbor had butchered his pig, and Father gave a cavan of palay for five kilos and the innards.
At the mention of dinardaraan, Tio Benito scowled at the cook, but he did not say anything. We sat before the long narra table, in the middle of which was the glass fruit tray topped with oranges and apples. Like Tio Benito, I also relished dinardaraan, but I could have been knocked down with the paper wand Sepa waved to drive the flies away. There he was, straight as a bamboo, his head bowed, his eyes closed; with his woman companion, he was praying! Father was all smiles; it seemed that we no longer had a pagan in our midst. After this surprise, I pushed toward him the bowl of dinardaraan, reminding him it was my favorite, too.
It happened then; with disdain clouding his greasy face, he pushed the bowl away as if it were poison.
“I prepared it,” Sepa said, surprised and defensive.
But Tio Benito ignored her; he stood up abruptly, and in sudden inspiration, he began the best speech—or sermon—I ever heard on the importance of eating the right food so as not to pollute the body or offend God. He spoke with power and conviction, and we stopped eating; even the maids paused in their chores and crowded in to listen to the words of wisdom that now poured from his lips. He spoke of the growing evil in the world, of the need for brotherhood, community, kindred spirit that would not only allow us to enter the kingdom of God but also banish the usurpers of His word in this land. He railed against the friars who established a church subservient to Rome: look at the money collected in the Catholic churches—it is sent to a foreign land to fatten foreign priests. The Americans were no better; they also sent their own missionaries to perpetuate the subservience of Filipinos to them. The Catholic priests, the Protestant pastors—they talk in a foreign language, they are ashamed of their own, of Ilokano or of Tagalog, which are the languages of the people. And then he spoke of the reasons why he could not eat dinardaraan or anything with blood, for such food was not fit for anyone who believed in the true God, for anyone who could read the Bible and regard it as sacred, for it is right there—and he proceeded to quote from memory the particular chapter and verse. It was my first experience with a convert of the Iglesia Ni Kristo. Sepa was very pleased, although her particular sect was Protestant; what was important was that Tio Benito finally believed.
“I will convert you,” he enthused. Turning to Father and me, and of course to Tia Antonia, then to all the maids and house help gathered around us, he added, “All of you, all of you.”
The woman was silent, but on her face was the most beatific smile I had ever seen—her mouth was aglow. So my Tio Benito became a Christian—of that much I was sure. Although I doubted if his hortatory rhetoric could move as much as an inch any of the people who listened to him, I was sure that the woman with him had some uncanny power of conversion, for it was she who did it and no one else. She married Tio Benito, and though I am not very positive about what Tio Benito said about not eating dinardaraan because it is cooked in blood, of this I am certain: In our town, it used to be fashionable for the very rich to have as many gold teeth as they could afford. Tio Benito’s wife had all her upper teeth in gold, and that, in itself, was enough proof to Christians and pagans alike that she was, indeed, a very wealthy woman.
CHAPTER
5
Nothing pleased Grandfather more than Tio Benito’s wedding; he once said that only a woman could tie my uncle down to Rosales and banish once and for all the itch that had sent him drifting to alien lands. Now that Tio Benito had settled down, the old man was at peace because all his children were where he wanted them: within his reach should the time come for him to die.
The wedding was celebrated in Carmay; in the mud-packed yard of Grandfather’s house, the tenants built a long shed roofed with coconut leaves and fenced with old bamboo fish traps. Here the entire village gathered to feast on three carabaos, two cows, and half a dozen pigs. The wedding ceremony itself, in the absence of a chapel of the new sect in Rosales, was performed in Grandfather’s living room, which was decorated by Cousin Marcelo with sprays of papaya blossoms and palmetto fronds. Many members of the sect arrived in a fleet of caretelas, and while their minister ranted and flung his hands to the roof, the women sang and cried. Grandfather made it clear, however, that he was not now going to stop enjoying dinardaraan or tolerate any attempt of the newly weds to interfere with his bucolic peace and the future of his soul.
Even before the china used at the feast was dry, Grandfather told Tio Benito to pack his overcoat and his thick, dark suits and, like a good husband, follow his wife to her home three towns away. It would have been ideal if Tio Benito and his wife lived with the old man, but Grandfather valued his independence and isolation. “Since your grandmother died,” he once said, “I have lived alone and I like it that way.” Nevertheless, he followed Father’s advice and kept a handyman, not to serve him but to see to it that in his twilight he did no unnecessary work that could cut his days still shorter.
Two days before Christmas, Grandfather came to the house; the helper who kept watch over him had crossed the Agno to spend the holiday with his family, and knowing this, we tried to dissuade Grandfather from returning to Carmay and spending Christmas there alone.
He was too stubborn and set in his ways to accede. He arrived hobbling up the graveled path with his long, ivory-handled cane, a relic of his younger days when he was gobernadorcillo, his feet encased in leather sandals firmly tied to his ankles by thongs. On his head was a crumpled buntal hat. Although he tried to walk as if his bones were those of a frisky youth still, he could not refrain from stooping. It was only when he paused at the foot of the stairs that his fatigue became apparent, though he had walked but a short distance from the bus station. He was panting, and as I tried to help him up, he looked at me, at the young hand that held his arm, and a flash of scorn crossed his face. The expression changed quickly into a wry smile. “I am all right, boy,” he said.
But he did not go up to the house alone, for quickly Father came rushing down, saying he should have sent us word so that Old David could have fetched him in the calesa.
It was one of the old man’s rare visits, usually made three or four times a year. He had chosen to stay on the farm, which he had helped clear out of the wilderness that had once stretched from the Andolan creek to the banks of the Agno. He had also imparted to the farmers around him his knowledge of farming amassed through years of frugal Ilokano existence, which were interrupted only when he held office and participated in the revolution or when he visited town.
If Father did not tell me, I would never have known, for instance, what he did during the revolution, that among other things, he knew Apolinario Mabini and took care of the Sublime Paraly
tic when he fled to Rosales, that Mabini stayed in our house, where he wrote a lot before he went to Cuyapo, where later on he was captured by the Americans.
The only time I heard Grandfather really raise his voice was when I was perhaps nine or ten years old. I had gotten ill, and he had come to see me on the third day that I had this high fever and hardly noticed the people fleeting about my sickroom. He had made inquiries about what had happened, and Sepa told him I had played at the foot of the balete tree together with some classmates and that we had constructed a playhouse on the veined trunk of the tree.
I remember him roaring at Father, why knowing this, he had not sent an offering so that I would get well, and how Sepa immediately went to the kitchen at Father’s harried command to do what Grandfather wanted although I knew that Father did not really believe in all that superstition.
Father used to threaten me when I misbehaved, saying that he would banish me to Carmay. Though I had always regarded Grandfather with awe, he never terrified me. After all, I loved listening to his stories of the supernatural and the mysterious. He was particularly fond of telling stories about the balete tree, for he believed that the tree was blessed and that it was bound to protect us from the curses and onslaught of evil. When Father realized that packing me off to Carmay would cause me no suffering, he resorted to the whip instead.
For a man over eighty, Grandfather seemed in good health. As far as I could recall, he had been sick only once, and I distinctly remember how, on a stormy September night, Father and the doctor had to rush in the calesa to Carmay and slosh through rice fields to attend to him; he lay in his old rattan bed saying that if death were to strike, no one would be able to thwart the blow, and for that reason he refused absolutely to take any medication.
Grandfather was more than prepared. It was no secret that he had ordered a coffin made of the finest narra when he was just a few years over seventy. Somehow, Father had disposed of the relic when the old man ceased asking about it. Many marveled over his ability to maintain an agile mind, and his memory for faces was superb; he could identify his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, and the host of farmers and their families who lived around him.
What was the secret of his longevity? His tenant neighbors, especially the more superstitious, had an explanation. It could be, they said, that once upon a time, he had heard the bells on Christmas Eve. On that very hour of midnight when Christ was born, a heavenly chime would peal; only the chosen would hear it, and they who are so blessed would live to a ripe old age, their fondest wishes all come true.
I recounted this to Grandfather, but he ignored it; he was not really all that keen about things said of him, for his religiosity pertained mostly to the land, whose yield was greatly influenced by God and the elements. He had not stepped within the portals of the church for ages, though he was not one to deride those who did. During the dark days of the revolution against Spain, he had developed an apathy about the Spanish friars and, eventually, the church.
That December evening as he sat down with us at the head of the table, he seemed exuberant. He relished the mudfish and sipped his chicken broth, as if he thoroughly enjoyed every drop. We waited for him to finish and had expected him to talk, but he was adamant. “I came here for no other reason than to take my grandson with me,” he said. “He can return when Basilio returns from his family.”
It was a time I did not particularly care for Carmay, because on Christmas I would rather be at home. The provincial road sliced through the far end of the barrio, which was really nothing but a few thatched houses huddled together with Grandfather’s—the biggest of them all and the only one with a tin roof—standing closest to the narrow bull-cart path that leads down from the road. There was peace and quiet in Carmay on Christmas Day, and perhaps its only attraction during the holidays was its excellent rice cakes, better than those available in town. It was livelier in Rosales—the early-morning mass, the chill permeating our bones, the jaunty band music rousing all of us. We would then stagger from our warm beds to go to church, where first we would drink scalding ginger tea from the convent kitchen. Afterward there would be the happy sight of flickering candles on the altar, the smell of incense swirling about, and above everything our voices swelling in the choir loft. Later the sun would rise from behind the heavily wooded hills of Balungao, and suddenly it was morning.
The evenings were just as memorable. Tio Baldo, come Christmastime, always fashioned a bamboo cannon for me, and as soon as it was dark we filled one end with heated kerosene, stuck empty milk cans in the mouth, and fired away at the youngsters across the street, who also had the same noisy toy. Or with Angel, Ludovico, and the other boys, we would play from house to house as a bamboo orchestra, all the rest tooting and puffing at a weird assortment of bamboo flutes, clappers, and jingles, while I played the harmonica—the only instrument that somehow managed to give a running tune to the noise that we emitted. The money we made was not much, but for the boys it meant a merrier Christmas. Shortly before midnight, when we returned to the house, we also had something for the help—maybe a cigar for Sepa and a bottle of gin for Old David.
But Grandfather had spoken, and what was Carmay at Christmastime but a wide, dreary field ripe with grain? There was nothing there to dispel the quiet but the booming voice of some farmer calling his children from their river bathing or the martins cawing in the lofty buri palms.
“We are not going to sleep in the house,” Grandfather said. “We are going to sleep in the field to watch the new harvest.”
It was only then that I perked up, for the prospect of sleeping in the open—something I had never done before—was vastly appealing.
“Why should we sleep in the field, Grandfather?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid you might get a cough?”
He tousled my hair, then went on to explain that times had changed. “Years ago,” he said, “during harvest time, the newly cut stalks of palay were piled in the fields, where they were not removed, or brought to the granaries till they were to be husked. Now, with hunger slowly stalking the land, one has to keep watch over the harvest, lest it be stolen.”
I am sure we made a fine sight that afternoon as we walked down the main street to the bus station. Grandfather walked stiffly in his sandals, ivory cane in his hand and his crumpled hat propped straight on his head. I felt proud walking behind the old man who had helped build the town and who was, perhaps, the oldest man for miles and miles around.
When we passed the church I said, “If I were not coming along, Grandfather, I would sing in the choir tonight during the Christmas mass.”
A scowl swept across his face, and knowing I had displeased him with my remark, I did not speak again.
The trip to Carmay was uneventful. We reached it in a few minutes. The sun lay bright on the countryside, and the golden fields were alive with reapers in brightly colored clothes. The boundaries of our land, which Grandfather had cleared, blended with the tall dikes running parallel to the banks of the Agno.
We went up to his house. Ears of corn and fishnets were piled near the door. In the kitchen, chickens were pecking at grains scattered on the floor. The nippy December wind stole in, and Grandfather told me to bundle the blankets and a couple of pillows. We hitched a bull cart, then headed for the open fields where the harvest was stacked high. Soon it had become dark, and stars began to sparkle in the black bowl of sky.
After we had fixed our beds in the bull cart and in the sled with a thin canopy of hay over us, Grandfather sat on the sled quietly. Distant wisps of singing and the ring of laughter from the farmhouses reached us. Rosales was far away—a halo of light on the horizon. No sound from it could reach us, not even the boom of the bamboo cannons or the sharp crackle of firecrackers.
It was peaceful and quiet. After a while, with his head resting on the rump of the sled, Grandfather began to tell stories of the days when this field was a jungle of cogon grass and mounds, and snakes lurked in every hole. He spoke of the Bagos, who trekked down
the Cordillera ranges and traded venison for cloth and matches. It was a time when the Agno River was not so wild and the Andolan creek had plenty of fish and, in his own backyard, he hunted the wild pig. He spoke, too, of past Christmases, though he was not keen about them, of the nights he slept in the open during the hunt and harvest evenings, when he kept watch over the grain that could not be carted off to his granary.
“Boy,” Grandfather said, “the silence of a field can give a man beautiful thoughts. Here, more than anyplace, you are nearer God.”
I did not understand then what he meant, for I was Padre Andong’s acolyte in the Catholic church and had quite a different idea about worship. But I listened just the same to his stories of the revolution till the singing and the hoarse shouting of the tenants from across the fields waned and a heaviness stole over my eyes.
Perhaps I dozed, for when I looked up from my seat of hay, Grandfather was no longer near me. Over the land, a moon shone, a cool, silver lamp. The Balungao mountain in the east slumped like a sleeping beast, and all around us was the night, the endless river of night insects and crickets, and the rich, heady smell of new hay. It was cold, and I wrapped the blanket tighter around my quivering body. I looked around apprehensively to where the camachile tree stood, and where the carabao, tied to a saluyot shrub, was chewing its cud. I saw Grandfather then standing in the open behind the cart, his head raised to the sheen of the starlit heavens and his right hand clutching his old ivory cane.
He stood there erect as a spear, for how long I can’t remember. I went to him, but he did not seem to feel my presence. Staring closer at his upturned face, I saw tears trickling down his coarse, wrinkle-furrowed face, to his lips, which were parted in an exultant smile.
Don Vicente Page 5
