It was close to midnight when the column paused. Someone from the front came down the line. Istak thought his guards were to be relieved, for he could not understand their Tagalog. It became clear to him when the men beside him moved on, and he was told in Spanish not to move. It was here where he should stop and he was not to follow them.
He watched them plod on, swallowed by the night, the sound of their marching muffled till it was quiet again. Frustration, massive and overwhelming, swept over him; anger, too, beyond words. His chest tightened and only when he broke down and cried silently, the tears streaming down his face, was he able to breathe easily again.
He wanted to shout, but no one would hear, no one would care. It was all wasted then—the days of racing against the final hour, and it came in one, swift blur—the lowland dangers that he had passed, the patrol which almost trampled him. He knew the way, but he was not trusted, so they left him to go back. At least he was not shot. Did he not convince the general with all he knew about the Cripple? Or was it difficult for the general to believe that a peasant like him, speaking Spanish, could be just a peasant?
He wanted desperately to rationalize, to absolve the general. He was young, and because of his youth he was a poor judge of men.
He woke up in the chill dawn, the grass at his feet wet with dew. The trail was near the river. The sharp rise of hillside was studded with butterfly trees in bloom. Quickly, he remembered again with some relief that the general did not order him shot—just left behind to find his way back. He rose and turned around—the cool majesty of the mountains before him and below, more of the low hills which they had passed in the night. In a while, sunrise—the mountains were blue, the peaks covered with mist and beyond the haze, the pointed ridge below which the pass cut through.
They must be over the pass, the soldiers who emerged faceless out of the darkness. A new day, perhaps a new life. Why should an impetuous young man and this fleeing president of a country riven by jealousies and personal hatreds matter to him?
Yes, just as he had told the Cripple, why should I care for others who are not members of my family, who have not done anything for me? I have this piece of land which I have cleared. My duty is not to this nameless mass you call Filipinas. No country can claim my time, my loyalty. And as for God—I served Him well by doing my fellowmen no harm, but instead brought them health when they came to me with their bodies racked with pain. And for all these, my father was punished, I was punished. I am not going to test fate again.
The Cripple had looked sadly at him, then spoke, the words taking shape like jewels shining, glittering, impinging into his consciousness how easily he had been seduced by self-preservation: “If there is no country as such or as you know and recognize, then in your mind you must give it its boundaries. Do this because without this country you are nothing. This land where you stand, from which you draw sustenance, is the mother you deny. It’s to her where your thoughts will go even if you refuse to think so, for it is here where you were born, where your loved ones live, and where in all probability you will all die. We will love her, protect her, all of us—Bisaya, Tagalog, Ilokano, so many islands, so many tribes—because if we act as one, we will be strong and so will she be. Alone, you will fall prey to every marauder that passes by. I am not asking that you love Filipinas. I am asking that you do what is right, what is duty …”
“And in the end I will be betrayed as others have been?”
“There wall always be betrayals because we are men, not angels. They who betray—no pile of money, no shining title or other forms of adulation by which they were bought can assuage the self-hate, the sense of inferiority and sickening weakness which will corrode their very bones. They know this and there is no greater punishment than this self-knowledge. They cannot end it with suicide, for they know that such an act is the final push that bogs them into the slime of their own creation.”
Was he rejected because he was Ilokano, or was it simply because the general did not know him? He had given all the incontrovertible proofs of his identity—not things that one could touch, or feel, but the account of what he had seen, what he knew. Had he been a spy, he would not have ventured this far, and alone. Again, the Cripple came to mind. He would understand.
It would be a long walk back to the plain, to Cabugawan. He had slept soundly and the tiredness in his legs seemed to have gone. He felt hungry again; it should not be difficult to calm that hunger and in the first stream that he had passed, he drank his fill. Nearby were papayas with fruit. The birds had eaten into the very ripe ones; he did not like them too ripe, for these often harbored tiny worms. He picked two and walked on; along the way, there would be guavas, too, or tree mushrooms.
He slept briefly, then woke up, the mountain breeze caressing his face. He brought out the journal—stained in places—and looked at his notations; it was ten days since he had left Cabugawan—it was now December, the first day of the month, and tomorrow would be Saturday.
He wet the pencil tip with his tongue, a habit that never left him, and wrote:
Duty comes in many forms; at times duty to country may conflict with duty to family. Yet, with a lucid mind the guises can be torn away and in the end, duty becomes but one, and that is duty to value justice above everything—to do what is right not because someone ordains it, but because the heart, which is the scat of truth, decrees it so.
Duty. Justice. All his life he had never really given much thought to these, or to the possibility of his being really free. He was concerned with being secure, with being part of the structure that the friars had built, because wherever he went, he saw that they did not even have guns. Their being white marked them as superior beings, for how else could they have conquered this land, how else could they have written all those books and understood the mysteries of God? For as long as he was brown and Indio, he was marked an inferior man, destined to be no more than an acolyte.
All this ignominy had been wiped away—the Indio had fought the white man and won, but how fragile, how short-lived that victory had been.
It would be a hellish trek out of the Ilokos, and ahead of him, now, was a long march out of this towering ring of mountains. Closing his eyes, in the black pit of memory, his past came instantly alive, ever present and bright, as if it were only yesterday that he had left Po-on. God forgive me for this one conceit; I am not just a healer, but in a way, I was Moses, too. He had read the Bible and seen the world in the Magnificat: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich He hath sent away empty …”
He closed the journal and turned to the narrow plain below, and there, in the last light of day—the pursuers in even file. He started counting quickly those that he could clearly see. A hundred, two hundred. Perhaps five hundred men, their horses loaded with provisions. By nightfall, they would be at the pass. How could they have marched so fast? They would get to Del Pilar before morning if they marched through the night.
He should no longer care, why should he? He had come to warn them, help them, and the general had rejected him. Let him and his men and even the president suffer the fate they had fashioned for themselves. He could save himself easily—he knew where to detour to a distance away from their line of march, and he would then be free to return to Cabugawan. There was all the time to do that in the safety of the night.
O Apo Dios, You who know everything and see everything. You will not begrudge me if I seek safety so that I can be with my loved ones. I have tried to give these soldiers all that this humble self can give but they did not trust me. Surely, I will do no wrong to the Cripple, to Don Jacinto, and most of all, to my own self-respect if I leave them to their fate. Surely, O Apo Dios, You will understand.
He turned to the darkening and disheveled landscape around him, the mountains that bore down on him with their silence and their gloom. He listened to his hurried breathing, to the thunder in his heart, to the depths of himself crying, yes, I do no wrong, bu
t I must prove in flesh and in spirit that I am Indio, I am one of them!
CHAPTER
18
The night came quickly, and though he was already up the incline, following the trail which laced the mountainside, still the pass seemed as distant as the stars that glimmered above. What sublime obstinacy was it that demanded he should now persist? He consoled himself; at night, the Americans might not march, not in this jumble of trees and rocks where they could be ambushed easily, that they were—like the Spaniards and the Guardia—afraid of the dark and the Indio phantoms that lurked in it.
He had raced the wind, propelled by a strength that did not flag. He climbed the trail, now shrouded by tall trees, quiet and sepulchral, and dark as men’s minds. What was it that urged him on?
Duty—the thought was emblazoned in his mind, a torch over the trail, food to his stomach, the rich, fresh air in his lungs, and yes, the bone to his tender flesh. Duty, and this meant Dalin as well, his two sons, and oh, my father, I can see you now with your one good arm reaching out, and Mother—you who had prayed that I be able to vault the distance from Po-on to a pinnacle where I could draw you up, where you would no longer know the cares of living.
And remembering them, tears stung his eyes, blurring briefly what was ahead, the brambles that tore at his legs, the huge boulders that blocked his way.
Then someone shouted the familiar ¡Alto! He did not stop; he ran forward instead, shouting: “The Americans! They are coming. With horses. Hundreds of them. The Americans—they are coming!” A commotion ahead, a mad whirl of bodies. Arms seized him, clamped his mouth, pinioned him, bade him keep quiet. Around him figures moved quietly.
They knew who he was, and he was thankful that he had reached them safely. They left him by the side of the trail while a soldier went up toward the pass. He sat quietly, letting the coolness of the mountain seep into his being, quieting down the tremor in his heart. And it was then that a tiredness crept into his limbs, his body, and with it, a heaviness of the eyelids, the diminishing awareness of everything around him, and finally, sleep—deep and dreamless.
He woke up with the whole world grown still; even the insects seemed to have gone to sleep. Then, the sound of digging, low Tagalog voices, brisk commands. Above him, the night arched beautiful and dusted with stars. It had become cold; he missed the familiar warmth of Dalin, the contours of her body, and the smell of their narrow sipi. Dalin—how she had changed through the years, from the headstrong woman that she was when they first met, into this wife and mother who knew how to persevere, to wait for the good times that might never come.
His mind remained sharp; it encompassed in one sweep again how it was in Po-on, those seemingly wasted years in the convent in Cabugaw. If he were there still, perhaps at this time he would still be reading, or writing, putting into pompous words the thoughts that came: he was so presumptuous then. Now, he was no longer afflicted with verbosity; he had discipline, detachment, maturity.
A soldier approached him.
“Yes,” he mumbled, “I am rested now.”
In a while, another soldier came with a cup. It was hot coffee sweetened with cane sugar, and it warmed his insides quickly. Then another came with a plate; he could see the pieces of dried meat, the white chunks of rice. He ate gladly, thankfully.
The air smelled so clean, spiced with the scent of grass. The crickets came alive again and they filled the night with their music. Thoughts of his boys crowded his mind. And Dalin most of all, the sound of her voice calling him Old Man. What was he doing up here, on this lonely roof of the Ilokos?
A soldier jarred him from his reverie. The general wanted to see him. He rose and followed him to the dark turn of the trail, and there the general sat, reclining against a boulder.
“Good evening, Apo,” Istak said.
“You came back to tell us the news, Eustaquio,” the general said quietly. “Have you rested?”
“Yes, Apo,” he said. “I am grateful.”
“Do you know how many they are? Surely a thousand.”
“I did not count, Señor General. I couldn’t go near—I was afraid—” He paused. That was the truth, he had been afraid. “They were in a very long line. With many horses. More than a hundred. Maybe three.”
“Sleep now,” the general said after a while. “We have plenty of work when it is light.”
The stone upon which he rested his head was hard, and the grass pierced the blanket in places and pricked his arms, his legs, but sleep did come again, this time fitfully.
He woke up long before daybreak, birdcalls echoing from the forested slopes below them. In the first flush of light he viewed the sweep of mountain and sky, the summit grassy in places. He knew the turns of the pass very well; every year he and Padre Jose, old, portly—beads of sweat on his ruddy face and even on the smooth dome of his bald head—had taken this route on the way to the village of Angaki and the other Igorot settlements beyond.
All around, these young Tagalogs barely out of puberty, the milk of their mothers not yet dry on their lips, pausing in their labor, appraising the earthwork they had made on sections of the pass. Among them, he felt old and tattered in spirit. He was not equal to them in strength, but he knew this land better than any of them, the secret crevices of these mountains, the labyrinthine ways to the valley—and the Igorot villagers that might attack them. He could lead them to wherever they wanted to go. This was, after all, what he was here for. And if it was their decision to make a stand here, they could do it better with ambushes farther down. They should also secure the mountainside at the right, for there was a steep trail there which overlooked the pass.
He turned again to the young men around him, sardonic indifference on their faces. It was not only their youth which saddened him—it was the casualness with which they waited in their trenches. Would these also be their graves? How many funerals had he attended, how many open graves had he seen, watched the coffins cased down, or sometimes just a frayed mat in which the corpse was bundled, the feet sticking out, the soles white and sometimes still specked with dirt if the man had been a farmer and could not afford slippers, let alone shoes. He wanted to strangle the thought but he saw with horror that, indeed, many of the soldiers were barefoot like him. They were farmers, too, but they were all Tagalogs; they would not trust him, they would not want him by their side when the hour came.
The wind swooped down bringing with it again the scent of grass and earth. It was harvesttime in the plains below, in Cabugawan as well. In his mind’s eye, his boys were romping around, trying to help although they could do but little, trailing behind their mother to see if she had missed any stalk with her hand sickle. There would be nothing missed, of course, and in a week the field would be bare and the sheaves would be laid out, spread like flowers to dry in the sun before they were neatly piled in the granary behind their house. How wonderful it was—the smell, the taste of new rice, the steam rising from it, even with just a dash of salted fish and lemon.
Istak did not speak with the soldiers. He doubted if any could speak Spanish. In fact, they could be wondering how it was possible for a farmer like him to know the language of their former rulers. He was much older, too, and he realized with some discomfort that he was not young anymore.
Morning rode over the hills, gleaming on the narrow valleys below, shimmering on the trees, its song of praise reflected on the shale and on the smooth surfaces of red rock. It came to him with a sudden twinge of remembrance that it was Saturday and if he were in Cabugaw now, he would be about through with the offertory of the morning Mass. He must not think about that, he was here in the splendor of morning, the hillsides burnished with light. If only this would last!
From around the curve of the pass above, the general appeared on his white horse. He came down at a slow canter, his spurs reflecting bits of sun. He was handsome—Istak saw that; no wonder then that the women in Pangasinan and wherever he went had swooned over him. He had a yellow scarf about his neck, and though th
ey had climbed trails and muddy gullies, his rayadillo uniform was clean and his boots neatly polished. He was examining the earthworks, pointing out here and there what needed to be done. Their positions gave them a clear sweep of the terrain below.
The general rode to where Istak sat on a shoulder of the narrow pass. His gold epaulets shone. He had been viewing the surrounding flanks with his field glasses and he seemed satisfied with what he saw. “Do you think they marched in the night, Eustaquio?”
“I do not know, Señor General,” Istak said. “I am not sure. It seems they are afraid to fight at night.”
Istak could see better now; the trenches were rimmed with earthworks. On both sides of the pass, soldiers were stationed behind boulders, but instinct told him at once—although he was no soldier—that there should have been trenches way up to his left, up to the peak of Tirad itself. It would be a difficult climb for the enemy to make, to crawl up that cliff and cross the ravine now covered with grass, but anyone who persevered could do it.
Would it do to tell the general, this imperious young man, what he had missed? He had had so much experience, he had lived through battles, and he, Istak, had never been in one.
Still, there was time to do it. He went to the solitary figure at the crest of the pass. The general was seated on a boulder, looking down in the direction of Angaki on the opposite side. What were the thoughts rankling him? He had but a handful of men to block the oncoming horde.
“My general,” Istak said. “Please do not be angry with me—but I know this pass. I have crossed it several times.”
Del Pilar looked up from his perch and there was a brief flash of kindness in the young eyes.
“Yes, Ilokano,” he said. “What do you want to tell me?”
“That side to your left, there is a trail there—maybe you think it cannot be scaled, but it can—”
The general smiled. “I have thought of that,” he said coolly. “But the Americans—they are not all that persevering. They don’t have the patience. There are so many of them, and so well-equipped—they will not do it the difficult way. They will do it the easy way—like it has always been …”
Dusk: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks) Page 28
