America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  And my hunger for affection, because of the lack of it in America, had driven me blindly to Eileen, and my long-denied urge to feel a part of the life about me burst forth like a blazon of burning stars. This force annihilated all personal motives, and again I began to feel stirrings inside me, coming out in torrents of poetry.

  My knee began to interfere with my nights of rest and days of study. The doctor put it in a cast hoping that the shooting pain would cease. I lay immobile, because the slightest movement of any part of my body would arouse the pain in my knee and spread it to all parts of my frame. I read ceaselessly, suffering, trying to forget that I was dying.

  I could scarcely eat any more. When I ate my soup, because I could take no solid food, the nurse put a glass siphon in my mouth. There seemed to be no hope for me. From the open porch, where the convalescing patients were kept, I was transferred to a dark little room where three other patients lay waiting to die. There was a young man whose throat was stuffed with rubber tubes. I watched him die clawing for breath, gasping desperately for the air that could not enter his lungs.

  I knew it was hard to die. It was hard to live I had discovered, but it was even harder to die. Why did some men live thoughtlessly? Why did they think life was something they could borrow from other men?

  The other two men, old and lonely, also died gasping for the last bit of air. They stared blankly into the ceiling, waiting for the final heartbeat. When death came to them, and it came slowly, they closed their eyes and put their hands over their flat chests. Then they were dead. I could see the deep yellow lines in their still faces.

  The cast on my leg only provoked the pain. At last the doctor told me that he would attempt an operation. I was wheeled through the long tunnel between the TB buildings and the new hospital. I waited in the hall near the operating room for what seemed hours before two nurses came and prepared me for the table. An interne injected a local anesthetic into my spine. When the drug began to take effect, I saw the doctor come into the room. He patted my leg and spoke to his assistants. Then I was swallowed by a deep sinking darkness that carried me into eternities.

  Three hours afterward I began to hear faint whispers around me. It was like waking from a dream. The doctor had done his job and was gone. The internes were putting on a new cast. I could see filmy white shadows in the gallery, where medical students were watching and taking notes. Then I was swallowed by the impenetrable darkness again.

  When I awakened it was morning. I could hear a slight rain falling. Eagerly I looked about the clean, well-lighted room. My leg was suspended from a small rack strapped across my bed. Everything smelled fresh and new; evidently I was in the new building.

  Eileen came the following Sunday. She was anxious to know what the doctor had done to my leg. I told her that the doctor had cut off two inches of bone and put the knee together with four sharp steel spikes. I was to wear the cast until the muscles had grown together and were strong enough to encase the bones.

  “My leg will be stiff from now on,” I said.

  “Oh.” She started to cry.

  When she had gone I discovered that she had left a copy of Rainer Marie Rilke’s Journal of My Other Self, a book which later led me to other writers: Franz Kafka, Ernst Toller, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Heinrich Heine. These writers collectively represented to me a heroism of the spirit, so immeasurably had they suffered the narrowness of the world in which they lived, so gloriously had they succeeded in inspiring a universal brotherhood among men.

  When I became better a nurse pushed my bed into a larger room, where two patients were recuperating from operations. One was a boy of ten whose arms had been amputated; the other was a young man who had had three operations. The boy’s courage made me feel at once brave and ashamed.

  I was wheeled back to my ward in the old building across the tunnel. It was Christmas Eve. Eileen came with pieces of roast chicken and fruits. She was soaked through from the rain. I noticed that she was unhappy, but tried to conceal it. She had not heard from Alice since the war had started in Spain.

  “The Loyalist Government is denied help from all the capitalist countries,” she said. “Now it is desperately fighting a death struggle.”

  “But Soviet Russia is sending men,” I said.

  “It’s not enough. Mussolini and Hitler are sending planes and tanks.”

  That was the way Eileen always talked. She took it for granted that I knew the world situation, that I understood her political views. I wanted to—yes. But it actually took me several years to really achieve a literate understanding of fascism.

  When Eileen left I wrote a poem for her.

  * * *

  —

  Eileen came again and again, bringing books and magazines, writing paper and stamps and envelopes. She wanted to be sure that I would read and then write to her. Sometimes she brought friends—one of them, Laura Clarendorn, was a young woman who had just written a proletarian novel about the Northwest. This book, the first of its genre to appear in the early thirties, had won a national contest. It had the defects and crudities of a form that was taking shape out of the sterility of American writing: the racialism of Margaret Mitchell, the opportunism of Ben Hecht, the decadence of Joseph Hergesheimer, and other literary barbarians of that period.

  But what attracted me to the book was its Filipino protagonist. Hitherto Filipinos had been only stockpile characters in entertaining stories such as those by Peter B. Kyne or Rupert Hughes. When Laura Clarendorn came again with her husband, a composer and professor of music, I urged her to go deeper into Filipino life in America.

  I felt she would write it. She was still in her middle twenties and had plenty of time. But she never wrote another book, and I never heard from her again. About the time she disappeared from American literature, I witnessed the emergence of a new writing. It was, however, a direct product of the form such as Laura Clarendorn had helped to shape, not a counterpart of it as some reactionary critics would have people believe.

  When some of my Filipino friends came to visit while Eileen was with me, I would tell them to wait in the dark hallway. I felt ashamed. But I understood them. One such friend, Felix Razon, the rebel peasant from Tayug, understood me. He waited patiently; when Eileen was gone he sat near me.

  “The UCAPAWA is now well on its way,” he began. “But there is a bigger task calling me.”

  “Are you thinking of leaving this country?” I asked.

  He became serious. “Over in Spain an historical conflict is going on. The Italian-German fascists are sending tanks and planes to Franco. What is the rest of the democratic world doing for the Spanish peasants and workers? Spain is significant in our fight for democracy: the Loyalists are holding the destiny of the world. Do not laugh. You will see someday that I am right. If Republican Spain is crushed, fascism will spread, not only in Europe but throughout the world. I am afraid, Carl, of the world to come. I am tired now. But I have to fight on, Carl.” He stopped and looked down, remembering, searching his past for some hope. And in a fleeting moment, I caught the startling image of the rebel peasant boy in the rice fields. “Spain is blockaded. The embargo law has been passed. We can’t even send volunteers to Spain. But I’m going anyway, Carl. I’m going with twelve of our friends to Mexico. Your brother Macario and Nick will go with me.”

  I was startled. “I didn’t know my brother was going with you. He didn’t mention it to me last Sunday.”

  “He will see you tonight,” Felix said.

  Felix Razon went away. I never heard from him again. Whether he was killed in Spain I have never found out. He was one of those who gave meaning to the futilities of other men’s lives—and one who, because he came from the peasantry, had planted in my heart the seed of black hatred against the landlords in the Philippines.

  “All right, Felix Razon,” I wrote in my diary when he went away. “You found no peace. The wise men lied to us
. All right, go fight a war on another continent, like my brother Leon. But if I live I will go back to our country and fight the enemy there, because he is also among our people. . . .”

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  When my brother Macario came to tell me that he was leaving for Spain, I realized that the Loyalist cause symbolized what he had been fighting for in California.

  “Maybe dying under a fascist bomb doesn’t necessarily mean that Filipinos would have the right to become naturalized American citizens,” he said. “But it means that there are men of good will all over the world, in every race, in all classes. It means that the forces of democracy are found in all times, ready to rally behind a cause of worldwide significance.”

  My brother always talked as though he did not exist. He was working in a restaurant as a pantryman, but his ideas were so universal and his ideals so lofty I knew he meant everything that he said. There was something in the way he talked—the impeccable movements of his hands, for instance—that dispelled all doubts. Slowly he was giving form to my dream, showing me a coherence of thought and action. When he talked about a land far away that needed him, I knew that his idealism was so great that it moved his whole life.

  I said: “It’s much easier for us who have no roots to integrate ourselves in a universal ideal. Were we not exiles, were we not socially strangled in America, we would never have understood the significance of the Civil War in Spain.”

  “I hope you will not think that I’m running away from you, Carl,” he said. He was looking at his rough hands, picking at them absent-mindedly.

  I had not noticed his hands before. They were hard and calloused, like my mother’s. They were ugly and twisted. I wanted to shout with anger at the whole world. Macario’s cracked and bleeding hands. I wanted to grab and kiss them. Now, now that I was a grown man I knew the meaning of my father’s struggles to hold his land, my mother’s sacrifices in order that her family might survive.

  * * *

  —

  I wanted to educate myself as fast as possible, and the fury of my desire was so tumultuous, I could not rest. I was drawn closer to Eileen Odell, and now, significantly enough, we were beginning to discuss some of the books she gave me to read.

  About William Faulkner I asked: “Why is he so concerned with decay?”

  Eileen said: “He writes about the South, where he lives. It is a dying world; it is decayed; so he wants us to know that it is futile to prop it up with a false foundation. The South was built on human slavery, but the slaves are stirring. They will be free and the South will collapse with its decadent institutions.”

  These would have been my own words. Were we thinking the same thoughts? When Eileen was gone, I returned to some of William Faulkner’s books. I wanted to be confirmed. Strange that I remembered many things! I could even remember a cousin who used to scare the girls when they bathed in the creek near our village. He would hide in the bushes and then spring from them with a growl. The girls would run in all directions, their hands flying to their naked legs and bouncing brown breasts. My cousin was playful: he screamed with joy when he saw the girls hopping about in the field.

  When I was in Montana, during the beet season, I met a Jewish girl in a drugstore. I remembered what she had said: “It is hard to be a Jew!”

  I also remembered a man in Binalonan who had killed another man when he had tried to steal water from his irrigation ditch. He sent his son to the town police to inform them of his crime. A policeman came to his house while the man was eating.

  They conversed in this fashion:

  Policeman: “Señor Juan, are you ready to go to town with me?”

  Juan: “Could you wait for three hours? I have not had my siesta yet.”

  Policeman: “I will wait, Mr. Juan. But don’t sleep too long. I would like to attend the late cockfights.”

  So while the criminal was sleeping pleasantly the policeman sat under the house waiting for him. Now and then the policeman would climb up the ladder and look through the door to see if he was still asleep. When the man woke up he walked complacently with the policeman, stopping now and then at a wine store for a glass and to inform the loafers of his crime. But in the presidencia, free to wander about like the non-prisoners, he played chess with the policemen and hangers-on. Sometimes he played baseball with the schoolboys in the yard. He was also free to eat at home, and the policemen would sling him across a horse when he had too much wine.

  I laughed when I remembered the prisoner in Binalonan. I did not know, however, that I would someday write a book about my town’s characters; that because I wrote about them as human beings, I would invoke the philistinism of educated Filipinos and the petty bourgeoisie, and the arrogance of officials of the Philippine government in Washington.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  I was psychologically unprepared when the doctor started operating on me. Two other experiments by another doctor—phrenic operation and a treatment called pneumothorax—failed to assuage the widening lesion in my right lung. The contagion was rapidly spreading to my left lung, and thoracoplasty, or a rib operation, was the last possible way to arrest its advance.

  My first operation came in June; in three weeks I had another. Finally in the middle of August, when the wound had healed, I had the third and last. The last was easy and the wound healed faster than the other two. I saw the doctor before he left the hospital.

  He said, “You have no more ribs on your right side, young man. But you will live for a while. Mabuhay!”

  For a while! All right, then. I lay on my right side so that my weight would press my body down, one way of finding relief from the pain. I was transferred to a small ward where another patient, a tall Mexican, was waiting for his operation. His left lung was gone. There was a wide hole in his back, where two small rubber tubes were inserted to drain out the fluid. He could not speak English, but we understood each other.

  One Sunday night, during the visiting hours, the Mexican told me to watch for the door when his wife came. The wife, a gaudy woman, gathered her dress about her and went into the bed with her husband.

  I woke up the next morning to see a nurse rolling the Mexican away. He was dead. Maybe he knew that he would die. I had seen men die before, but not the way this Mexican died.

  I returned to the old building. I went to my place on the porch, facing the lawn where WPA workers were digging a wide hole. There were three: a supervisor, who was always lying under a tree, a man with a shovel, and another man who took the shovel from him when he was not reading a newspaper. When the hole was about five feet deep the two men would fill it up with the earth that they had dug from it. Then they would move about ten feet from it and start digging another hole. For six months they dug holes in the lawn and filled them up. I wondered what they were doing. But when they were gone some of the patients said that it was one way of keeping unemployed men out of trouble.

  Once a week, on Sundays, amateur musicians and singers came to the hospital. I was still on my back, so the attendants propped me up. Their voices cracked, but I enjoyed the hula-hula dancers. Some of the patients who could afford it threw dimes and quarters on the floor. The entertainers went from ward to ward, dancing and singing, but six months afterward they stopped coming. It was then that the WPA was vehemently assailed by reactionary politicians in Congress.

  But I had my books. Throughout that year I read one book a day including Sundays. I could obtain all the books I wanted from Eileen Odell. I discovered a world of music, of light and immortal things. I trembled with delight when I came upon a brilliant phrase or a novel idea. While the other patients were worrying and complaining, I explored the worlds of great men’s living minds.

  One of these men was an American poet, Hart Crane, who wrote The Bridge. His intense frenzy of words captivated my imagination. I leaped with him across the magnificent steel arc over the river, flew into the dizzy heights of fire, plunged in
to the sea and peace. Here was a writer in the tradition of Whitman and Melville: he tried to find a faith strong enough to challenge modern chaos. The bridge, the symbol of his faith in America, an ecstatic conjuration against false gods and legends, was also a myth that he tried to create out of the turmoil of modern industrialism.

  And another book, Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, gave me a panorama of the historic birth of a socialist country. But it also gave me an insight into the collective faith of a people, its growth and flowering. I knew that it was good literature, that it was honest and written with a purpose. It was an introduction to other Russian writers: Maxim Gorki, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoi, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Anton Chekhov. But it was Gorki, the vagabond and tramp, the tubercular outcast, who most attracted me. Perhaps it was because I identified myself with him in his lowly birth, his wanderings in the vast Russian land, his sufferings and the nameless people who had suffered with him.

  Gorki made me aware of his counterparts in America: Jack London, Mark Twain, and the youngest of them all—William Saroyan. Although these Americans did not stir my social conscience, their struggles and successes fired me with ambition. Now I could understand and appreciate the appearance of a Chinese writer named Lu-sin, whose stories were compared with Maxim Gorki’s: not in style, but in dignity and humanity.

  I discovered that one writer led to another: that they were all moved by the same social force. While Federico Garcia Lorca was writing passionately about the folklore of the peasants in Granada, Nicolas Guillen was chanting verses of social equality for the Negro people in Puerto Rico. While André Malraux was dramatizing the heroism of the Chinese Communists, a Filipino, Manuel E. Arguilla, was writing of the peasantry on the island of Luzon.

  So from day to day I read, and reading widened my mental horizon, creating a spiritual kinship with other men who had pondered over the miseries of their countries. Then it came to me that the place did not matter: these sensitive writers reacted to the social dynamics of their time. I, too, reacted to my time. I promised myself that I would read ten thousand books when I got well. I plunged into books, boring through the earth’s core, leveling all seas and oceans, swimming in the constellations.