fiction

from The Winds of April
by N. V. M. Gonzalez

1

There’s a story that Mother often tells about a baby boy who was thought at first to have come stillborn but Grandfather took him out to the salas, where a big oil lamp hung from the ceiling. There he began to squall, and rather fiercely, frightened perhaps by the light, and this to the great relief of all.

It was well past midnight. “How odd!” said the old man. “Strange will be his days….”

The midwife who brought him out into the world had a notion of her own: “Ay, his element will not be darkness but light.”

Father was a schoolteacher in Romblon at this time. He had come to town fresh from Normal School, in Manila. As usually happens to most young schoolteachers caught in the web of life in a new and strange town, he fell in love and got married in no time.

Father was scarcely two years into it when he was sent to another teaching station, Cajidiocan, a town on Sibuyan Island. Late one afternoon, while riding down the beach, he saw a middle-aged woman in a loose patadiong. She had long, black hair. She appeared to be heading for the river just ahead, where he hoped to find a sailboat for Romblon. She might know about that, he thought; or where the water would be shallow enough for crossing. He decided there and then to ask her; but before he could ride up to her, she was gone.

He did cross the river himself and almost overtook her but lost her again. It was at the next river that she reappeared; but before she was within hailing distance she was gone once more.

It was two years later when Father saw her again, this time in Mindoro, a sparsely populated province, where he was given a new appointment, that of Supervising Teacher, his seat of office a municipality called Bulalacao, in the far south of the province. The job required him to visit barrio schools along the coast, as far north as Bongabong; he bought a horse named Ricanya for this purpose.

It did already occur to him, even then, that he probably would not like being a school official all his life. He had a hazy notion about what to do, but he liked Wasig and felt like settling there in any case.

Wasig was a day’s ride from Bulalacao. I was about four then. I do not quite remember many things about those early days except that we first stayed in a small hut in the middle of the village. Some thirty houses comprised the barrio, and it was bounded on the south and west by swamps and a mangrove forest, on the north by the river Wasig and on the east by the sea. Since Father was almost always away, Mother had to ask an old woman, Aling Tale, to be with us. Come nightfall and a thousand unknown sounds from nowhere would descend upon us; the desolation often made Mother cry.

With Aling Tale’s husband for his guide, Father set out one Saturday afternoon up the river and into the interior to see about a homestead. He stayed away until Monday and, on returning, rode posthaste to Bulalacao on Ricanya.

It was altogether too stressful that way. Not too long after this, he was able to have his office transferred to Wasig. A dilapidated house across the yard from the barrio schoolhouse served this purpose. I remember how soon afterwards, many visitors began coming to the village, mostly municipal officials from Bulalacao and Bureau people from Calapan, the capital of the province. In school I had become something of a declaimer; for Father’s guests and friends, I usually had a rime or two ready, some nonsensical and harmless verses that greatly amused them:

Once there came a giant to my door,
A giant brave and strong—

Mother sat waiting one afternoon for Father to come home from Bulalacao. What had happened? Had some brigands waylaid him? Had he fallen off his horse or drowned in Langawon River? As the hours passed, Mother grew more and more worried.

As it happened, a man named Adjak came by. He was a Mangyan—a non-Christian, one of those who lived in the hills of Mindoro. Mother had had quite a fear of them before, but she lost it after many months of contact with them. She had in fact begun to consider them among the most harmless of people.

Adjak had come down to the village to barter chickens for matches, and now he was on his way back to the hills.

If by chance he should meet Father on the way, Mother said, couldn’t Adjak perhaps ask him to hurry home?

Adjak’s place was a settlement in Caloocan, which you passed on your way home from Bulalacao.

“That’s an easy matter,” said Adjak. “Let me help you.”

He began what he called the daniw, a way Mangyans have of communing with spirits. This required sitting in total silence, and staring at the thatch wall, remaining there motionless. In this instance, Adjak had the batalan, or back porch, and the eerie sounds from the mangrove forest nearby, all to himself.

“What does it say in your daniw?” Mother asked impatiently.

Adjak took a long time to reply. “The Perbising is on his way home now,” he said, finally breaking his silence. “He rides a white horse and is bringing home a string of dried fish. In two hours, he should be crossing Langawon River. Before you know it, he will be home at last.”

And so saying Adjak bade us goodbye and hurried away. Mother and I remained at the steps and waited.

The moon had already risen when Father arrived at last, and barely able to sit upright in the saddle. He had a string of dried fish, just as Adjak had said. But he was not quite himself. He had been invited to some tuba drinking by people who had given him the fish; he could not have easily declined.

It was the first, and the last time, we saw him in that condition.

One day Mother grew suddenly afraid of the village. A man had come to the house for medicine; his wife, he said, had become ill. Mother thought that it was probably malaria; and, as there was not a single quinine pill in the house, she told the man that there was nothing she could do for him.

The man’s name was Rufo Gaal; and he was a sorcerer and his wife a witch. I was in the yard playing by myself when he came by, and Rufo Gaal had noticed me there, mother said. He had remarked about how intent at play I was, and that it was unusual that I could play all by myself. That evening I ran a fever.

I remained in bed for days. Tatay Kanut the barrio medicine man had to be sent for to break the spell that Rufo Gaal had cast upon me. I was so sick, Mother said, that I tossed about for hours, several times rising off my mat as though I had wings.

Father and Tatay Kanut kept vigil, believing that Rufo Gaal would make an appearance. Tatay Kanut brought in an amulet, something in a tiny bag of red cloth, that he suspended from a rafter. Toward midnight, noises could be heard on the roof. This was Rufo Gaal, making a try for me. Armed with bolos, Tatay Kanut and Father chased him away.

The next night Rufo Gaal was back. And for six successive nights. Father and Tatay Kanut were ready for him as well on the seventh night, but the spell must have been over: no more noises on the roof could be heard.

At the beach, by the riverbank the next morning, Father met Rufo Gaal’s wife; he recognized her at once. She was the woman of Sibuyan, in the loose tube skirt and with long, flowing hair.

There was a fiesta in progress in Mansalay town then, and Father and Mother took me there the next day. The school had put together a Garden Day exhibition and, in one of the booths, Father bought me a parrot for five pesos. No sooner was it handed to me than it stopped chattering and then dropped dead.

Tatay Kanut, hearing about the parrot, said that that was Rufo Gaal himself trying to cast his spell upon me again. If the bird had not died, Rufo Gaal might have had his way.

I feel like laughing now, recalling that once a parrot died for me.

2

When I was seven Father sent me to Mansalay to live with Mr. Adap the schoolteacher. He was an Ilocano and had studied in an agricultural school as a youth and then obtained a teaching post, in Naujan and then in Mansalay. I was to study at the Intermediate School.

Mr. Adap had brought something new to the community, a violin. He had a wooden case for it shaped like a coffin, and with this he went acourting, marrying eventually a girl named Dolores, a native of Paclasan. Thereafter, he became a changed man, putting the instrument away the better to spend his free time fishing. Visiting Father and Mother in Wasig, he often stayed overnight to fish our river. In time, he lured Father also. During moonlit nights, Mother and I combed the beach for them, with an extra container of our own should we find them with more fish and shrimps than could be held in the basket they had themselves brought along.

Mr. Adap’s house was just across the school grounds and, as soon as he had dismissed our class for the day, I’d run there and sit on the bamboo steps to worry myself sick thinking of Wasig, of home. As twilight fell, I’d wonder if it would be twilight also in Wasig, at that same time. For Wasig and Mansalay, though distant by only a four hours’ hike from each other, were like the two poles of the earth. A plain called Caloocan led through grassy hills and to the sandy beaches of pookan. All this appeared to me to be a journey beyond measuring. Home was some place very far away, to be reached only after many long, wearisome hours.

The hills of Mansalay hemmed in a bay almost always steeped in gray and purple shadows by nightfall, and the clouds that hung low over the mountains were of many shapes. Some looked like the faces of beautiful women; others like humped old men or animals; and still others were like churches, towers and castles. For a moment they’d be all there in the sky, parts of a huge canvas; then night would set in. Nothing remained afterwards except the dark and a few sharp stars.

One afternoon I got so homesick and Mrs. Adap saw me crying. She was a small pretty woman, with long black hair. I ran to the yard and stood for a moment under the big camachile tree and, looking up at the branches, pretended I had seen a bird. Mrs. Adap watched me from the doorway. Some minutes later Mr. Adap arrived from school, with an armful of books. You could tell that twilight meant for him more than just the end of another day. As if he had not seen his wife at all, he lingered there awhile at the gate, studying the blue sea and the first stars in the sky. It was then that he noticed me and, smiling, said,

“Come, let us set out.”

I had known him to set out even thought with a rather tattered net, for schoolwork never quite allowed him any time to mend it. I’d tag along anyhow, for I liked watching the phosphorescent wake each fugitive minnow made, jumping clear off the broken data.

We went that night to Pookan beach, picking our way through a stand of mangrove trees and reached the water shortly. There were many strange and beautiful things in the water and up in the now dark, starry sky, but I could not ask Mr. Adap what they were. The water reached up to our knees, and we had to observe the strictest silence, he with his dala and I, close behind with the fish basket. We were like thieves in the night.

Later, resting upon a sand bank, Mr. Adap did ask, “Are you hungry now?” Indeed, we had not thought about taking supper before leaving.

I lied, saying, “Oh no, I’m not hungry yet.”

“Next time, let’s not forget to get a bite of cold rice before we go,” he said.

The night was still. In the dark, the lights of the town seemed so far away. Occasionally we ran into twigs, dry and crackly like sweet potato chips, which the tide had strewn about.

Suddenly, Mr. Adap quickened his steps. I had to hurry also, for fear of being left behind. He had heard the shrill cries of a child. Indeed, as it happened, Mrs. Adap’s baby girl squalled incessantly.

Mr. Adap could not decide whether to go home or not; but before he could make up his mind one way or the other, already he had cast the dala once more, as if his arms had willed it all by themselves. Not until I had told him that our basket had become too heavy for me did he say it was time for us to be returning.

We found Mrs. Adap in the kitchen, tending a pot of boiling rice. The child, she reported apologetically, had been such a nuisance again; were it not for the brat, she might have already prepared supper.

“Then let me have her,” said Mr. Adap.

But no sooner had he reached for the baby than he realized that, quite apart from being wet all over, he reeked of the sea.

Behind the schoolhouse was a hill on whose crest stood thick clumps of bamboos, whence came wild shrieks when the wind was strong. At times it was as though fairies were playing hide and seek perhaps.

To the left of the schoolhouse was a mango tree. It could be seen from the room where Mr. Adap held our music class. No birds nested there; crows, in fear of us school boys, avoided the tree.

One afternoon we left our books under the mango tree; we had to go to our school garden, a little way down the bottom of the hill. On returning, though, I found my music book gone. This caused me much grief and I began to nurse a grudge against the tree.

Mr. Adap did not know about it at first. The next morning, when he asked me to sing from the book, I had to borrow my seatmate’s copy. I really felt he had to be told. He had given the class the pitch, drawing the note from his violin; then he put down the instrument and turned his large, round eyes upon me questioningly. I had to tell him then.

Later, early in the evening, we went to fish again. His dala, being as hapless as ever, allowed many fishes to go, leaving countless tracings of their flight. Every which way, ripples glistened in the moonlight. It was as though the water were strewn with precious jewels. But the lost book was very much in my mind, and I could only see the gray night around us.

“What will I tell your father?” asked Miniong.

He was a boy from Wasig, too, and had been my constant companion; both of us boarded at Mr. Adap’s. There were seven other boys from the barrio studying at that time in Mansalay, and they lived in a house in a coconut grove by the beach. They cooked their own meals; they had a lamparilla instead of a kerosene lamp for reading. Miniong and I felt we were much luckier than they.

Of course, we could do nothing about the book except try looking for it. “We still have up to Friday,” said Miniong.

Friday was the day we usually returned to Wasig. Mr. Adap often dismissed us two hours early then. This allowed us to reach Caloocan while it was still light. On moonlit nights, it was fun running after stray cattle grazing by the wayside.

This week, Mother sent up a horse; it was blind in the left eye. It had gotten list and had strayed into a cornfield; the owner, maddened by the destruction wrought by the horse, gave it a good cut across the face, damaging the left eye. It was a gentle horse, though; and now that it had acquired the name Bulag it had become even more gentle.

Miniong and I rode together, he snug in the saddle; but because we had not found the book we scarcely spoke during the journey.

When we left Mansalay, the sun had not yet set; but dark overtook us readily. Before we came to the first hills, night was already upon us. When we reached Caloocan, we thought that it wouldn’t be fair to the other boys for us to gallop away. They’d be left too far behind.

I held on to Miniong’s belt as tightly as I could. I had a feeling something would happen; it seemed that spirits haunted the plain that night; at any moment, one might pull me off the saddle and carry me away. The thought so scared me I could feel my hair stand on end. I didn’t dare look back, fearing that we’d find the other boys gone, that in fact the malevolent spirits of the plain had already snatched them away.

Strangely enough, my worry over the lost book dispelled my fears. I remembered the mango tree and clearly saw myself putting down my things on top of the low V-shaped branch. Oh, how I ran out to the school garden, I remembered. Upon reaching the gate I had looked back at the mango tree and noted where and how I had placed my things, my music book included. After we had finished with the day’s gardening chores, I had hurried back and found the little pile very much intact. At what point, then, did the book disappear from sight?

“Do you see the bobog trees yonder? We’re nearer home now,” said Miniong.

If only those two bobog trees were not the home of spirits and devils that we believed them to be!

Instead of merely holding on to Miniong’s belt as I had been doing, I now clung to his waist. As we approached the first of the trees, I began to forget about the bobog trees altogether.

We came abreast of the second tree and from there the trail turned in the direction of the sea. Our half-blind horse reared and bolted, as though aware of some great danger ahead.

“He got scared and dismounted,” Miniong reported to Mother when we reached home half an hour later. “Then I dismounted also and led Bulag by its bit until we came to the seashore.”

He started laughing, suggesting that my fright had caused me to behave so foolishly, and I balled up my little fists and began pounding his arm.

3

Miniong’s mother, Tia Pulin, and his stepfather, Tatay Kanut, arrived that evening from their homestead up the river. You could see from the way Tia Pulin rolled her eyes and from Tatay Kanut’s speech that they must have stopped at no less five drinking places in Troso, the landing up the river, before proceeding by banca to the barrio. They reeked of tuba, both of them, although not exactly drunk.

“Look,” said Tia Pulin, showing me a bundle of sugar cane. “Here’s something for you.”

There was a second bundle of cane in his mother’s basket and this Miniong took, and then we went to sit by the kitchen window and there began chewing our cane. A moon three-quarters full was rising over the mangrove and swamps at the edge of the village. In her condition, Tia Pulin rolled her eyes all the more; looking at her brought a chill up the small of my back and I choked on the juice of sugar cane quite a few times.

“You two boys,” said Tatay Kanut, “you must have become starved for sugar cane in Mansalay. You should come to see my cane!”

Tatay Kanut liked to boast about his kaingin. He raised the biggest sweet potatoes and claimed he had a secret method of planting coconuts; wild pigs spared them. He raised the biggest papayas and harvested the biggest rice crop. All this, everyone said, because he was in league with spirits.

Tia Pulin didn’t roll her eyes any more. “Now, as for you,” she was telling Mother, “I have a basketful of vegetables and sweet potatoes. But where’s your husband?”

Father was away in the homestead, in the interior; and Mother said, “You have not seen him, then, in jolo? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, perhaps, he must be on his way home now and could be at Troso this very moment,” said Tatay Kanut.

“And waiting for a banca to take him down the river,” Mother said, putting her worry aside.

“Let’s take a banca up the river to fetch him,” Miniong whispered to me. “Shall we?” But before I could say a word, he added, “Only it will be getting dark soon and you’ll get scared again…”

It was not long after this when we had supper, and Tia Pulin and Tatay Kanut told stories about Jolo, meaning the clearings up the river. They saw me yawning, and Mother said, “You must turn in now. You have come all the way from Mansalay tonight, remember….”

I closed my eyes and thought of Father. By then, he must be, indeed, at the landing in Troso. It seemed I could hear someone calling faintly beyond the swamps, and I wondered why a bridge couldn’t be built over the entire length of the river so that people from jolo did not have to wait at Troso, for bancas to take them down to the village. I decided that when I grew up I would build that bridge myself. I turned the idea over and over in my mind, and then finally fell asleep.

In the morning, Father was home. Instead of heading for Troso, he said, he had taken the trail west, the one that went through Macawalo. About that time last night, when Miniong and I were chewing sugar cane to our hearts’ content, Father was making his way through Macawalo. Miniong and I were sitting by the window, tearing out bits of sugar cane. You hold the stick much in the same way you do a bamboo flute, only the result is different. You have juice in one instance, a song in the other. But what was odd was that over swamps and mangrove forest the moon hung low, it was just about then that Father must have been trudging tiredly across the Macawalo track to reach the village.

Although a strip of familiar-looking woods and cogon grass, Macawalo was a place full of spirits, according to Tatay Kanut. Legend had it that there once lived eight sisters who lost their way in that general area. They were bound for Socol, in the north, for the fiesta there, and had stopped by a brook to rest. They were happy bathing, giggling and laughing, when a young man appeared right in their midst and made friends with them. He was young and handsome, and they all had so much fun that they lost their sense of time altogether. It was to these woods that the young man led them away. He took one of the maidens for his wife and made housemaids of the others, a contentious arrangement that reduced them all to endless railing and bickering. Hence, people traveling in the Macawalo area frequently heard voices in these woods; no longer could the sisters live peaceably even to this day.

There were two trails to Barok, where Father now had found land. One was through Macawalo, and the other up the river by banca, as far as Troso. There a second trail took one past several homesteads and clearings into the area called Barok.

Tatay Kanut’s land was also in Barok. A dry, empty river was all that separated it from that of Father. As many footpaths to Tatay Kanut’s place criss-crossed the dry bed of the river as there were to a well at the bend abutted by tall cogon grass, for Tatay Kanut’s help as a healer was much sought after and from many directions people came to see him or send for him.

Father sought his help to reach a decision about Barok land. The place had struck him as rather some distance from Wasig, and was to forested, so wild. He could only keep it if Tatay Kanut would do the ceremony required for driving evil spirits away from the land, which, in fact the medicine man did. Shortly after, Father found a man named Beto from Romblon, who could stay on the land and was anxious to begin planting at once, but Tatay Kanut would not allow him to before he had butchered a pig and the four corners of his field given a dousing of its blood. This was all very strange, but Father allowed it because it did nobody any harm.

With Beto there on the land, Father could now visit it less often; but whenever he did, he stayed there for days. Beto’s little hut was by the bank of the river. Father would tell Mother endless stories about the land every time he returned from Barok, and I’d listen myself for hours on end and go to bed thinking of Barok, too.

“would you like to join me?” Father asked, one day.

But nothing would come of the invitation, although I could not show enough my eagerness for the adventure.

“Maybe, you’re too young and your mother doesn’t approve of it,” Father dissuaded me in the end. “The mosquitoes there are huge and they’re likely to eat you up, a small boy like you.”

Then came one April morning when Father took us to Romblon instead. We sailed on a little red schooner, and on account of the long stretches of calm weather, when not a breath of wind could be felt and the boat from prow to stern rocked to the tug and swing of the boom and the squeak of pulleys, we spent an entire week at sea.

In Romblon, we had a welcome addition to the family, a baby girl Nene but christened Evangeline. The name, I later realized, was a throwback to Father’s days at Normal School, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been a prescribed text and “The Song of Hiawatha” quite loved.

4

We did not return to Wasig until Nene was old enough to make the voyage. A steamer brought us to Calapan, where Father had now a new job, a much better post than the one he had held in Wasig; besides, it provided him a better salary.

We had a big house by the seaside in Calapan, only Father had to be away most of the time because his job required making trips around the province on a motorboat.

Moni, a boy from Wasig, came to live with us; so did another boy from Paclasan, who enrolled in the high school. In the afternoons, I’d join them roaming the hills in the outskirts of town, with my slingshot along. Moni was an orphan; a sad-eyed boy, he was much given to crying when teased by other boys; but he was really all right. Once when a circus came to town, we went to see the manager about distributing flyers so that we did not have to ask Mother for money for the show. The manager said all right. Until Mother heard about it and put a stop to it, we enjoyed the circus free of charge and for an entire week.

Months before she died, Moni’s mother left him seven pesos. “Keep this money,” she has said. “You’ll need it when school opens—for your books.”

But before school opening day came around, Moni had loaned the money to a schoolmate who, promptly enough, lost it in a gambling game. All afternoon, Moni sat at our kitchen steps—in tears.

Late that same afternoon, Mother said, she saw an old woman came by the house; this was Moni’s mother herself, only of course she had been dead some months before. We all concluded it was an apparition. My sister Nene began to tease Moni about the money, and he looked so miserable and sorry about it. He would run away to Manila, he said.

Early one morning, Father woke us up to say a quick goodbye, for he was starting once more on an inspection trip of the schools along the coast. It was not his practice to wake us up that way; often it would be only by morning that we would know he had left. Or we might hear about the projected trip in the evening, but we would realize he would not be gone until the following morning. This time my little sister Nene, of whom Father was very fond, made a scene and was comforted only when she was allowed to see him off. The town wharf was three kilometers away and it was rather cold that morning, so she wore a thick flannel dress.

It was hours before Father’s boat, it seemed, could weigh anchor and steam away. From the wharf, we watched her disappear behind the rocky cliffs at the end of the harbor, and then we rode home in a calesa. Against the chilly wind, Nene began to choke and cough.

She caught a rather terrible cold. The school doctor gave her some medicine but no sooner had she shown signs of recovery than her cough returned. It worsened, in fact. She had frequent fits of it and began to look like a grown-up girl, her face lining with strain.

This was October. And toward Christmas time, she got no better. After the holidays, Father too us all to Manila. Nene was in hospital for an entire month.

This was my first trip to the city. I recall now only my first automobile ride and our visit to a doctor, a specialist in children’s diseases who lived in the walled city. He had a large clinic. While in his waiting room, I tripped and spilled the contents of one of his tall cuspidors, which was so embarrassing.

He had a bird collection, this doctor. Besides numerous birds, and all of them so colorful, the aviary included a blue peacock and a talkative parrot. The cages were at the far end of the hall adjacent to his waiting room. The doctor had collected his birds in the course of his travels all over the world.

That hospital had a smell of its own I remember so distinctly. And also the elevator rides from floor to floor, and my dashing up and down the long, shiny corridors; and where Nene and Mother stayed, its door swinging nearly every moment, not particularly because someone was passing through; and then the soundless footsteps of the nurses: all this remains in my memory.

Mother put on weight during her stay. The nurses and doctors were curious about Mindoro, about Father’s work and about how we lived in Wasig; and listening to her filled me with indescribable pride.

And the hospital meals, the steam rising from the bowls of broth, the smooth half-moon roundness of mashed potatoes, the aroma of bread; and the crisp crackers in the afternoon, the tea sweetened with sugar cubes that came in a little white saucer….

But my sister did not get any better. The doctor advised that Nene return to Wasig, where perhaps the climate would do her some good.

And so, by April, we were home again.

5

I remember that night she died. We were all in her room. The night was warm, and Mother had opened the windows letting in the evening wind. Some tenants of ours from the homestead had come to the barrio to see if Nene’s condition had improved, and they were there in the room next to where Nene’s bed was, some pacing the floor, others talking in whispers. Women crowded the doorway.

Nene had brown paler and thinner than ever, but she was calm and cheerful; indeed, she smiled and smiled most of the time. Father moved restlessly about, not knowing what to do; sometimes he’d fix her up in bed, raising the pillow on which her head rested, for she experienced great difficulty in breathing.

“When you get well, we shall return to Manila,” Mother said.

“Return, Mama?” asked my little sister.

“Yes, that we shall do,” said Mother.

“I should get well quickly then,” said Nene, raising herself on her elbow. “Let me become well, mama, so we can go back to Manila and see those nice streets again and those beautiful parks covered with cool, green grass. Oh, Mama, how I want to see the elephant and the bear in the zoo….”

“You tire yourself when you talk that way,” said Mother.

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