THOUSAND YEAR EVE

I HAD never been to a radio station before, and I was shocked that it looked so ordinary. Even the offices adjacent to the disc jockeys' booths resembled those government agencies where you got your license or paid your taxes: a row of desks, clicking typewriters, worn-out, obsolete computers in a dirty beige color, a bunch of hardened secretaries, and a gaggle of people shuffling around and waiting in vague lines.

Off to one side, facing a corridor filled with people, were big square glass windows. Those were the disc jockey's booths. From small speakers perched above the windows came the sound of a woman's voice. Presumably that was what was on air at the time. Sure enough, in a corner of one of the windows was a little sign that said "On The Air"--just as I had expected it to be. The woman was weeping while speaking, and from where I stood, in the main office area, I thought I could see the figure of the woman in one of the booths, through the glare of reflections on the window.

The woman was calling for her missing mother. She was 68 years old, about five feet tall, with graying hair, and had worn a dress with blue flowers on the day she disappeared. They had gone to the zoo a week before. They had gone there because it was a Sunday and animals fascinated her. After separating ways with her daughter for a half an hour, the old woman failed to show up at a small rest area, which was their prescribed meeting place. A three-hour wait ended in a search involving a gaggle of security guards. When closing time came--

The woman's voice was interrupted by the deep, booming voice of the announcer. His tone was kind and concerned. I was surprised that it didn't sound tired, or hurried, or irritated, as I would most likely have been. It sounded just like that--exactly like that radio announcer we imagine in our head, a dislocated voice overriding everything, but a kind voice. With enough character so you could talk back to it, regard it, but with a kind of indifference that comes from authority. It sounded as if it came from another world.

The woman then resumed, explaining that her mother had Alzheimer's disease. It was strange hearing the word Alzheimer's within the tones and textures of that voice, because I could tell the woman wasn't used to saying that word, and it sat in the middle of her sentences, perfectly enunciated, like a newly built landmark that divided the past and the present. The term had been taught to her by doctors, experts, but it had surely never arisen between mother and daughter.
READ MORE:

DEAD STARS

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.

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

"In 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 nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in 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 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 as 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 prolong 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 in 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.

THE WITCH

When I was twelve years old, I used to go to Libas, about nine kilometers from the town, to visit my favorite uncle, Tio Sabelo, the head teacher of the barrio school there. I like going to Libas because of the many things to eat at my uncle’s house: cane sugar syrup, candied meat of young coconut, corn and rice cakes, ripe jackfruit, guavas from trees growing wild on a hill not far from Tio Sabelo’s
house. It was through these visits that I heard many strange stories about Minggay Awok. Awok is the word for witch in southern Leyte. Minggay was known as a witch even beyond Libas, in five outlying sitios, and considering that not uncommonly a man’s nearest neighbor was two or three hills away, her notoriety was wide. Minggay lived in a small, low hut as the back of the creek separating the barrios of Libas and Sinit-an. It squatted like a soaked hen on a steep incline and below it, six or seven meters away, two trails forked, one going to Libas and the other to Mahangin, a mountain sitio. The hut leaned dangerously to the side where the creek water ate away large chunks of earth during the rainy season. It had two small openings, a small door through which Minggay probably had to stoop to pass, and a window about two feet square facing the creek. The window was screened by a frayed jute sacking which fluttered eerily even in the daytime.

PORTRAIT OF A GREAT MAN

DR. RUFINO T. Ventanilla knew this capricious mood of the city but he was too irritated to care. To the east, where the sun, intruder of sleep and stolen love, was slowly rising, he could see the black smoke spiraling above the shipyards. He and Serafin, his chauffeur, whose unkempt head and dirty nape annoyed him, had left the snarled traffic of Avenida Rizal. They were now speeding along the street leading to Mabini Avenue. It was a comparatively quiet street. All he could see were two or three employees from his bureau—hurrying, hurrying, because of the stern compulsion of the Bundy clock he himself had ordered installed according to civil service requirements. The employees had grumbled: but it did not matter.

As the sleek car moved slowly he wanted to ask Serafin what it was he had forgotten of the items Lita had asked to him to bring, but forcibly caught himself in time. How would Serafin know? What Lita wanted was strictly a matter between them. Let’s see, remembering the tyrannical, exciting lips of Lita, the fierce passionate hours at dawn. A case of evaporated milk, a sack of white sugar, and… He was baffled.

The car eased to a stop before the high, imposing structure housing his office. He heaved his heavy bulk from the front seat, yanking his bulging black portfolio, and told Serafin to send in the personnel clerk right away. As he turned right from the long flight of steps, he saw three figures. The thin, angular girl whom he had assigned to the research section smiled at him as she wiped her pink eyeglasses.

“Don’t be in a hurry, doctor, you are on time; it’s still five minutes to eight,” she said without apparent guile.

He managed a parody of a laugh and said, “Yes. Yes. That’s good.” Darn her, doesn’t she know I am the Deputy Commissioner? I will fire her yet. But he knew he never would; she was the protégée of Assemblyman Juan Tuviera y Sibulsibul.

He strode into his office and found himself barricaded by the hill of papers on his desk. If only I can sweep all this blasted correspondence aside. The refrigerator in the inner room to his right was purring softly.

He shouted at Zabala, his stenotypist and asked him if he had put in the bottle of Schenley in the frigidaire. When Zabala said yes, Dr. Ventanilla said: “What are you standing there for? Give it to me.” Silently, as he rested his bulk on the plush armchair, he drummed his fingers and was discomfited to find that the papers and bundles of previous records were scattered as far as the edge of the table. He tried to remember what the third item was that Lita wanted.

ESSENCE

 

WE had just finished lunch in a small café along Katipunan Road. Two cups of steamy brew enveloped our table in a delicious aroma.

"So where did you meet?" I asked my friend Patrick as he put down his coffee cup.

"In the Faculty Center in UP."

"Again? How come you meet a lot of guys there? I'm always there and nothing ever happens."

Patrick pointed to his face and smiled.

"Che!" I replied laughing. But I knew that it was true. Patrick was not really that good looking, but he had this sexy air about him. And he had fair skin which is, for most Filipinos, a prerequisite for beauty. I looked at the mirror behind him and saw my dark, emaciated reflection.

AT WAR’S END: AN ELEGY

 

THE evening before he killed himself, Virgilio Serrano gave a dinner party. He invited five guests—friends and classmates in university— myself included. Since we lived on campus in barracks built by the U.S. Army, he sent his Packard to fetch us.

Virgilio lived alone in a pre-war chalet that belonged to his family. Four servants and a driver waited on him hand and foot. The chalet, partly damaged, was one of the few buildings in Ermita that survived the bombardment and street fighting to liberate Manila.

It had been skillfully restored; the broken lattices, fretwork, shell windows and wrought iron fence had been repaired or replaced at considerable expense. A hedge of bandera española had been planted and the scorched frangipani and hibiscus shrubs had been pruned carefully. Thus, Virgilio’s house was an ironic presence in the violated neighborhood.

He was on the porch when the car came to a crunching halt on the graveled driveway. He shook our hands solemnly, then ushered us into the living room. In the half-light, everything in the room glowed, shimmered or shone. The old ferruginous narra floor glowed. The pier glass coruscated. The bentwood furniture from the house in Jaen looked as if they had been burnished. In a corner, surrounded by bookcases, a black Steinway piano sparkled like glass.

Virgilio was immaculate in white de hilo pants and cotton shirt. I felt ill at ease in my surplus khakis and combat boots.

We were all in our second year. Soon we will be on different academic paths—Victor in philosophy; Zacarias in physics and chemistry; Enrique in electrical engineering; and Apolonio, law. Virgilio and I have both decided to make a career in English literature. Virgilio was also enrolled in the Conservatory and in courses in the philosophy of science.

We were all in awe of Virgilio. He seemed to know everything. He also did everything without any effort. He had not been seen studying or cramming for an exam in any subject, be it history, anthropology or calculus. Yet the grades that he won were only a shade off perfection.