DEAD STARS by Paz Marquez Benitez 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. Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain. He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom. The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard. Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del

Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now-One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom. A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening. He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain. To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I had once before." "Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved. "A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!" He laughed with her. "The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without help." "As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--" "I was thinking of Mr. Manalang." Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and banged away as the player's moods

altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice. He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doa Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality. On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door. Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring." He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's." She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman. That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on. It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding. "Up here I find--something--"

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?" "No; youth--its spirit--" "Are you so old?" "And heart's desire." Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man? "Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery." "Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream. "Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--" "Not in some," quickly. "Not in you." "You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery." "I could study you all my life and still not find it." "So long?" "I should like to." Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments. Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She and Doa Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit to her father; how Doa Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks. After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young coconut looked like-"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"--while the children,

convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving beach. Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps, narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand. When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure. "I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection. "Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach." There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm. "The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can visit." "The last? Why?" "Oh, you will be too busy perhaps." He noted an evasive quality in the answer. "Do I seem especially industrious to you?" "If you are, you never look it." "Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be." "But--" "Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself. "I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause. She waited. "A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."

"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely "Who? I?"

"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--" "Are you withdrawing the compliment?"

"Oh, no!" "You said I am calm and placid." "That is what I think." "I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves." It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase. "I should like to see your home town." "There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes squashes." That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him. "Nothing? There is you." "Oh, me? But I am here." "I will not go, of course, until you are there." "Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!" "Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment." She laughed. "Can't I come to say good-bye?" "We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees." "Oh, you don't need to!" "Could I find that?" "No, but I want to." "If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly. "There is no time." "I'll inquire about--" "What?" "The house of the prettiest girl in the town." "There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere." "It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically. "I thought you, at least, would not say such things." The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness. "Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life." Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned gold. "No, of course you are right." "Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back. "I am going home." The end of an impossible dream! "When?" after a long silence. "Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at home." She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time." "Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--" "If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily. "Exactly." "It must be ugly." "Always?"

"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things." "Old things?" "Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second. Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind. Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye."

Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life. Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop. The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again, where, according to the old proverb, all processions end. At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession. A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home. Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening" and fell into step with the girl. "I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was both excited and troubled. "No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go." "Oh, is the Judge going?" "Yes." The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As lawyer--and as lover-Alfredo had found that out long before. "Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you." Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable. "For what?" "For your approaching wedding." Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?

II ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart of the town--heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old brickroofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and convento, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts. Came too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes, heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device. Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints' platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax. The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look unaware, and could not. The line moved on.

"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about getting the news," she continued. He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice--cool, almost detached from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song. "Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly "When they are of friends, yes." "Would you come if I asked you?" "When is it going to be?" "May," he replied briefly, after a long pause. "May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony. "They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?" "Why not?" "No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?" "If you will ask me," she said with disdain. "Then I ask you." "Then I will be there." The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill. There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home. "Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose between something you wanted to do and something you had to do?" "No!" "I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such a situation." "You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.

"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him." "But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all." "Doesn't it--interest you?" "Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house." Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away. Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive. He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which he tried to control. She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average. She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended. "She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out bad." What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta? "You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive. "But do you approve?" "Of what?"

"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"

"What she did." "No," indifferently. "Well?" He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is that it is not necessarily wicked." "Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that." "My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she is not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not." "She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment. "The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice. "Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next? "Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will say." Her voice trembled. Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say--what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of the wedding? "Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to his lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare--" "What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man." Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack on Julia Salas?

"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere man word such a plea? "If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are tired of me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved. The last word had been said.

III AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to find that elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up. He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond her reach. Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost

themselves in the purple shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening. The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat-slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lakeshore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted. "Is the abogado there? Abogado!" "What abogado?" someone irately asked. That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing. It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy--Tandang "Binday"-that noon for Santa Cruz. Seor Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house." Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her." San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him. It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help. Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the water. How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelas making scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-andchicken." The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness. How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of

incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished prayer. A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz. Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise. "Good evening," he said, raising his hat. "Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?" "On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint. "Won't you come up?" He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last--he was shaking her hand. She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush. Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly interested him. The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.

So that was all over. Why had he obstinately clung to that dream? So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens. 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. Wedding Dance By Amador Daguio Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the headhigh threshold. Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound that carried him across to the narrow door. He slid back the cover, stepped inside, then pushed the cover back in place. After some moments during which he seemed to wait, he talked to the listening darkness. Im sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it. The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house like muffled roars of falling waters. The woman who had moved with a start when the sliding door opened had been hearing the gangsas for she did not know how long. There was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave no sign that she heard Awiyao, but continued to sit unmoving in the darkness. But Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on all fours to the middle of the room; he knew exactly where the stove was. With bare fingers he stirred the covered smoldering embers, and blew into the stove. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of pine on them, then full round logs as his arms. The room brightened. Why dont you go out, he said, and join the dancing women? He felt a pang inside him, because what he said was really not the right thing to say and because the woman did not stir. You should join the dancers, he said, as ifas if nothing had happened. He looked at the woman huddled in a corner of the room, leaning against the wall. The stove fire played with strange moving shadows and lights upon her face. She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger or hate. Go outgo out and dance. If you really dont hate me for this separation, go out and dance. One of the men will see you dance well; he will like your dancing, he will marry you. Who knows but that, with him, you will be luckier than you were with me.

I dont want any man, she said sharply. I dont want any other man. He felt relieved that at least she talked: You know very well that I wont want any other woman either. You know that, dont you? Lumnay, you know it, dont you? She did not answer him. You know it Lumnay, dont you? he repeated. Yes, I know, she said weakly. It is not my fault, he said, feeling relieved. You cannot blame me; I have been a good husband to you. Neither can you blame me, she said. She seemed about to cry. No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have nothing to say against you. He set some of the burning wood in place. Its only that a man must have a child. Seven harvests is just too long to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance before it is too late for both of us. This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in. She wound the blanket more snugly around herself. You know that I have done my best, she said. I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed many chickens in my prayers. Yes, I know. You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in the terrace because I butchered one of our pigs without your permission? I did it to appease Kabunyan, because, like you, I wanted to have a child. But what could I do? Kabunyan does not see fit for us to have a child, he said. He stirred the fire. The spark rose through the crackles of the flames. The smoke and soot went up the ceiling. Lumnay looked down and unconsciously started to pull at the rattan that kept the split bamboo flooring in place. She tugged at the rattan flooring. Each time she did this the split bamboo went up and came down with a slight rattle. The gong of the dancers clamorously called in her care through the walls. Awiyao went to the corner where Lumnay sat, paused before her, looked at her bronzed and sturdy face, then turned to where the jars of water stood piled one over the other.

Awiyao took a coconut cup and dipped it in the top jar and drank. Lumnay had filled the jars from the mountain creek early that evening. I came home, he said. Because I did not find you among the dancers. Of course, I am not forcing you to come, if you dont want to join my wedding ceremony. I came to tell you that Madulimay, although I am marrying her, can never become as good as you are. She is not as strong in planting beans, not as fast in cleaning water jars, not as good keeping a house clean. You are one of the best wives in the whole village. That has not done me any good, has it? She said. She looked at him lovingly. She almost seemed to smile. He put the coconut cup aside on the floor and came closer to her. He held her face between his hands and looked longingly at her beauty. But her eyes looked away. Never again would he hold her face. The next day she would not be his any more. She would go back to her parents. He let go of her face, and she bent to the floor again and looked at her fingers as they tugged softly at the split bamboo floor. This house is yours, he said. I built it for you. Make it your own, live in it as long as you wish. I will build another house for Madulimay. I have no need for a house, she said slowly. Ill go to my own house. My parents are old. They will need help in the planting of the beans, in the pounding of the rice. I will give you the field that I dug out of the mountains during the first year of our marriage, he said. You know I did it for you. You helped me to make it for the two of us. I have no use for any field, she said. He looked at her, then turned away, and became silent. They were silent for a time. Go back to the dance, she said finally. It is not right for you to be here. They will wonder where you are, and Madulimay will not feel good. Go back to the dance. I would feel better if you could come, and dancefor the last time. The gangsas are playing. You know that I cannot. Lumnay, he said tenderly. Lumnay, if I did this it is because of my need for a child. You know that life is not worth living without a child. The man have mocked me behind my back. You know that. I know it, he said. I will pray that Kabunyan will bless you and Madulimay.

She bit her lips now, then shook her head wildly, and sobbed. She thought of the seven harvests that had passed, the high hopes they had in the beginning of their new life, the day he took her away from her parents across the roaring river, on the other side of the mountain, the trip up the trail which they had to climb, the steep canyon which they had to cross. The waters boiled in her mind in forms of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters tolled and growled, resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the stiff cliffs; they were far away now from somewhere on the tops of the other ranges, and they had looked carefully at the buttresses of rocks they had to step ona slip would have meant death. They both drank of the water then rested on the other bank before they made the final climb to the other side of the mountain. She looked at his face with the fire playing upon his featureshard and strong, and kind. He had a sense of lightness in his way of saying things which often made her and the village people laugh. How proud she had been of his humor. The muscles where taut and firm, bronze and compact in their hold upon his skullhow frank his bright eyes were. She looked at his body that carved out of the mountains five fields for her; his wide and supple torso heaved as if a slab of shining lumber were heaving; his arms and legs flowed down in fluent muscleshe was strong and for that she had lost him. She flung herself upon his knees and clung to them. Awiyao, Awiyao, my husband, she cried. I did everything to have a child, she said passionately in a hoarse whisper. Look at me, she cried. Look at my body. Then it was full of promise. It could dance; it could work fast in the fields; it could climb the mountains fast. Even now it is firm, full. But, Awiyao, I am useless. I must die. It will not be right to die, he said, gathering her in his arms. Her whole warm naked naked breast quivered against his own; she clung now to his neck, and her hand lay upon his right shoulder; her hair flowed down in cascades of gleaming darkness. I dont care about the fields, she said. I dont care about the house. I dont care for anything but you. Ill have no other man. Then youll always be fruitless. Ill go back to my father, Ill die. Then you hate me, he said. If you die it means you hate me. You do not want me to have a child. You do not want my name to live on in our tribe. She was silent.

If I do not try a second time, he explained, it means Ill die. Nobody will get the fields I have carved out of the mountains; nobody will come after me. If you failif you fail this second time she said thoughtfully. The voice was a shudder. Nono, I dont want you to fail. If I fail, he said, Ill come back to you. Then both of us will die together. Both of us will vanish from the life of our tribe. The gongs thundered through the walls of their house, sonorous and faraway. Ill keep my beads, she said. Awiyao, let me keep my beads, she half-whispered. You will keep the beads. They come from far-off times. My grandmother said they come from up North, from the slanteyed people across the sea. You keep them, Lumnay. They are worth twenty fields. Ill keep them because they stand for the love you have for me, she said. I love you. I love you and have nothing to give. She took herself away from him, for a voice was calling out to him from outside. Awiyao! Awiyao! O Awiyao! They are looking for you at the dance! I am not in hurry. The elders will scold you. You had better go. Not until you tell me that it is all right with you. It is all right with me. He clasped her hands. I do this for the sake of the tribe, he said. I know, she said. He went to the door. Awiyao! He stopped as if suddenly hit by a spear. In pain he turned to her. Her face was in agony. It pained him to leave. She had been wonderful to him. What was it that made a man wish for a child? What was it in life, in the work in the field, in the planting and harvest, in the silence of the night, in the communing with husband and wife, in the whole life of the tribe itself that made man wish for the laughter and speech of a child? Suppose he changed his mind? Why did the unwritten law demand, anyway, that a man, to be a man, must have a child to come after him? And if he was fruitless

but he loved Lumnay. It was like taking away of his life to leave her like this. Awiyao, she said, and her eyes seemed to smile in the light. The beads! He turned back and walked to the farthest corner of their room, to the trunk where they kept their worldly possessionhis battle-ax and his spear points, her betel nut box and her beads. He dug out from the darkness the beads which had been given to him by his grandmother to give to Lumnay on the beads on, and tied them in place. The white and jade and deep orange obsidians shone in the firelight. She suddenly clung to him, clung to his neck as if she would never let him go. Awiyao! Awiyao, it is hard! She gasped, and she closed her eyes and huried her face in his neck. The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened, and he buried out into the night. Lumnay sat for some time in the darkness. Then she went to the door and opened it. The moonlight struck her face; the moonlight spilled itself on the whole village. She could hear the throbbing of the gangsas coming to her through the caverns of the other houses. She knew that all the houses were empty that the whole tribe was at the dance. Only she was absent. And yet was she not the best dancer of the village? Did she not have the most lightness and grace? Could she not, alone among all women, dance like a bird tripping for grains on the ground, beautifully timed to the beat of the gangsas? Did not the men praise her supple body, and the women envy the way she stretched her hands like the wings of the mountain eagle now and then as she danced? How long ago did she dance at her own wedding? Tonight, all the women who counted, who once danced in her honor, were dancing now in honor of another whose only claim was that perhaps she could give her husband a child. It is not right. It is not right! she cried. How does she know? How can anybody know? It is not right, she said. Suddenly she found courage. She would go to the dance. She would go to the chief of the village, to the elders, to tell them it was not right. Awiyao was hers; nobody could take him away from her. Let her be the first woman to complain, to denounce the unwritten rule that a man may take another woman. She would tell Awiyao to come back to her. He surely would relent. Was not their love as strong as the river? She made for the other side of the village where the dancing was. There was a flaming glow over the whole place; a great bonfire was burning. The gangsas clamored more loudly now, and it seemed they were calling to her. She was near at last. She could see the dancers clearly now. The man leaped lightly with their gangsas as they circled the dancing women decked in feast garments and beads, tripping on the ground like

graceful birds, following their men. Her heart warmed to the flaming call of the dance; strange heat in her blood welled up, and she started to run. But the gleaming brightness of the bonfire commanded her to stop. Did anybody see her approach? She stopped. What if somebody had seen her coming? The flames of the bonfire leaped in countless sparks which spread and rose like yellow points and died out in the night. The blaze reached out to her like a spreading radiance. She did not have the courage to break into the wedding feast. Lumnay walked away from the dancing ground, away from the village. She thought of the new clearing of beans which Awiyao and she had started to make only four moons before. She followed the trail above the village. When she came to the mountain stream she crossed it carefully. Nobody held her hand, and the stream water was very cold. The trail went up again, and she was in the moonlight shadows among the trees and shrubs. Slowly she climbed the mountain. When Lumnay reached the clearing, she cold see from where she stood the blazing bonfire at the edge of the village, where the wedding was. She could hear the far-off clamor of the gongs, still rich in their sonorousness, echoing from mountain to mountain. The sound did not mock her; they seemed to call far to her, to speak to her in the language of unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their gratitude for her sacrifice. Her heartbeat began to sound to her like many gangsas. Lumnay thought of Awiyao as the Awiyao she had known long ago a strong, muscular boy carrying his heavy loads of fuel logs down the mountains to his home. She had met him one day as she was on her way to fill her clay jars with water. He had stopped at the spring to drink and rest; and she had made him drink the cool mountain water from her coconut shell. After that it did not take him long to decide to throw his spear on the stairs of her fathers house in token on his desire to marry her. The mountain clearing was cold in the freezing moonlight. The wind began to stir the leaves of the bean plants. Lumnay looked for a big rock on which to sit down. The bean plants now surrounded her, and she was lost among them. A few more weeks, a few more months, a few more harvestswhat did it matter? She would be holding the bean flowers, soft in the texture, silken almost, but moist where the dew got into them, silver to look at, silver on the light blue, blooming whiteness, when the morning comes. The stretching of the bean pods full length from the hearts of the wilting petals would go on. Lumnays fingers moved a long, long time among the growing bean pods.

THE HOUSE ON ZAPOTE STREET Quijano de Manila Dr. Leonardo Quitangon, a soft-spoken, mildmannered, cool-tempered Caviteno, was still fancy-free at 35 when he returned to Manila, after six years abroad. Then, at the University of Santo Tomas, where he went to reach, he met Lydia Cabading, a medical intern. He liked her quiet ways and began to date her steadily. They went to the movies and to baketball games and he took her a number of times to his house in Sta. Mesa, to meet his family. Lydia was then only 23 and looked like a sweet unspoiled girl, but there was a slight air of mystery about her. Leonardo and his brothers noticed that she almost never spoke of her home life or her childhood; she seemed to have no gay early memories to share with her lover, as sweethearts usually crave to do. And whenever it looked as if she might have to stay out late, she would say: "I'll have to tell my father first". And off she would go, wherever she was, to tell her father, though it meant going all the way to Makati, Rizal, where she lived with her parents in a new house on Zapote Street. The Quitangons understood that she was an only child and that her parents were, therefore, overzealous in looking after her. Her father usually took her to school and fetched her after classes, and had been known to threaten to arrest young men who stared at her on the streets or pressed too close against her on jeepneys. This high-handedness seemed natural enough, for Pablo Cabading, Lydia's father was a member of the Manila Police Depatment. After Lydia finished her internship, Leopardo Quitangon became a regular visitor at the house on Zapote Street: he was helping her prepare for the board exams. Her family seemed to like him. The mother Anunciacion, struck him as a mousy woman unable to speak save at her husband's bidding. There was a foster son, a little boy the Cabadings had adopted. As for Pablo Cabading, he was a fine strapping man, an Ilocano, who gave the impression of being taller than he was and looked every inch an agent of the law: full of brawn and guts and force, and smoldering with vitality. He was a natty dresser, liked youthful colors and styles, decorated his house with pictures of himself and, at 50, looked younger than his inarticulate wife, who was actually two years younger than he. When Leonardo started frequenting the house on Zapote Street, Cabading told him: ill be frank with you. None of Lydia's boy friends ever lasted ten minutes in this house. I didn't like them and I told them so and made them get out." Then he added laying a hand on the young doctor's shoulder:" But I like you. You are a good man."

The rest of the household were two very young maids who spoke almost no Tagalog, and two very fierce dogs, chained to the front door in the day time, unchained in the front yard at night. The house of Zapote Street is in the current architectural clich: the hoity-toity Philippine split-level suburban stylea half-story perched above the living area, to which it is bound by the slope of the roof and which it overlooks from a balcony, so that a person standing in the sala can see the doors of the bedrooms and bathroom just above his head. The house is painted, as is also the current fashion, in various pastel shades, a different color to every three or four planks. The inevitable piazza curves around two sides of the house, which has a strip of lawn and a low wall all around it. The Cabadings did not keep a car, but the house provides for an eventual garage and driveway. This, and the furniture, the shell lamps and the fancy bric-a-brac that clutters the narrow house indicate that the Cabadings had not only risen high enough to justify their split-level pretensions but were expecting to go higher. Lydia took the board exams and passed them. The lovers asked her father's permission to wed. Cabading laid down two conditions: that the wedding would ba a lavish one and that was to pay a downy of P5.000.00. The young doctor said that he could afford the big wedding but the big dowry. Cabading shrugged his shoulders; no dowry, no marriage. Leonarado spent some frantic weeks scraping up cash and managed to gather P3.000.00. Cabading agreed to reduce his price to that amount, then laid down a final condition: after the wedding, Lydia and Leonardo must make their home at the house on Zapote Street. "I built this house for Lydia," said Cabading, "and I want her to live here even when she's married. Besides, her mother couldn't bear to be separated from Lydia, her only child." There was nothing. Leonardo could do but consent. Lydia and Leonardo were on September 10 last year, at the Cathedral of Manila, with Mrs. Delfin Montano, wife of the Cavite governor, and Senator Ferdinand Marcos as sponsors. The reception was at the Selecta. The status gods of Suburdia were properly propitiated. Then the newlyweds went to live on Zapote Street -- and Leonardo almost immediately realized why Lydia had been so reticent and mysterious about her home life. The cozy family group that charmed him in courtship days turned out to be rather too cozy. The entire household revolved in submission around Pablo Cabading. The daughter, mother, the foster-son, the maids and even the dogs trembled when the lifted his voice. Cabading liked to brag that was a "killer": in 1946 he

had shot dead two American soldiers he caught robbing a neighbor's house in Quezon City. Leonardo found himself within a family turned in on itself, self-enclosed and self-sufficient in a house that had no neighbors and no need for any. His brothers say that he made more friends in the neighborhood within the couple of months he stayed there than the Cabadings had made in a year. Pablo Cabading did not like what his to stray out of, and what was not his to stray into, his house. And within that house he wanted to be the center of everything, even of his daughter's honeymoon. Whenever Leonardo and Lydia went to the movies or for a ride, Cabading insisted on being taken along. If they seated him on the back scat while they sat together in front, be raged and glowered. He wanted to sit in front with them. When Leonardo came home from work, he must not tarry with Lydia in the bedroom chatting: both of them must come down at once to the sala and talk with their father. Leonardo explained that he was not much of a talking: "That's why I fell in love with Lydia, because she's the quiet type too". No matter, said Cabading. They didn't have to talk at all; he would do all the talking himself, so long as they sat there in the sala before his eyes. So, his compact family group sat around him at night, silent, while Cabading talked and talked. But, finally, the talk had stop, the listeners had to rise and retire - and it was this moment that Cabading seemed unable to bear. He couldn't bear to see Lydia and Leonardo rise and go up together to their room. One night, unable to bear it any longer he shouted, as they rose to retire: "Lydia, you sleep with your mother tonight. She has a toothache." After a dead look at her husband, Lydia obeyed. Leonardo went to bed alone. The incident would be repeated: there would always be other reasons, besides Mrs. Cabading's toothaches. What horrified Leonardo was not merely what being done to him but his increasing acquiesces. Had his spirit been so quickly broken? Was he, too, like the rest of the household, being drawn to revolve, silently and obediently, around the master of the house? Once, late at night, he suddenly showed up at his parents house in Sta. Mesa and his brothers were shocked at the great in him within so short a time. He looked terrified. What had happened? His car had broken down and he had had it repaired and now he could not go home. But why not?

"You don't know my father-in-law," he groaned. "Everybody in that house must be in by a certain hour. Otherwise, the gates are locked, the doors are locked, the windows are locked. Nobody can get in anymore! A younger brother, Gene offered to accompany him home and explain to Cabading what had happened. The two rode to Zapote and found the house dark and locked up. Says Gene: "That memory makes my blood boil - my eldest brother fearfully clanging and clanging the gate, and nobody to let him in. 1 wouldn't have waited a second, but he waited five, ten, fifteen minutes, knocking at thai gate, begging to be let in. I couldn't have it!" In the end the two brothers rode back to Sta. Mesa, where Leonardo spent the night. When he returned to the house on Zapote the next day, his father-in-law greeted him with a sarcastic question: "Where were you? At a basketball game?" Leonardo became anxious to take his wife away from that house. He talked it over with her, then they went to tell her father. Said Cabading bluntly: "If she goes with you, I'll shoot her head before your eyes." His brothers urged him to buy a gun, but Leonardo felt in his pocket and said, "I've got my rosary." Cried his brother Gene: "You can't fight a gun with a rosary!". When Lydia took her oath as a physician, Cabading announced that only he and his wife would accompany Lydia to the ceremony. I would not be fair, he said, to let Leonardo, who had not borne the expenses of Lydia's education, to share that moment of glory too. Leonardo said that, if he would like them at least to use his car. The offer was rejected. Cabading preferred to hire a taxi. After about two months at the house on Zapote Street, Leonardo moved out, alone. Her parents would not let Lydia go and she herself was too afraid to leave. During the succeeding weeks, efforts to contact her proved futile. The house on Zapote became even more closed to the outside world. If Lydia emerged from it at all, she was always accompanied by her father, mother or fosterbrother, or by all three. When her husband heard that she had started working at a hospital he went there to see her but instead met her father coming to fetch her. The very next day, Lydia was no longer working at the hospital. Leonardo knew that she was with child and he was determined to bear all her prenatal expenses. He went to Zapote one day when her father was out and persuaded her to come out to the yard but could not make her make the money he offered across the locked gate. "Just mail it," she cried and fled into the

house. He sent her a check by registered mail; it was promptly mailed back to him. On Christmas Eve, Leonardo returned to the house on Zapote with a gift for his wife, and stood knocking at the gate for so long the neighbors gathered at windows to watch him. Finally, he was allowed to enter, present his gift to Lydia and talk with her for a moment. She said that her father seemed agreeable to a meeting with Leonardo's father, to discuss the young couple's problem. So the elder Quitangon and two of his younger sons went to Zapote one evening. The lights were on in Cabading house, but nobody responded to their knocking. Then all the lights were turned off. As they stood wondering what to do, a servant girl came and told them that the master was out. (Lydia would later tell them that they had not been admitted because her father had not yet decided what she was to say to them.) The last act of this curious drama began Sunday last week when Leonardo was astounded to receive an early-morning phone call from his wife. She said she could no longer bear to be parted from him and bade him pick her up at a certain church, where she was with her foster brother. Leonardo rushed to the church, picked up two, dropped the boy off at a street near Zapote, then sped with Lydia to Maragondon, Cavite where the Quitangons have a house. He stopped at a gasoline station to call up his brothers in Sta. Mesa, to tell them what he had done and to warn them that Cabading would surely show up there. "Get Mother out of the house," he told his brothers. At about ten in the morning, a taxi stopped before the Quitangon house in Sta. Mesa and Mrs. Cabading got out and began screaming at the gate: "Where's my daughter? Where's my daughter?" Gene and Nonilo Quitangin went out to the gate and invited her to come in. "No! No! All I want is my daughter!" she screamed. Cabading, who was inside the waiting taxi, then got out and demanded that the Quitangons produce Lydia. Vexed, Nonilo Quitangon cried: "Abah, what have we do with where your daughter is? Anyway, she's with her husband." At that, Cabading ran to the taxi, snatched a submachinegun from a box, and trained it on Gene Quitangon. (Nonilo had run into the house to get a gun.) "Produce my daughter at once or I'll shoot you all down!" shouted Cabading. Gene, the gun's muzzle practically in his face, sought to pacify the older man: "Why can't we talk this over quietly, like decent people, inside the house? Look, we're creating a scandal in the neighborhood.." Cabading lowered his gun. "I give you till midnight tonight to produce my daughter," he growled. "If you don't, you better ask the PC to guard this house!" Then he and his wife drove off in the taxi, just a moment before the mobile police patrol the neighbors had

called arrived. The police advised Gene to file a complaint with the fiscal's office. Instead, Gene decided to go to the house on Zapote Street, hoping that "diplomacy" would work. To his surprise, he was admitted at once by a smiling and very genial Cabading. "You are a brave man," he told Gene, "and a lucky one", And he ordered a coke brought for the visitor. Gene said that he was going to Cavite but could not promise to "produce". Lydia by midnight: it was up to the couple to decide whether they would come back. It was about eight in the evening when Gene arrived in Maragondon. As his car drove into the yard of this family's old house, Lydia and Leonardo appeared at a window and frantically asked what had happened. "Nothing," said Gene, and their faces lit up. "We're having our honeymoon at last," Lydia told Gene as he entered the house. And the old air of dread, of mystery, did seem to have lifted from her face. But it was there again when, after supper, he told them what had happened in Sta. Mesa. "I can't go back," she moaned. "He'll kill me! He'll kill me!" "He has cooled down now," said Gene. "He seems to be a reasonable man after all." "Oh, you don't know him!" cried Lydia. "I've known him longer, and I've never, never been happy!" And the brothers at last had glimpses of the girlhood she had been so reticent about. She told them of Cabading's baffling changes of temper, especially toward her; how smiles and found words and caresses could abruptly turn into beatings when his mood darkened. Leonardo said that his father-in-law was an artista, "Remember how he used to fan me when I supped there while I was courting Lydia?" (At about that time, in Sta. Mesa, Nonilo Quitanongon, on guard at the gate of his family's house, saw Cabading drive past three times in a taxi.) "I can't force you to go back," said Gene. "You'll have to decide that yourselves. But what, actually, are you planning to do? You can't stay forever here in Maragondon. What would you live on?" The two said they would talk it over for a while in their room. Gene waited at the supper table and when a long time had passed and they had not come back he went to the room. Finding the door ajar, he looked in. Lydia and Leonardo were on their knees on the floor, saying the rosary, Gene returned to the supper table. After another long wait, the couple came out of the room.

Said Lydia: "We have prayed together and we have decided to die together. We'll go back with you, in the morning." They were back in Manila early the next morning. Lydia and Leonardo went straight to the house in Sta. Mesa, where all their relatives and friends warned them not to go back to the house on Zapote Street, as they had decided to do. Confused anew, they went to the Manila police headquarters to ask for advice, but the advice given seemed drastic to them: summon Cabading and have it out with him in front of his superior officer. Leonardo's father then offered to go to Zapote with Gene and Nonilo, to try to reason with Cabading. They found him in good humor, full of smiles and hearty greetings. He reproached his balae for not visiting him before. "I did come once," drily remarked the elder Quitangon, "but no one would open the gate." Cabading had his wife called. She came into the room and sat down. "Was I in the house that night our balae came?" her husband asked her. "No, you were out," she replied. Having spoken her piece, she got up and left the room. (On their various visits to the house on Zapote Street, the Quitangons noticed that Mrs. Cabading appeared only when summoned and vanished as soon as she had done whatever was expected of her). Cabading then announced that he no longer objected to Lydia's moving out of the house to live with her husband in an apartment of their own. Overjoyed, the Quitangons urged Cabading to go with them in Sta. Mesa, so that the newlyweds could be reconciled with Lydia's parents. Cabading readily agreed. When they arrived in Sta. Mesa, Lydia and Leonardo were sitting on a sofa in the sala. "Why have you done this?" her father chided her gently. "If you wanted to move out, did you have to run away?" To Leonardo, he said: "And you - are angry with me?" house by themselves. Gene Quitangon felt so felt elated he proposed a celebration: "I'll throw a blow-out! Everybody is invited! This is on me!" So they all went to Max's in Quezon City and had a very merry fried-chicken party. "Why, this is a family reunion!" laughed Cabading. "This should be on me!" But Gene would not let him pay the bill. Early the next morning, Cabading called up the Sta. Mesa house to pay that his wife had fallen ill. Would Lydia please visit her? Leonardo and Lydia went to Zapote, found nothing the matter with her mother, and returned to Sta. Mesa. After lunch, Leonardo left for his classes. Then Cabading called up again. Lydia's mother refused to eat and kept asking for her daughter. Would Lydia please drop in again at the house on Zapote? Gene and Nonilo Quitangon said they might as well accompany Lydia there and start moving out her things.

When they arrived at the Zapote house, the Quitangon brothers were amused by what they saw. Mrs. Cabading, her eyes closed, lay on the parlor sofa, a large towel spread out beneath her. "She has been lying there all day," said Cabading, "tossing restlessly, asking for you, Lydia." Gene noted that the towel was neatly spread out and didn't look crumpled at all, and that Mrs. Cabading was obviously just pretending to be asleep. He smiled at the childishness of the stratagem, but Lydia was past being amused. She wont straight to her room, were they heard her pulling out drawers. While the Quitangons and Cabading were conversing, the supposedly sick mother slipped out of the sofa and went upstairs to Lydia's room. Cabading told the Quitangons that he wanted Lydia and Leonardo to stay there; at the house in Zapote. "I thought all that was settled last night," Gene groaned. "I built this house for Lydia," persisted Cabading, "and this house is hers. If she and her husband want to be alone, I and my wife will move out of here, turn this house over to them." Gene wearily explained that Lydia and Leonardo preferred the apartment they had already leased. Suddenly the men heard the clatter of a drawer falling upstairs. Gene surmised that it had fallen in a struggle between mother and daughter. "Excuse me," said Cabading, rising. As he went upstairs, he said to the Quitangons, over his shoulder, Don't misunderstand me. I'm not going to 'coach' Lydia". He went into Lydia's room and closed the door behind him. After a long while, Lydia and her father came out of the room together and came down to the sala together. Lydia was clasping a large crucifix. There was no expression on her face when she told the Quitangon boys to go home. "But I thought we were going to start moving your things out this afternoon,," said Gene. She glanced at the crucifix and said it was one of the first things she wanted taken to her new home. "Just tell Narding to fetch me," she said. Back in Sta. Mesa, Gene and Nonilo had the painful task of telling Leonardo, when he phoned, that Lydia was back in the house on Zapote. "Why did you leave her there?" cried Leonardo. "He'll beat her up! I'm going to get her." Gene told him not you go alone, to pass by the Sta. Mesa house first and pick up Nonilo. Gene could not go along; he had to catch a bus for Subic, where he works. When Leonardo arrived, Gene told him: "Don't force Lydia to go with you. If she doesn't want to, leave at once. Do not, for any reason, be persuaded to stay there too." When his brother had left for Zapote, Gene realized that he was not sure he was going to Subic. He left too worried. He knew he couldn't rest easy until he had seen Lydia and Leonardo settled in their new home. The minutes quickly ticked past as he debated with himself

whether he should stay or catch that bus. Then, at about a quarter to seven, the phone rang. It was Nonilo, in anguish. "Something terrible has happened in Lydia's room! I heard four shots," he cried. "Who are up there?" "Lydia and Narding and the Cabadings." "I'll be right over. Gene sent a younger brother to inform the family lawyer and to alert the Makati police. Then he drove like mad to Zapote. It was almost dark when he got there. The house stood perfectly still, not a light on inside. He watched it from a distance but could see no movement, Then a taxi drove up and out jumped Nonilo. He had telephoned from a gasoline station. He related what had happened. He said that when he and Leonardo arrived at the Zapote house, Cabading motioned Leonardo upstairs: "Lydia is in her room." Leonardo went up; Cabading gave Nonilo a cup of coffee and chatted amiably with him. Nonilo saw Mrs. Cabading go up to Lydia's room with a glass of milk. A while later, they heard a woman scream, followed by sobbing. "There seems to be trouble up there," said Cabading, and he went upstairs. Nonilo saw him enter Lydia's room, leaving the door open. A few moments later, the door was closed. Then Nonilo heard three shots. He stood petrified, but when he heard a fourth shot he dashed out of the house, ran to a gasoline station and called up Gene. Nonilo pointed to the closed front gate; he was sure he had left it open when he ran out. The brothers suspected that Cabading was lurking somewhere in the darkness, with his gun. Before them loomed the dark house, now so sinister and evil in their eyes. The upper story that jutted forward, forming the house's chief facade, bore a curious sign: Dra. Lydia C. Cabading, Lady Physician. (Apparently, Lydia continued- or was made- to use her maiden name.) Above the sign was the garland of colored lights that have been put up for Christmas and had not yet been removed. It was an ice-cold night, the dark of the moon, but the two brothers shivered not from the wind blowing down the lonely murky street but from pure horror of the house that had so fatally thrust itself into their lives. But the wind remembered when the sighs it heard here were only the sighing of the ripe grain, when the cries it heard were only the crying of birds nesting in the reeds, for all these new suburbs in Makati used to be grassland, riceland, marshland, or pastoral solitudes where few cared to go, until the big city spilled hither,

replacing the uprooted reeds with split-levels, pushing noisy little streets into the heart of the solitude, and collecting here from all over the country the uprooted souls that now moan or giggle where once the carabao wallowed and the frogs croaked day and night. In very new suburbs, one feels human sorrow to be a grass intrusion on the labors of nature. Even barely two years ago, the talahib still rose man-high on the plot of ground on Zapote Street where now stands the relic of an ambiguous love. As the Quitangon brothers shivered in the darkness, a police van arrived and unloaded quite a large contingent of policemen. The Quitangons warned them that Cabading had a submachinegun. The policemen crawled toward the front gate and almost jumped when a young girl came running across the yard, shaking with terror and shrieking gibberish. She was one of the maids. She and her companion and the foster son had fled from the house when they heard the shooting and had been hiding in the yard. It was they who had closed the front gate. A policeman volunteered to enter the house through the back door; Gene said he would try the front one. He peered in at a window and could detect no one in the sala. He slipped a hand inside, opened the front door and entered, just as the policeman came in from the kitchen. As they crept up the stairs they heard a moaning in Lydia's room. They tried the door but it was blocked from inside. "Push it, push it," wailed a woman's voice. The policeman pushed the door hard and what was blocking it gave. He groped for the switch and turned light. As they entered, he and Gene shuddered at what they saw. The entire room was spattered with blood. On the floor, blocking the door, lay Mrs. Cabading. She had been shot in the chest and stomach but was still alive. The policeman tried to get a statement from her but all she could say was: "My hand, my hand- it hurts!" She was lying across the legs of her daughter, who lay on top of her husband's body. Lydia was still clutching an armful of clothes; Leonardo was holding a clothes hanger. He had been shot in the breast; she, in the heart. They had died instantly, together. Sprawled face up on his daughter's bed, his mouth agape and his eyes bulging open as though still staring in horror and the bright blood splashed on his face lay Pablo Cabading. "Oh, I cursed him!" cries Eugenio Quitangon with passion. "Oh, I cursed him as he lay there dead, God forgive me! Yes, I cursed that dead man there on that bed, for I had wanted to find him alive!" From the position of the bodies and from Mrs. Cabading's statements later at the hospital, it appears that Cabading shot Lydia while she was shielding her husband, and Mrs. Cabading when she tried to shield

Lydia. Then he turned the gun on himself, and it's an indication of the man's uncommon strength and power that, after the first shot, through the right side of the head, which must have been mortal enough, he seems to have been able, as his hands dropped to his breast, to fire at himself a second time. The violent spasm of agony must have sent the gun - a .45 caliber pistol- flying from his hand. It was found at the foot of the bed, near Mrs. Cabading's feet. The drama of the jealous father had ended at about half-past six in the evening, Tuesday last week. The next day, hurrying commuters slowed down and a whispering crowd gathered before 1074 Zapote Street, to watch the police and the reporters going through the pretty little house that Pablo Cabading built for his Lydia.