Bangladesh - BAWO exhibition

From the Bangladesh Artist Welfare Organization

Face Acrylic on Paper

*

Philippines - Palaver!

PALAVER!
Koytus Interaptus sa Mai/lakan/iyan

A Play by Alberto Florentino

SETTING: The play carries no date---day, month, or year---since the play never really happened in the real world, only in the city, or the theater, of the mind; thus, a short drama fiction, or fiction drama, a la Jorge Luis Borges' ficciones.

SCENE: A backroom in El Palacio. Lunchtime. El General and a high-class call-girl (aka Sonia) are meeting for a McQuickie, the equivalent of the Big Mac taken at midday.

SONIA: (in a voice Mina Sorvino used in Woody Allen's movie Mighty Aphrodite). And where, Señor Presidente, is your small room?

HENERAL: Please, just call me Heneral. (points to the C.R. and makes as if to accompany her)

SONIA: I'll be back in a sec! Get yourself ready. We don't have much time. (enters the C. R., toting what looks like a lady's make-up kit)

(EL HENERAL primps up: takes out a comb and fixes his Elvis Presley hair, opens the front door, and talks to someone on the other side of the door)

HENERAL: No calls---nothing and nobody---until one thirty.

(HENERAL is about to to remove his coat when SONIA returns from the C.R., brandishing a high-caliber automatic handgun which he aims pointblank at a spot between the HENERAL's eyes.)

SONIA: (in her Mina Sorvino voice) Surprise! Surprise!

HENERAL: (really surprised) Hey! Careful there!

(SONIA takes off her wig and we see YOMA in a drag make-up that matches his/her mini-skirt and high heels.)

HENERAL: (regaining his composure) That . . . surely was . . . the quickest sex-change ever!

YOMA: (speaking in his male voice for the first time) You know who I am? Do I have to shed this off?

HENERAL: (points to handgun) Not one unauthorized firearm has been found inside El Palacio since I took office. How did that pass my security?

YOMA: Remember when Al Pacino goes to the C.R. in Godfather and comes out with gun blazing?

HENERAL: I'm not too fond of movies.

YOMA: Then see Godfather. It's a classic: a lesson on how to run an empire.

HENERAL: May I? (indicates phone)

YOMA: Sure, you're allowed one call. (coolly takes one of the chairs in front of the table, all the time keeping the gun pointed steadily at the HENERAL)

HENERAL: (He lifts the phone and finds it dead. He feels under his desk to press a button but it gives no sound) You've cut all lines---who did---planted the gun---

YOMA: That's my secret M.O. Now, as per your instructions, no one will bother us for the next half-hour while we make love---here on this table?

HENERAL: Cut that out! What do you want?

YOMA: I'll be brief. Call off your plans to stay in office. The constitution limits you to eight years---not one day more.

HENERAL: But if the people want me---

YOMA: Yes, the people want you . . . out!

HENERAL: But the polls say---

YOMA: All your inventions.

HENERAL: And the media---there's not a freer press in the whole world!

YOMA: Nor one more corrupt. You've bought all of them. As you are trying to do with the Camara so they'll amend the constitution to extend your term.

HENERAL: But what if that's what the people want? And the Camara and the Cabinet?

YOMA: All your creations, and all to perpetuate your stay in El Palacio!

HENERAL: I may have got some people to want me to stay, but can you blame me if everyone wants me to continue in power?

YOMA: Everyone?

HENERAL: Well, almost everyone. The millions who signed the petitions!

YOMA: All stamped "bought, sold, and paid for." If one had ten billion pesetas---which your Banco Central can print in one weekend like bottle labels---it can buy you anything, or anyone. For small change, enough to buy them a Big Mac at McDo; the poor millions will sell their votes and elect the monkey in the Palacio petting zoo as President, or vote you to succeed yourself!

HENERAL: Yoma! I bailed you out when you were down and out. Your movies were not making money. I offered you to be my defense secretary, or any Cabinet post. Instead, you ran to the hills, plotted against my government, and staged one unsuccessful coup after another!

YOMA: Señor, we don't have much time. Your security will knock in a few minutes.

HENERAL: Look, Yoma, I know how to forgive. You may have anything you want---anyone---any woman---or any man if that's your---

YOMA: Here's my counter-offer you can't refuse. I want you to abdicate. Give everything up, except what you and your family will need in the next 50 years---you may live in comfort in any country of your choice. It's all here, just sign on the dotted line.

HENERAL: And if I don't?

YOMA: Again, let me quote from the Godfather movie. "Your signature on the dotted line, or your brains." (with his free hand takes out a silencer from his make-up kit and screws it on without relaxing his aim)

HENERAL: (panicking only now) You know me well, Yoma. I'm the immovable wall to your unstoppable bullet. But we can still strike a deal. Drop that gun and you can walk out of here. Or I can make you a "designer amnesty" right now, in my own handwriting. Run under my party and I'll make you President, after my term. I'll annoint you. As sure as the sun rises, you get elected, you get to run this country.

YOMA: After you've sucked it dry? Leaving the country---

HENERAL: Why think of the country at this moment? Think of yourself, your family.

YOMA: All I wanted was to be mayor of Quezon City. I know my limitations, mentally, intellectually.

HENERAL: Why let the people in on it? Why be . . . limited?

YOMA: Stop brainwashing me. I want your signature here---now!

HENERAL: And if I don't? When my secretary and my security enter, you're kaput. You're a dead man walking. That movie I saw, did you . . .

(They hear footsteps and voices outside the door. Both panic. Knocks on the door)

HENERAL: Time's running! If I don't open the door a minute after 1:30, you're DEAD!

YOMA: SIGN! SIGN NOW!

HENERAL: OVER MY DEAD BODY!

YOMA: AS YOU WISH, SIR!

(The clock on the wall rings 1:30. At close range YOMA shoots the HENERAL once between his eyes. The HENERAL's blood splatters on the paper on the table)

YOMA/SONIA: (in a Mina Sorvina voice, looking at the audience) Who was the playwright who once wrote, "If you bring in a gun on stage, it must be fired"?

(YOMA/SONIA quickly puts on his/her wig, and fixing his/her mini-skirt and makeup walks up to the door as knocks and the first voices [the secretary's and the security's] are heard)

YOMA/SONIA: I'm coming out! (opens the door just a foot wide) Just on time! (points to the HENERAL slumped on the table but looking as if he were only taking a nap) The President's resting as you can see.

(The secretary offers a thick envelope to YOMA/SONIA. A security man tries to enter but is stopped by the hesitant secretary blocking the way and by YOMA/SONIA holding the door back)

YOMA/SONIA: If I were you, I wouldn't wake him up yet. Let him finish his siesta. When he wakes up, he will be a young buck again. Here's my card, in case he calls for me, and I know he will. I made sure he will.

(The secretary again offers the envelope to him)

YOMA/SONIA: (refuses the envelope) Oh, no, no, Ma'am, no. This is different, not what you think! If you'll let me pass, I have to meet someone else in the palace and I'll need someone to lead me.

(Then, clinging to the security man's arm, YOMA/SONIA walks through the door, past the secretary and the other security men. Once past the door, the people outside the door peer through the opening. Then slowly, quietly, they close the door and leave the HENERAL to enjoy his presidential Post-coital Siesta)

*

Indonesia - Wayang Kulit

Wayang Kulit
[Image of Shadow Play as seen by an audience]

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Japan - Ikuta

IKUTA

by Zembo Motoyaso

PRIEST.

I am one that serves Honen Shonin of Kurodani; and as for this child here,--once when Honen was on a visit to the Temple of Kamo he saw a box lying under a trailing fir-tree; and when he raised the lid, what should he find inside but a lovely man-child one year old! It did not seem to be more than a common foundling, but my master in his compassion took the infant home with him. Ever since then he has had it in his care, doing all that was needful for it; and now the boy is over ten years old. But it is a hard thing to have no father or mother, so one day after his preaching the Shonin told the child's story. And sure enough a young woman stepped out from among the hearers and said it was her child. And when he took her aside and questioned her, he found that the child's father was Taira no Atsumori, who had fallen in battle at Ichi-no-Tani years ago. When the boy was told of this, he longed earnestly to see his father's face, were it but a dream, and the Shonin bade him go and pray at the shrine of Kamo. He was to go every day for a week, and this is the last day. That is why I have brought him out with me. But here we are at the Kamo Shrine. Pray well, boy, pray well!

BOY.

How fills my heart with awe

When I behold the crimson palisade

Of this abode of gods!

Oh may my heart be clean

As the River of Ablution;

And the God's kindness deep

As its unfathomed waters. Show to me,

Though it were but in dream,

My father's face and form.

Is not my heart so ground away with prayer,

So smooth that it will slip

Unfelt into the favour of the gods?

But thou too, Censor of our prayers,

God of Tadasu, on the gods prevail

That what I crave may be!

How strange! While I was praying I fell half-asleep and had a wonderful dream.

PRIEST.

Tell me your wonderful dream.

BOY.

A strange voice spoke to me from within the Treasure Hall, saying, "If you are wanting, though it were but in a dream, to see your father's face, go down from here to the woods of Ikuta in the country of Settsu." That is the marvellous dream I had.

PRIEST.

It is indeed a wonderful message that the God has sent you. And why should I go back at once to Kurodani? I had best take you straight to the forest if Ikuta. Let us be going.

(describing the journey)

From the shrine of Kamo,

From under the shadow of the hills,

We set out swiftly;

Past Yamazaki to the fog-bound

Shores of Minasé;

And onward where the gale

Tears travellers' coats and winds about their bones.

"Autumn has come to woods where yesterday

We might have plucked the green."

To Settsu, to those woods of Ikuta

Lo! we are come.

We have gone so fast that here we are already at the woods of Ikuta in the country of Settsu. I have heard tell in the Capital of the beauty of these woods and the river that runs through them. But what I see no surpasses all that I have heard.

Look! Those meadows must be the Downs of Ikuta. Let us go nearer and admire them.

But while we have been going about looking at one view and another, the day has dusked.

I think I see a light over there. There must be a house. Let us go to it and ask for lodging.

ATSUMORI (speaking from inside a hut).

Beauty, perception, knowledge, motion, consciousness,--

The Five Attributes of Being,--

All are vain mockery.

How comes it that men prize

So weak a thing as body?

For the soul that guards it from corruption

Suddenly to the night-moon flies,

And the poor naked ghost wails desolate

In the autumn wind.

Oh! I am lonely! I am lonely!

PRIEST.

How strange! Inside that grass-hut I see a young soldier dressed in helmet and breastplate. What can he be doing here?

ATSUMORI.

Oh foolish men, was it not to meet me that you came to this place? I am--oh! I am ashamed to say it,--I am the ghost of what once was . . . Atsumori.

BOY.

Atsumori? My father . . .

CHORUS.

And lightly he ran,

Plucked at the warrior's sleeve,

And though his tears might seem like the long woe

Of nightingales that weep,

Yet were they tears of meeting-joy,

Of happiness too great for human heart.

So think we, yet oh that we might change

This fragile dream of joy

Into the lasting love of waking life!

ATSUMORI.

Oh pitiful!

To see this child, born after me,

Darling that should be gay as a flower,

Walking in tattered coat of old black cloth.

Alas!

Child, when your love of me

Led you to Kamo shrine, praying to the God

That, though but in a dream,

You might behold my face,

The God of Kamo, full of pity, came

To Yama, king of Hell.

King Yama listened and ordained for me

A moment's respite, but hereafter, never.

CHORUS.

"The moon is sinking.

Come while the night is dark," he said,

"I will tell my tale."

ATSUMORI.

When the house of Taira was in its pride,

When its glory was young,

Among the flowers we sported,

Among birds, wind and moonlight;

With pipes and strings, with song and verse

We welcomed Springs and Autumns.

Till at last, because our time was come,

Across the bridges of Kiso a host unseen

Swept and devoured us.

Then the whole clan

Our lord leading

Fled from the City of Flowers.

By paths untrodden

To the Western Sea our journey brought us.

Lakes and hills we crossed

Till we ourselves grew to be like wild men.

At last by mountain ways--

We too tossed hither and thither like its waves--

To Suma came we,

To the First Valley and the woods of Ikuta.

And now while all of us,

We children of Taira, were light of heart

Because our homes were near,

Suddenly our foes in great strength appeared.

CHORUS.

Noriyori, Yoshitsune,--their hosts like clouds,

Like mists of spring.

For a little while we fought them,

But the day of our House was ended,

Our hearts weakened

That had been swift as arrows from the bowstring,

We scattered, scattered; till at last

To the deep waters of the Field of Life

We came, but how we found there Death, not Life,

What profit were it to tell?

ATSUMORI.

Who is that?

(Pointing in terror at a figure which he sees off the stage.)

Can it be Yama's messenger? He comes to tell me that I have outstayed my time. The Lord of Hell is angry: he asks why I am late?

CHORUS.

So he spoke. But behold

Suddenly black clouds rise,

Earth and sky resound with the clash of arms;

War-demons innumerable

Flash fierce sparks from brandished spears.

ATSUMORI.

The Shura foes who night and day

Come thick about me!

CHORUS.

He waves his sword and rushes among them,

Hither and Thither he runs slashing furiously;

Fire glints upon the steel.

But in a little while

The dark clouds recede;

The demons have vanished,

The moon shines unsullied;

The sky is ready for dawn.

ATSUMORI.

Oh! I am ashamed . . .

And the child to see me so . . . .

CHORUS.

"To see my misery!

I must go back.

Oh pray for me; pray for me

When I am gone," he said,

And weeping, weeping,

Dropped the child's hand.

He has faded; he dwindles

Like the dew from rush-leaves

Of hazy meadows.

His form has vanished.

*

India - Rabindranath Tagore

A monologue from CHITRA

by Rabindranath Tagore

CHITRA: At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty I had heard from Arjuna; --drinking drop by drop the honey that I had stored during the long day. The history of my past life like that of my former existences was forgotten. I felt like a flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the humming flatteries and whispered murmurs of the woodlands and then must lower its eyes from the sky, bend its head and at a breath give itself up to the dust without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment that has neither past nor future. The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering Malati bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body. On my hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die on. I slept. And, suddenly in the depth of my sleep, I felt as if some intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame, touched my slumbering body. I started up and saw the Hermit standing before me. The moon had moved to the west, peering through the leaves to espy this wonder of divine art wrought in a fragile human frame. The air was heavy with perfume; the silence of the night was vocal with the chirping of crickets; the reflections of the trees hung motionless in the lake; and with his staff in his hand he stood, tall and straight and still, like a forest tree. It seemed to me that I had, on opening my eyes, died to all realities of life and undergone a dream birth into a shadow land. Shame slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I heard his call -- "Beloved, my most beloved!" And all my forgotten lives united as one and responded to it. I said, "Take me, take all I am!" And I stretched out my arms to him. The moon set behind the trees. One curtain of darkness covered all. Heaven and earth, time and space, pleasure and pain, death and life merged together in an unbearable ecstasy. . . . With the first gleam of light, the first twitter of birds, I rose up and sat leaning on my left arm. He lay asleep with a vague smile about his lips like the crescent moon in the morning. The rosy red glow of the dawn fell upon his noble forehead. I sighed and stood up. I drew together the leafy lianas to screen the streaming sun from his face. I looked about me and saw the same old earth. I remembered what I used to be, and ran and ran like a deer afraid of her own shadow, through the forest path strewn with shephali flowers. I found a lonely nook, and sitting down covered my face with both hands, and tried to weep and cry. But no tears came to my eyes.

*

Bengal - Forbidden Openings

Forbidden Openings

by Samaresh Basu

(Translated from Bengali by Prasenjit Gupta)

“Son of a pig!” Kanto Kundu bellows.

“Yes, sir, what is it?” Benda runs completely attentive, reflecting great distress. Before he comes, though, he winks at the boy--who is about his own age, about ten or eleven--standing at the stationery counter.

Kanto Kundu says, “Son of a sheep, are you deaf, or what? Get the tin of sugar-candy from shelf number three for Ishen.” Kanto puffs noisily on his toasted-tobacco cigarette. He looks at the elderly man in dhuti-panjabi standing before him, and says with a laugh, “People don’t know these things. Pyesh with candy settles your stomach. I eat pyesh every day, pyesh with candy.--Yes, what do you want? Oil? There isn’t any.--You? Gur?”

Seated on his large, comfortable cushion behind the cash box, Kanto Kundu asks the customers, one by one, what they want, then tells his workers to measure out the groceries. He turns his head and says, “What’s keeping you, Ishen? How long can it take to weigh out three kilos of sugar-candy?--How much gur? Five kilos? Okay. Hey!--Hey, son of a hyena!”

Benda is talking to the boy standing at the stationery counter: “Potla? The Potla who comes in all the time to buy four lozenges? He scored a goal?--He’s got the legs for it, doesn’t he?”

The boy says, “Yes, I’ve heard he eats turtle meat every day.--Give me a toffee. The six-paisa kind.”

“Okay. So, do they play every evening in the field behind the school?” Then he hears Kanto’s call, “--Son of a hyena!” and answers, “Babu?”

“Come here, rascal, get the gur from shelf number one and give it to Ishen,” commands Kanto Kundu.

Benda signals the boy to wait, and runs to the crammed shelves. Benda is twelve; he could be called Gorachand [“White-Moon,” a name of Chaitanya]. More surprisingly, he isn’t all skin and bone. Maybe even somewhat pudgy. Spiky ashen hair, eyes almost round. Button nose. When he shows his teeth--all healthy new teeth but stained--in a smile, his eyes almost vanish. Gritting his teeth, he lifts the twenty-kilo tin of gur from the shelf. He can’t carry it far, so he pushes it across the floor towards Ishen, and leaves it in front of the scales. Ishen pinches Benda on the buttock, and Benda goes to the stationery counter rubbing his backside. He takes a toffee wrapped in colored paper from the jar and pushes it towards the boy. The boy gives him a five-paisa coin and a one-paisa coin and says, “Can’t you come to the field to watch the game?”

“I can’t get the time off.” Benda says, “But Thursdays I visit my mother in Kanchrapara.--I don’t want to. But if I don’t go, Ma gets angry, and Babu gives me a beating.” He indicates Kanto Kundu with his eyes.

The boy asks “Why don’t you want to visit your mother?”

Benda grimaces, “I don’t like Ma’s man. He makes me do all the heavy work, and he swears at me.”

The boy looks surprised. “Who’s your Ma’s man? Not your father?”

Benda says, “Oh, my pop handed in his gourd a long time ago. Now Ma has a guy. And a bunch of kids. I don’t like it. One of these Thursdays I’m going to take off and go watch the game.”

The boy stares blankly at Benda.

Benda says, “I really want to go out and play. Football. I want to kick the ball so hard I bust it.”

The boy asks, “Don’t you play anything at all?”

Benda leans forward, eyes flashing, and says, “I do, every night I play kill-the-mice.” A hard smile flashes across his face.

“Hey, son of a dog!” comes Kanto Kundu’s bellow. “Fetch five kilos of oil cake from the sack and put it in a bag.”

Before Benda can leave, the boy asks, “Why doesn’t anyone call you by your name?”

Benda, not understanding, stares at the boy. The boy says, “They call you son of a pig and son of a crow--why do they call you these names?”

Benda laughs and says in a low voice, “Oh! They’re all sons of mice.”

“Hey, son of a monkey!” Suddenly, again, Kanto Kundu’s bellow. “Five kilos of oil cake from the sack!”

“Right away, Babu.” Benda runs off.

Kanto Kundu’s shop is always humming. Benda is his youngest worker. He gets food and clothes, and a salary of twenty rupees, which his mother comes and takes every month. Kanto’s first wife is dead; they didn’t have any children. He married again four years ago; no children. This wife is young, pretty. Kanto’s wife calls him turnip--apparently his face resembles a turnip. His own mother calls him many names, most of them not worth repeating. Kanto, too, has many such epithets for him, not worth repeating. All this matters little to Benda. In his mind he calls all of them mice, or sons of mice. All this matters little to him. He lives only for one reason, one passion. His game of kill-the-mice. And with the excitement of the game comes the thrill of money. A small mouse fetches five paise, and a larger field mouse is worth ten paise. Kanto Kundu pays.

It is nine-thirty at night: The front door of the shop has already been closed. At the rear of the shop is a warehouse, where Benda stays at night. There’s a door at the rear of the warehouse, and on the other side, between the door and the surrounding boundary wall, is a narrow patch of land with a toilet in one corner. The boundary wall is crowned with pieces of broken glass set into the cement along the top, and above that three strands of barbed wire.

From the shop to the warehouse there’s only one door. After letting Benda into the warehouse, Kanto Kundu secures the door with four padlocks. Then the outside door: he pulls the collapsible grill across it, puts about a dozen padlocks on it, and goes off. Everything is set for the night.

Benda is now alone in the warehouse. Candle and matches are stored atop a large wooden box. He picks up the matchbox and strikes a match, and lights the thin candle standing on top of the box. From the gap between two sacks of bran he pulls out a blanket and a stained old pillow and lays them down on the sacks.

In the light of the thin candle, the whole warehouse can’t be seen. On either side of the blood-red glow are sacks, boxes, and barrels, and the gaps between all these different things contain little handfuls of darkness. In that darkness and in that red light, Benda’s shadow is immense, his limbs inhuman. With unblinking eyes he begins to look around. Smoke drifts from his mouth and nose. The skin on his face grows taut: his eyes start to burn. Eagerly he listens to every noise, inside or outside. This expression is never seen during his entire day at work. It’s as if he’s preserving his body’s energies by means of some mantra, allowing only his face to show excitement. He puffs on his biri, blows out smoke. His face becomes hard and ferocious. Somewhere in the warehouse there is a slight noise. He doesn’t turn his head; he closes his eyes, tilts his head, listens carefully.

He stops puffing on the biri. He lifts the stub to eye level, then easily pinches it out and throws it away. He reaches behind the barrel and pulls out a bamboo lathi, shiny with oil, one end bulging like a head. He lifts the lathi to his eye and stares at it once. Then he grasps the narrow end in his fist. He turns his head and blows out the candle, and the darkness thuds down like a heavy curtain. Benda slowly, soundlessly walks a few steps away from the box and stands motionless as a figure carved in stone.

Benda’s world, too, is motionless now. The universe is dark; the creature called man ceases to exist. Time is stopped, waiting.

Benda sees two ember-points gleam, high up, near the roof, then move down rapidly and blend into the darkness. Benda is motionless. Four ember-points move across the floor a few feet from him. Benda is carved in stone. Two ember-points hurriedly move close, stop for an instant, and disappear into the darkness behind. Immediately, again, two ember-points come from the left and stop at his feet, then run away to the right.

These pairs of ember-points, high and low, far and near, begin to move and run and jump. Then, as if hypnotized, several ember-points begin to frisk and frolic in front of him. Benda’s fist tightens, the lathi rises and comes down incredibly quickly, violently. Benda jumps around, bringing the head of the lathi down in heavy thudding blows. Then he moves to one side and again stands as still as a stone statue. The world, too, is stopped again, become motionless.

There’s no counting time, no measuring the depth of the darkness. Again pairs of ember-points begin to appear, high and low, on the floor, on the sacks, on the box. Running and jumping, twisting and turning again, some ember-points begin to move, as if in a trance, in front of Benda. Benda’s hands rise again, again the blows fall like lightning. Then he comes back to the box, strikes a match, and lights the candle. The glow of the candle slowly pushes away the darkness. Benda, looking from side to side, picks up from the floor the carcasses of three small mice and a field-mouse. He sets them down on top of the box near the candle. He stares at them with shining eyes; a cruel smile spreads across his excited face. His face and body are slick with sweat, his hair fanned out over his forehead. He says, “Bastard mice, sons of mice.”

He puts the lathi behind the box. He blows out the candle. In the darkness he goes to the blanket laid out on the sacks of grain, stretches out on it, lays his head on the stained pillow, and falls asleep.

After the long day’s hard toil in this nameless life, after many insults and many hungry days, this is his one pleasure. So much pleasure, it doesn’t take him long to fall into a deep sleep. This pleasure and ease last until the dawn. Then, again, another cursed day begins. After nine at night, the game, the excitement, the pleasure, and then the ease of a deep sleep.

Benda has no time to think how some unknown force arranges these days and nights of his life. Where this life will end, he doesn’t know. Sometimes on the surface of this life, on its body, some openings appear for an instant. And in those openings float up images of playing in a large field, the sounds of many children’s delight. All these images and sounds are in the realm of the forbidden. The openings are forbidden.

*

Indonesia - Me

Me

By: Chairil Anwar

When my time comes
No one's going to cry for me,
And you won't, either

The hell with all those tears!

I'm a wild beast
Driven out of the herd

Bullets may pierce my skin
But I'll keep coming,

Carrying forward my wounds and my pain
Attacking
Attacking
Until suffering disappears

And I won't give a damn

I want to live another thousand years

*

Philippines - Bonsai

Bonsai

By: Edith Tiempo

All that I love
I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe.

All that I love?
Why, yes, but for the moment-
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Son's note or Dad's one gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a queen,
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.

It's utter sublimation,
A feat, this heart's control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand's size

Till seashells are broken pieces
From God's own bright teeth,
And life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.

*

Japan - Kobayashi Issa

By: Kobayashi Issa


oh sake cup
don't go floating away!
a sickle moon


*

Persia - Life Passing by

Poetic Interpretation of Omar Khayam's Poetry




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Bangladesh - Roar, O Freedom

Roar, O Freedom

by Shamsur Rahman

What shall I do with the spring
when I hear only the cuckoo moaning
and cannot see gorgeous flowers blossom?
What shall I do with the garden
Where no birds ever pays a visit?
Oh, how rough and stony is this earth!
Skeletons of trees stand, row after row,
like so many desolate ghosts.

What shall I do with the love
that places on my head a crown of thorns
and hands out to me the cup of hamlock?
What purpose the road serve
On which no one treads,
Where vendors of coloured ice-cream
Or waves of city-inundating processions
are never seen?

I had called you, dearest
When we started our journey
With our face turned to the rising sun.

When the back-pull of bourgeois charm
Kept from your ears the soaring sound of the people singing.
You are still prisoner under the claws of a fierce eagle.
you cannot yet walk on a road
with the rainbow coloured carpet spread on it.
Oh, how tough it is to keep going
without you by my side!

A horrid monster comes, casting dark shadows
all around;
in a moment he crushes under his heels
the foundation of new civilization,
he hangs the full moon on the scaffold,
declares unlawful the blossoming
of the lotus and the rose.
He bans my poems, stanza by stanza,
quietly, without any fanfare,
he bans your breath,
he bans the fragrance of your hair.

By the bent body of the young girl
sitting on the lonely porch of old age.
waiting for the dawn of happy days.
By the long days and nights of Nelson Mandella
spent behind the bars.

By the martyrdom of the heroic youth
Noor Hossain,
O Freedom, raise your head like Titan,
give a sky shattering shout,
tear off the chain around
your wrists.
Roar, Freedom, roar mightily!

*

Indonesia - In Vain

In Vain

By: Chairil Anwar

The last time you came
You brought bright flowers,
Red roses, white jasmine,
Blood and holiness,
And spread them in front of me
With a decisive look: for you.

We were stunned
And asked each other: what’s this?
Love? Neither of us understood.

The day we were together.
We did not touch.

But my heart will not give itself to you,
And does not care
That you are ripped by desolation.

*

Philippines - The Children of the Poor

The Children of the Poor

By Gemino Abad

The children of the poor have at least
one outstanding virtue—
no one’s spoiled, they survive
even where their worms must fast.

Toys for instance aren’t to buy,
But invent: to find within
1/4 sheet of soiled paper
makes a boat, the estero its Pacific –
or an empty can of sardines
with a string—already a car!

One does not need to dream.
Instinctively they know
Dreams cause food poisoning.

*

Nigeria - I Thank You God

I Thank You God

By: Bernard Dadi

I thank you God for creating me black,
For making of me
Porter of all sorrows
Setting on my head
The World.
I swear the Centaur’s hide
And I have carried the World since the first evening.

I am glad
Of the shape of my head
Made to carry the World,
Content
With the shape of my nose
That must snuff every wing of the world
Pleased
With the shape of my legs
Ready to run all the hats of the world

Thank you God for creating me black
For making of me
Porter of all sorrows

Thirsty-six swords have pierced my heart
Thirty six fires have burnt my body.
And my blood on all calvaries has reduced the snow
And my blood at every dawn has reddened all nature

Still I am
Glad to carry the World,
Glad of my short arms
. of my long legs
. of the thickness of my lips.

I thank you God for creating my black,
White is a colour for special occasions
Black the color for everyday
And I have carried the World since the dawn of time
And my laugh over the World, through the night, creates the Day.

I thank you God for creating me black.

*

Korea - Sijo Sample

by:

Jung Mong Ju

My body may die, again and again

One hundred times again, and

May turn into but a pile of bones and dust,

My soul may or may not live on, but

My loyalty to my country shall remain unchanged for ever.

*

Japan - Death Poem Sample

by:

Ishigaki Choko

This final scene I'll not see
to the end...my dream
is fraying.

(Sue ikki
mi hatenu yume no
hotsure kana)


*

Philippines - Dead Stars

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 Doña 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 Doña 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 Doña 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?"

"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.

"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."

"Could I find that?"

"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.

"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."

"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"

"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"

"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?"

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."

"Can't I come to say good-bye?"

"Oh, you don't need to!"

"No, but I want to."

"There is no time."

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."

"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."

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 brick-roofed 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.

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?

"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.

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

"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?"

"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 lake-shore 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. Señor 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-and-chicken." 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.

*