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 presidentewas 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 thepresidente 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 chinelasmaking 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.
This is the 1925 short story that gave
birth to modern Philippine writing in English.
