It was now the end of my brother Macario’s school year. We gave a sigh of relief. We knew that our burden would end at last. God willing, he would shoulder the responsibility of buying back our land.
There was a national election that year, and the peasants went to the presidencia to cast their ballots. My father was not a political man, but he had always considered his right to vote a great privilege. One morning he told me to tie a rope around the neck of the white kid in the pasture. My brother Macario would be home for a few days, and we had an occasion to celebrate. It was my first opportunity to see him. I had been born in the barrio and when I had gone to town he had always been away.
My father filled a large sack with eggplants and tomatoes and told me to take the kid. The animal followed me obediently. When we were nearing the town, my father saw a pond with many snails in it. We took off our clothes and went into the water, gathering the slow-moving snails from the bottom of the pond. We filled our hats, which the kid carried to town, stopping now and then to kick the burden off its back.
When we got home my mother was still in the public market. We put the snails in a large earthen jar. I tied the kid to the ladder so that my mother could see it when she came home.
“Let’s go to town and wait for your brother, son,” said my father.
“Is he coming home today?” I asked.
“Sometime this afternoon,” he said.
“I hope he will bring some books with him,” I said.
The street was filled with voters on their way to the presidencia to cast their ballots. They carried little jugs of basi, which is a homemade drink extracted from sugar cane and seasoned with herbs and leaves; and some of them brought their food and blankets with them.
My father and I stopped in the public market to see my mother. She was selling salted fish and an indescribable aggregation of vegetables under an umbrella, while my sister Irene was crawling on a blanket near by. My mother gave me two centavos for pan, a kind of bread made from rice flour, which children in my day particularly enjoyed.
Then my father and I went to the plaza and sat in the shade of the kiosk, listening attentively to the band playing our national anthem and other patriotic songs. When the students from Lingayen began to arrive, we ran to the station under the large arbor tree. We sat in the coffee shop and watched every bus that stopped, but my brother Macario did not arrive. After a while my father went to the presidencia to cast his ballot; but before he came back a bus full of students came along. A young man in a white cotton suit alighted from the bus and kept turning around, as though he were looking for someone. I knew he was my brother Macario because even at his age his resemblance to my father was unmistakable. The way he carried his head slightly toward the left made me sure.
But I was afraid to go up to him. I could not move from my stool. I kept watching him for fear he might disappear before my father came back. Then he saw my father coming out of the presidencia with the old felt hat in his hand. My brother lifted his rattan suitcase and ran to meet him. They shook hands affectionately, which was uncommon because ordinarily Macario would have kissed my father’s hand; but he was being educated in the American way. Then my father waved to me.
It was the first time I had seen Macario, surely the most educated man in our family. He looked at me wordlessly for a moment and then passed his hand over my head.
“Is this Allos, Father?” he asked.
“Yes, son,” father said.
“Well, let us go home and I will cut your long hair,” said Macario to me. “Don’t you ever cut your hair, brother?”
I was speechless. I was ashamed to say anything.
“He needs it for protection against vicious mosquitoes and flies,” said my father. “It is also his shield from the sun in hot summer.”
“I will make a gentleman out of him,” Macario said. “Wouldn’t you like to be a gentleman, Allos?”
I could not say anything. I walked silently between them: my brother on my left, my father on my right. They were like two strong walls protecting me from the attack of an unseen enemy (moving into my life to give me the warm assurance of their proximity, and guiding me into the future that was waiting with all its ferocity).
We went to the public market, but my mother had already left. We walked eagerly to our house; then we saw the black smoke coming out of the small kitchen window. My mother was preparing an early dinner. My father told me to run ahead and untie the kid under the ladder.
My mother was boiling rice, but she came running to meet my brother at the door, uttered a few words of affection, and returned hastily to the stove. My father carried the kid on his shoulder to the bench in the kitchen and tied its legs. It was very gentle; it did not resist. While my father sharpened the bolo on a soft stone, I poured vinegar and uncooked rice into a large wooden bowl. When he struck the jugular vein with the sharp blade, I knelt on the floor and put the bowl in place. The kid jerked convulsively, moaned, stiffened, and died. The warm blood rushed out of its gurgling throat into the bowl.
The night came on quickly. I could hear my father hacking at the meat in the lean-to; once in a while his bolo flashed in the faint lamplight. Beyond him, in the backyard, I could see the weird silhouettes of the banana leaves, and above them, in the light of the sky, I caught glimpses of the coconut trees moving in the wind. Then the stars shone brightly in the sky, and my mother opened the windows so that the light would fill the house.
After we had eaten our dinner we went to the living room and sat around the low table.
“How are you getting along with your studies, son?” asked my mother.
“Three months more and I will be through forever,” said my brother, moving uneasily in his chair. “But I need two hundred pesos to finish the course. That is why I am here.”
“Two hundred pesos?” said my mother, rising slightly from where she sat on the floor. “You might as well ask for two thousand pesos.”
“Don’t you have it?” asked my brother, looking at my father and then at my mother. “Can’t you do anything at all? Can’t you sell some more land?”
“We have only one hectare left, son,” said my mother, trying desperately to make my brother understand our poverty with futile movements of her hands.
“Can’t you sell this house?” asked my brother.
It was then that my father stirred in his seat and said: “We will sell the land. You can go back to school and do not worry at all. We will send you the money and you will finish your studies.”
My mother’s hands leaped frantically from her lap to her mouth and stayed there, stifling the protest. In one fleeting instant I saw her hands—big-veined, hard, and bleeding in spots. I saw her lips tremble for a moment, and the fear in her eyes.
“You can go back to school and do not worry about anything,” said my father again, rising to go to the kitchen for our bundles.
Now, toward midnight, we were on our way to the village to work all the harder because we would have no more land. What words of great conviction were said when my father got up from his seat, I had not heard, and if I had, they were forgotten in the sudden rush of conflicting emotions.
We had no more land except the narrow strip of ground where our hut stood and the lot where my father had built a house for my brother Leon and his wife. We still had the clearing, but it did not really belong to us; most of what we raised still went to the church. According to the verbal agreement we could raise anything but the church would have one third of it, and from the third year on, we would share the crop on equal basis.
The land was not for sale, so there was no hope of possessing it. There were no usury laws and we the peasants were the victims of large corporations and absentee landlords. When the church took part in the corruption, the consequences almost tore the Philippines from its economic roots. It was only years afterward that a definite program was adopted for the peasantry, but even then it was merely a bait tossed by politicians into the restless life of the nation.
Some of my uncles were already dispossessed of their lands, so they went to the provincial government and fought for justice; but they came back to the village puzzled and defeated. It was then that one of my uncles resorted to violence and died violently, and another entered a world of crime and criminals.
But my father believed in the eternal goodness of man, and only once did he almost give up his faith. Even when the usurers were closing in on us, he did not believe that he would be cheated. He was an honest, simple man, who went about his work hoping for an ample reward at the end. He was also a strong man when his deep convictions were at stake. Illiterate as he was, my father had an instinct for the truth. It was this inborn quality, common among peasants, that had kept him going in a country rapidly changing to new conditions and ideals.
One summer day, when the rice lay golden in the sun, startling rumors came to Mangusmana: the peasants in a province to the south of us had revolted against their landlords. There the peasants had been the victims of ruthless exploitation for years, dating back to the eighteenth century when Spanish colonizers instituted severe restrictive measures in order to impoverish the natives. So from then on the peasants became poorer each year and the landlords became richer at every harvest time. And the better part of it was that the landlord was always away, sometimes merely a name on a piece of paper.
The peasants did not know to whom they should present their grievances or whom to fight when the cancer of exploitation became intolerable. They became cynical about the national government and the few powerful Filipinos of foreign extraction who were squeezing a fat livelihood out of it. They began to think for themselves and to take matters into their own hands, and they resorted to anarchistic methods. But there came a time when an intelligent campaign for revolt was started, with the positive influences of peasant revolts in other lands; and the Philippine peasants came out with their demands, ready to destroy every force that had taken from them their inherited lands.
The unorganized revolt in the southern province ended in tragedy; the peasants were shot down and those who survived were thrown into medieval dungeons. But these conditions could not go on for long without disastrously rocking the very foundation of Philippine life. These sporadic revolts and uprisings unquestionably indicated the malignant cancer that was eating away the nation’s future security and negatively influencing the growth of the Philippines from a backward and undeveloped agricultural land into a gigantic industrial country. The wealth that was not already in the power of the large corporations, banks, and the church, was beginning to flow into the vaults of new corporations, banks, and other groups. As bloodily as this wealth concentrated into the hands of the new companies, as swiftly did the peasants and workers become poorer.
But some were favored by this sudden upsurge of industry. The sons of the professional classes studied law and went to the provinces, victimizing their own people and enriching themselves at the expense of the nation. In a few years these lawyers were elected to the national government, and once secure in their positions and connections, they also took part in the merciless exploitation of the peasantry and a new class of dispossessed peasants who were working in the factories or on the vast haciendas.
These conditions could not continue forever. In every house and hut in the far-flung barrios where the common man or tao was dehumanized by absentee landlordism, where a peasant had a son who went to school through the sacrifice of his family and who came back with invigorating ideas of social equality and of equal justice before the law, there grew a great conflict that threatened to plunge the Philippines into one of its bloodiest revolutions.
Such were conditions in the Philippines when my brother Macario graduated from high school and started teaching in Binalonan. Since he was an exceptionally bright student, he was appointed to teach in the sixth grade at a monthly salary of fifty pesos. His salary, which amounted to twenty-five dollars, was the highest in our town and therefore the most enviable.
Now my father began to feel at ease despite the fact that we had no more land of our own. The plow became lighter and he followed it gaily through the water and under the stifling heat of the summer sun. The nights became more peaceful and the days of labor shorter and more promising. The burden was off his shoulders at last and now he could relax for the first time in his life.
I remember this period of my childhood vividly because it was the only time that my father and I went hunting together. It was spring and the grass in the plain was young and as green as the pine trees on the mountains where we were going with our dog and a week’s provision of rice. As we walked through the stony village road, I could see the tall talahib grass with its crown of white flowers spreading majestically on the ditches and the soft, windswept cogon grass parting beautifully as the breeze came blowing, as though it were a wave pushed seaward by a gentle inland wind; the murmuring sound sang through the thin, long blades, stopping our dog in its tracks with a puzzled look in its eyes.
When we reached the stony bottom of the river at the edge of Mangusmana, I saw my face in the clear, cool water that stood like a pool of light between two boulders. My father took off his clothes and plunged in; the dog followed him, whimpering in the sudden cold of the spring water. I took off my clothes also and crept slowly to the edge of the pool, holding onto the boulders as I submerged myself. We sat in the fine sand at the bottom of the pool and played with the little fishes that emerged from the crevices between the stones. It was clear and quiet in the water, and we sat side by side as though we were sitting in the sun.
I will never forget the kilins, or mountain bamboo, that we saw on the way up the trail, and how my father made tubes from the young shoots and filled them with shrimps. As soon as we had made a camp, I built a fire between two large stones. My father wrapped the bamboo tubes with banana leaves and put them under the fire.
“This is called doayen, son,” said my father, pushing the burning coals over the tubes. “It is more delicious than the wild boar.”
“How did you learn to make it, Father?” I asked.
“From the Igorots in the mountains of Baguio,” he said. “I lived with them when the revolution was broken in southern Luzon. I fought with them, and we were called guerrillas. Someday you will understand, and maybe when you grow up you will see my Igorot friends. . . .”
To this distant day, I know that my father was right about the doayen. I remember that we caught one alingo, or wild boar, and tried its meat, but it was not as palatable as the doayen. I also remember that we caught a little deer and took it back with us to Mangusmana. I tried to feed it with tender tamarind leaves and marongay flowers, but it refused to eat anything, and our dog would stand for hours facing the wild animal. Finally, it became too weak to stand. I have forgotten, now, what happened to it.
Some weeks after our hunting trip a man came from nowhere to our house and presented my father with a paper purportedly signed by the church people. Because my father could not read the document and there was no man in the village who could read it, he went to town and let my brother Macario explain it to him.
It was midnight when he came back to Mangusmana. I heard him come into the hut, stopping at the door to locate me in the dark. Then he sat on the bench by the window for a long time. I could not see him in the dark, but knew that he was looking out of the window toward our clearing.
When the moon came out at dawn my father awakened me. We went outside and walked side by side to the clearing. There were crickets everywhere in the fields. I remember their tinny chirping and the fine moonlight that was streaming like a flood of silk as far as the eyes could see. Walking with my father in the moonlight was as peaceful as sitting with him in the bottom of the clear mountain pool. When we arrived at the clearing the quails were singing their mating songs between the growing rows of corn. The long, broad leaves were like human arms upraised to heaven in gentle supplication, moving slowly with the night breeze toward the west, as though they were making the sign of the cross and bowing to the wet earth in reverence.
“We will have a good crop this year, Father,” I said.
“It is not our plantation any more, son,” said my father, touching the leaves with the gentleness that he showed toward plants and animals. “It belongs to a man in Manila now. We will have to look for another land tomorrow.”
I could not understand why. “You mean the land does not belong to us any more?” I asked.
“The land never did belong to us,” said my father. “It belonged to the church. But now it belongs to a rich man in Manila.”
“What about our corn?” I asked.
“They paid me for the corn, son,” said my father. “But it is not enough to cover the seeds we have used. I accepted it because they told me that I had no right to plant corn in a land that did not belong to me.”
I did not ask my father again about the agreement between him and the church. It was only fifteen months since we had cleared the land, and we had had a good crop of highland rice; and now we were expecting a good crop of corn. But a strange man appeared from nowhere and claimed that the land belonged to another man in Manila.
This incident was actually the beginning of my father’s struggle to hold onto the land he knew so well, fighting to the end and dying on it like a peasant.
When the clearing was finally taken away from us, my father went to town several times and consulted with my brother Macario on how to get it back. There was nothing he could do; even my brother was desperate because we had no more land left. He had been at his job three months now, but had saved only about a hundred pesos. It was not enough for a first payment on what we owed the moneylender.
In the month of August of that year, when the provincial government was in session, my father filled a sack with rice and fresh vegetables and walked to Lingayen to fight for the repossession of our land. Three weeks later he came back to Binalonan a defeated man. Lingayen was about fifty kilometers away, and when he came back on foot, which was the way he had gone, his feet were bleeding from walking on the rough and stony road. He walked about in great agony, but he went around asking farmers to lend him some land to cultivate. . . .