This family tragedy marked the beginning of my conscious life, when my responses to outward influences grew so acute that I almost wrecked my whole future. I became sensitive in the presence of poverty and degradation, so sensitive that my unexpressed feelings tempered my psychological relation to the world. It was only long afterward in a land far away, long after these conflicts were conquered and forged as a weapon against another chaos that threatened to plunge me into despair and rootlessness, that the full significance of our tragedy burst into a flaming reality and drove me, suddenly and inevitably, into the struggle for the fulfillment of the redeeming qualities which I believed were inherent in me.
It was at this time that my father lost the land we had cleared for the church. Because our own land was still in the possession of the moneylender, there was no longer anything to do in the village. My brother Macario had not yet earned enough money to redeem the four hectares of land, which were all that was left of the original family property. My father could not find a man who would lend him farming land, and could not even hire himself to a farmer. The villagers were all small farmers, and they had only enough hectares to cultivate for themselves.
For a long time it seemed that my father and I could find nothing to do except to go to some farmer’s rice field and help in the harvesting. But my father was a farmer, not a hired laborer. It humiliated him to hire himself out to someone. Yet he was willing to swallow his pride and to forget the honor of his ancestors.
It was only when my maternal grandmother died that my father was allowed by my uncles on my mother’s side to cultivate the old woman’s little piece of land. But it was stony ground and far from the reach of water, and the grass was stunted and yellowish in color. It was not good for anything, not even camote or sweet potato, but my father was a stubborn man born to dig in the earth. He even said jokingly, when he saw my interest dying, that he would squeeze enough water from the stones to irrigate the land.
I tried to help him cut the tall grass with a broad cutting knife called a palang, but when we started digging a ditch to connect the land with the main waterways, I was shocked to discover that one foot below the surface were large stones and fossils of trees buried by floods many years before. My interest in the project died.
“I think you should go to town and live with your mother,” said my father. “Besides it is high time for you to go to school. I will try to farm alone.”
“I will come back and help you again,” I said.
“I will call you when I need you, son,” said my father.
“I will always be ready,” I said, looking at the boulders and huge roots of trees in the mouths of the caves that we had dug for the irrigation ditch to pass through, looking beyond this nightmare of my childhood into the future and the dark unknown.
“Good-bye, son,” said my father sadly. “Come to the village once in a while, when you feel like helping me.”
“I will, Father,” I said.
But I knew it was the end of my life in Mangusmana, the end of the bitter days of childhood. It was actually the end of my life with my father, the end of my farming life in the Philippines, the end of blinding heat and heavy rains. I was leaving all of my childhood now, leaving forever to face the demands of sudden manhood, and there was no return journey anywhere. I knew I could not go back to Mangusmana, and my father knew it too because he had witnessed it before, when my other brothers went the way I was going, away from him and his earth forever.
When I arrived in Binalonan the overland highway was under construction and a few people of the town were employed. The new road connected Manila in the south with the beautiful summer city of Baguio in the north. Hundreds of men and women were working on it, pounding the gravel into the sand with flattened pieces of wood. At night when there was a bright moon their pounding was like the distant roar of the sea. There was only one crushing machine in the ten-kilometer stretch under construction, but it was used in the daytime for leveling the ground that had been pounded by the men and women working through the night.
I went to the capataz, or foreman, of the construction gang and asked for a job. The work went on for three months; sometimes it rained torrentially and the water washed away the soft shoulders of the road. We wrapped palm raincoats around our bodies and worked furiously to save the road, but the strong rain tore our coverings to shreds. We discarded them and went on working without protection in the total rain. But sometimes it was so extremely hot we could hardly see what we were doing; the heat rose from the sand and stone like steam and hurt our eyes. It made the foreman irritable and angry, so we worked harder only to drop on the road from exhaustion.
But on the moonlit nights the children in the neighborhood came out with rice pestles and helped us without asking for any compensation. It was fun for them to work with us before they went to bed. We worked on toward the river that separates Binalonan and Puzzorobio, until one day the water came rushing upon us. I was swept away into a deep bend of the river and was pasted there against the bank, struggling.
I was told afterward that three men had hung on ropes tied to the huge mango tree near the river and reached for me. When I regained consciousness, I was lying on a soft grass mat in our house. It was two days after the accident, and the road had been finished. The foreman came to our house and gave me my salary, plus a small bonus. I gave it to my mother, and my father took it from her; then putting our earnings together, he went to the moneylender. It was the first payment on our land.
One day my brother Macario came home from school and saw me in bed.
“You should not work too hard at your age, Allos,” he said.
“Did you bring home a book with pictures?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “But you should wait until you are better.”
“I would like to look at the pictures now,” I said.
He went to the kitchen and came back with the oil lamp. He sat on the floor beside me. He started reading the story of a man named Robinson Crusoe who had been shipwrecked in some unknown sea and drifted to a little island far away. My brother patiently explained the struggle of this ingenious man who had lived alone for years in inclement weathers and had survived loneliness and returned safely to his native land.
I was fascinated by the bearded man, and a strong desire grew in me to see his island.
“You must remember the good example of Robinson Crusoe,” my brother said. “Someday you may be left alone somewhere in the world and you will have to depend on your own ingenuity.” Then he pointed to the picture of the lonely man and his faithful dog sitting side by side on an unknown shore. “Maybe you will be thrown upon some unknown island someday with nothing to protect you except your hands and your mind. Now read this line after me, Allos. . . .”
It was the beginning of my intellectual life with Macario, the beginning of sharing our thoughts with each other; and although he went away not long afterward to escape a tragedy that was about to crush him, I found him again in another land where we resumed the friendship we had found long ago at my sickbed.
When I was well again I saw that my mother needed help in her small trading business. It was because I wanted to help keep our family together that I had neglected going to school. My older brothers were all away from home, and I knew that they would not come back to Binalonan except for brief visits. Amado, who had left the village two years before, was now in the province of Bulacan working on a sugar plantation. Only Macario and I were left, and I did not want our family to disperse completely. But circumstances stronger than my hands and faster than my feet were inevitably dividing us, and no matter what I did our family was on its way to final dissolution and tragedy.
My mother’s trading business was very simple and primitive, yet the effort and time we put on it was incalculable. We awakened in the early morning and filled an earthen jar with boggoong, or salted fish, and peddled it in the villages. My mother carried the jar on her head, while I carried a long tube of salt on my shoulder. The villagers had no time to come to town for their supply of salted fish and salt, so we brought it to them once a week, hoping for a little profit.
Boggoong is an essential food to the peasants, for without it their simple fare of rice and leaves of trees is tasteless. They spread it thinly on the rice, if they have nothing else to eat; but most of the time they mix it with vegetables, especially with eggplants and paria, or bitter melon, which they like better than any other vegetable. They are always without money, and if they have saved anything at all, it is only a few centavos wrapped tightly in dirty rags.
My mother and I carried on our trade with the peasants by barter. For one cup of salt we would get three cups of rice, or four cups of beans; but for one cup of salted fish, which was more valuable than salt, we would get five cups of rice or six cups of beans. Sometimes the peasants had no rice or beans, so we willingly accepted chickens or eggs. But my mother gave even to those peasants who had nothing to barter in the hope that when we came around again they would be ready to pay. We were not always able to collect everything we had loaned, but my mother kept on giving our products to needy peasants.
It was during this period that I came to understand my mother’s heart. We had gone to a village where the women made decorative potteries. Most of the women gave us rice and chickens, but there was one woman who had nothing to give except a beautiful drinking jar that she had made out of the red clay in her backyard. My mother was attracted by it instantly, and she gave the woman more than the pot’s value. I had never before known her to appreciate beauty, but perhaps it was because she had had no time to express the finer qualities in her.
It was an unusually successful day. We had sold everything at a good price and our baskets were bulging with rice and beans. My mother carried the basket on her head and the beautiful jar in her left hand. Her right hand was holding the edge of the basket. I walked ahead of her and pushed away the tall grasses, stopping only when the chickens I was carrying made too much noise.
When we reached the Tagamusin River that separates Binalonan and the town of San Manuel, it began to rain and the red clay made the footpath slippery. My mother tucked her skirt between her legs, so that from a distance she looked like a man with short pants. We waded carefully across the murky water with the baskets held high above our heads. But when we reached the rise that led up to the road to town, her feet began to slip. She dug her toes into the mud and held desperately onto the beautiful pot, but she kept slipping back to the water. She was like a woman rolling on a pair of skates, slowly moving downward without losing her balance. Then suddenly she lost her grip on the jar, and it rolled into the water.
My mother wanted to turn her head to see what happened to it, but could not because she would have spilled the rice in the basket. Slowly and carefully she climbed up the rise, holding her head high and straight, digging the toes of one foot after the other into the mud and clutching the bank with her left hand. When she reached the level of the road, she heaved the basket to safety.
The jar was floating down the river. My mother slid down the mud, rushed into the water, and came back to the footpath wiping the undamaged jar with her skirt. When we arrived home I told the story to my brother Macario, who burst into laughter.
“Allos, stop that now!” said my mother.
My mother and I had another experience, a sad one, in a village called Cabolloan, where the poorest peasants lived on a barren land. The women asked for credit, or if refused, paid very little. When Saturday came around and our debtors saw us walking into the village, they started hiding in their empty granaries or pretended to be sick.
One woman came down from her grass hut trembling and looking very hungry and ill.
“I have not tasted boggoong for a long time,” she told my mother.
“You can taste it now,” said my mother, pretending not to know that the woman wanted credit.
Finally the peasant said, “I have nothing to barter because I am all alone and I am sick.”
My mother did not say anything. She was thinking of the next payment on our land.
Then the woman said pathetically, “Cannot I even dip my hands into it?”
“What good will it do you, old woman?” I said, noticing that her hands were cracked in places. “You know that the boggoong will hurt your hands the moment you touch it.”
The woman looked at me blankly; then she ran into her house and came back with a small earthen bowl half-filled with water. Quickly she put her hands into my mother’s can of salted fish, and taking them out as quickly, she washed them in her bowl of clean water. There was agony in her face. When the water had reached the deepest recesses of the cracks in her hands, the woman looked at me with forgiving eyes. Suddenly she lifted the bowl to her mouth and drank hungrily of the water where she had washed her hands that had been smeared with salted fish. When it was empty she scraped the sediment in the bottom of the bowl with her forefinger; then she rushed into her hut to look for rice.
I wanted to laugh because it was so comical, but my mother looked at me with angry eyes.
“Someday you will understand these things,” she said, looking up at the house. Then she knelt on the ground, lifted the basket, and put it expertly on her head.
I followed her slowly down the road.