I had written to Luciano that I was coming home, but he was not at the station in Binalonan when I arrived. I put my suitcase on my back and walked in the darkness, watching the flickering lamps in the houses on both sides of the street. It was a time of religious festival and there were many peasants in the street, on their way to church. They wore homespun clothes and rough wooden sandals, and there were townspeople in the crowd who wore leather slippers and shoes and cotton suits. The more fortunate ones rode in decorated caromatas with their perfumed daughters and sleek-haired sons. The peasants moved carefully out of their way. If the man in the caromata were an important personage or a government official of rank, the driver would lash at the peasants or spit on them. The important passenger would merely show his face in the window and everything would be forgiven and forgotten.
I was surprised to find our house in total darkness. When I saw that it was empty, I felt desolated. I stood at the gate for a long time trying to decide what to do. Several of our neighbors passed by with their carabaos and other beasts of burden and called my name, but I did not answer them because I lacked the courage to say anything.
Slowly I climbed into the house and fumbled under the earthen stove for matches. When I found the little box, I went into the living room and struck a match. The tiny yellow flame flared up and lingered in the small cup of my hand. Mice scampered into their holes and house lizards fell from the roof, turning over and over on their scaly sides. Then I saw the oil lamp on the rack at the edge of the table and lit it.
I took the lighted lamp and went to the kitchen. The pots were all clean and in order. The rice bin in the corner was empty. The plates were clean and the earthen drinking jars were full. There was firewood by the stove, and the salt tube above it, stuck in the grass roof, was full and leaking where the rain had touched it. Hanging on a rope above the stove was a leg of lamb. I was relieved to find something to eat, because I had not eaten since I had left Baguio.
I went to the wall where we kept our sharp bolos. The rack was still there, but the bolos were gone. I began to wonder what had become of my family. Had they come upon a fortune? Had they recovered the land? Had they gone to the village? I cut a piece of meat and chopped it into little pieces. Spraying vinegar and chopped pepper on the meat, I started to eat the hard rice crinkle I found in the bottom of one of the pots. The food warmed my stomach and my heart. I was in my own house.
I washed my hands and took off my clothes. I spread the grass mat on the bamboo floor and tried to sleep, but the mice kept coming out of their holes and running about the house. I was thinking of going to the village when the bells in the church tower began pealing and people from everywhere started shouting. I could hear the resounding roar of pagbayoan, or threshing boxes. When the spreading clamor reached our neighborhood, I could see people rushing into the street and children waving palm leaves and screaming.
I went outside and ran to the street where the crowd was thick and noisy. I rushed into the crowd and mingled with the people milling madly up and down the street. Then I heard them shouting:
“Happy New Year! Happy New Year!”
I pushed my way deeper into the crowd, shouting and laughing aloud when I accidentally ruffled the dignity of a shy village girl.
“Happy New Year!” I shouted at the top of my voice. “Happy New Year!” I pushed and moved slowly with the crowd. I kicked the ground like a little boy again, remembering other years that were not like this one.
“Happy New Year, Allos!” I said to myself.
Suddenly I felt a hand on my neck. I turned around and saw Luciano waving a palm leaf in his hand.
“This is a miracle!” he shouted above the noise. “I did not know you were in town. When did you arrive?”
“A few hours ago,” I said, beginning to feel the miracle of the new year. “Since when did you start celebrating like this?”
“This is the first time, Allos,” said my brother, putting his arm around me and shouting, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!”
I cupped my hands to my mouth. “What year is it?” I shouted into my brother’s ear.
“It is the year of the Lord,” he shouted back. “You must remember this year because it is significant: it is the year of all years. In the United States it is the sad end of another depression year and the beginning of a sadder one. Happy New Year! Happy New Year, Allos!”
When one o’clock came the celebrants circled the plaza and crowded into the presidencia. The noise suddenly ceased, and the people started for home. One by one lamps in the houses went out and the policemen barred the door of the presidencia. My brother and I walked in the street, suddenly exhausted.
“Where is your suitcase?” he asked.
“I have it in the house,” I said.
“House?” he said. “That house was sold months ago.”
“I did not know that,” I said.
“Father sold it because he had a chance to buy a small piece of land in Mangusmana,” said my brother. “Mother and the two girls are there with him. I have heard that mother is doing most of the work. Father is very sick.”
“I must see them at once,” I said. It was unbearable to think that my mother was now doing the farm work. And my two little sisters—how were they going to grow up now?
We went to our former house and picked up my suitcase. Then we proceeded to Luciano’s house where, greatly disturbed by the thought of my mother, I got up from my mat at dawn and walked to Mangusmana through the wet rice fields.
It was only when I was nearing our village that I remembered my brother Leon. He had come back from a war about which he had never spoken, and then had gone away again with his wife to start a new life. I was not coming from a war, but it was my first homecoming—home to the village and our grass hut, home to years of hard labor and bitter memories. And the grass was taller than usual, the water in the ditch was sweeter, the mango trees by the footpath were greener and the meadow larks more melodious. There was a sweet feeling of homecoming in me.
Then I saw my mother’s familiar back. She was following the plow, her skirt tucked between her legs. Suddenly I knew what Leon had felt the day he came home, running suddenly to take the plow from my father. I started running across the fields and leaping over ditches, shouting and calling frantically:
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
My mother stopped the carabao and looked toward me. The sun was falling directly upon her face, and she raised her hand to protect her eyes from the strong morning light. When she recognized me, she tied the rope to the handle of the plow, as my father used to do, and waited for me.
“Have you come home, son?” she said. And that was all she could say. Her mouth began to tremble with joy and sorrow, because to her joy and sorrow were always one and the same. Suddenly she grabbed me affectionately and wept, murmuring: “We are poor people, son. We are very poor people, son.”
I brushed back the tears from my eyes. I tried to laugh in order not to cry. Gently I pushed my mother out of the way and took the rope from her.
“Go home, Mother,” I said. “I will finish this piece for you.”
“Don’t work the animal too hard,” she said.
“I won’t,” I said. I watched her go away, a little peasant woman who carried the world on her shoulders. Then I flipped the rope gently across the carabao’s back, and the animal moved obediently and expertly along the deep furrows.
The sun came slowly up and burnished the upturned earth, felling the sweet dew in the grass and rousing the birds in their nests. I could hear dogs barking in the houses near by and the roar of water rushing through the tall talahib grass and rolling over the flat, fine sand in the river. I unhitched the carabao and tied it to a peg with a long maguey rope, so that it could reach the shade of the tamarind and the water in the ditch. I covered the plow with grass and started for our hut.
My father was lying in a corner in the kitchen, coughing violently and shivering whenever the draft reached him. His body had shrunken and his teeth had fallen out. He ate only soup and logao, or soft-boiled rice. He could no longer stand up even to get a cup of water, but my sister Francisca attended to his needs. She was only six years old, but she knew what to do around the house. I knew that she would grow up into a fine peasant girl.
I was home with my family and this alone was a comforting feeling. I had come back to manhood, here in my native village. I had come back to myself and my roots, here in this narrow strip of land. Back to my soil and to my father’s faith. I had not forgotten him limping through Mangusmana on his sore feet, going from house to house and asking the farmers if they could lend him a piece of land to cultivate or could hire him. I had not forgotten his love for the earth where his parents and their parents before him had lacerated their lives digging away the stones and trees to make the forest land of our village a fragrant and livable place.
While we were planting rice seedlings one of my cousins came to our house and invited me to go to a dance in a nearby village. We wrapped our clothes with banana leaves and walked through the rain and mud, shouting our manhood into the night.
We found a well near a banana grove where we washed our feet. My cousin was a high school student in Vigan, a large city in the province of Ilocos Sur. He had a good pair of shoes and his alpaca suit was new and smoothly pressed. He wore a red tie and striped silk shirt. My feet were still as bare as when I was born, but Luciano had given me an old khaki suit. I put a bandanna around my neck and the girls thought that it was better than a necktie.
I noticed a girl who had fallen for my cousin. I saw him kiss her on the mouth, a thing which was very daring in those days. The old men looked at them with great anticipation, but the women frowned with scorn. The girls snickered in their corners, sticking out their little yellow tongues behind outspread fans. The little girls and boys around the dance floor drummed on their bloated bellies. Sometimes they danced among themselves and attracted much attention from the crowd with their naked bodies and ugly, spreading toes: spitting as they jumped to the wild music, their spittle falling on their naked loins.
I was too shy to dance, so I hung about the pavilion.
“Approach a girl you like and stand before her if you are afraid to talk,” said my cousin.
“Do you think it will work?” I asked.
“It always works with these shy peasant girls,” he said. “Watch me do it.” He saw a rather good-looking girl in a red dress. He strode across like a peacock and stood in front of her.
I was watching her mouth to see if she would say something to him, but she almost jumped into his arms. My cousin turned around and winked at me. I saw a girl I liked sitting on the bench near the door, at the far end of the dance floor. I circled the people and stood in front of her. The girl flung herself into my arms, and I was taken by surprise, and for a while I could not move my legs. Then we were holding each other innocently and dancing the way it should not have been done in the village. I could see the sensual stare of the men and the anger of the women. The children spread out along the walls, sticking out their tongues and giggling.
When you dance for the first time, the world is like a cradle upon the biggest ocean in the universe. There are no other sounds except the beating of your hearts, and when the wild blaring of the trumpet and the savage boom-boom of the drum bring you back to reality, you get scared and begin to misstep and falter. Your hands weaken their hold on the rapturous being near you, and you want to apologize to her but the words are stuck in your throat. Suddenly you become conscious of the staring people around you, appraising you with obscene eyes and lascivious tongues, and slowly you lead the beauteous creature in your arms back to her seat. Then the orchestra becomes a cymbal of crashing noises, meaningless and riotous, and you return to your corner, trembling with cold and sudden fear. You are pushed back to reality, to the world of puny men and women who are circumscribed by fear. Then you, too, are one among them and one of them, prisoned by their fears and the ugliness of their lives. You go to the window and lean far out, savoring the bitter taste on your tongue. . . .
The next morning my cousin came running to the field where I was planting rice.
“Let us go away at once, Allos,” he said.
“I think I will stay until the rice is all planted,” I said. “And I would like to help my mother with the crop. I am sorry I cannot go with you.”
“You don’t understand what I mean,” he said. “Remember those two girls we danced with last night? Well, they are sisters. They are in the village now looking for us. I think they would like to force us into marriage.”
I laughed, because it seemed incredible.
“It is no laughing matter,” my cousin said.
“Well, what have we done?” I asked.
“We danced, that is all,” he said. “But you’d better come with me to Lingayen if you don’t want to be married to a mud-smelling peasant girl. I will go to school there instead of Vigan, but I am on my way to town now. Hurry, Allos!”
“I will think it over,” I said.
My cousin started running toward Binalonan, looking back and shouting to me to follow him. I waved at him innocently and went back to my work. But when I went home in the afternoon, Francisca met me at the door.
“Mother said for you to go away for a while,” she said, giving me a bundle and a basket of vegetables.
I thought it was all very foolish, but when I reached the ladder, the heads of the two village girls became visible. They were talking to my mother. My father was coughing violently. I could see Marcela playing with the girl near the stove. I took the bundle from Francisca and ran for the gate. Only when I reached the rice fields did I begin to feel free.
I wanted to stay in town for a week. But ten days afterward, when I returned to Mangusmana, the rice seedlings were already planted. My mother told me that I could go. I went to Binalonan and stayed with Luciano. When my cousin set out for Lingayen in an oxcart, I decided to go with him. I had saved a little money in Baguio, but it was not enough to take me to America. With Lingayen’s fishing industry in mind, I went with my cousin. But the cow was very small and lazy, and it was three days before we arrived in Lingayen.