2
All who served us used to tell me that I was born under a dark cloud not so much because my mother died giving birth to me, but because I never saw her. She was, they said with candor and reverence, the most beautiful woman they ever saw, and whenever they would start talking about her who nourished me in her womb, I listened attentively. I would be vastly proud and at the same time feel this sense of loss and futility, and foolishly I would wish to see her even though she be but a pallid ghost.
But I never did, although she lingered in every nook of the house, among the old iron pedestals and the tarnished mirrors, in the garden she once tended, and most of all in the big and troubled room that she had shared with Father. Her portrait there, by Cousin Marcelo, the servants told me, was lifelike. I often stood before it and marveled, for in the light that came in a flood when the sash shutters were open, I could almost feel her long hair, her benign smile upon me, her oval face, her dark eyes. Her expression exuded tenderness, patience, and that virtue of compassion, of forgiveness for even the deepest hurt such as that which Father could inflict.
The painting hung before Father’s writing desk—an old narra masterpiece with a cover that slid down. Cousin Marcelo knew how to capture every nuance in a person’s face, but more than this, he had also rendered in paint my mother’s luminous skin, the very flutter of her eyelashes.
Seeing me there gazing at the picture once, Sepa said: “Don’t you ever think she was that homely; she was much prettier than that—and her hair, her beautiful hair!” Then she called me to the kitchen, and among her shining pots and pans, she told of those times when she helped my mother wash her hair with lye from straw ash, treat it with coconut oil when it was dry, and comb it slowly as if she were combing fragile threads of gold.
Sepa was past fifty and stout like a pampered sow. Like Old David, who looked after the horses, she could not read or write. She used those black, thick slippers called cochos, and she always wore the traditional Ilokano handwoven skirt and rough cotton blouse. She had served the family all her life, and she spoke to Father and me with an intimacy none of the other help ventured to imitate. “If your mother were here now—if she were only here now.”
I remember my first visit to my mother’s grave on a windy October afternoon a few days before All Saints’ Day. I was five or six years old. I was chasing dragonflies in the yard under the watchful eyes of one of the maids when Old David scooped me up in his arms and took me to the house, where Sepa gave me a good scrubbing. She dressed me in my sailor suit, and when I was ready, Father emerged from his room in a white drill suit looking as if he was going to an important feast, for his hair was neatly combed and his robust cheeks shone.
Near the family altar in the sala he picked up a bouquet of roses wrapped in palm leaves. They came from my mother’s rose garden, which Father now tended. Then, taking my hand, he led me down to the yard, where Old David was waiting for us in the calesa. The drive to the cemetery was pleasant; the afternoon was mild, and the smell of grass, the good earth, and the fields yellow with grain filled the air. The wind whistled in the bamboo groves by the side of the road, and Old David sang snatches of his favorite Ilokano song, “If You Still Doubt.”
Father was silent all the way, his eyes at the distance. The road narrowed and was now devoid of gravel; rutted in the rainy season, it was now drying up, the deep lines drawn by bull carts and sleds hardening into neat furrows. We reached the cemetery, its low stone wall shrouded by vagabond cadena de amor. The earth was carpeted in amorseco weeds, and in the empty spaces stood leafless sineguelas trees. The cemetery was busy with people painting the crosses and the slabs with white lime. At the dead end Old David stopped, jumped down, and helped us off.
We walked down a gravel path bordered with rosal, bloomless now till next June, when it would sprout white, scented flowers, to the small chapel at the center of the cemetery. It was already quite late in the afternoon, and the sun was soft on the skin. The vestiges of work were everywhere—the freshly cut grass and the splashes of whitewash on the picket fences and on the figures of plump baby angels that adorned the tombs.
Father held my hand and guided me through the narrow passageways between the tombs. We reached a lot fenced off from the rest by a low iron grill, and in its center was a narrow slab of black marble, bordered with freshly trimmed San Francisco. Father let go of my hand. He removed the palm wrap of the bouquet and placed it at the foot of the slab, then, as if his legs were suddenly knocked away from under him, he fell on his knees on the grass and I, too, compelled by some magic force, knelt beside him. When he spoke, his voice was hollow and sounded far away. “Nena, I’ve brought your son to you now that he is old enough …”
I glanced at Father in the thickening dusk; his hair was tousled by the wind, his white unbuttoned coat flapped about him, and tears streamed down his cheeks.
It was the first time I saw him cry, and I realized how much he must have loved—and still loved—her who was no more.
Ours was an old house with a steep, galvanized-iron roof grown rusty red over the years. It had unpainted wooden siding and sash windows with balustrades that could be flung open to let the breeze in when the days were hot. The ground floor was red tile, and its walls were red brick, scarred in places but whitewashed. The flooring was solid mahogany—long planks two inches thick and a foot wide—laid side by side without a single nail piercing them. When the servants scrubbed the floor, the fine grain of the wood shone.
The furniture was just as old; though some pieces were lost during the Japanese occupation, most of the bigger ones were still with us: the mirrored lockers, the steel pedestals, the marble-topped tables.
A few paintings hung in the living room—just pretty pictures done by my Cousin Marcelo. One that should not have been there was the picture of Don Vicente. The modern frame, a media cuerpo, shows Don Vicente, massive and impregnable, wearing a Panama hat, his corpulent chest almost breaking out from his tight-fitting, collarless suit. The picture hung on the wall by the big clock as a symbol, I think, of the vast authority the rich man wielded over us, particularly Father.
I could not understand then why Father worked for Don Vicente. We had enough to get by, and Father had his own lands to look after. Maybe, as Cousin Marcelo said, he did not have enough courage to leave Don Vicente, or maybe Father knew that if he ceased being close to the Great Man, there would be a hundred fawning and greedy men who would be only too glad to take on his job. This could be the reason, but I don’t think it was; Father took the job because Don Vicente trusted him and, more than that, it gave Father a sense of power such as he would never have known if he tended no more than the land and properties under his name. Once I heard him say to a tenant, “Don’t you know that I can drive you all away from your homes today, right now, if I wanted to? Where will you live? Don Vicente’s word is law, and I am that law!”
But knowing Father, his bluster seldom meant anything, for he was, I always like to believe, just and fair.
The living room, through a door at the right, led to the dining room and the kitchen, which were in a separate structure roofed with clay tile upon which weeds sprouted. At the left of the kitchen, which was Sepa’s domain, was a stone azotea that stretched to the wing of the house including the living room. On warm evenings, when the moon bloomed over the town, it was Father’s haunt and mine.
The wide yard—all the way up to the storehouse roofed and walled with galvanized-iron sheets, too—was not grassy like the plaza. The earth was bare and packed tight and clean with carabao dung but for the green patch of garden planted with roses, azucenas, and other flowering plants. Guava trees—their slender branches seldom laden with fruit—stood in the yard, and to their trunks the carabaos of the tenants were often tethered when they came during the harvest season with their bull carts. A woodshed and a stable stood near the storehouse. In all three buildings, big rodents lived, burrowing under the piles of chopped acacia boughs or in the sacks of grain.
One of the pleasant pastimes I used to enjoy as a child was to discover the alien things in the crannies of our home. I used to climb to the attic, endure the sun as it lashed on the iron roof. There, among the dust of years, I poked at old boxes that stored strange shapes and wanton objects. The place I enjoyed best, however, was Father’s room. It adjoined mine, but I seldom had freedom in it except when he was in the field during the planting and harvesting seasons looking after the hacendero’s tenants under his care as encargado and also after our own. Then I would sneak into the room, open his drawers and trunks. There was one beside his dresser that fascinated me most, because it was made of handsome and polished Chinese rosewood embedded with ivory carved into birds and bamboo. It was always locked, and though I had seen him open the other trunks, I never saw him touch this one. I heard him riding down from the stable to the street one Sunday morning, and after he had galloped toward the creek, I was in his room before the rosewood trunk. I lifted the lid, and this time, to my surprise, it was open. The biting scent of naphthalene balls assailed my nostrils. There before me, filled to the brim, were women’s things. I knew at once I had opened my mother’s wardrobe.
I picked up a garment and held it in the light—a bright silk shawl embroidered with red roses and edged with lace. I placed it back, then lifted a thick wad of clothes, and underneath, close to the bottom of the trunk, was a small wooden box with two small ivory angels on its lacquered cover. I opened it and found a heap of letters and dried petals of what looked like a big red rose. The box smelled of perfume, and in a moment the heavy and wonderful scent pervaded the room. It was then that Martina, one of the new maids, drifted by the open door and for a moment stood there, watching me. I opened one of the letters. It was in fine, feminine script, and addressed to Father. I could not read all of it; at the end, “Always—Nena.” I felt as if I was trespassing into a secret realm, where I belonged but was not, at the moment, allowed in. Trembling, I put the letters back and gently placed the box under the pile of clothes.
Her pert brown face screwed up, Martina asked, “What is that?” She did not dare venture into Father’s room.
“Letters,” I said. “My mother’s letters to my father.”
“Those are her clothes?”
I nodded.
“They look beautiful,” she said, still standing at the door. “Why don’t you try one?”
“I am a man,” I said, frowning at her.
“Go on,” she said. “I just want to see how women’s clothes looked years ago. I won’t tell anyone.”
In another moment, I was flailing my arms and thrashing as I put on a blue silk dress.
It did not fit, of course; it hung loose, well below my feet, and seeing me attired thus, Martina let go a delighted squeal. I laughed with her and was, in fact, enjoying myself so much I did not realize that Father had returned, was at the door in his riding breeches, the whip in his hand. Martina must have seen him approach, for she had disappeared.
Although his countenance was severe, Father did not whip me; in fact, there was more sadness in his eyes than anger. “Never again,” he said softly but sternly. “Never again shall I see you open this trunk.”
And never again did I do it. After Father died I kept the trunk, and it has always been closed as he had willed it; with the years its locks rusted, and there came a time when the key no longer worked and it would take a crowbar and a sturdy hand to open it—but that hand would not be mine.