3
Next to December and its holidays, June was the most welcome month in our town. The floodgates of heaven were finally opened, the rains started, and the rice planting began. The fields that were brown began to stir with the emerald of new grass. Grasshoppers were on the wing, and the frogs came alive. But more than these, June was the time when we celebrated our town fiesta. A full month before the festivities, they had already started coming, the feria people who erected tin sheds near the church, in which they sold cheap dolls with plump cheeks and bright eyes, and ran shooting galleries and stalls for other forms of gambling.
It was during this time, too, that the comedia players—the farmers and their children—from Carmay came and stayed in the bodega, where they practiced their prancing and their lines before they acted them out on the stage in the plaza. As fiesta patron, Father provided for their meals, their mirror-spangled clothes, the papier-mâché helmets and wooden swords, as well as the five-piece band that accompanied their acting.
The year I was twelve, two weeks before the fiesta, a circus came. Three big trucks immediately transformed the plaza into a mud puddle as they manueuvered into position. I did not know anyone from the circus except a girl about my age; she walked the tightrope—so well, up there in the heights, she could have been walking on even ground. Her name was Hilda.
She and I did not have much in common, but during the two weeks that she was in Rosales, we became friends. I lived in a big house with old people. The young sons of Father’s tenants acted ill at ease in my presence, but Hilda did not. She lived in a tent—that was the home she knew—with old people, too, who did not care about what went on inside young minds, what made them want to go swimming even in dirty creeks the whole day, or what drove them, naked, splashing and singing in the rain.
I should not have told Hilda about my going to Grandfather’s house, but we got to talking about where we would like to be most; she had come that morning as usual to draw water from our artesian well, and I was waiting for her there. She had a ready answer for me: “I would like to be up there, feeling the height, knowing that people are looking at you—tensely, waiting for you to fall.”
She said she started walking the tightrope when she was five years old along with her parents, who were trapeze artists. She did not sound boastful at all. At six, when she should have been in school, she was already earning, starring in the circus act.
I described to her what Carmay was, and I did not exaggerate. I told her about the buri palms, how in the dry season they were tapped and the sap was boiled in huge iron vats into sugar or drunk sweet and cool and soothing in the sweaty afternoons. Cornfields laced Carmay, and water lilies decked its irrigation ditches in flaming violet. Beyond the village was the Agno, swift and murky during the wet season, and in its wide delta, corn and watermelons grew. In Grandfather’s yard were fruit trees—santol, duhat, and orange—all of which I climbed. I also often went with the men to the river to watch them fish till their bamboo baskets were full. And now that the rains had come, the banabas lining the paths were flowering. It is a heavenly place, Carmay!
“I must go with you,” Hilda said.
During the first week of June, the vacant lot beyond the house, which was often regarded as an extension of the plaza—which it was not—was transformed into a field of green amorseco weeds that had started to flower. Before Father built the storehouse behind the house, his tenants used to fill the place with their loaded bull carts while waiting for Chan Hai, the Chinese merchant who came for the grain with his battered truck and a huge weighing machine. But every time there was an athletic competition of the grade schools in the district, the town mayor always asked Father’s permission to use the place in addition to the plaza. Father did not ask for any rent, and perhaps in recognition of his charity, his name was always prominently included in the programs.
The balloting for the fiesta queen was not yet over—it was usually held two weeks before the fiesta—when the circus came. The trucks—their radiators spewing steam, their tops brimming with poles, trunks, and people—rumbled past the house, drawing the servants from their chores to the windows. They proceeded to the plaza and to Father’s vacant lot and started to unload.
Father saw the crates spilled on the grass, the wooden stakes piled high, the lot now churned by heavy tires. Shaking his head, he went on with his figures. In a while, three policemen from the nearby municipio approached the visitors, who had already started driving stakes on Father’s land. They went into a huddle and finally broke up, the policemen leading the way to our house.
Ever correct and polite, Father met them in the hall where they piled in with their muddy shoes and flopped on the rattan sofas with their brash city ways. From their ranks, a well-built man with a balding top came forward; his tone was apologetic, and he was saying how sorry he was that they had used Father’s land without realizing it was not part of the town plaza. A girl tugged at his hand continually, and when he could not ignore her anymore, he said, “This is my daughter. She walks the tightwire.” Another tug. “And she is the star of the show.”
She was not even ten, I think; she certainly was no taller than I. She preened her faded overalls and grinned exuberantly, her big eyes shining, then she stepped back a little and executed a neat curtsy. Everyone broke into laughter, even Father, then she walked away from the assembly. I followed her to the middle of the hall near the picture of Father’s grandfather; from it her gaze turned to the chandelier in the rose-colored ceiling as it tinkled to a slight breeze, then she walked to the grandfather clock by the foot of the stairs, and finally, catching a glimpse of me watching her, she came to me and asked if I lived in the house.
I nodded.
“It looks so big,” she said, scowling. She was on the verge of another question, but the circus people seemed to have obtained Father’s permission, for they started for the stairs, her father still profuse with thanks. Hilda joined them.
“Please come when we start,” her father said at the top of the stairs. “We have a good program, and it is known through all of the province. There will be people from as far as Lingayen, Dagupan, and, of course, from Urdaneta.”
Father nodded, then went back to his seat in the sala.
“It is not much of a circus,” he told me afterward. It was dusk, and I had lingered by the window watching the men work, listening to the rhythmic pounding of their sledgehammers on the wooden stakes. A stage took shape, and a wire fence, and within the enclosure they rolled out a mound of canvas that occupied one whole truck. Amid shouts and creaking pulleys, they hoisted the giant tent.
“When you go to the city,” Father continued, “you will see a real circus at the carnival. This is just a big sideshow, although it is quite famous. A circus has wild animals, maybe five elephants, lions, and tigers. And look at them—they have only two elephants.”
“Father said yours is not a real circus,” I told Hilda the next morning. She had come to the backyard where the artesian well was, as did the other members of the troupe before her. They had also parked some of the trailers near our bodega, and in the wide threshold of the building they had set up some of their cots. “A real circus,” I went on reciting what Father had said, “has lions and tigers.”
“It is a real circus,” Hilda retorted. She put down her battered pail, braced herself before the pump, and glared at me. I did not move from the bottom rung of the stone stairs that led to the azotea. For a while, it seemed that she would shout at me or do something rash, but she lowered her pail and started to pump.
“There was a time,” she said, throwing angry glances at me, “we had two lions and two tigers. Three elephants, tall and strong as trucks.”
“They are not here now,” I said.
“No,” she said, pumping furiously. “The trainer was killed by the tigers. They were all sold to the zoo—but not the elephants because they are easy to take care of. And they work—but even without them ours is still a real circus. Come with me.” Her pail was full. I turned apprehensively to the house to see if anyone was watching. Sensing my reluctance, she taunted, “Don’t be a sissy.”
I helped her with the bucket, spilling the water on our legs as we hurried behind the house and out to the plaza until we were behind the tent. The previous night, rain had fallen, and now the morning was polished to a sheen. The tent was a dull white hump fringed by acacias. In its cool shadow, on planks that were laid side by side, the menfolk rested. The women were washing and cooking, and when they saw me, they smiled in recognition. Hilda was holding my hand, and as we entered the wide awning, her grip tightened. “Wait here,” she said, and darted out. It was warm inside the tent. Tufts of grass rose above the narrow slits between the boards that were laid in the middle for a stage. Around it, on the sides, were boards fastened together, tier upon tier. From the top of the tent, which now looked patched up from within, bits of sun stole in and lay in bright silver puddles on the ground. The two poles crowned by a blue halo of the June sky soared up, and near the halos were swings and ropes that stretched from one pole to the other.
Hilda returned wearing red tights. Her feet were encased in thin-soled leather shoes, and she trotted to one of the poles where the end of a rope ladder dangled. She bade me follow her as she started the climb, nimbly scaling each swaying rung. It was warmer up on the precarious perch near the top, but Hilda did not seem to care. She smiled when she turned and saw me holding tightly to the pole, not venturing as high as she had climbed. She put one foot forward on the high wire that extended out into space—and there was no net beneath her. I called at her to stop, but she answered with a resonant laugh. As she lifted each foot in her slow progress, the wire swayed. Balancing on her right foot, she raised her hands. The wire ominously zagged, and by then, I thought that even the poles were swaying. I turned away, unable to look.
When I looked again at her urging, the swaying had ceased. Hilda was not on the wire anymore; she was perched safe and smiling on the small platform near the other pole.
I was weak and trembling when I got down. Hilda waited for me at the entrance and walked cheerfully with me to the outside, where the sunlight was waiting.
Hilda’s father dropped by the house again the next afternoon, reiterating his invitation. But Father, always enigmatic and aloof, merely nodded and said he would try.
The plaza was in a gala mood that night; the small town band whose services the circus had secured started tooting around the town, even before dusk, carrying placards about Hilda’s death-defying act and the world’s strongest man pitting his strength against an elephant. After a hurried supper, I asked Father if I could go. He called Tio Baldo—I don’t know why I called him Tio when he was really just one of the help; perhaps it was because Father had considered him bright enough to be patron to him; perhaps because of all those who helped in the house, it was only he who attended to my school problems. He was to accompany me with no less than the circus manager, so that I would be given the best seat that night.
The plaza was illuminated by carbide lamps of dice tables and other enticements. Before the makeshift stage that was actually part of a truck with the sides removed, a big electric bulb blazed, drawing many moths, showing the painted faces, the baggy pants of the circus clown, and the barker, urging the crowd to hurry, hurry—the seats were being filled. Some members of the troupe were seated at one end of the stage, and I recognized Hilda at once in the same red tights she had worn that morning, but her face was now thick with paint. She did not recognize me in the crowd as she sat there in the center, basking in her glory while the barker pointed to her and shouted her virtues, her mockery of death. The band stopped playing and went inside the tent, followed by the troupe; the show was about to begin.
Tio Baldo and I had the best seats, beside the mayor and his wife, at the rim of the circular stage. Although outside it was cool, within the tent it was warm, and the smells of perspiration and tobacco smoke were all around us. I did not mind this so much, for soon the clown came out, Hilda’s father recognizable even in his baggy pants and with a pillow tied to his girth; he and the other clowns went through their paces while the kids up on the tiers squealed at their pratfalls. A magician enthralled us as he made balls vanish, drew doves out of a black hat, put a woman to sleep, then proceeded to saw her in two. Next, the strongest man in the world—a hefty six-footer with bulging biceps—bent a steel rod, let a truck run him over slowly, and, as a finale, pushed an elephant toward the other end of the stage. Then the trapeze artists, and finally, Hilda.
Now the lights blinked out except for one spotlight atop a tall tripod. In the middle of the stage, in that circle of white, she seemed so tiny and fragile. While the barker described what she would do, she did somersaults, splits, and back bends; it was as if she were made of rubber. She could put her head down between her feet and contort into every imaginable shape. She did several curtsies, turning around to face the audience, then she trotted to the pole and went up, up to her perch, the spotlight never leaving her. The band ceased playing, only the snare drum rumbled, and now an apprehensive murmur coursed through the audience. The beat of the snare drum quickened as she rose from the narrow platform; she stepped onto the high taut wire on her dainty feet, tested it like a frightened child learning how to walk. One shaky step forward, then a short, ominous pause. Balancing herself, she repeated the same staggering process until—or almost until—she got to the center, for now the wire had started to sway, and from the audience exploded one despairing cry as she slipped and then toppled.
But Hilda did not fall. Below the first wire was another; she had jumped into a dance, each step sure and steady this time, below her no net at all. When she had finished, the applause was deafening.
Hilda was in the yard again the following morning and, of course, in the succeeding mornings with the same battered pail. She worked like the others and did not seem to mind. She did not have much to say when I asked about the different towns she had visited, but her face always brightened as she recounted each.
“I will go to the city someday,” I told her a week later when she said she liked performing best in Manila, for she did not have to work so hard helping in the kitchen. Her chores for the day were over, and we were idling in the bodega, which was now, save for a few sacks of seed rice, almost empty.
“I will study there,” I said, and she told me, too, how she had taken snatches of schooling during the rainy season; Rosales, as a matter of fact, was their last performance for the season, for the circus closed when the rains came, and they started on the road again in November.
Within the week, more sideshows came to town and decked the main street with their gaudy fronts and raucous shooting galleries. The people flocked to them—children wide-eyed and amazed at the freaks, the wild man from Borneo who ate live animals, the cobra woman, half snake, half human—but it was really the circus that attracted people, for this was the first time it traveled to our part of the country. The two elephants alone, feeding on sugarcane and mountains of grass—drew crowds from other towns and the distant villages. Two weeks before the actual fiesta, the streets were rigged up with varicolored bulbs and from all the houses stretched bunting of brightly colored Japanese paper. Above every street corner soared a bamboo arch, festooned with woven palm flowers, proclaiming Her Majesty, the Queen, for whom the town market was decorated, and on one end a stage with a throne and across the white canvas, Her Majesty’s name and that of her two princesses—the annual handiwork of Cousin Marcelo.
The day before the feast of San Antonio de Padua, Hilda came as usual to the artesian well. I was in the yard, waiting for Old David to hitch the calesa; beside me was my air rifle and my canvas bag. Father had expected a few guests to arrive in the afternoon for the fiesta; as a matter of fact, some of the tenants had already appropriated places under the balete tree and others were camped inside the bodega. We needed some chicken and fresh vegetables, perhaps fruits from the farm. We fell to talking again about Carmay, and when the calesa was ready, Hilda cast her pail aside and said firmly, “Take me with you.”
“But your folks might look for you,” I tried to dissuade her.
“They won’t,” she replied. “They do that only if they don’t see me on the high wire. I haven’t been to any farm, really. You know, I have ridden two elephants in the parade, but I have not ridden any carabao yet.”
All argument was useless. She clambered up the calesa after me, and we drove out. From the asphalted main street we veered to the left, to the graveled provincial road and Carmay three kilometers away. The calesa jerked over the ruts, but Hilda did not mind. Beyond the town, Father’s fields lay green and vast, extending to the banks of the Agno. Some of these he had bought from Don Vicente, whose lands were in the opposite end of the town; some were cleared by his grandfather, who had come with the first settlers from the Ilocos; some he had taken bit by bit from farmers who owed him money and could not pay. The sun punctuated every tree, the buri palms, the mounds that dotted the fields and on whose crests tall grass waved with each breath of wind.
We reached Carmay, a neat huddle of farmhouses beside a creek. She crinkled her nose and said it was not much—just like all the other villages in this part of the country. We dipped down the provincial road into a narrow path and got off before the biggest house in the village, the only one roofed with tin. We found Grandfather knitting fishnets by the stairs. In his old age, he should not have been living alone, but he preferred the Carmay, where he was born and where he grew, where he worked and saved enough not only to buy out his other neighbors’ farms but also to send all his children to college, so that they would not be farmers like him.
I kissed his gnarled and wrinkled hand, then embraced him, smelling once again his tobacco. Old David told him what we had come for, and while our servant tended to his chores, Hilda and I went to the irrigation ditches, which had begun to fill. We romped in the newly stirring fields and chased grasshoppers. For lunch, Old David had brought hard-boiled eggs and broiled catfish; he then broiled a slice of dried carabao meat, tough as rubber, all of which we ate with our hands in Grandfather’s cluttered kitchen. After this, we went back to the cornfields and gathered a few ears, which we roasted over coals that Grandfather had kept alive for us in the shade of one of his mango trees. Under the tree, with the scent of June and the living world around us, we were shielded from the sun, which was shining on the rich brown earth, freshly plowed and shining still where the plowshares had ripped into it. I went to the furrow and picked up a clod. It was warm and moist.
Hilda was lying on the sled. I sat beside her and told her to raise the hem of her dress up to the navel. She turned to me, half-rising, and said angrily, “I will not do such a thing.”
I told her then, “I want you to belong to Carmay, to be free from the sickness of other earths. I will rub this on your stomach”—I held the clod before her eyes—“and just as Grandfather said, you will never get sick, not while you are here.”
She seemed apprehensive, but she smiled. Though she did not seem fully convinced about the efficacy of my magic, she finally raised her dress. “You are like an old man,” she said, shaking her head. “You believe in spirits.”
I did not speak. Her legs were white and clean, and her skin was smooth. I crushed the clod and let particles trickle on her skin. The grains fell on her navel and rolled down her sides. With my palm, I spread the clod on her belly, slowly, softly, and when this was done, she snapped her dress down and pinched my hand. “Foolish!” she said, laughing.
It was late afternoon when we headed for home. Shortly before dusk, rain fell in torrents and flooded the newly dug canals along the streets. When she saw the clouds darken, Hilda had hoped it would not rain so hard so that the tent entrance would not be muddy. She had asked me to go see her again, but I was tired, and besides, the program would not be changed till the morrow—on the first night of the fiesta—when there would be some variations.
I went to bed after a supper that we shared with Father’s talkative guests from Manila. The rain stopped, but soon there was a slight insistent patter on the roof again. Occasionally a streak of lightning knifed across the sky. I closed the sash shutters and went to sleep. The patter was still on the roof when I woke up and discerned weighted voices in the hall. They persisted, anxious and harried, not the soft sounds of a dream. I rose and walked to the door. The hall was ablaze, and even the big chandelier, which was used only on special occasions, was lighted. Beyond the balcony, however, the plaza was dark and quiet and the lights of the many vendors and dice tables were out.
I recognized at once the members of the troupe. Hilda’s father paced the floor, still wearing his baggy pants and multicolored coat, but the paint was erased from his face. Hilda’s mother was a forlorn figure near the sofa where most of them were gathered.
Catching a glimpse of Father, I went to him and asked what it was all about. He told me to go back to sleep, but I could see that he was greatly disturbed. “Who is it, Father?” I asked. He said it simply: “Hilda, the girl from the circus, the tightwire artist. She slipped.”
“Isn’t the doctor coming?” one of the women asked. She did not get any reply. The others slouched on the sofas, their faces tense with waiting, and soon they started mumbling. Hilda’s father told them to be quiet. He approached Father and said softly, “I hope you don’t mind the inconvenience we are causing you, but the plaza, with all those people, and the rain …”
Father dismissed him with a nod. Then I saw her. I went to the sofa where the older women were gathered about. Hilda lay there, pale and motionless, and in the corners of her mouth were little streams of red that had dried. As she opened her eyes, her mother bent over her, whispering, “My poor, poor darling …”
She was not listening; she closed her eyes again, and as she stirred, she moaned. “Don’t crowd around her,” Father said when they started hurrying to the sofa again. With the exception of her mother, they went back to their seats.
“Our star is no more,” Hilda’s mother wept bitterly, casting a beseeching look at Father, who turned away. “She always did it right—she could do it even with a blindfold on.”
Hilda opened her eyes again, and briefly our eyes locked. She opened her mouth as if to speak, and I bent low only to hear her say, “I hate you,” almost in a whisper. But her mother heard, and she cried, “You naughty girl!”
I wheeled and ran to my room. Father followed me there. I did not know what to do, what to say. “She came to Carmay with me this morning,” I said. “I did not want to bring her along, but she insisted—”
“I know,” Father said, sitting on my bed. “David told me.”
“I did not do anything,” I said.
Father nodded, then bade me go to sleep. Outside, the rain and the wind grew stronger. The leaves of the balete tree rustled, and there were sounds of people scurrying below the house seeking shelter in the wide sweep of the media agua. They would be drenched if they went under the balete tree; its cover would not be enough. Above the monotonous patter on the roof, the merry music of a brass band somewhere beyond the plaza drifted into the house, and the dusky magic of June clung like a wanton spell to my troubled mind.