4
In another two days the fiesta was over, but the circus did not wait for the last rocket to be fired. The morning after the accident, it packed up, leaving the plaza looking sullen and desolate. The bamboo arches in the street corners and the paper buntings that were soaked and frayed were not dismantled till after a week, but when the circus left I was miserable. Not even the strong afternoon rains, which brought my friends out—racing in the streets and shrieking and splashing in the solid jets of water from the roofs—could lure me away from the sad, sad thought that bedeviled my mind.
My depression would have lasted much longer, but by the end of the month, another celebration came. After more than ten years in America, Tio Benito finally returned home.
Among our many relatives, only he could claim the distinction of having been to America. He went there in the 1920s at the age of eighteen when many Ilokanos were lured by the promise of high wages on the sugar plantations in Hawaii and in the orange orchards of California. There was also the dubious expectation of being able to go to bed with an Americana. It was the question often asked of Tio Benito when he settled down to talk with old friends and neighbors.
Grandfather had objected to his leaving, for it meant Tio Benito’s denying himself a college education, which his brothers and sisters had. But Tio Benito was bent on his adventure; he pilfered cavans of grain from the bodega over which he kept watch, sold them to the Chinese comprador, then scampered off to Manila and across the Pacific.
Grandfather was very angry, not so much at the minor thievery as at the fact that Tio Benito had gone without bidding him good-bye. But the old man was quick to forgive, particularly after Tio Benito’s letters started coming and with them an occasional dollar bill or a shipment of clothes that, alas, may have been all right for Alaska and Northern California but certainly not for Carmay.
But in his letters Tio Benito asked for money more often than he sent it. He got, of course, what he wanted, plus pleadings from all in the family that he hurry back to the land of his birth because Grandfather was becoming old, and there was need for him to look after his inheritance, for his brothers and sisters were too involved with their own.
Everything about Tio Benito was wonderful and done with style. But Tia Antonia, on the occasions that she visited us, always derided him for having gone wrong; she said he had become a “pagan.” She had an ally in Sepa, our cook, who believed in religion as convert Protestants devoutly do. Almost all of my relatives were a religious lot, though they were very democratic about their beliefs; they went to any church of their liking. It was almost a rule that hardly anyone stayed home Sunday mornings—all must go to church. I found this not too disturbing, for I was serving then as sacristan to Padre Andong, the Catholic priest—a chore I appreciated, as I always managed to swipe a few coins when I passed the collection plate on Sundays.
Tio Benito’s explanation for his “paganism” was pragmatic. “Look,” he would say. “What is the need for one to go to church or pray to God? He is everywhere. God knows that when something miserable has happened to you, you need help. Why go to church and make the preacher or the priest grow rich? God knows you are thankful for the things He has done for you. Besides, He isn’t like a young girl whom you must flatter every day with words so that His love for you won’t diminish. He isn’t like that because He is God. He is good. He knows that you like Him, and there is no need to be repetitive—mumbling prayers over and over, prayers said yesterday or a thousand years previous. He gets tired of that.”
Still Tia Antonia insisted that he did not even know how to make the sign of the cross. It was hard to believe that a man as old as he did not know that.
Father, however, recalled that Tio Benito was quite religious before he left for the United States; consequently, he explained his brother’s sanctimonious behavior as a result of American influence.
To this, Tio Benito retorted, “Don’t you dare say that the Americans have no religion, that they don’t know how to worship. Yes, they do worship—and it is the buck, the dollar, they revere. It is the end and the beginning—an American without money has nothing, not even God. And that is why America is strong—because it worships money. And look at all of you, worshipping something that cannot help you. Is God responsible for the droughts, the typhoons that destroy the crops?”
Tia Antonia looked at his recalcitrance in a slightly different manner: “America is rich and, therefore, licentious and without God. Look at the absence of modesty of its women.” And then she would go into a tirade against the magazines showing American girls in the briefest of bathing suits.
“And that is precisely what I like,” Tio Benito admitted to me one day when he was regaling me again with his stories about the United States.
“But surely, Tio,” I said, “there must be something in America that you did not like.” He was silent for a while, then, in quiet tones, he told me of days of hunger, how difficult it was to get a job because he was brown, how he was treated no different from the Chinese, and how he pitied the Negroes most. “They are not regarded as people,” he told me.
“But America is the land of equality, of the free—”
“Bullshit,” Tio Benito said, raising his voice.
I quoted at length from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which I had already memorized.
“It is the land of opportunity—that is right,” Tio Benito said. “If you are white, if you are Protestant, and you are Anglo-Saxon.”
“Meaning you cannot play the saxophone?”
He laughed and tousled my hair. “You are too young to be discussing religion with me,” he said. Then off again he went, this time to Carmay to be with Grandfather. But after being there for a month, the farm must have bored him, for he moved into the house again, this time sharing Cousin Marcelo’s room on the ground floor. He did not seem to have a care in the world. He had obviously saved some money to fool around with, and he continued his meanderings, holding court in the marketplace and at the town barbershop, and ready with the bottle even for the slightest acquaintance. Spending as he did, his savings soon petered out but not the heckling, particularly from Tia Antonia and from Sepa. His impending bankruptcy and the unrelenting nagging about his profligate ways must have done something, for one Sunday morning he decided to give God a chance.
To please Sepa, he went with her to the Protestant chapel. He played no favorite, for on the following Sundays he tried them all—the Catholic church, the Seventh-Day Adventists, even the Aglipayans. Not one of the denominations, however, appealed to him. After he had tried them all, he did not hide his loathing for “the stuffy crowdedness in the churches—even God would have been uncomfortable there. With all those many converts, they have no need for me. The priests talk in a language I cannot understand,” he said. He complained, too, of people with bad voices singing.
“What did you do in California on Sundays, Tio?” I asked.
“I had a good time,” he said, a grin breaking across his rotund, oily face.
“Did you play games? Cockfights?”
His eyes twinkled. He looked at me expansively. “Cockfights—yes, although the Americans never liked them; they always tried to haul us to jail for it. And games … yes.” He turned to Father and to Sepa, who was hovering by, ready with another helping of his favorite dinardaraan. “I will tell you later … later …”
That afternoon, I cornered him in the bodega, where he was making an inventory of the sacks of grain gnawed by rats. “We followed the crops in California,” he explained. “We would be picking beans, tomatoes, lettuce. Then strawberries and grapes. And apples, yes, apples. I would smell of apples even on Sundays.”
I could picture him munching an apple, although he said apples made him sick. On Sundays, he went on, he had plenty of money. He brushed his teeth, wore his flashiest suit and his black Stetson, then boarded the silver bus that was fast and smooth, and soon he was in town. He went around a corner, and when he came out, he was holding the waist of a tall blonde, who was, all the while, laughing and immensely enjoying herself.
I did not like her laughter. I did not like her looks, even if she was as white as a newly washed radish. She destroyed the picture of baskets and baskets of golden apples that Tio Benito had picked.
A year after Tio Benito had returned, I noticed that the talk about his ways and the questions that were posed to him diminished, then almost disappeared. Everyone began to accept him for what he was—even his profanities, his showing off, and his attachment to his black Stetson when a lighter, airier hat would have sufficed. On Tio Benito’s part, he seemed to have become more morose each day, for he had finally spent all his money and had started to sell some of his things; he even tried to sell his woolens, which no one would buy. Now he often asked for money from Father, but knowing his ways, Father would only give him pin money; after all, Tio Benito was assured a roof over his head and meals every time he was hungry. More than that, he had his share of the harvest, which, alas, was months away. He wandered less and less to the marketplace and to the barbershop on the main street and kept more to the house, talking with Sepa, Tio Baldo, and Old David, for they listened dutifully to his jokes and his stateside stories. Sometimes he also ventured to Carmay to be with Grandfather on weekends.
Then one day he announced pompously at the breakfast table that he would go to the neighboring town to look after a business deal involving the buying and selling of the mongo harvest, and would Father be gracious enough to advance him a small loan of fifty pesos, which he would repay within the month? Father was a bit puzzled but was pleased nonetheless; at last—American commercialism had made its mark in a time of need.
Tio Benito was away for a week, but on the next Sunday he returned at about lunchtime. He looked pleased. His shirt was wet with perspiration, for the sun was bright and the streets were baking in the heat. He did not seem to mind, although I knew him to curse even at the slightest rise in temperature. Now his eyes danced with a light I had never seen before, except when he described his Sundays in America.
Tio Benito had a companion—a woman. She looked at least twenty years older than he. Tio Benito was middle-aged, but he did not have any of the wrinkles that lined the woman’s face. I told myself, of course, that she must be just a business associate and not someone toward whom he had amorous intentions; after all those blondes in America, such a thought was unthinkable.
Not that she was ugly; she was brown—very—and she had classic Ilokano features: a broad forehead, a small nose, and lips that were quite thick. What struck me were her upper teeth, which were all set in gold so that when she smiled it seemed as if her mouth was on fire. From snatches of conversation while they were talking with Father in the sala, I learned that the woman lived three towns away, that she had come to pay my very surprised and very amused father the fifty pesos that Tio Benito owed him plus whatever interest there was. But more than this, she also wanted to talk to all of us about a very urgent matter “concerning salvation and the soul.”
“Yes,” Father said. “This is very good to hear. But let us eat first.”
We stood up and went to the dining room, and when Sepa saw Tio Benito, she told him he was lucky, for she had prepared dinardaraan, his favorite dish. It consisted of pork and the innards of the pig stewed in its own blood and in vinegar. The day before, a neighbor had butchered his pig, and Father gave a cavan of palay for five kilos and the innards.
At the mention of dinardaraan, Tio Benito scowled at the cook, but he did not say anything. We sat before the long narra table, in the middle of which was the glass fruit tray topped with oranges and apples. Like Tio Benito, I also relished dinardaraan, but I could have been knocked down with the paper wand Sepa waved to drive the flies away. There he was, straight as a bamboo, his head bowed, his eyes closed; with his woman companion, he was praying! Father was all smiles; it seemed that we no longer had a pagan in our midst. After this surprise, I pushed toward him the bowl of dinardaraan, reminding him it was my favorite, too.
It happened then; with disdain clouding his greasy face, he pushed the bowl away as if it were poison.
“I prepared it,” Sepa said, surprised and defensive.
But Tio Benito ignored her; he stood up abruptly, and in sudden inspiration, he began the best speech—or sermon—I ever heard on the importance of eating the right food so as not to pollute the body or offend God. He spoke with power and conviction, and we stopped eating; even the maids paused in their chores and crowded in to listen to the words of wisdom that now poured from his lips. He spoke of the growing evil in the world, of the need for brotherhood, community, kindred spirit that would not only allow us to enter the kingdom of God but also banish the usurpers of His word in this land. He railed against the friars who established a church subservient to Rome: look at the money collected in the Catholic churches—it is sent to a foreign land to fatten foreign priests. The Americans were no better; they also sent their own missionaries to perpetuate the subservience of Filipinos to them. The Catholic priests, the Protestant pastors—they talk in a foreign language, they are ashamed of their own, of Ilokano or of Tagalog, which are the languages of the people. And then he spoke of the reasons why he could not eat dinardaraan or anything with blood, for such food was not fit for anyone who believed in the true God, for anyone who could read the Bible and regard it as sacred, for it is right there—and he proceeded to quote from memory the particular chapter and verse. It was my first experience with a convert of the Iglesia Ni Kristo. Sepa was very pleased, although her particular sect was Protestant; what was important was that Tio Benito finally believed.
“I will convert you,” he enthused. Turning to Father and me, and of course to Tia Antonia, then to all the maids and house help gathered around us, he added, “All of you, all of you.”
The woman was silent, but on her face was the most beatific smile I had ever seen—her mouth was aglow. So my Tio Benito became a Christian—of that much I was sure. Although I doubted if his hortatory rhetoric could move as much as an inch any of the people who listened to him, I was sure that the woman with him had some uncanny power of conversion, for it was she who did it and no one else. She married Tio Benito, and though I am not very positive about what Tio Benito said about not eating dinardaraan because it is cooked in blood, of this I am certain: In our town, it used to be fashionable for the very rich to have as many gold teeth as they could afford. Tio Benito’s wife had all her upper teeth in gold, and that, in itself, was enough proof to Christians and pagans alike that she was, indeed, a very wealthy woman.