8
Lack of household help was one problem we never had to face. In fact, Father used to have some difficulty turning away many youngsters who wanted to serve in the house, the sons and daughters of tenants who wanted their children to be with us, so that they would be assured of three meals a day, particularly during the lean months of the planting season—June to August—when many a rice bin was empty. Some of those who came to work, of course, knew that their servitude was payment for debts incurred, debts that their fathers had accumulated through the years. They all came to Rosales without much education, barefoot, their brown, emaciated bodies slowly putting on flesh after the first few weeks of eating regularly, their blemished skin becoming clear, their deportment less awkward as in the first few days when, awed by Father’s presence and the proportions of the house, they would walk or go about their chores in reverential silence.
Not Martina; of all the maids who came to serve us it was she I remembered best, for there was a brashness in her ways that was self-confidence rather than arrogance; it was not that she did not respect Father or that she looked with condescension at the timidity of the other help. She was, from the very beginning, herself, untrammeled by convention and uncaring toward those who thought she was without the refinements that any growing girl—barrio-born or from the heart of town—should have. They said that no good would ever come to her—that she would end up in the streets; I cannot believe this conclusion, and though I never saw her again after she left us, I am sure that wherever she is, she can cope with most of the problems life would shower on her.
She was fifteen when she came to the house. She had had some schooling, for she knew how to write her name and many a time, too, did I see her go over the old papers Sepa used to kindle the firewood. She was well on the way to becoming a woman, and I remember the ogling of the boys in the barbershop when they watched her go to market and the guarded language they used when they spoke with her. She never bothered with them. She would flop on the bench in the yard in a most unwomanly manner, exposing her thin thighs. Sometimes, too, I would catch the other boys in the house stealing glances at her low neckline and her small firm breasts, as she bent doing her chores, sweeping the yard or pumping water from the artesian well.
At first she came to the house only on weekends to do odd jobs, and she would do them as fast as she could, sweeping the wide yard cluttered with acacia and guava leaves and the dung of work animals when the tenants brought their bull carts in. She also helped clean the bodega, which was always in disarray, and once her chores were done, she would disappear. She did not seem to bother with her looks, her hair hanging in damp, uncombed locks, her face stained with dirt, although I was sure with some care and with a little bit more to eat, she would be good-looking.
Once, as Old David told me, her father operated Father’s rice mill, but by some accident, his feet got caught in the gears. It was a miracle that he survived, but he was maimed for life. Earning a living with both legs gone was impossible, so Father gave him an annual pension of twenty cavans of palay, more as a result of a court order, I think, than of sympathy.
Martina always took the shortcut from her house, which was a distance, and hurdled the tall barbed-wire fence in the rear of the bodega. Seeing her scrambling over the fence one afternoon, Father shook his head and said, “Knowing that girl’s future is like being sure that tomorrow the sun will rise from behind the Balungao mountain.”
One afternoon I saw her up a guava tree in the yard; I had refrained from climbing it for one week so that by the end of that time the fruits would be ripe. She had tied a piece of string around her waist, then filled her dress with the hard green fruits so that her tummy bulged out front.
“Get down there!” I shouted. “Or I’ll call Father and he will flog you.” She did not mind me, and angered by her insolence, I started to whimper and cry. As she scurried down, the string around her middle snapped; the fruits all came tumbling out.
“Cry—cry all you can,” she said, jumping to the ground. I stopped crying and scrambled after the fruits, grabbing with both hands all that I could and stuffing them into my pockets until they were full. And while I was at it, she never made an attempt to take anything; she just stood there watching me. When I could no longer gather more fruit, I looked up to meet her gaze, contempt, pity, perhaps, in her sullen eyes. She turned and walked to the house.
There seemed to be a gulf between us after that incident, but somehow, in another week we were friends again. She told me little about herself, but she did talk a lot about her father, who was not feeling well, so that she had to go home for about an hour every day to see him. She was not hindered from doing so; after all, she was not needed much in the house, and I think that Father tolerated her presence only because he felt some obligation toward his former employee.
I went with Martina to the river, too, and we bathed there, her clothes sticking to her thin body, her hair wet and dripping. We dove into the cold depths and tried to stay there as long as our breath could hold, and in the murky greenness, I would open my eyes to see her flapping and holding her nose. After the swim, we crossed the fields glinting brown in the sun and took the path that went by the rice mill, climbed the barbed-wire fence, and then we were home, dry and ruddy from the swim.
I had not seen Martina’s father, and once or twice I asked her to take me so that I could see how a man without legs moved about, but she always said, “Some other time.” Her mother died when she was a baby, and she did not remember her; she was more like a shadow in the past, without any importance.
Martina was very clumsy but could be very gentle, particularly with animals. She was cleaning my room one morning when she tipped the china vase—my bank—from my aparador top, and it fell with a resounding crash on the hardwood floor. She had said earlier that her mother brought bad luck to her father, that her father said so, and now that Martina was growing up, she, too, was bringing bad luck to him.
“See?” she said as I looked aghast at what remained of my vase. “I am bad luck, too.”
She was etched against the bright frame of window where the morning sun came in. “I was simply cleaning this …” she said as she picked up the fragments and placed them in the dustpan.
I faced her squarely, my suspicions aroused. “Where is the money?” I asked. “There were two one-peso bills there.”
She glared at me, her hands fingering the frayed hem of her soiled cotton dress. She had raised it so that her dirty bones stuck out. “Am I to know?” she retorted.
I was angry and could not hold back. I took one step forward. “You are a thief!” I hissed at her.
She did not budge; she lowered the hem of her dress, then pointed a finger straight, almost into my face. “Don’t you ever repeat that word to me,” she said coldly, evenly. “The thieves in this town are not us; if I ever hear you call me a thief again …”
I was helpless facing her, knowing how capable she was of doing whatever she threatened to do.
“I will tell Father,” I said finally.
“Go tell him,” she said in the same even voice.
But i did not tell Father, and it was not that I was afraid to do so; rather, I was bothered by what she had said, that the thieves in Rosales were not people like her. Yet, I had heard Father say so often that the tenants could not be trusted, that during the harvest season they should be watched carefully for they were always hiding part of the grain or harvesting the fields in spots where it could not readily be discovered. They never gave our rightful share of the vegetable harvest, the fruits of the orchards—the bananas, the pomelos—and in time of need, they went to no one but him.
I could not ask Martina about these, so we never talked about the money in the vase again. I could have easily forgotten about it, but the next day, after she had gone to visit her father, I found that the coconut-shell bank that I had filled with coins had grown very light, and there had not been a day that I had not put something in it. But who would I blame? There were other servants in the house who went to my room—Old David, Sepa—I had no proof and will never have one, but nonetheless, Martina was always on my mind.
She came to me once while I was in the bodega chasing the rats, which were eating the palay and the corn stored in huge piles. She asked if I wanted to go with her to her father’s. It was an invitation I had waited for, more out of curiosity than anything else. Now I would see a legless man who did nothing but weave fishnets every day.
Again, we went by the backyard, hurdled the barbed-wire fence, and headed for the open fields. It was a long walk to the other end of town. We paused in the shade of a mango tree, which had started to bloom, then followed the path that led to the big ash mound behind the rice mill.
“You have never been on top of that,” she said. “When you are there, on top of that black mound, you stand so high, you can see almost all of the town and the river, too.”
“Let’s climb,” I said.
She took my hand to lead me, and we followed the black path up the huge mound—the ashes spewed by the rice mill for more than two decades. Her palms were rough and her grip was strong. The rice mill came into view, and we heard the faint chug-chug of its engine, saw its smoke, like a careless lock of Martina’s dark, uncombed hair, trailing off from the tall chimney that stabbed black and straight into the afternoon sky.
When we reached the top of the mound, I was breathless and my hands and brow were moist; there was not much to see—the mound was not high enough the way Balungao mountain and its foothills were. Just a stretch of the river, farms baked in the sun, and the shapeless forms of farmer houses. But for Martina this was the pinnacle, the top of the world, and on her face was happiness and triumph. “This—all this,” she said, “my father put this here. How many years did he work to put this here? And now, I am on top of it—and look at what both of us can see.”
I did not want to spoil her pleasure. “Yes,” I said softly. “You can see farther and more from up here.” A sharp wind rose and the ash swirled around us. For some time the view was marred. A speck got into my eye and blinded me, hurt me, and I went down with her, half seeing what was ahead of the soft and powdery path that led to the fields.
We reached the tobacco rows, the green plants taller than we were, their green speckled leaves, their white flowers like plumes glinting in the sun.
It was a stupid question I asked on impulse: “What did he do before?”
She paused and looked sternly at me: “You know that,” she said. “He built that mound where we were. A mountain of ashes—a mountain! How long do you think it took to collect all that ash? Certainly, it was not a week.”
I regretted having asked again when it was so unnecessary. Now we were silent, unusually so. We walked across the tobacco plots, the leaves brushing against our faces, the air around us strong and compounded with the aroma of tobacco and the brilliant sun.
“I am his bad luck,” she finally said. “He says he had plenty of good luck before. Then he married my mother … then I came. Bad luck … bad luck, that is all he says …”
“Why was your mother bad luck?”
“Mother?” she turned quickly to me, anger flashing in her eyes. But the anger quickly fled, and in its place, this ineffable sadness, and she shook her head as we walked on. We had reached the end of the tobacco farm, and before us was a narrow strip of fallow land given to dried brown shrubs and the amorseco weeds. “Wait here,” she commanded.
Across the weed-choked strip was her father’s shack. Its windows of battered buri palm were closed, and it stood alone and desolate, no life pulsating from it. But I wanted to look within, and I objected shrilly. “You asked me to come, to see your father. You asked me!”
Her tone was final. “You stay here and wait.”
I watched her gallop away; her lithe, catlike figure disappeared behind a curtain of grass, then emerged again only to go up the bamboo ladder and into the hut.
Its windows did not open, and no sound seeped from it.
We got home at dusk, and Father was already eating. I was breathless, and when he asked where I had been, I said simply, “I climbed the ash mountain, Father. Martina and I. We went to her house, too.”
“So. Did you see her father?” I turned briefly to Martina and could see the look of displeasure on her face, the anxiety.
“No,” I said.
Father continued with his chicken adobo, and, when Martina returned from the kitchen with the water pitcher, he said, “Don’t go with Martina to that place again.” And to Martina, who was filling the glasses, he said icily, “Don’t take him there again, understand?”
“Yes, Apo,” she said, looking straight at Father, and then she turned to me, the ancient sadness in her eyes.
Martina and I did not talk anymore about that afternoon, though I wished we had. And when I saw her leave, I wanted each time to go with her, but she merely smiled and said there would be a time when the sun would not rise from the east.
She continued to do her work with frenzy, so that Sepa and all the others could not complain when, having nothing more to do, she would be out in the yard, playing marbles with me, or out in the fields chasing the grasshoppers that had come with the rains.
Then on that week before school opened, she asked me if I wanted to go with her. She had a bottle of medicine that she had bought with her savings; it was for her father, who, I now learned, had not been feeling well for weeks but, in spite of this, had sent his daughter to work for us, and this was what Martina had done, knowing that her place was at home. What was it that made him do this? And for her to accept it? I did not know, Father did not know, but it had to be done if that black mound of ash was anything.
I did not want to disobey Father, though, and the thought held me back, but only briefly. He had gone to Carmay that day, and it would be late in the night when he would return. “It will be I who will tell him. Only I will know that you had come along,” Martina assured me.
It was almost dusk; the farmer boys were bringing home their carabaos from the creek where they had been bathed, and the pigs were being called in for their meal.
“We may be late coming back,” I said.
“Are you afraid?”
“Of course not,” I said.
We hastened to the backyard and climbed over the barbed-wire fence, and as we dropped on the other side, she turned apprehensively toward the house, almost hidden from view by a screen of guava trees, to see if Sepa or any of the help had seen us. We were secure; there was no one in the kitchen or in the azotea.
We walked quickly toward the river, passed the clump of thorny camachile trees, and found the path that led to the gully, which the carabaos had widened when they were herded down for their daily bath. We skirted the bank, then went up the path that crossed the tobacco patches. I had begun to tire, for she walked at a fast pace; she did not want the darkness to catch up with us, and now my breath came in heavy gusts. We went over a bamboo bridge that spanned a dry irrigation ditch, and I sat down to rest. She jeered at me. “You are not tired. I sometimes run all the way from your house to ours!” And I recalled those mornings when she came to sweep the yard and she was pale and breathless, sweat trickling down her forehead.
“No, I am not tired,” I said, and rose.
We rounded the curve where the grass was tall, and in the deepening hush of afternoon, the sound of insects was sharper, the smell of the earth stronger. Then we were at the foot of the black mound, and Martina was saying softly, “How long did it take to build? How long did it take the balete tree to grow? Only those who have memories can tell, and I would like nothing better than not to remember … to forget …”
The small hut was ahead of us, somber and alone against the purpling sky. She held my hand, and I could feel the sudden sprint of life coursing through her with the tightening of her grip.
“Do you know what to say if he asks you who you are?”
“Do I have to say anything?” I was disturbed by what her question implied.
“Only if he asks,” was her hurried reply. “Just tell him anything—anything—that you live across the street. Anything. But don’t tell him you live in the big house—that you are your father’s son!”
I nodded dumbly, and her grip on my wrist relaxed. She continued quietly: “We may be little people … but you must understand, we are not beggars.”
“Whoever said you are a beggar?” I objected vehemently.
“Everyone does,” she said. “Why should you be different?”
We were in the yard and had hurdled the low bamboo gate. Martina headed for the short flight of bamboo stairs, and at the top, she beckoned me to follow her. I did. She slowly opened the door of the sipi—the small room where farmers kept their precious things, their rice, their fishnets, their clothes—and stepped in.
“Father?” tentatively, then, “Father, Father!”
Silence.
In a while, she came out slowly, and in that instant, I should have known from the dumb despair on her face. I should have stayed with her and learned to understand her ways, why she came to the house swiftly and disappeared just as fast when she had done her work, how hurriedly she ate her meals—like a hog—especially during those first days she was with us, the hunger in her belly that could not be easily appeased. Most of all, I should have understood how steadfastly, how proudly she took care of that cripple inside, how he, too, had sought to live his way by sending his only child to work for us, making believe that what was given to him by Father was not charity, when all of us—but not the two of them—knew it was theirs by right. Who built the ash mound?
But I did not know. I was only twelve.
Martina did not fumble for words. “Father is dead,” she said quietly.
I remember having peeped briefly into that darkened room at the legless figure there lying still and stiff, its eyes staring blankly in the gathering dusk, the buzz of mosquitoes around us. And this feeling came to me, freeing me of other feelings, all other thoughts, this feeling of dread that I had intruded into a misshapen world that I had somehow helped to shape, and that, if I did not flee it, it would entrap and destroy me. I do not recall what else Martina said, for I had quickly turned, rushed down the stairs and across the barren ground, away from this house and the ash mound beyond it. I ran and ran—away from the macabre shadows that trailed me, away from Martina and her dead father, into the comforting brightness of our home. I remember, too, her voice, her face determined and calm, and that last look of hurt and abandonment, as I ran out of a beautiful friendship into the certitude of ease that awaited me. And much later, I wished that I could see Martina again, that I could reclaim her friendship, but she left Rosales that very night and did not even attend her father’s funeral, which Father had grudgingly arranged.