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Stare-Case Define heavy. My ceiling, Trumpet I called forty times. |
1. Le Cimetière Columbine – Marche Funèbre pour Petite Flûte, Clarinette, et des Graines de Laiteron
Katie went on throwing her head back and pumping her toes high in the air.
"No such place," she snapped on her way down.
Brick sat on his swing, at rest, watching his little cousin whose pumping and skepticism had improved so much since last summer. "Ever see a dead one?"
"They die in trees," said Katie on her way up and, on the way down, "or on roofs."
"No, they don't. They go to the Pigeon Cemetery."
Katie stopped pumping, turning into a pendulum as she thought it over, furrowing her brow, dragging her feet. Brick was teasing her again. On her last visit he had her digging for buried treasure. She knew it wasn't true.
"You're so smart, how do the pigeons get to their graveyard if they're dead?" she said with satisfaction.
Brick was unflapped. He just smiled knowingly.
"Well, how do you know where this graveyard is?"
Brick looked at Katie's eager, freckled face. "Stumbled on it by accident. It's deep in the woods." He pointed beyond the Jungle Jim. "In there." He bent down, still holding one chain of his swing, picked up a white stone, bounced it in his hand. "Wanna see?"
On their way through the woods Brick told Katie the story of the town's pigeon problem.
"It was about forty years ago, maybe fifty. The whole town was infested with the things. Cooing so loud people couldn't concentrate, pigeon poop all over the place. Rats with wings–that's what people called them."
"Rats?"
"You know, vermin. Like roaches. Mosquitoes. Skunks."
"But pigeons are birds," Katie objected.
"So what? It didn't matter that they were birds." Brick quoted his mother, "A rose is a weed if it's where you don't want it. Same with pigeons. People wanted to get rid of them. So they tried . . . things."
Katie ducked under the smooth branch of a beech. "Like what things?"
"Well, first they put sirens up all over town. They thought if they made a lot of noise when the pigeons were nesting for the night, they'd fly away, go someplace else. I mean just to get some sleep."
"Like fire engine sirens?"
"Yep."
"Did it work?"
"Not a bit. Just frightened dogs and cats–and little kids, like you."
"A siren wouldn't scare me," said Katie stoutly. She checked the undergrowth for poison ivy. "So what did they do next?"
"Shot 'em."
"What?"
"Police sharpshooters, hunters, kids with BB guns."
"That's awful!"
"Well, it wasn't just people popping off any old way. It was organized, you know, so it'd be safe."
Katie's curiosity outran her doubt. "How many pigeons did they shoot?"
"As many as they could, I expect. But apparently it wasn't enough. And then nobody knew what to do with the dead pigeons either. They'd never seen any before"
"Didn't they bury them?"
"Not really. They used bulldozers. Pushed 'em into a big pile in the high school's parking lot then burned them. Must have smelled bad."
"Eeuww. Well, did that work?"
"The live pigeons hardly noticed. There were still thousands, way too many to shoot one at a time. That's when they decided to try poison."
"Poison?"
"Sure. They got this poison that looked just like corn kernels. They warned everybody to stay inside and hired a plane to drop the pellets all over town. They did it on a Sunday afternoon, after church. The poison kernels fell on roofs, in gutters, on lawns and sidewalks, all over the streets."
Katie stopped and put her hand against a sticky pine trunk. "You're making this up."
"Am not. You can ask the old folks. They'll remember all right. Just ask 'em about the week it rained pigeons."
"Rained pigeons?"
"You bet. They just fell out of the sky. A pigeon'd be flying over the playground, say, or City Hall, and suddenly it'd just stop flapping its wings and then–splat."
"That's horrible!"
"Everybody had to stay inside, like for a tornado. For two days."
"They just fell, like that?"
"Yep. Straight down. But the really strange thing was—" Brick hesitated.
"What?"
"Don't get scared now."
Katie crossed her arms. "I'm not scared. What was the strangest thing?"
"When people came back out all those dead pigeons were gone."
"Gone? What do you mean gone?"
"I mean there weren't any pigeons, except the twenty or thirty that weren't shot or poisoned. I guess people figured the survivors deserved to be let alone."
"What happened to the dead ones?"
"Nobody knew. But I do."
"Oh. You do," Katie mocked.
"Those twenty or thirty survivors? Well, overnight they picked up the dead ones in their beaks and flew them right–right in there." Brick pointed to a small clearing about thirty yards ahead. Afternoon sunlight flooded it.
"There?" said Katie, dubious still.
"I'll bet that field must've been six feet deep in dead pigeons."
Katie leapt forward, repelled, attracted, skeptical, semi–believing. "Let's see."
It was just an ordinary clearing in the woods. High grasses and lots of milkweed. Brick opened a few pods and blew the seeds into the air.
"Pigeon souls," he declared. "Bones and feathers all rotted away, of course; but these white things swirling around, they're pigeon souls. And they get reborn as more pigeons. And that's why even the poison didn't work."
"You're so silly," Katie said, and meant it.
Nevertheless, for the rest of her long life, Katie never saw a milkweed plant without thinking of clouds of bird souls wafting up from the pigeon cemetery into the clean, thin air.
2. Chat et Chien – Duo Belliqueux pour Violon et Violette
SCENE: A broad suburban back yard. Cat is up in a sycamore tree. Below, Dog is barking.
–Why all the barking? It's useless and annoying.
–To frighten you and please myself.
–You dogs are a foolish lot. Cowardly, too.
–Is that so? Then why don't you come down?
–Watch out. I just might.
–Why do you call us foolish?
–Because you sold yourselves.
–What do you mean by that?
–Just what I said. The first dog was a wolf who took meat from a man. Don't you even know that?
–Oh, really? What about you house cats?
–We did what we always do. We chose to take it easy. They accept our contempt for them. They expect it and even find it cute. It's rather touching that they believe they're joking when they say it's we who own them. How long do you think you'd last if you stopped your fawning?
–I can't stand your smell, your sneaky way of moving, your noises.
–No doubt. Or our claws. Or the spitting, I suppose.
–I'll tear you apart like a rag.
–You've been chasing me all your life. How many times have you caught me? And if you ever did, by some odd chance, know what they'd do to you? Kill a cat, kill a child. You don't scare me.
–Yet you're up there and I'm down here.
–We cats are a prudent bunch.
–You don't love them.
–Hardly. However, as you may have observed, they adore me.
–That's you all over.
–What?
–Incapable of love, of devotion. Selfish, sensual, stinking, and—
–Feline?
–Precisely.
–The way I see it, it's about loneliness. You can't bear it while I'm just fine with it. You're quite a brute but the fact is I'm stronger. You always need a pack and a master. You turn them into lords, pine for them when they're gone, lick their hands, grovel at their feet.
–We're friends.
–So you tell yourself. Fact is, you're trained. Can you imagine one of them trying to train me?
–What about that box you do your business in?
–Entirely my choice. It's neater. I like things tidy. You, on the other hand, would rip slippers and chew carpets. You did, didn't you? Until they smacked that big nose of yours a few times. Rolled-up Times, wasn't it?
–They should smack you.
–Yet they never do, do they? They know it's pointless. You're the docile sort, not me. You do their bidding; I do as I please. No, they do as I please.
–Your insincerity's disgusting but your conceit's even worse.
–And your earnest lack of irony is degrading. Look what happens when they abandon you for hours and hours. When they finally come back you're all over them, can't be grateful enough, leaping up, tail wagging to beat the band. Know what I do?
–You turn up your tail and won't look at them.
–You bet. I can keep it up for days. They have to beg my forgiveness.
–I've seen how you kill. I've seen you with birds and voles. It's sadistic.
–We're just a playful bunch, us cats.
–Weaklings and bullies.
–Bullies? And who chased who up this tree?
–You're intolerable.
–And yet we're stroked; we're petted.
–Not as much as I am.
–A fact for which I'm grateful. I never give my heart away; you always do.
–We'll always be enemies.
–As you wish. I couldn't care less.
–And that's what I can't bear above all. Your bored indifference.
–Wait. What's that? I think I hear them calling you. Best be on your way.
3. Marengo L'Ètalon Infructueux – Chaconne Nostalgique pour Gunbri Seul
The mares huddle together, as usual, by the far fence, near the larches, casting contemptuous looks at him. New Barnes is peaceful, a place of quiet and routine, immune to violence and no doubt pleasant, if one likes that sort of thing. The mares rub up against one another, pertly flick their tails, turn and look again. Was it that they were tired of his story of the five–hour eighty–mile gallops from Valladolid to Burgos? Well, what could Burgos signify to them? For a time they were interested, or pretended to be, admired his flanks that had turned from gray to white. But what they wanted most to hear about was what interested him least, the six years before his life began, before he was put on a ship in Africa and let off in France. To them, Africa was exotic. His eight wounds, of which he had been so proud, which men had stroked and admired, made their big eyes go vacant. He was more than twenty–five years old, what did they expect of him? On the never–to–be–forgotten day when he had won his name, the first time he had borne that masterful, almost weightless rider into battle, he could have impregnated twice their number; he could have repopulated the cavalry's whole paddock.
Ironic he should wind up in England, as impotent as his master, a pair of trophies shipped off after the catastrophe in Flanders.
Were they tired of his stories then, or had he wearied of telling them? The great triumphs on the German plains, Austerlitz, Jena–Auerstedt, Wagram–he had been at them all. Did they think he was boasting, compensating for flaccidity, his shortness? Might they be as stupid as they appeared? What could they know of the frost and the Cossacks, of the dead, legs frozen stiff and pointed up in despair, the hunger and exhaustion? They were accustomed to mewling little girls bearing apples and lumps of sugar in their tiny English hands; for them, that was an exciting day. And yet they mocked him. How could he make them hear the cannon, muskets, yelling, the glorious noise of battle, the whistle of the balls? They couldn't conceive the comfort of a campfire in a December bivouac or feel what it was to have a single rider and to be at one with him. They had no idea of the gratification as the man patted his lathered flanks or the beauty of his words, "Sain et sauf encore, mon vieux" or, if there were dispatches to deal with, calls for him on every hand, the quick whispered "Merci, mon cher."
He crops the tasteless English grass, aware that he has outlived not only his great days, but that he had also survived that little rider whom his concave back still yearned to feel.
What was Africa to him but sun and burning sand?
Better to endure in silence the disappointed curses of Angerstein, who had dreamed of heroic foals when he paid so many pounds to Baron Petre. Better to ignore the foolish brood mares than to fail again.
|
It was a beautiful day |
My wife came in and said, "Ta-daaaa!"
Great, I thought, poor thing must've learned another magic trick.
(My wife loves magic, mostly because our marriage lacks a great deal of it.)
I looked up from the book I was reading. (Koontz.) I squinted. I looked hard.
Oh, it was a trick all right–a real "mind–freak," in fact–something she'd done to her head.
"Well," she said, pushing her nubby fingers through those . . . things, "what do you think?"
My wife had decided, the night before, to put curlers in her hair. (I'm hip; I let her.) Yet who knew wrapping one's hair in little plastic coffins could result in something so wretched?
Strands of my wife's red hair now hung in hideous, bobbing coils. Like Medusa. Like Little Orphan Annie. Like someone I didn't care to be around for too long.
I tried to say the least offensive thing I could think of while still retaining some dignity:
"You look like a senile lunch lady."
Her face contorted. "I'm sorry, what was that?" she said.
"You look like a school lunch lady," I said. "Especially in that white cardigan." (Poor thing had on a white cardigan.)
"For your information," she said, "my mother was a lunch lady."
"So was mine," I said. "For a short while, that is."
"Well, mine was one for a long while," she said.
Figures.
"How long do those things last?"
My wife shrugged and said, "Probably until my hair gets wet a few times."
All I could think of, then, were instances of water.
Kiddy pools, I thought. Puddles. Car washes. Wishing wells. Baptisms. Even a day at the beach was considered–something I am naught to do. Anything to flatten those ghastly springs protruding from her empty skull would have sufficed.
Then I pictured a child's birthday party, my wife dressed as a clown and handing out animal–shaped balloons–a terrible vision.
"Listen," I said, "I don't think I can make love to you. Nope, not with a head like that I can't."
"Oh? What's new?"
Queen of sarcasm.
"You wouldn't have me last night," she said, "even when I wore that negligee you like."
"Well, those curlers you had on just cheapen the experience." I said, "No man in his right mind would want anything to do with–" I was at a loss. Then it came to me. I sang to her. The chorus to "Beauty School Drop Out," from Grease, is what I sang. (I'm clever; I grinned.)
"Well, you'll just have to live with it," she said. "What do you think of that?"
I didn't answer. Instead, I considered divorcing her. Right then and there. "You'll just have to live with it," I'd say. "Broccoli Head. Lunch Lady." (Men have killed for less, I'm sure.)
"Too bad," she said, and as those abominations continued with her into the next room she added, "You'll learn to love it."
Doubt it.
I tried getting back to my book. No luck there, so I turned and looked out the window. I saw a lady walking her dog. She wasn't much in the face, this woman, but at least her hair was straight.
I kept looking.
The boat rumbled downstream, towards civilization, natural order, and the airport. It was slow going. The boat was wide–bottomed with two decks and lots of cabins. The rescue had been four days earlier and the last death twelve hours before that.
Seven people rode the boat–four crew and three survivors. One of the survivors was gravely injured. He was a black man in a coma. The other two–the white man and the white woman–spoke of him tenderly. He was funny, they said, and his humor had helped them through their ordeal. They had thought him dead, they explained, but he turned up alive at the last moment.
"We owe him our lives, in a way."
For a day and two nights after the rescue, the white man and woman had slept, together in one cabin, then slept together. No one said anything; it would have been awkward. Besides, they made a handsome couple. He was muscular, blonde, and had a square jaw. She was blonde, too, and athletic except for her bosom. They looked like the cover of a romance novel, the crew agreed.
He awoke sharply in the night and only just kept from screaming. His heart pounded and his loins throbbed, in sync, then out, then in again. The dream lingered longer than the burst of adrenaline, but after a few minutes gasping the hot, tropical air, all he could remember was thrashing water, the chomping teeth of the piranha–things, and blood, blood, blood. He looked across the bed at her sleeping form, hanging on to the very edge of the mattress. A lurch of vomit came from deep within, but he held it back.
The next day, she sat cross–legged astern, watching the stygian, brown Amazon pass away onto the horizon. It passed slower than she would have preferred. He came and sat down next to her, put his arm around her. She didn't stiffen, but she didn't soften into him.
"Hey, Dr. Teeth," he said. It was a nickname he'd revived as she gently nipped at him in bed, originally given when he found out she was a piranha expert. She'd come to hire him and his boat–the Virgil–to take them upriver, to find a research facility. The nickname lay on the deck as lifeless as a wrench. She kept watching the water. He watched with her. He took his arm away. After a while, he took the rest of him away, too.
He went to the bedroom, sat on the bed, and looked down at his hands. He didn't understand how things had changed so dramatically in so short a time. At the lab, sure, they had started off antagonistic. He found her pushy and arrogant. She'd found him barely competent and chauvinistic, she told him later, in the tender nights. They'd warmed to each other in the cold terror, to the final point of making out in the scorched and sparking ruins of the lab, surrounded by the piranha–thing dead. The relationship had been forged in mortal danger. Surely it could survive anything. Surely. Maybe, he thought, it had all been defense and that's all love was, but the thought had gone before he could realize the implications.
At sunset, the engine quit in a plume of grim smoke. The engineer took large parts off the motor and inspected them. He tightened bolts and checked the pistons. The survivor man joined him. They worked for a few hours. She sat on the steps to the engine–room and watched. The men pinched their fingers and hammered their thumbs as they worked. The engine still didn't start.
"I thought you were ex–Special Forces," she said.
"Special Forces enough to save your life," he said.
She got up and stormed out. She went to the small toilet on the lower deck and sat down. Her fingers curled into fists and her lips to a snarl. From her pants, she took a bloodied wad of gauze. It was her time and she had had to make–do. The red–brown stains took her back to the slaughter of the lab and stirred something deep. She wondered if she and the others had really left, ever would, could.
Freshly gauzed, she went back on deck and threw the old into the river. The engine coughed and sputtered back to limping life. She went upstairs and curled up alone in the spare berth. The boat rumbled on downstream, through the night, along the endless river.
|
Just let me be a train wreck. Let me be a wreck. Uncertainty rules the best of me, |
|
. . . Even I, |
Everyone was poor that year. Everyone wore shabby, patched–up clothes. Everyone was sad and bitter and had a bad temper.
All the boys that were growing up to manhood that year were thin and pale and melancholy. They went around with hunched–up shoulders as if a chill wind were forever blowing.
"Why don't you go look for work?" was the eternal refrain that greeted the poor young men. But there was no work; there were no jobs. The young men would gulp down the breakfast coffee and hurry out the house, followed by the bitter voices of fathers and mothers. The young men would flee from the house to stand idle at the street corners, or to sit on the rocks by the bay, or to lie on the grass of Luneta, under the shifting shade of a tree.
That was the year Ernesto Ortega turned seventeen.
Every morning, when he woke up, he had to make an effort to remember where he was. Everyday, on opening his eyes, he would wonder: "Why does the room look so strange?" And then, slowly, he would recognize the discolored ceiling, the ugly walls and the cockroaches crawling up those walls.
"It's only a dream, a bad dream," he would tell himself, shutting his eyes tight, trying to get back to that older house he occupied every night in his dreams – the lost house of memory, the house where he had been born and had grown up. He would see the old–fashioned garden and his mother in a white dress strolling among the flowers and he was calling out to his mother in the garden. She peered up from under the parasol and smiled and waved at him. He was a little boy in a sailor's suit – a cute little boy with long curls and a toy gun. His mother picked a flower and looked up again and showed him the flower. She was as clean and bright and beautiful as the sunny day gleaming in the garden.
Then a big old–fashioned automobile appeared at the garden gate and his father stepped out with a cane, wearing a coat buttoned right up to his neck. His mother ran to meet his father. They stood there talking and laughing at the gate. His mother turned around to point to him there at the window and his father laughed and turned around to look at him, too.
He was a curly–haired little boy at the window of a big, beautiful house that was clean and fragrant. There it was: the house. And even as he looked at it, it dissolved into a discolored ceiling and ugly wall crawling with cockroaches, and it was seven in the morning.
Outside, in the foul alley, he could hear the slum women quarreling and the noise of cats and dogs fighting over the garbage heaps. From the public shed, two doors away, came the vile stench of this day, this year, this life.
He rose and went to the window and saw his mother. She stood there in a faded dress bargaining with the old man who bought old bottles. Tears rose to his eyes. Ah, she was not young or beautiful anymore. She was thin and haggard and needed money so she could go to the market. So, she stood there selling old bottles. His father had died long ago. The big, beautiful house of his childhood was gone. And the garden, the automobile, his sailor suit and his toy gun as well.
He was seventeen – a sad young man going downstairs to wash his face in a stinking tin sink. As he groped for a towel, his mother came in.
"Ernesto, are you going anywhere today?"
The street corner, rock by the bay, Luneta park, . . .
"No, Mother."
"Ernesto, you're wasting your life. You're young and . . ."
"Please, Mother, must we start so early in the morning?"
"All your other brothers are working."
"I can't do anything."
"I want you to go to your godfather."
"That crazy old man? What could he do for me?"
"He might be able to help you. You're young and you're wasting your life."
"Please, Mother, if you want me to go to him, all right, I'll go but let's not quarrel."
Suddenly she began to cry.
"Oh, Ernesto, Ernesto – I'm so worried! How are we going to live? I'm not used to living this way! I shall die! I shall die!"
The wet towel in his hand, Ernesto stood grimly silent by the foul sink, his young face turned away from the anguish of poverty.
* * * * *
Don Salvador Garcia still lived in a big, old–fashioned house on Carriedo. The other big houses on that street had become bazaars or Japanese refreshment stores. But Don Salvador still kept his house and the ancient bookstore on the first floor though no one ever came now to buy anything in that dim, old bookstore. All the books were old – Spanish classics or books by the revolutionary patriots or books of devotion. On the walls where cobwebs hung thick were faded paintings of the heroes and the saints. Poverty, too, lay heavy here – but it was not sordid poverty. It was poverty with an air of magnificence to it.
Don Salvador Garcia was Ernesto's godfather.
"Hola, Ernesto," he said wiping the ink off his fingers with a perfumed linen handkerchief. "How is my godson?"
"Okay. Godfather."
"And what can I do for you, young man? Ah, you don't have to tell me, you young rascal! You need a little money for a dance, a girl, eh?"
Ernesto shuddered. Don Salvador was just as poor as everyone now, but he spoke like a millionaire.
"No, Godfather, I don't need anything. I just came to visit you."
"Well, sit down, sit down, son! And how is your mother? How is the widow of my good friend? A beautiful and elegant woman."
Ernesto shuddered again, remembering his mother among the slum women, the old–bottles man, the fighting cats and dogs in the refuse heap, the public shed . . .
"She is fine, Don Salvador – thank you. And how is the history?"
"Oh, I shall finish it soon, soon! It shall make me famous! I am writing the greatest history ever written. Manila shall be known all over the world when my book is finished! Here let me read to you the opening lines . . ."
Ernesto turned his face away. How many times Don Salvador had read him those opening lines! The old man fumbled through his manuscripts, spread one and began to read:
"As Palmyra to Arabia, as Alexandria to decaying Hellenism, as Rome to the classic world and Carthage to old Africa, as Byzantium to the Eastern Empire, and as Venice to the Europe of the Renaissance, so was this noble and ever loyal City of Manila to the Orient . . ."
From somewhere in the house, Ernesto heard a scream. But the old man never gave heed. He continued to read – slowly, sonorously, with emotion and with majesty.
There was a clatter of slippers and three women appeared. They swept in, full of cold wrath, full of disdain and bitterness. They were the old man's daughters and they had his beauty and his majesty. But they were growing old. Poverty had marked them. It embittered them.
"But we could be rich!" they said. "People are offering to buy this house, to turn it into a department store. But Papa will not sell! Oh, he is a hard man! And you know his reasons? Because he wants to finish a ridiculous history that no one will ever read, that no one will ever buy, that no one in the world is interested in! And for that he is killing us! Oh, if only we were free! Oh, if only he were dead, dead! We would sell this house at once and go far, far away!"
Now they swept in and stood in a row before the desk. Don Salvador never lifted his head. He went on reading, intoning the majestic Spanish words. They looked at him with cold fury, with bitter disdain. They cast not a glance at Ernesto who sat rocking in his chair. From outside, in the street, came the sound of a passing street car.
The old man paused and looked up.
Suddenly the three daughters screamed in unison.
"Oh, you hard man! You cruel man! You old devil!"
The old man turned his face towards them and smiled.
"Is the merienda ready?" asked the old man, smiling majestically.
* * * * *
A long, long time afterwards, Ernesto returned to that house in Carriedo. It was not there anymore. Only the ruins of it were there. A great heap of rubble and twisted steel. It was August, 1945, and Ernesto was a grown man now, dressed in olive–drab clothes. The war had just come to an end and he had just arrived from the provinces to see the city for the first time in a long, long time.
Ernesto walked down the piteous horror that was Carriedo. A street of desolation, a street of death. He stopped before the house that had once been the fine and mighty house of Don Salvador Garcia. It was late afternoon. The rumble of passing army trucks echoed through the streets.
Ernesto stood there looking at the ruined house and suddenly, his heart gave a leap. Lights had sprung up within the ruins. There were people inside.
He had not been to that house since that day long, long ago when he was seventeen. He knew that Don Salvador had long been dead. Of Don Salvador's daughters he had heard nothing. He had left the city when he was seventeen and had not come back till today, to see what war had done to it.
The lights within the ruins grew brighter as evening gathered and Ernesto heard a murmur of voices. His heart beating fast, he walked into the ruined house.
In the very heart of the ruins, a space had been cleared of rubble and a roof of galvanized iron had been set up. Under that barong–barong stood a few old chairs, a table, and some book cases. At the table the three old women sat.
Ernesto stepped nearer and coughed. The three women looked around and their faces brightened.
"Why, it's Ernesto!"
The three old women were the Garcia daughters.
Ernesto went forward. They had all risen with glad cries and were dancing around him like young girls.
"Sit down, Ernesto. We were just having merienda. Won't you have some chocolate?"
"No, thanks."
Ernesto looked at the table. It was set with three dainty cups.
"You must excuse us Ernesto, but we're not dressed to receive visitors," said the three women laughing.
"I didn't know you were still here."
"Oh, but we have always been here. And we will never go away. This is our home. This is our father's house."
"You never sold it?"
They looked at him with shocked faces.
"Why should we sell it?"
"But when your father died . . . you were free to sell the house."
"Never, never did we ever think of doing so!" they cried together.
"But I thought . . . you had always wanted to sell it . . ."
"This is our father's house and we have kept it exactly as it had always been."
"And you have been living here since he died?"
"All the years since he died, here we have been. Oh, there were people who wanted to buy this house but we would not sell it. Our father was a great man. This is his house but we would not sell it and we have kept it as a shrine to his memory. He was a great man."
Ernesto stared in horror at the three women.
"Oh, he was a great man!" they chanted in unison. "And he wrote a great book, a history of Manila. Would you like to see it?"
They ran to one of the bookcases and lugged out a bundle of paper. Ernesto stared at the bundle. The sheets were yellow with age. The fire of war, the tears of the rain had touched that treasured bundle of paper that those three crazy old women had rescued from the wreckage of the house.
Ernesto stared at the yellowed pages of the manuscript. Every single word had been blurred. The ink had washed away. The labors of Don Salvador had been lost, had been in vain. No one would ever read what he had written. Not one word remained legible.
But the three women were hovering over the pages, their eyes full of love. "It is a magnificent history, Ernesto. Would you like us to read you the opening lines?"
Ernesto began to tremble.
"Light another lamp," said the eldest sister.
When she had put on her glasses, she bent over the page where not one word remained, where every single word had been effaced.
Ernesto gazed with growing horror as the old woman began to read, her fingers moving over the yellow page, tracing the words that were not there. Her voice rose clear and sure: "As Palmyra to Arabia, as Alexandria to decaying Hellenism, as Rome to the classic world and Carthage to old Africa, as Byzantium to the Eastern Empire, and as Venice to the Europe of the Renaissance, so was this noble and ever loyal City of Manila to the Orient . . ."
Outside in the street, a truck rumbled past as the dark devoured the ruins.
Merienda: late afternoon snack
Barong– barong: makeshift shanty
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It's not complex, Create in your mind, if you will, Erase this, wipe the slate clean. All right, one wittily retorts, Class, the teacher addresses, |
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