BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: SERVANT GIRL

SERVANT GIRL
by Estrella D. Alfon

ROSA was scrubbing the clothes she was washing slowly. Alone in the washroom of her mistress’ house she could hear the laughter of women washing clothes in the public bathhouse from which she was separated by only a thin wall. She would have liked to be there with the other women to take part in their jokes and their laughter and their merry gossiping, but they paid a centavo for every piece of soiled linen they brought there to wash and her mistress wanted to save this money.

A pin she had failed to remove from a dress sank its point deep into her fin­ger. She cried to herself in surprise and squeezed the finger until the blood came out. She watched the bright red drop fall into the suds of soap and looked in delight at its gradual mingling into the whiteness. Her mistress came upon her thus and, shouting at her, startled her into busily rubbing while she tried not to listen to the scolding words.

When her mistress left her, she fell to doing her work slowly again, and sometimes she paused to listen to the talk in the bathhouse behind her. A little later her mistress’ shrill voice told her to go to the bathhouse for drinking water. Eagerly wiping her hands on her wet wrap, she took the can from the kitchen table and went out quickly.

She was sweating at the defective town pump when strong hands closed over hers and started to help her. The hands pressing down on hers made her wince and she withdrew her hands hastily. The movement was greeted by a shout of laughter from the women washing and Rosa looked at them in surprise. The women said to each other “Rosa does not like to be touched by Sancho” and then slapped their thighs in laughter. Rosa frowned and picked up her can. Sancho made a move to help her but she thrust him away, and the women roared again, saying “Because we are here, Sancho, she is ashamed.”

Rosa carried the can away, her head angrily down, and Sancho followed her, saying “Do not be angry,” in coaxing tones. But she went her slow way with the can.

Her mistress’ voice came to her, calling impatiently, and she tried to hurry. When she arrived, the woman asked her what had kept her so long, and without waiting for an answer she ranted on, saying she had heard the women joking in the bathhouse, and she knew what had kept the girl so long. Her anger mounting with every angry word she said, she finally swung out an arm, and before she quite knew what she was doing, she slapped Rosa’s face.

She was sorry as soon as she realized what she had done. She turned away, muttering still, while Rosa’s eyes filled with sudden tears. The girl poured the water from the can into the earthen jar, a bitter lump in her throat, and thought of what she would do to people like her mistress when she herself, God willing, would be “rich.” Soon however, she thought of Sancho, and the jokes the women had shouted at her. She thought of their laughter and Sancho following her with his coaxing tones, and she smiled slowly.

Getting back to her washing, she gathered the clothes she had to bleach, and piled them into a basin she balanced on her head. Passing her mistress in the kitchen, she said something about going to bleach the clothes and under her breath added an epithet. She had to cross the street to get to the stones gathered about in a whitened circle in a neighbor’s yard where she was wont to lay out the clothes. She passed some women hanging clothes on a barbed-wire fence to dry. They called to her and she smiled at them.

Some dogs chasing each other on the street, she did not notice because the women were praising her for the whiteness of the linen in the basin on her head. She was answering them that she hadn’t even bleached them yet, when one of the dogs passed swiftly very close to her. Looking down, she saw in wide alarm another dog close on the heels of the first. An instinctive fear of animals made her want to dodge the heedlessly running dog, and she stepped gingerly this way and that. The dog, intent on the other it was pursuing, gave her no heed and ran right between her legs as Rosa held on to the basin in frantic fear lest it fall and the clothes get soiled. Her patadiong was tight in their wetness about her legs, and she fell down, in the middle of the street. She heard the other women’s exclamations of alarm and her first thought was for the clothes. Without getting up, she looked at the basin and gave obscene thanks when she saw the clothes still piled secure and undirtied. She tried to get up, hurrying lest her mistress come out and see her thus and slap her again. Already the women were setting up a great to do about what had happened. Some were coming to her, loudly abusing the dogs, solicitousness on their faces. Rosa cried, “Nothing’s the matter with me.” Still struggling to get up, she noticed that her wrap had been loosened and had bared her breasts. She looked around wildly, sudden shame coloring her cheeks, and raised the wrap and tied it securely around herself again.

She could stand but she found she could not walk. The women had gone back to their drying, seeing she was up and apparently nothing the worse for the accident. Rosa looked down at her right foot which twinged with pain. She stooped to pick up the basin and put it on her head again. She tried stepping on the toes of her right foot but it made her wince. She tried the heel but that also made her bite her lip. Already her foot above the ankle was swelling. She thought of the slap her mistress had given her for staying in the bathhouse too long and the slap she was most certain to get now for delaying like this. But she couldn’t walk, that was settled.

Then there came down the street a tartanilla without any occupant except the cochero who rang his bell, but she couldn’t move away from the middle of the street. She looked up at the driver and started angrily to tell him that there was plenty of room at the sides of the street, and that she couldn’t move anyway, even if there weren’t. The man jumped down from his seat and bent down and looked at her foot. The basin was still on Rosa’s head and he took it from her, and put it in his vehicle. Then he squatted down and bidding Rosa put a hand on his shoulders to steady herself, he began to touch with gentle fingers the swelling ankle, pulling at it and massaging it. They were still in the middle of the street. Rosa looked around to see if the women were still there to look at them but they had gone away. There was no one but a small boy licking a candy stick, and he wasn’t paying any attention to them. The cochero looked up at her, the sweat on his face, saw her looking around with pain and embarrassment mingled on her face. Then, so swiftly she found no time to protest, he closed his arms about her knees and lifted her like a child. He carried her to his tartanilla, plumped her down on one of the seats. Then he left her, coming back after a short while with some coconut oil in the hollow of his palm. He rubbed the oil on her foot, and massaged it. He was seated on the seat opposite Rosa’s and had raised the injured foot to his thigh, letting it rest there, despite Rosa’s protest, on his blue faded trousers. The basin of wet clothes was beside Rosa on the seat and she fingered the clothing with fluttering hands. The cochero asked her where she lived and she told him, pointing out the house. He asked what had happened, and she recited the whole thing to him, stopping with embarrassment when she remembered the loosening of her patadiongand the nakedness of her bosom. How glad she was he had not seen her thus. The cochero had finished with her foot, and she slid from the seat, her basin on a hip. But he took it from her, asking her to tell him where the bleaching stones were. He went then, and himself laid out the white linen on the stones, knowing like a woman, which part to turn to the sun.

He came back after a while, just as Rosa heard with frightened ears the call of her mistress. She snatched the basin from the cochero’s hand and despite the pain caused her, limped away.

She told her mistress about the accident. The woman did not do anything save to scold her lightly for being careless. Then she looked at the swollen foot and asked who had put oil on it. Rosa was suddenly shy of having to let anyone know about her cochero, so she said she had asked for a little oil at the store and put it on her foot herself. Her mistress was unusually tolerant, and Rosa forgot about the slapping and said to herself this was a day full of luck!

It was with very sharp regret that she thought of her having forgotten to ask the cochero his name. Now, in the days that followed, she thought of him, the way he had wound an arm around her knees and carried her like a little girl. She dreamed about the gentleness of his fingers. She smiled remembering the way he had laid out the clothes on stones to bleach. She knew that meant he must do his own washing. And she ached in ten­derness over him and his need for a woman like her to do such things for him—things like mending the straight tear she had noticed at the knee of his trousers when her foot had rested on them; like measuring his tartanilla seat cushions for him, and making them, and stringing them on his vehicle. She thought of the names for men she knew and called him by it in thinking of him, ever afterwards. In her thoughts she spoke to him and he always answered.

She found time to come out on the street for a while, every day. Sometimes she would sweep the yard or trim the scraggly hedge of viola bushes; or she would loiter on an errand for tomatoes or vinegar. She said to herself, He dreams of me too, and he thinks of me. He passes here every day wishing to see me. She never saw him pass, but she said to herself, He passes just when I am in the house, that’s why I never see him.

Some tartanilla would pass, and if she could, as soon as she heard the sound of the wheels, she looked out of a window, hoping it would be Angel’s. Sometimes she would sing very loudly, if she felt her mistress was in a good humor and not likely to object. She told herself that if he could not see her, he would at least wish to hear her voice.

She longed no more to be part of the group about the water tank in the bathhouse. She thought of the women there and their jokes and she smiled, in pity, because they did not have what she had, some one by the name of Angel, who knew how to massage injured feet back to being good for walking and who knew how to lay out clothes for bleaching.

When they teased her about Sancho, who insisted on pumping her can full every time she went for drinking water, she smiled at the women and at the man, full of her hidden knowledge about someone picking her up and being gentle with her. She was too full of this secret joy to mind their teasing. Where before she had been openly angry and secretly pleased, now she was indifferent. She looked at Sancho and thought him very rude beside… beside Angel. He always put his hands over hers when she made a move to pump water. He always spoke to her about not being angry with the women’s teasing. She thought he was merely trying to show off. And when one day Sancho said, “Do not mind their teasing; they would tease you more if they knew I really feel like they say I do,” she glared at him and thought him unbearably ill-mannered. She spat out of the corner of her mouth, letting him see the grimace of distaste she made when she did so, and seeing Sancho’s disturbed face, she thought, If Angel knew, he’d strike you a big blow. But she was silent and proud and unsmiling. Sancho looked after her with the heavy can of water held by one hand, the other hand flung out to balance herself against the weight. He waited for her to turn and smile at him as she sometimes did, but she simply went her way. He flung his head up and then laughed snortingly.

Rosa’s mistress made her usual bad-humored sallies against her fancied slowness. Noticing Rosa’s sudden excursions into the street, she made remarks and asked curious questions. Always the girl had an excuse and her mistress soon made no further questions. And unless she was in bad temper, she was amused at her servant’s attempts at singing.

One night she sent the maid to a store for wine. Rosa came back with a broken bottle empty of all its contents. Sudden anger at the waste and the loss made her strike out with closed fists, not caring where her blows landed until the girl was in tears. It often touched her when she saw Rosa crying and cowering, but now the woman was too angry to pity.

It never occurred to Rosa that she could herself strike out and return every blow. Her mistress was thirtyish, with peaked face and thin frame, and Rosa’s strong arms, used to pounding clothes and carrying water, could easily have done her hurt. But Rosa merely cried and cried, saying now and then Aruy! Aruy!, until the woman, exhausted by her own anger left off striking the girl to sit down in a chair, curse loudly about the loss of such good wine, and ask where she was going to get the money to buy another bottle.

Rosa folded her clothes into a neat bundle, wrapped them in her blanket, and getting out her slippers, thrust her feet into them. She crept out of a door without her mistress seeing her and told herself she’d never come back to that house again.

It would have been useless to tell her mistress how the bottle had been broken, and the wine spilled. She had been walking alone in the street hurrying to the wine store, and Sancho had met her. They had talked; he begging her to let him walk with her and she saying her mistress would be angry if she saw. Sancho had insisted and they had gone to the store and bought the wine, and then going home, her foot had struck a sharp stone. She had bent to hold a foot up, looking at the sole to see if the stone had made it bleed. Her dress had a wide, deep neck, and it must have hung away from her body when she bent. Anyway, she had looked up to find Sancho looking into the neck of her dress. His eyes were turned hastily away as soon as she straightened up, and she thought she could do nothing but hold her peace. But after a short distance in their resumed walk home, he had stopped to pick up a long twig lying on the ground. With deft strokes he had drawn twin sharp peaks on the ground. They looked merely like the zigzags one does draw playfully with any stick, but Rosa, having seen him looking into her dress while she bent over, now became so angry that she swung out and with all her force struck him on the check with her open palm. He reeled from the unexpected blow, and quickly steadied himself while Rosa shot name after name at him. Anger rose in his face. It was nearly dark, and there was no one else on the street. He laughed, short angry laughter, and called her back name for name. Rosa approached him and made to slap him again, but Sancho was too quick for her. He had slipped out of her way and himself slapped her instead. The surprise of it angered her into sudden tears. She swung up the bottle of wine she had held tightly in one hand, and ran after the man to strike him with it. Sancho slapped her arm so hard that she dropped the bottle. The man had run away laughing, calling back a final undeserved name at her, leaving her to look with tears at the wine seeping into the ground. Some people had come toward her then, asking what had happened. She had stooped, picked up the biggest piece of glass, and hurried back to her mistress, wondering whether she would be believed and forgiven.

Rosa walked down street after street. She had long ago wiped the tears from her face, and her thoughts were of a place to sleep, for it was late at night. She told herself she would kill Sancho if she ever saw him again. She picked up a stone from the road, saying, I wish a cold wind would strike him dead, and so on; and the stone she grasped tightly, say­ing, If I meet him now, I would throw this at him, and aim so well that I would surely hit him.

She rubbed her arm in memory of the numbing blow the man had dealt it, and touched her face with furious shame for the slap he had dared to give her. Her fists closed more tightly about the stone and she looked about her as if she expected Sancho to appear.

She thought of her mistress. She had been almost a year in the woman’s employ. Usually she stayed in a place, at the most, for four months. Sometimes it was the master’s smirking ways and evil eyes, sometimes it was the children’s bullying demands. She had stayed with this last mistress because in spite of her spells of bad humor, there were periods afterward when she would be generous with money for a dress, or for a cine with other maids. And they had been alone, the two of them. Sometimes the mistress would get so drunk that she would slobber into her drink and mumble of persons that must have died. When she was helpless she might perhaps have starved if Rosa had not forcibly fed her. Now, however, thought of the fierce beating the woman had given her made Rosa cry a little and repeat her vow that she would never step into the house again.

Then she thought of Angel, the cochero who had been gentle, and she lost her tears in thinking how he would never have done what Sancho did. If he knew what had happened to her, he would come running now and take her to his own home, and she would not have to worry about a place to sleep this night. She wandered about, not stopping at those places where she knew she would be accepted if she tried, her mind full of the injustices she had received and of comparisons between Sancho and Angel. She paused every time a tartanilla came her way, peering intently into the face of the cochero, hoping it would be he, ready to break her face into smiles if it were indeed. She carried her bundle on her arm all this while, now clenching a fist about the stone she still had not dropped and gnashing her teeth.

She had been walking about for quite a while, feeling not very tired, having no urgent need to hurry about finding herself a place, so sharp her hopes were of somehow seeing her cochero on the streets. That was all she cared about, that she must walk into whatever street she came to, because only in that way would he see her and learn what they had done to her.

Then, turning into a street full of stores set side by side, she felt the swish of a horse almost brushing against her. She looked up angrily at the cochero’s laughing remark about his whip missing her beautiful bust. An offense like that, so soon after all her grief at what Sancho had done, inflamed her into passionate anger, and mouthing a quick curse, she flung the stone in her hand at the cochero on his seat. It was rather dark and she did not quite see his face. But apparently she hit something, for he suddenly yelled a stop at the horse, clambered down, and ran back to her, demanding the reason for her throwing the stone. She exclaimed hotly at his offense with the whip, and then looking up into his face, she gasped. She gasped and said, “Angel!”

For it was he. He was wearing a striped shirt, like so many other people were wearing, and he had on the very same trousers of dark blue he had worn when he massaged her foot. But he gazed at her in nothing but anger, asking whether her body was so precious that she would kill his horse. Also, why did she keep saying Angel; that was not his name!

Rosa kept looking up at him not hearing a word of his threats about taking her to the municipio, saying only Angel, Angel, in spite of his protests that that was not his name. At last she understood that the cochero did not even remember her and she realized how empty her thoughts of him now were. Even his name was not Angel. She turned suddenly to walk away from him, saying, “You do not even remember me.”

The cochero peered at her face and exclaimed after a while, “Oh yes! the girl with the swollen foot!” Rosa forgot all the emptiness, forgot the sudden sinking of her heart when she had realized that even he would flick his whip at a girl alone on the road, and lifted her smiling face at him, stopping suddenly to tell him her foot had healed very quickly. The cochero asked her after a while where she was going, and she said breathlessly, without knowing just why she answered so, “I am going home!” He asked no questions about where she had been, why she was so late. He bade her ride in his vehicle, grandly saying he would not make her pay, and then, with many a loud exclamation to his horse, he drove her to her mistress’ house.

Rosa didn’t tell him what had happened. Nor anything about her dreams. She merely answered the questions the cochero asked her about how she had been. “With the grace of God, all right, thank you.” Once he made her a sly joke about his knowing there were simply lots of men courting her. Rosa laughed breathlessly and denied it. She wished they would never arrive, but they soon did. The cochero waited for her to get out, and then drove off, saying “Don’t mention it” to her many thanks. She ran after the tartanilla when it had gone off a little way, and asked, running beside the moving vehicle, looking up into his face, “What is your name?”

The cochero shouted, without stopping his horse, “Pedro” and continued to drive away.

Rosa went into the house without hesitation, forgetting all her vows about never stepping into it again and wondering why it was so still. She turned on the lights and found her mistress sleeping at a table with her head cradled in her arms, a new wine bottle before her, empty now of all its contents. With an arm about the thin woman’s waist, she half dragged her into her bed. When the woman would wake, she would say nothing, remembering nothing. Rosa turned on the light in the kitchen and hummed her preparations for a meal.

BEST PHILIPPINE SHORT STORIES: A QUESTION OF FIDELITY

A QUESTION OF FIDELITY
by Gémino H. Abad

I KNOW, Filo I know," Paco told his imaginary self, "in a story it would be a cheap trick, and Nelson would surely deride it." But there it was! could he help it?--on the cab's front door was written, Great is your faithfulness. It caught him up as though it laid a mocking charge at his door, and as his heart tingled, he sensed that it was the last incident, entirely factual, which should illuminate the fiction of his past. But his own life story? "Ye gods!" it was farthest from his mind. And the last incident? why? The first day of the advertisers' conference had just ended and he was only waiting for Bianca at the balcony of Inday's candle shop, idly watching in Baguio's misty dusk the customers that came into the café below, when the cab drove in and stopped to let off someone. A pretty girl, her legs faintly luminous as she slid out, glanced up at him and hurried inside. It was the merest instant, lost at once. "How many such moments in a lifetime, ha Filo?" he gibed, but Filo only stared, wildly considering a moment's impulse… No, Paco didn't think the pretty girl resembled Bianca. Not at all.

Paco was creative director in the Asia-Pacific Ad World, Inc., and Bianca, his assistant, who took charge of the two biggest accounts with the company, Coca-Cola and Philip Morris. For quite a while now, whenever they had their coffee breaks and exchanged notes on the company's business dealings and enjoyed each other's bantering, he sometimes sensed a sweet yearning for her. She was young and alive, nice-smelling, pretty… But he would quickly repress it. "Ye gods, Filo!" he'd inwardly cry, "I'm past fifty and happily married. It's juvenile, your hankering after a lost youth, also called midlife crisis, haha! Bianca in her mid-twenties, could very well be my own daughter, and surely has not a few male friends, much younger, and not-unlikely, has a special affection for one."

In the hazy light from street and café Paco couldn't catch more of the cab's text as it drove away. It was surely from the Old Testament, the Psalms maybe, but surely too, this puzzling now was a distraction, a quick evasion. For some time he had wondered whether he could unravel to himself his own story. Then, perhaps, he might see into his future or, at least, the sort of person that he had become from which events still to happen must inexorably take their form. But what a strange notion, that if he were to contrive now his real life-story, just such a cab's message should happen just as it already has, as a twist to his past's fiction.

Paco smiled to himself. He was in fact, it seemed to him, always living his story, or that of his pathetic "other," Filo. Bianca had promised that she would join him at Inday's. He glanced at his watch, quarter to six. There were many things to talk over, they had agreed, but he wasn't eager to review them just now, he would as usual simply let things happen as they come. Filo would of course insist that he take control, but he knew Filo--at the last moment, he would draw back. No, certain things you just let happen, they take their natural course like the common cold. Sometimes, when you try to have it your way, things become a little perverse, as though they have a will of their own. The important thing is to avoid hurting anyone.

"Are you avoiding me, Paco?" Bianca had asked point-blank while they were having their usual coffee break in the office. "No, of course not, Bai," he had quickly denied. It was a lie, but what choice did he have? She had frowned but did not press. A simple denial was best, for explanations are like clouds, forming and dispersing, the words failing short, or worse, aghast to spell out the heart's agenda, embarrassed with its yearning items. There are simply no clear skies in human affairs, and so, how could he even begin to explain to Bianca?

Whenever he mentioned Bianca to his wife Agnes, usually over breakfast when they would relate some events the day before, he sensed that it agitated her although she never let on. An uneasy feeling would come over him, perhaps from the way Agnes looked, as though she had not heard anything, or as though on a sudden her mind were somewhere else, but her eyes would turn sad, as if a light there had been snuffed, and he would feel guilty and vexed at the same time. It would always make him vaguely apprehensive and irritable, her sad look, her silence, as though he had done her wrong, haunting him through his day at the office.

Agnes was the senior partner with four women friends in a law firm that they had put up. She often came home late, and after kissing him, looking up from his papers at his work table, she would quietly enter their teenage son Dylan's room and kiss him, already fast asleep, and later carry the laundry in her arms to the washing machine before she retired for the night. She called it a form of relaxation! She had a remarkable strength of character, managerial, down-to-earth, which often bared his pathetic inadequacy in practical matters, yet capable of gentleness, a rich warmth of affection and intense loyalty, but also to his secret discomfiture a fine, sometimes even caustic moral sense… Surely he had resented it at times,. finding no reasonable excuse, because he tended toward sloth and a happy indifference. Filo was poor refuge, just as well quite hid. O, he loved Agnes, and the future had often seemed bleak without her quiet affection, her cool efficiency…

What could be keeping Bianca? Paco lighted a cigarette. Maybe in a quarter or so, he could take a cab back to Pines Hotel to look for her. He leaned over the balcony and watched the small crowd below in the café's patio. A young man with unkempt hair swirling around his twin cowlicks, in faded jeans with a tear on the right knee, was sitting at one table, tuning his guitar and trying a few chords. A dark frail-looking girl sat close to him, indifferently watching the passersby on the street as she sipped at the straw into her bottle of Coke. The tip of her straw was stained a deep red… "What, Filo?" It was strange that Filo should be perturbed by the stain. "Maybe they're lovers, ha Filo?" he felt a twinge of envy. Maybe there was going to be a performance later, and would she be singing? Four guys were noisily talking and laughing over their bottles of beer and chicharon at another table, and rose as one with a loud cheer, "Rita!" as the pretty girl he was earlier looking at joined them.

A dèjá vu swept Paco to a familiar café, he had met Rita before! among other noisy customers, but as he looked closely at her, he was certain it had never happened. No, it was not possible, however Filo denied it. He looked again. Though the light from street and café struggled with the pervading dusk, Rita's face seemed to glow with a kind of companionable warmth. Just such bright almond eyes, too, and a full sensual mouth... Rita threw her head back and laughed, and Paco could hardly take his eyes off where the little delta between her breasts fairly glowed in the hazy light. Something snakelike too about her as she leaned over the table to touch familiarly an arm or push jestingly at one or the other of the flirtatious guys. "Like a snake, Filo?" however did he, Paco, get that impression? Filo sneered at Paco's recollection. He was only eighteen when he had gone up to Baguio for the first time and proposed to meet the woman caller at Star Café. She too had long dark hair and wore a tight dark red dress which showed her figure to advantage. No, she was not a Chinese mestiza like Rita, but she was not unattractive. Her name, she had told him over the phone, was Zita.

His parents didn't know at the time that he was attending the YMCA Summer Youth Leadership Conference. It wasn't right, they would have said, to participate in a Protestant fellowship. He went ahead of his friends Nelson and Deomund from UP Los Baños to see the city for himself the day before, enjoy the scenery freely wandering around, even perhaps write ardent verses under the pine trees for Deomund's sister, Celine, without the distraction of endless debates with Nelson on what makes a poem.

At the bus station--was it somewhere near Tutuban? he couldn't quite recall just now--after a hurried lunch, he noticed that his Dangwa ticket bore his lucky number: 7490. Neither could he recall where Nelson had read that 4 was in Chinese mythology the number for Death, but it had always seemed to him a good omen. He sat almost at the edge of his seat during the entire trip because he had an old couple for seatmates, an enormously fat woman with a can of La Perla biscuits on her lap where she would dip from time to time for a nibble, and a small, sickly looking man, obviously her husband, who was quite glum but would sometimes mutter and whine to himself. To keep from failing or pressing against the glum old man whenever the bus made a sharp turn, he would grip hard the bar on the back of the opposite seat across the aisle which had become cluttered with luggage and boxes. He decided the old couple wouldn't be pleasant company for six hours, and pretended to be dozing most of the time while keeping his grip with an outstretched hand on his bar. The fat woman never offered him a biscuit during the entire trip.

"Isbo! Isbo!" the conductor cried before they went up Kennon Road. The bus stopped at a roadside where, as the cloud of dust settled, he could see dark naked boys cavorting like nimble goats over the rocks and diving into the clear waters of a mountain stream that glittered in the sun. A number of passengers, among them the old couple, went down to relieve themselves among the scraggly bushes. It was a painful sight, the fat woman with her husband in tow navigating the cluttered aisle, stepping carefully over the luggage and holding on to the seats or the other passengers, as they made their way to the door. Outside, in the soft wash of five o'clock sunlight, the glum old man had to cling to the fat woman's neck with his left arm as he stood shaking, waited, and then blessed the grass and scatter of shards on the ground.

As the bus climbed the zigzag along the mountain slopes, Paco's ears seemed suddenly to have fallen deaf and then softly popped and filled again with the bus engine's roar and the passengers' incessant chatter. He felt buoyant and free, eagerly awaiting his first sight of Baguio as pine trees raced past the fat woman's dozing head at the window and flushed the cool mountain air with their fresh invigorating scent. His eye caught a waterfall dropping gracefully like a long, serene sheet of shimmering lace down a cliff crowded with desperate trees and shrubs. How he wished, as the sight vanished around a bend, he could get off there awhile to stretch his cramped legs and gaze at the silent marvel of clear mountain water leaping out of the sky! Was it perhaps an American colonial officer who called it Bridal Veil the first time that he climbed up to the site of Baguio from camp to camp on a relay of horses? Who was the bride he thought of--perhaps an Igorot maid, a village chief's peace offering… Paco dismissed his fantasy. Deomund would surely scoff: "So the past romanticizes itself to clear its conscience." When Paco saw the gigantic lion's head carved out of the rock over a cliff's edge, he knew they would he in Baguio soon enough.

They drove past villas and pretty cottages along a ridge amid their lush flowering gardens, a roadside café, a sprawling bungalow displaying its rich stores of woodcraft and woven things--Ah, here at last, thought Paco, the summer capital of government and the rich, the Shangri-La of honeymoons. The bus chugged tiredly on a narrow dirt road to its station, on either side a clutter of shanties and ramshackle stores, and ragged children playing among the litter of the poor--a squatter colony among pine trees vanishing down a ravine. Through the tall pines like towers lost in the gathering shadows, Paco glimpsed the dull gold-brown sheen of dome and spires, the Baguio Cathedral in the last light of day.

At the bus station, he asked for directions to Session Road from a boy vendor of strawberries in little rattan baskets. A cab driver offered to take him to Patria Inn, but no, he preferred to walk the distance, breathe the cool pine-scented air, and jostle with the crowd strolling pell-mell down Session Road as the city throbbed to life in the neon flood and blare of music and hubbub of trade and fellowship. He was in no hurry to get to his inn. His luggage was light, which he slung over his shoulder, and despite the long trip, he felt energized by the festive tumult around him. Neither was he hungry; perhaps he might just have a snack before midnight in one of those bars that he had passed. Never had he felt freer, it was as though he had all of life and the world to enjoy at leisure. He was glad when, at the inn, he was given a room that looked out on an empty lot, filled with the debris of a wrecked building but gazing out on Session Road so that, at his window, he caught still the strains of music from the bars and felt the quiet, undemanding companionship of strangers in the streaming crowd.

The phone suddenly rang, startling him. He hadn't told either Deomund or Nelson about Patria Inn. "Hello?" Perhaps someone had dialed the wrong number. "Yes?" A tinny rasp at the other end. "Who is it?" Standing by the large bed, he held the telephone set absently over the lamp at a low side table. "You don't know me," a woman's soft voice, "if you're lonely, I'm at Star Café…" Is it right to just--hang up' now? "Hello?" pretending he didn't quite hear. But she probably sensed his confusion. "Will you come?" So frank and direct a dare, and is he able? A listening silence like a spell. Who is she? "It's okay, I just got in…" at once he felt stupid. "I…" Yes, why shouldn't he just hang up, 'Sorry, ma'am'--a cruel touch! "Oh," a sigh, or so he imagined, "I'll wait, take your time." What lame excuse now? he'd be a silly "country bumpkin," in Nelson's words. "Alright," pretending casualness, a cool indifference. "I'll see you there." He heard a low nervous giggle, as to say perhaps how easily she had won! "Oh, how nice… I like your voice. Call me Zita." She twitters, and he is caught! but she cannot see, he had better have a hold on himself. "I'm Filo," the first name that came to mind "how will I know it's you, Zita?" Ah, what pretense, even the way he made his voice deep and resonant; he felt a tremor of adventurous daring. What will happen now? he had crossed over. "I'm in a red mini, with a white handbag," Zita's voice caught on a light mischievous note, "waiting at the counter by the cashier. Will you really come, Filo?" She was confidently teasing. "Yes," he was surer of himself now, "I'll have a dark-leather jacket on, and a blue cap," both which he didn't have, but he had already formed a plan.

She was indeed sitting at the counter on a high stool near the cashier, her long shapely legs catching the eye at once, and a glass of Coke beside her small white handbag. He dallied just outside Star Café to buy the Manila Times from an old woman vendor before he took a corner table at the foot of a stair where he took cover in the editorial page. Ostensibly reading--"Oh, just coffee, black ha," to the Chinese waiter who hovered above the page--he watched Zita cross her legs and lean her head a little on her left hand which she had placed behind her ear, her long dark hair flowing to the small of her back. She was not unattractive, just about his age, too, and she cut a nice sensuous figure in her red mini. He was glad he hadn't said, "Oh, so sorry, ma'am" and hung up. Something easy and nimble too about her movement as, she reached for her bag and took out a little mirror where she checked her face, frowning a little. This is for real, Filo, he thought, he wasn't imagining a temptress in a garden. Perhaps Zita earns her college tuition from tourists and vacationers. But now, what? Zita looked quickly around as she put back the mirror into her bag, then scanned three, four customers as they went in from the crowd of passersby and vendors on the pavement just outside Star Café. She straightened up, looked briefly in his direction where he slid between the movie pages and reached for his cup of coffee. For a split second there, did not her glance catch his eye, his solitariness suddenly suspect, as his hand froze at his cup? She must already have paid her bill, or perhaps, she was a favored customer at the café; pushing aside her empty glass, she spoke to the cashier, slid gracefully from her high stool at the counter, and left him stranded, somehow disconsolate, amid all the movies "Now Showing."

His eyes followed Zita's dark red form and quickly lost her in the crowd. But Filo still pursued her, calling her name. How he filled Paco with distaste. The milling crowd on Session Road suddenly seemed cheerless and indifferent. Passing by a bar called Melody, he thought a snack would feel like gravel in his mouth. Zita? probably his own fiction. Couldn't he just have walked casually up to her, confidently touch her arm on the counter, say "I'm Filo"… Now she was only an imaginary garden, and Filo the only live toad there, he could croak all night! He went up to his room and stripped to mock Filo in the bathroom mirror. Filo only hovers at the edge of critical moments, but does not live. At heart perhaps, give him breath and space for action, a schemer, and like all schemers, slinks away as the moment rises to its accomplishment. Ah, he was thoroughly punished for his empty daring.

"O, Paco, how long were you waiting?" He started at Bianca's cheery voice as she tapped lightly his elbow on the balcony's railing. She looked pretty and elegant in her plaid skirt, sky blue blouse, and a silken scarf around her throat. Paco was glad he hadn't gone back to the hotel to look for her. She always seemed to bring exhilaration to his accustomed solitude where Filo, he imagined, would just sulk in a shallow pond, his dreams awash in lichen. It was what drew him to her, not simply that hey enjoyed their imagination together in creating images and texts for their clients, it always seemed as though they were opening up worlds where they could be quite free, basking in their fantastic light; no, not only the free rein to their imagination, but her vitality, which seemed to sharpen a sad knowledge, long denied, that he had missed those tricky and delicious moments with women in his youth's dry and desolate solitariness; Bianca's was a kind of wild electric vibrancy which often expressed itself in youthful mischief, when she'd slice into his seriousness with some witty gibe or even play a trick or two on his projects, deliberately confounding the mathematics in some corner of the budget (but she always found a clever way for him to notice the absurd error).

"I'm so sorry, Paco, I had to help the girls run photocopies…" "It's okay, Bai, I was just watching Rita." "Rita?" Bianca's eyes squinted with mock envy. "It's a secret." He wanted to see surprise on her face. "Oh… you were dreaming!" she jeered blithely. "Look there… but keep your voice down. There, with those boisterous crooks. She's very pretty, no?" "So… you were dreaming." She looked at him, smiling, and he laughed. It was so characteristic of Bianca, scoring at once and taking charge, while he let things be, considering most as indifferent, and content to be left alone or merely jest and banter. "O, but I was also thinking, how do you steal an image from that scene for a Coca-Cola commercial?" "Right," she taunted, "how do you rouse a cliché?" "Maybe you'd like to look around in the shop?" "No, let's go somewhere else." "Neutron's?" Bianca nodded. "The evening's so cool, Paco, let's enjoy it and walk."

They took the spiral stairs down to the café. As they passed Rita's table, Bianca glanced at her, the way a woman swiftly appraises another, it always mystified Paco why women seem instinctively driven to it. As they rounded a corner of the street, she asked, "Did you just invent that name for her?" "No, I heard those guys call her Rita," "She's pretty," she concluded, "with a mole on her lip which makes her a chatterbox." Paco couldn't help but laugh, "Such a serious charge, Bai!"

As they turned another corner, they could see through the dark cascade of pine trees down a winding street, dimly lighted Burnham Park and its small glimmering lake, now quite deserted. Neutron's was a private cozy café on a hill that overlooked it. Only a few customers were quietly conversing at small round tables. Seeming to flow and tingle like a brook in air were soft strains played by a pianist behind a trellis of flowering plants. They took a table in an alcove and ordered drinks, creme de menthe for Bianca and vodka tonic for himself.

"Well, you start it, Bai," as they waited for their drinks, "you said we have things to talk over." "Okay," fingering her scarf around her throat, "you just seem a little distant these days. Is there something… wrong?" "Really?" but Paco knew it was coming, Bianca was always forthright, "it may just be something that worries me… in the family, you know." He lighted a cigarette. Bianca seemed to study him a while. "Dylan is asthmatic. But we've been to an acupuncturist, I think it'll cure the kid."

Paco considered his white lie. It would be indelicate to involve Agnes; besides, his impression of her odd silences on Bianca might really be quite spurious. He remembered Dylan's first attack of asthma a month back. The poor kid barged crying into their bedroom, breathing heavily. "It's alright, son," he tried to comfort him as he got out of bed and placed his arm around his son's shoulder, "you can sleep with us"--as Dylan used to when he was little. But he felt helpless before his son's anguish and could only wish it were his own affliction. Agnes went to the medicine cabinet and set up the respirator. She took off Dylan's shirt and rubbed some ointment on his chest as he lay in bed, gasping for breath. Through all that, leaning on the headboard, he kept gently tapping his son's shoulder as to tame his drowning, and as he watched mother and son, he felt a wave of tenderness toward Agnes…

"Acupuncture?" Bianca broke into his thoughts. "Yes," he pulled himself up, "Dr. Jesus Santiago, he's getting to be quite famous. He trained in China, I'm told, after Harvard medical school." "I sure hope, Paco, your son gets well soon. Can acupuncture treat insomnia, do you think?" "O, I should think so, but I'll ask next time we visit."

They fell silent awhile as a waitress in a light green uniform came with their drinks. She looked at Paco with a querying smile, Would that be all? and he waved her away, "Just ice water, please, and an ashtray, ha."

He looked earnestly at Bianca. "I think I need to be sure about something." "What?" teasing. "Does it bother you, Bai, when people talk, I mean, seeing how were often together, they'd be gossiping soon enough." "O, I would just ignore it, gossips are so empty-headed." "Trouble is," swirling the ice in his drink, "they don't know how else to fill up." "Too bad," shaking her head. "Well, as for me, I'd actually be pleased," said Paco, chuckling and looking slyly at her. "I think it would sort of improve my reputation." "Meaning?" her eyes lighted up mocking. "That there's danger in my character," Paco pursued quizzically, but half-serious, "not all milk of kindness, you know; it has a dark side." "So has everyone, but then," laughing, "as to that sleazy fame you want, you'd be using me." "Gads, I thought you said you wouldn't mind the whole town talking." "Now I do, because--why do you want a double?" "The dark side needs light." "Paco, you're being melodramatic. Are you writing a story?"

She was close. Filo, it occurred to him, was not quite man at his best--Paco smiled over his drink--no, yet deeper than he knew himself, with quite a pagan notion of sexuality. If Eve, he'd darkly say, were the first woman, then woman is life's very source, and man must connect with her or be less than human; man is the parasite, drawing his vigor, his machismo, from that source, her sex. Gads! how Filo's silly notions carry him away. He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray.

"Am I writing a: story?" he echoed. "Actually, at lnday's, I was thinking that." On a sudden he remembered the near fatal accident with Agnes two weeks back that he had told Bianca about, and a strange intuition swept through his mind, a sense that for one deeply troubled and in denial, something just happens or erupts as though to express the unnamed distress. But how really stupid of him then! as their old Ford stalled on a slope along Krus na Ligas on their way to a reunion of friends, how could he have let go of the handbrake!

"Did you write stories before, Paco?" "No… I only recalled just now that near accident with our car." "Ah, that was terrible…" Bianca waved her hand as though to ward off an imminent tragedy.

But Paco couldn't shake off his memory. It wasn't so much the terror of that moment that shook him, but an immense feeling afterwards of sadness, as though for the first time in his life he knew emptiness if he should lose Agnes. But what stark mindlessness! When their Ford stalled, he had put the hand brake on, gone out of the car, and walked to a mechanic's shop they had just passed. What luck, he had told himself, for he knew little about cars, and Agnes would sometimes reprove him for not reading the car's manual. The mechanic told him to release the hand brake, or so he thought he heard, and he did like an idiot! opened the car door as he stood on the street and released the brake. Of course the car slid down, rolling backward without direction, and desperately trying to seize it by its side, he fell on the road where he barely had time and space to duck as the open door swung past his head. He picked himself up and scurried after the runaway car, unmindful of vehicles driving past up and down on either side of the slope. All this time Agnes froze on the front seat, she told him afterwards that she closed her eyes when she saw a truck down the slope, and thought he would surely go under its wheels.

"Hello?" Bianca shook his hand. "Oh, sorry, Bai… I got distracted." The same feeling swept through him, a great inexplicable sadness, sweet to the soul as it suffered the sudden rush of memory and in a flash seemed to have at last fathomed a great mystery. Oh, a tired truism. it certainly is, how each day's familiarity blinds one, and the easy companionship devours the ardor of feeling, and one takes the affection freely given, and takes it, like the air one breathes without having to take thought. Filo could be cynical about all that, and stand back and jeer, but right now, now, as he remembered how the Ford caught on a tree stump where it would have plunged into the squatter's shanties across the shallow ditch, the sudden tide of sadness was suffering almost more than he could bear so that his tears seemed to well up where he stood shamed upon a crumbling strand of his life's own time.

"Paco… is anything wrong? You look…" Bianca gently pressed his hand. "It's alright, I…" Maybe this vodka, suggested itself; no, he must not lie again. He felt strangely pure with the sudden resolve, a new wholeness seemed to surge through him. How could he in his heart return to Agnes if he didn't face up his feeling for Bianca, make a clean breast of it, and let go? Now was the moment he had sensed at Inday's candle shop. "Have I told you about Zita?" "You mean Rita?" "No… it was my first time in Baguio…" "Ah, yes, that woman who called you at Patria Inn, you played a heartless trick on her!" "I was only eighteen, and I think frightened. Nothing really happened there, but maybe it struck me then… about sex and women, you know." Ah, there was no help for Filo now, so daring in dream, who wouldn't think of jumping like Basho's frog! "What?" she looked mockingly at him. "There's that need… maybe we guys joke no end about it to sort of make light of it." Bianca shook her head, smiling. "Oh, you're just thinking it, Paco, intellectualizing it. It's the normal thing, but," laughing softly, "it's just to start things." He laughed with her, but the moment had come, although he had a vague sense of its rashness. "I meant to tell you, Bai… I'm quite drawn to you, but…" But it isn't right, oh, he shouldn't have so foolishly blurted, what need to be so honest?

Bianca looked startled, and the mocking glint in her eyes blinked out. "I know, Bai, it's crazy." She was silent a long time. "But if the feeling is honest?" It was almost a whisper. "Oh, it's honest, Bianca," was all he could say as he stared at his drink. Couldn't he have found another way without hurt to be open and plain? He felt oppressed by a feeling that he had transgressed a silence between them where their light heartedness with one another had seemed perfectly natural.

"Paco," Bianca placed her hand gently on his. She sounded distant and looked beautiful and sad and inaccessible. I'm sorry, Bai, it's crazy of me, let it go, he wanted to say. "Maybe, Paco, it's really just Zita--like you have to make it up to her." She let her hand stay on his.

Was she just saying it? But, Yes, he thought bitterly, it might be Zita, for she had become a creature of his disappointed memory; but also, No, for it was rather with having to be honest with Bianca, by a hurtful bridge of poor words, that he had crossed over a darkness. He looked at her as though across a great distance, "You may be right, Bai…" he said, and pressed her hand. What words more? I'm sorry, Bai… anything more would seem to mock the silence that he had in foolhardiness transgressed. She smiled at him and released his hand.