It was as if he did not hear. He went to the small room, got his books, and leafed through them. She followed him. Well, don’t you want to see your father? He gazed out of the small window and saw his grandfather seated with the menfolk, talking at Tio Joven’s store.
Don’t you want to go? Like your grandfather said, this has to come sometime. The decision is yours. You are old enough now to have a mind of your own.
She would get angry again, so without a word Luis put on his battered rubber shoes and his only shirt, which was stiff with starch. When he was ready she bade him stand before her. This is how it has to be, she said quickly. He knew that she was angry, not with him but with the man in the big brick house, he whose name she always told him to spit at whenever it was mentioned, the man he was going to see, the man whose blood, she said, was in his own veins.
It was late when Luis returned to Sipnget. A rooster crowed, the stars were out like jewels in the deep bowl of the sky, the air was sultry and dust was thick on the deserted lane. Were there people peeping through the close windows into the dark maw of night?
It hardly mattered then whether he went back to Sipnget or not. Now he knew what was within the red house, the brightness and the spaciousness, the piano, the table laden with apples and oranges shining with the luster of soft gold. Vic and he tasted apples and oranges only once a year, at Christmas. His mother would unwrap the frayed kerchief she always had tied to her skirt strings, and after she had counted carefully she would hand him and Vic a few coins and say: This is Christmas. And they would buy apples as gifts in exchange for apples they would get during the Christmas party in school.
The lamp in the house still shone, so they would be awake, waiting for him. He went up the stairs slowly and heard the steady whirr of the sewing machine. When he reached the door the whirring stopped. His mother called out to him: Draw the ladder up and don’t forget to bolt the door. He did what she told him. It was as if she were afraid a giant hand might slip past the door to snuff out their lives, but there was no such hand and they never had visitors except the women who came to have their clothes mended — and the man from the big red house with whom she argued in the yard.
The small sala was littered with pieces of cloth, as usual, and in the center was the old sewing machine with his mother hunched before it. She would be there until it was almost dawn, sewing until she could hardly see.
Her face was expectant when she turned to him: Did you kiss his hand?
I did, Mother.
She seemed relieved. I thought you’d forget, she said; you always forget what I teach you.
The machine whirred again. He took off his shoes and squirmed out of his shirt carefully, so that the slight tear on its back, which had been mended, would not run. Vic was still awake and was looking at him from across the room.
In the big red house, what where they saying now? You will not regret it — that was what Santos, the caretaker, told his father. With his hand upon Luis’s shoulder Santos had added: And there is a good head on these shoulders.
The great man — his father — looked at Luis, then the porcine head nodded and smiled — he whose name he must spit at every time it was uttered, he whom his mother had cursed. But Luis could not look at him, nor could he spit at him, so he stared at the polished floor and at his dusty rubber shoes. He could not look at his father, who was all smiles and solicitation.
Yet he went to him, and as his mother had said he should, he held the white hirsute hand and kissed it, knowing as he did that someday, if he grew old and fat and powerful, perhaps he would look just like this man. He would have been glad if he had known this man when he needed him most; he would have been proud to kiss his big fat hand and would have wanted to live in his big red house — but why had his father waited? Why did he not come when he was in the cradle or when he was six or eight and was teased in school — or when they had nothing to eat but rice gruel and leaves of camote and marunggay? There would not have been those bitter moments when his mother would not talk with him, moments when he knew he was not like Victor, nights when she would toss and weep. There would not have been the anguished look on her face when he asked her for the first time: Mother, what has my father done and where is he? My father is not Vic’s father — I know that now …
He was eight years old then, mud was thick on his feet, his hair unruly, but his skin was fair — fairer than anyone’s in the village, although he swam in the river, too, and climbed the camachile trees and like everyone else was exposed to the rage of the sun.
You bear an honorable name! his mother shrieked. She dropped her sewing and towered before him. Her hand fell across his face, its sting sharp on his lips. He stared at her in utter surprise, feeling the pain spread across his face, but he did not cry. He did not move, and he could feel something warm trickling down his mouth, and when she saw this she ran to the kitchen and with a damp towel wiped the blood off his lips. It was not she who had done him wrong: it was his father, and though he could not understand why she had slapped him, he was not angry with her, though always, the memory of her hand across his face and the taste of his own blood would be imperishable in his mind.
December — she had many clothes to sew, but they were neither for Victor nor for him. January — and the harvest would be in, but they would have none of it. Cold mornings — and she would rise before the sun and in the white mists hovering over Sipnget would go to town to get more sewing to be done and through the night, the whirr of the infernal machine in his ears. In March, Luis finished grade school, while Vic, who was younger, had one more year to go. Then April — and the man from the big red house came and said, your father who is visiting from Manila wants to see you. He would have been glad, but he was thirteen and it was enough that there was this frail, sun-browned woman who had slapped him, this old man who loved to talk of days gone by, and his brother — much, much darker than he, who looked up to him, as if he were the only holder of knowledge and virtue.
What did your father say? his mother asked suddenly. She had stopped pedaling and the machine was quiet.
He asked me if I wanted to live with him, Luis said.
She dropped the colored piece of cloth she was holding and folded her hands at the wooden edge of the machine. What did you tell him?
I said I would ask you first, Mother.
She picked up the piece of cloth and started working on it again. You must go with him, she said; you are going to live with him from now on.
Luis held his breath, not wanting to believe, not wanting to listen to what she had said. You don’t mean that, Mother! he cried.
Her voice was firm but disconsolate: You — you have to go to high school and then to college, so that you will not be in want, and someday, when you are older, I hope that you will be kind — much kinder than he — and not wreck the life of one hapless woman.
Mother!
Yes, she said, be kind.
He could not contain his grief anymore. You never wanted me, because I am not like Vic!
She dropped the piece of cloth she was working on and pointed a thimbled finger at him. Do you want to rot here? she asked softly. No, my Luis, you must go, not only because it is your fate but because I want you to. Vic does not have a similar choice, so he will stay.
Luis walked to the open window. In the near distance, the light in Tio Joven’s store still burned, and among the men talking was the hunched, unmistakable form of his grandfather. Yes, Luis was different. His classmates called Vic and him “coffee and milk,” and although the jesting did hurt at first, he learned to bear it. After all, his mother loved them both in a way that blunted all barbs. He had put the jumbled pieces together and understood — it was he, not Vic, who had sprung from muddied springs.