* The Filipinos usually coin nicknames (often terms of endearment) from a person’s physical attributes. “Kalbo” (“bald”) is the name given to a man by people who know him. President Ramos is called “Tabaco” because of the unlit cigar always clamped in his mouth. A fat boss will be called “Taba” (“fat”) by everyone in his office, although not to his face.
CHAPTER 14
My concern is here in this land that I have cleared. Yes, my house is small — a typhoon can destroy it. I have no weapons to defend it against the Americans, who have everything. I will welcome them to partake of my food, and if they will command me to serve them, what choice do I have? The little people have always been like this — they die, but then they can bring on a plague. All that I want is to be left alone.
Amami adda ca sadi langit—
Dalin and the two boys intoned the Lord’s Prayer. Always in the hush of dusk before they supped, they prayed with the words that the Augustinians had shaped for them, and with the end of the novena, they now sang softly, their voices blending together with what Istak had taught and explained to them:
Tantum ergo sacramentum
Veneremur cernui
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui …
So be it, the old giving way to the new. Where the senses cannot confirm, let faith be the unswerving guide, the final and only answer. Faith made them persevere so that they could reach Rosales. His two boys, his wife — they looked up to him with more than faith; Dalin could only write her name before; now she could read and knew a lot more than woman’s work. Still she had not changed really — she was still the same woman who took that desolate trail to Po-on. What is it, then, that makes people endure? To remain steadfast? Surely they must be imbued with more than courage.
And now, the Cripple was asking him to face the enemy, fling stones at him, and bare his chest to him. No, courage is also the capacity to use wisdom so that we, not he, will prevail, to learn how the enemy can be destroyed, to have the patience to wait, to search for his weakness, to attack when he Does not expect it.
Istak could not sleep. The gecko called from the dalipawen tree beyond the house, and the cocks crowed from their roosts in the nearby branches. Dalin was quietly asleep beside him. In the morning, he would have to return to town with answers that had been thought out, dredged from his deepest being. It was only at night when he was home lying wide-awake that the big thoughts — as he called them — came but did not linger. A body that was tired succumbed easily to sleep; he waited for it but it was a long time coming.
Daylight again, Dalin preparing breakfast in the kitchen, the smell of corn coffee, of dried fish frying in coconut oil. Outside, the boys already shouting, the dogs yelping, the world alive and pulsing, and here he was, though rested, still disturbed, still unsure.
At the low eating table, the two boys ate noisily. He nibbled at the dried fish, the fried rice almost untouched on his plate.
“Whatever it is that the Cripple is asking you to do,” Dalin said, “do it. He is a man you respect and honor; he will not ask you to do work which will dishonor you or leave you without reward. And reward does not mean silver.”
She seemed fairer in the morning light of the open doorway. It must have been her blouse as well, its long sleeves rolled up. Her hair, neatly combed, hung down her shoulders. Every so often, she washed her hair with the ash water from the stalks of palay that she burned — now it shone lustrous in the light.
“I am not going to be involved with his violence,” Istak said quickly. “My duty is to them.” He thrust a chin at the boys, who continued eating. “And to you.”
Dalin shook her head. “How quickly you have forgotten.” She sighed. “You have tried to run away from it, but it seeks you just the same.”
“We have had peace for years now,” he said, shaken a little by what she said.
“We cannot escape our fate,” she said softly, reaching out to touch his hand.
Don Jacinto gave him a corner in the cavernous storeroom beneath the house. The windows were wide, the sun flooded in, and it was bright even till late in the afternoon. Then, a maid would come with a candle or a pair of oil lamps and he would continue writing till the work was done. If needed upstairs, he would go up the stone flight of the azotea without having to pass the main hall. The Cripple merely thumped on the wooden floor with a cane and the dust of many years would drift down, threatening to smother him. But soon, no matter how loudly the Cripple thumped, no more dust descended on him.
The work was not difficult; most of the time, it was simply copying neatly what the Cripple had written and corrected. Istak had some difficulty at first — he had not written with a pen for a long time, and the nib often flattened out as he pressed on it too hard. After two days it all came back — the old agility, the smoothness. Though his back ached from the hours hunched before the writing table, it was not the body that was really fatigued but the mind, for everything that the Cripple wrote, he absorbed. Writing provoked thinking as well, and it had been a long, long time since Istak was made to think as he was doing now. He marveled at the Cripple’s tenacity and how, despite his infirmity, he could still write so much, even now that he was no longer in power and the war was being lost. The Americans were getting closer and very soon they would reach Pangasinan.
It was the Cripple’s view on the Church, on Bishop Aglipay, whom he wanted to be the undisputed leader of the Filipino priests, that bothered Istak most. Mabini’s belief in God was formidable and steadfast, but he thought little of the Roman Church as an institution. The Cripple’s letters and resolutions asked instead for the creation of a Filipino Church, serving not Rome but the Filipino people.
Shadowy figures stole into the house and talked with Don Jacinto, who then took them to the Cripple’s room. They did not tarry. Their faces were grim and melancholy when they arrived, but when they left it seemed as if they were recipients of indescribable grace, their gait quicker, the sorrow banished from their faces. Surely, the Cripple held some secret talisman as well.
Istak was justly proud of his penmanship, which he had developed through the years. Though he no longer gave his capital letters fancy loops, he still decorated them with a curl or two. It was, after all, with this penmanship that the trained writer was recognized; the more elegant the calligraphy, the better it spoke of the writer’s skill.