(Part I)
Nota Bene: This story was often anthologized in the ’60s. I am reprinting it as a reminder of Dec. 8, 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the beginning of World War II.
OUR FRONT door opened right into the sidewalk, and the street sloped down to a lily-dappled estero, in our house in Quiapo.
Across the river, a soap opera was always taking place. A man with a wife and a mistress lived in an unpainted house beside the lumber mill. When the sun went down the two women began to quarrel, clouting each other with wooden clogs, and a bundle of clean wash would come flying out of the window into the silt below. We watched one chase the other down the stairs, clawing each other’s clothes off and rolling down the embankment, and the dogs of the neighborhood surrounded them, barking and snarling—till from the lumber mill the husband emerged, a shirtless apparition with a lumber saw in his hand.
At least once a month they had a wake on the riverbank across. They rented a corpse, strung up colored lights so they could gamble till the wee hours. Sometimes a policeman wandered in, having heard some rumor, and poked around with his night stick. But there would be the corpse, and it was truly dead, there would be the card games, but no suspicion of betting (the chips having been scooped into the basket of money) and the policeman would saunter away, wiping a tear, leaving the poor relatives to their mourning and their gambling.
We must move to another neighborhood, my father said everyday. We planted trees to screen them from sight, we planted trees to preserve our respectability. A truck unloaded two grown acacia trees on our doorstep. The houseboy planted them on our side of the riverbank. He made a bamboo fence around their trunks, and every afternoon the maids hauled out pails to water them.
Indefatigable battle
Soon the trees grew tall and lush with yellow-green leaves and the crickets sang in them. The street boys shook them down for bugs and crickets or stripped off the bark with penknives or swung on the branches till they snapped. My father waged an indefatigable battle with the street boys, for why should they want to destroy beautiful things?
He was terribly good with a slingshot and seldom missed his target—for ammunition, he used a round clay pellet instead of a stone, and it made a painful red mark. In time my father just had to lean out the window and the boys scampered down the trees, and after a while they learned to leave the trees alone.
The soft dappled shade served many purposes. The branches sheltered a group of nursery schoolchildren with sausage curls whose playground had been turned during the Occupation into a garrison. In the afternoons a Japanese girl named Sato-san came to air a nephew and a niece and lay out rice cakes under the spreading trees. She was a masseuse in the Japanese barbershop at the corner, which was always brilliant with neons and sweet with the odor of Bay Rum.
Occasionally, too, a dispossessed family of tattered jugglers did their act in the shade of the acacias. They laid a dirty tarpaulin on the ground and tumbled on it, juggling wooden balls and bottles. Then the father stood on a barrel and balanced his two daughters on his shoulders and it was the most daring, most brilliant finale I had ever seen. As they made their bows, an indifferent crowd dropped a coin or two into the man’s soiled hat, and once I saw someone drop in a rotten mango.
Our driver now turned houseboy (our Plymouth had been commandeered) hailed from a pot-making region. He would come from vacation with a tobacco box full of hard clay pellets baked in the sun, for my father’s slingshot—a years’ supply till the next vacation. My father had a low opinion of the Imperial Army. When I showed him my report card, he thundered, “What do you mean 75 in Algebra, 95 in Nippongo! Am I raising a little geisha?”
Oh yes, one night he almost got into real trouble with that slingshot. A drunken Japanese officer was kicking noisily on the door of the family renting downstairs, calling the young girl’s name amorously and growling like a jungle ape. Annoyed, my father flung back the bed sheets and charged to the window with his slingshot. Mother tried to pull him back, but already father had aimed and hit—right in the seat of the olive drab pants.
Grim samurai
It was blackout, and the Jap was at a disadvantage—flattened behind the window, his treacherous opponent let loose another volley of pellets. With a horrible war cry, the soldier unsheathed his sword, a grim samurai brandishing reprisal in the air. Mother and I cowered in our nightgowns and embraced each other. Whenever the officer’s drink-clouded eyes looked up in our direction, my father shot at him from another window. Finally, the Jap stumbled away, his hobnailed boots echoing in the deserted midnight street. We half-expected the Imperial Army to storm our door the next morning, but they never came. I guess the Jap was too drunk to remember it.
After a while our curtain of trees became useless. The people on the other side of the river raised a contribution to build a bamboo bridge across it, and the bad elements started coming into town. It was a narrow, split-bamboo bridge that swayed, and the Japanese soldiers loved to walk on it.
As the beggars with coconut shells in their hands increased in number, it became a usual thing to see a bloated corpse under a newspaper. Everyone was suddenly interested in food production: twin curly-haired young men from across the river began to cultivate the ground surrounding the acacias. From 2 o’clock until sundown they puttered among their neat plots, loosening the soil around the flourishing yams and talinum buds, fetching water in cans, collecting fertilizer from under the dokars parked in the street.
Aquilino was the leaner, handsomer twin, he was my brown god in an undershirt, reeking of sweat and fertilizer; but when Santos knocked on our door with a basket of talinum tops for Mother, I couldn’t decide whom I liked better. When the jasmine vine climbing from our window box was replaced with the more practical ampalaya, I carved their names on the fruit, and the letters grew as the fruit grew: Santos and Aquilino.
Up-to-Date
The impoverished Spanish family renting another downstairs portion of our house opened a small laundry called Up-to-Date. The women sat behind the unpainted counter in their bedraggled kimonas, like soiled aristocracy, handling the starched pants drying on the wire hanger with pale finicky fingers. They pretended to understand nothing but Spanish, and a customer’s every Tagalog word sent them huddling together in consultation.
If you were overtaken there by lunchtime, in the kitchen, Señora Bandana placed a wet rag on her hot frying pan. The daughter then came out and asked wheedlingly, come join us, having made you believe, by the fabulous sizzle, that there was a chicken or at least a milkfish in the pan. Since it was unthinkable to stay over for a meal during those hard times, you left with thanks and profuse apologies. The family then commenced on its meal of rice and bagoong, smugly sitting on their reputations.
They had been paying us P15 a month before the war and insisted on paying the same amount in Japanese money. My father continually begged them to leave so we could take in boarders, but whenever he brought up the subject, Señora Bandana had one of her heart attacks. Finally, they compromised by giving us back two rooms, which we needed for Mr. Solomon and Boni.
Boni was a third cousin from Malabon on my father’s side. He had gotten stranded in Manila when the schools closed and came to live with us because he found it easier to make money in the city, on buy-and-sell. He always had some business or another: He had converted an old German bicycle into a commercial tricycle and rented it out to a man every morning. He also dealt in wooden shoes, muscovado, agar-agar from the sea, and cotton batting for auto seats.
On father’s birthday, Boni presented him a skeletal radio he had tinkered with that could catch the Voice of Freedom, and it pleased my father no end. Once Boni bought three truckfuls of bananas wholesale—our garage was so full of them there was hardly any space to walk. That venture had been a fiasco—before he could resell the lot, half of them rotted away while he was at a dance in Parañaque.
Boni was an expert balisong wielder. He could hit a coin four feet away, the knife piercing a clean hole in the center of it. He also had a bad habit of throwing the knife at cockroaches and lizards and cutting them to ribbons. Once he threw it at a stray cat that was annoying him below his window and my mother almost had a fit. Send him away, my mother told my father over the tulia broth. Make him go home to the province. My father took the knife away and told Boni to behave.
Boni’s father was an unbeliever, and when he died, which was three years before the war, he asked the family to erect a devil on his gravestone. And there it still stands in a cemetery in Malabon, regal and black, its tail long and sharp as an arrow, its eyeballs and armpits a fiery red, lording it over all the weeping angels and white crosses. On All Souls’ Day, Boni alone came to visit the grave, to cut away the weeds and repaint the devil a deep, glossy black.
Great salt war
Mr. Solomon occupied what had been Señora Bandana’s sala. He hung up his crucifix and his hat and locked the door and never opened it again. Mr. Solomon owned vast salt beds in Bulacan and his dream was to control the salt market in Manila. Just before the war he was competing even with the Chinese merchants, and whatever price he dictated the merchants had to follow. In the great salt war, there was a time when salt was selling for ten centavos a sack.
His four sons joined Marking’s Guerrillas after the fall of Bataan, and Mr. Solomon became its heaviest contributor. The Japanese had seized his salt beds and when he became the Kempeitai’s most hunted man, he begged my papa, who was his old friend, to hide him, and that was why he was boarding with us.
Mr. Solomon stayed all day in Señora Bandana’s sala, gazing out the window saying nothing. He listened to the nursery schoolchildren singing; he watched Sato-san air her nephews and nieces; he dropped coins into the juggler’s hat. But we had to pass his food down a wobbly dumbwaiter. My brother Raul and I complained whenever we were assigned to deliver the food, especially if there was hot soup, but Mother said to be patient with Mr. Solomon as he was a man who had “gone through the fire of suffering.”
The only time Mr. Solomon ever went out of his room was when he offered to show Papa how to make ham. After rubbing the precious pig’s thigh with salt, he brought out a syringe and shot the red meat full of saltpeter and other preservatives. Then he wrapped it in a flour sack and told Mama to keep it in the ice box for three months. Mama said Mr. Solomon was probably getting tired of eating fish.
