(Part II)
When my cousins Eden and Lina came to live with us, I gave up my room and slept with Mother.
They were home-loving sisters who made my room look nice with printed curtains, and they made crocheted covers for the beds. Under the bed they had many boxes of canned goods, mostly milk for Eden’s baby. A basket lined with diapers was hung from the rafters and the baby slept in it.
Eden and Lina’s father was Papa’s brother, and they used to live in Cabanatuan where they had a rice mill. As children, we used to play baseball on the area of cement beside the granary where the palay was spread out to dry, during our vacations in the province before the war.
Their mother ran a restaurant called “Eden’s Refreshment,” where she served a thick special dinuguan smoking right from an earthen pot. Tia Candeng played favorites. It was always “Eden is pretty, Eden is valedictorian, My child Eden….” Never Lina. Lina ran around in ragged slacks and played cara y cruz with the mill hands.
On Eden’s 18th birthday they rented the roof garden of the municipio and held a big dance. Her dress was ordered from Manila and cost P350. The town beautician worked all day putting a lot of pomade and padded hair in her pompadour. They sent us an 8 x 10 photograph of Eden on her debut with a painted waterfall in the background.
Hotdogs
After that, a rich widower used to motor all the way from Tarlac to visit Eden. A fishpond owner also fell in love with her and lavished the family with bangus. When the charcoal-fed Hudson and Ford stopped by their gate, Tia Candeng, all a-flutter, brought out from her stock of prewar canned goods and precious hotdogs to fry and serve to the rivals.
But one day a small squat soldier without a job blew into town and Eden ran away with him. He was a lowly sergeant, and Tia Candeng never forgave them. They came to the city to live, in a muddy crooked street. Minggoy and Eden had violent quarrels. Whenever they did, Eden bundled her cake pans and pillows and mats and photo albums and the week-old baby, and stayed with us for a few days. In the latter part of the Occupation, her husband joined the guerrillas and Eden came to live with us permanently.
Lina came later. Her stringiness had blossomed into a willowy kind of slenderness, and she had her mother’s knack for housekeeping. But she was of a nervous temperament. Continually, she wove “macrame” bags of abaca twine in readiness for the day when we would be fleeing the bombs. She had also fashioned a wide inner garment belt of unbleached cotton, with numerous secret pockets.
***
My brother Raul’s room was the largest in the house; it was the size of the sala and the dining room together, because in the good old days it had been a billiard room. It led out to an azotea and had a piano in it. His friends, Celso, Paquito and Nonong, were always in Raul’s room for they were trying to put together an ambitious book of poems.
Celso’s father had an old printing press, rusty from disuse, and they lugged it up to the room and were always tinkering with it, trying to make it work. Boni offered them a price for the scrap metal, and they threw an avalanche of books at him.
The piano had been won by an uncle of Nonong’s, who was timbre-deaf, from a raffle. This uncle was so timbre-deaf, in fact, that the only tune he could tell from another was the National Anthem because everyone stood up when it played. All he had to spend for was the ticket and the transportation, and on Nonong’s birthday the beautiful second-hand Steinway was presented to him instead of the books he wanted.
Nonong’s room was too small for the piano, and so of course it ended up in Raul’s room. Mother never objected to the boys lugging things into the house, just as long as they never lugged things out.
Muse
Sometimes they stuck a candle in a bottle and my brother Raul read the Bible deep into the night. They called me their Muse and allowed me to listen to their poems, for I had read Dickinson and Marlowe, and of course that made me an authority, and besides I was always good for a plateful of cookies or to fetch an extra chair.
Paquito could play “Stardust” on the Steinway and Celso could do a rib-splitting pantomime, but best of all I liked Nonong although he couldn’t do anything. Nonong gave me a Ticonderoga pencil he had saved all the way from before the war—it was stuck on a painted card where you could read your fortune. On Christmas I gave him a handkerchief embroidered with his initials in blue thread.
Nonong was always trying to make a reader out of me. The few books I had—“Les Miserables,” “Rashomon,” “Graustark” and “Inside Africa”—were all from him. I ransacked my father’s trunk for something to give him in return, and came up with the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, from John the Baptist to Leghorn.
I own a lot of books, Nonong would tease me, but best of all I’ve read is the Encyclopedia Britannica, from John the Baptist to Leghorn.
Once, after a visit to a friend’s house, my brother Raul couldn’t fetch me and my mother telephoned, don’t go home alone, Nonong is coming. I will send him over to fetch you. We walked down the avenue laughing under the unlighted streets lamps, the carretelas and tricycles zigzagging past us.
Let’s drop by my office, Nonong said, so I can get the book I promised to lend you. There’s not much print left to read though—the Japanese censors have inked out all the nice pages and covered the pictures connected with America.
That’s all right, I said, flinging my arms in a bored gesture, the way I had seen movie stars do. It’s better than dying slowly of boredom.
Are you lonely, Victoria?
No, I said defiantly, deep in my heart, lying.
We walked.
We turned into the stairs of his office in R. Hidalgo over which was a sign in Japanese characters. The back of the building had been bombed out and no one had bothered to clear out the rubble. There was a blackout notice again that night and it was pitch-dark in the building. We groped our way to the head of the stairs and into the room. There were five desks and Nonong’s was the farthermost, under the electric fan. Kneeling, Nonong opened each drawer and ransacked its contents. It’s here somewhere, he said.
I went out to the little balcony and stood looking down at the gradually emptying street. It was four days before Christmas. There were paper lanterns hanging at the windows of the houses but none of them was lighted, and they swayed, rustling dryly in the cold wind.
Tired
I was tired of the war. I wished Nonong would put his arms around me and kiss my mouth and always love me, but I knew that if he even as much as touched my hand, I would slap him hard on the mouth and kick him on the shin and never speak to him again. He stood silently beside me and put his lean arms on the window sill, I could see the veins taut on them. Behind us, the darkness was absolute and complete.
What are you going to be after the war, Nonong?
Oh… a writer, I guess, or a bum if I don’t succeed.
Me, I’m going to buy a house on top of a hill and live there all my life alone.
Suppose someone falls in love with you?
Who’s going to fall in love with me when I lock the door forever?
Someone is bound to say, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair! He smiled. I’ve got the book now, let’s go if you’re ready.
We felt our way through the pitch-dark corridor to the stairs at the foot of which was the door in a well of smoky light.
We were a lost generation. My brother Raul and his friends were neither men nor boys, they were displaced persons without jobs and they roamed the streets restlessly in search of something useful to do. My father had started a business making oil lamps and the boys helped him in the mornings, cutting the glass and hammering open the tin cans and shaping them in the vise to fit the pattern. But their afternoons were empty.
Nonong and I learned to lag behind after church and walk, nibbling roasted coconuts that tasted like chestnuts when we were together. Sometimes I went with the gang to the Farmacia de la Rosa where we could order real fresh milk ice cream.
Mrs. De la Rosa told us her fresh milk came all the way from Pampanga every day and had to pass four sentries and that was why it was so expensive. Sometimes we went to a Tugo and Pugo stageshow to buy an hour’s laughter, at other times we rented bicycles and rode to the very end of town where nobody knew us, peeping over the fences of Japanese garrisons with the flag of the Rising Sun fluttering over it.