In the Palanca-winning short story, “The Axolotl Colony” by Jaime An Lim, we follow a day and night in the life of a Filipino post-graduate student living in Bloomington, Indiana by the name of Tomas Agbayani, an academic from Dumaguete. When the story opens, we immediately learn that he had just been left by his wife Edith, who had come with him to America to pursue her own graduate studies in biology—and in what proved to be the withering years of their marriage, had soon divorced him, married a white man [another academic from Rhode Island], and had taken their daughter Suzie to live with her. It is through Tomas’ eyes that we see this story unfold—and it is through that subjectivity that this piece of fiction becomes alive as an object of literature.
How does the world look like to one whose heart has just been broken? Will that persona describe things the same way if they were happy? How does our emotions affect the way we perceive things? Can literature limn this subjectivity to offer us textured storytelling that affect even the devices of narration and description, which are tools writers use to frame what they need their readers to see [and feel]? An Lim’s story is the perfect story that ably demonstrates this.
In the following excerpt, a quietly grieving Tomas, who has just spent the day going over in painful detail what exactly happened to his marriage—the growing distance between him and Edith in the ways they used to be intimate with each other, the realization that her affair with another man had started long ago when she would go on academic conferences, and the shameful uniqueness of divorce happening to a Filipino couple—gets a call from the secretary Edith’s old department at the university. They need someone to gather Edith’s things from the laboratory she used to do her research in. From the story:
Jordan Hall was on Second Street, a more interesting older building with ivy creeping up its limestone walls. The hallways, painted the usual beige, smelled strongly of formaldehyde. At regular intervals, display windows were punched into the walls, where stuffed birds and animals crouched in arrested motion and stared out with glassy eyes. Through a half-opened door, he caught a glimpse of several stretched boards where crucified cats, skinned to their raw muscles, grinned their eternal grimace of pain. Great, he thought, and nearly bumped into a waste container in his hurry to get to the end of the hallway.
“Mrs. Weinstein? I came for Edith’s….”
“Oh, yes. This way, please. I’m sorry to bug you about the table but we’re a bit overcrowded this semester.” She looked more kindly than she sounded almost motherly, in her gray cardigan and loose brown dress.
“That’s all right. I understand.”
Take note on how An Lim chooses specific words to describe the building he is entering. We get words like “creeping,” “formaldehyde,” “punched,” “arrested,” “crucified,” “skinned,” “grimace of pain,” and “glassy” littering the descriptions of Jordan Hall and its contents [the walls, the hallway, the windows, the cats]. The descriptors are very unique but also correct in their beholding of specific things, but their usage as such—as specifically chosen by An Lim—also add another layer of meaning, a subtle and psychological one, that the persona whose subjectivity we are following—Tomas’—is indeed wallowing in emotional distress. He is “punched.” He is “arrested.” He is “skinned.” He is internally “grimacing in pain.” All metaphorically speaking, of course. It is a very elegant way of giving a fictional character a lived-in interiority, by using narration and description to subtly give us a view into his mindscape.
In this same scene at Jordan Hall, Tomas goes on to collect Edith’s things from her desk, but he also witnesses the kind of biological experiments she used to be part of in this laboratory. This is when he notices the set-up of the titular axolotl colony. Axolotls are Mexican salamanders which have the uncanny ability to regenerate lost body parts. The laboratory is testing them by cutting off parts and observing how they regrow—or how they die. Tomas turns to the department secretary escorting him, and asks her: “Was Edith involved in any of…these experiments?” And the secretary replies: “Of course. It was part of her assignment. She was pretty handy with the scalpel, if I may say so myself. And she kept meticulous records of their rate of regeneration.” The telling detail!
When Tomas finally comes home, the image of mutilated axolotls haunts him. He cannot sleep, and in a seemingly last bid for reconciliation, he calls his ex-wife long-distance. Lulled from sleep, Edith tries to humor him, and to placate his distress, but Tomas finally senses that all is really lost. His wife has wielded her scalpel all too well, and has cut him off from her life, mutilating his sense of self in the process. The story ends on that melancholic note.
It is a sad story—and actually something one could call “confessional literature,” because this is Jaime An Lim putting into the guise of fiction things that have actually happened to him. He, too, had gone to Indiana to pursue his Ph.D. in literature, and had taken his wife along. And like Tomas and Edith in the story, he and his wife also got divorced.
An Lim was born in Cagayan de Oro City in 7 January 1946 , and finished his BA in English from Mindanao State University in 1968. He later pursued his MA in Creative Writing at Silliman University, and his Ph.D. in Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has published a book of literary criticism, Literature and Politics: The Colonial Experience in Nine Philippine Novels [1993]; two books of short stories, Hedonicus [1998] and The Axolotl Colony [2016]; and two poetry collections, Trios [1998] and Auguries [2017]. He has won various awards from the Palanca and other bodies, and in 2000, he received the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas for poetry and fiction in English from the Unyon ng Manunulat sa Pilipinas. He was the Director-in-Residence of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in 2017 and 2018. He considers himself very much a Dumaguete writer.
In a brief interview, An Lim says of his story: “Some authors tend to write about things that are familiar to them or things that have a personal significance to them. I am such a writer. I wrote the story as a way of coping with some difficult issues in my life. During our doctoral studies in the U.S., my wife and I fell out of love with each. She fell in love with an American academic. The guy was married as well. So they planned to divorce their respective spouses so that they would be free to marry each other. My wife also wanted to stay in the U.S. along with our two children. I was set on going home after my studies with one of our children. Just to be fair. [This was] easier said than done. This was the basic conflict of the story. I had to imagine some sort of resolution, vicariously if not in real life.”
He continues: “The story is part of my personal history. It was my way of explaining what happened to our marriage and family. My wife divorced me but her American lover changed his mind. So she did not get to stay in the U.S. and get an American husband. She wanted to come back to me. I said, ‘No, thank you.’ And she said: ‘Masakit ka pa unta, mamatay ka pa unta.’ I will never forget what she did and said. The story is one of life’s painful lessons for me.”
The following is a fictionalized account by the late Jose Riodil D. Montebon of his father, the politician, lawyer, and writer Jose Villahermosa Montebon Jr., nicknamed Efren,whose birthday we celebrated last February 1. The senior Montebon was a prominent campus writer when he was a student at Silliman University, and was acclaimed nationally for his fiction. He won second prize for his short story “Bottle Full of Smoke” at the 1951 Philippines Free Press Literary Awards. He would marry Virginia Mendez Demerre, whom he called Nene. He passed the Bar in 1956, worked for a time in Manila, but later moved back to Dumaguete, where he served in various capacities at his alma mater, eventually becoming a member of the board of trustees during the presidency of Dr. Quintin Doromal. He was later elected as Dumaguete City Councilor, and became the OIC Vice-Mayor of Dumaguete in 1986-1987. He died on 6 October 1996. His son Jose Riodil—a name that is a portmanteau in honor of Silliman University College of Education Dean Dr. Pedro Rio and writer Edilberto K. Tiempo—was also a lawyer, and co-founder of EDLAW. Together with the Montebon family, he published his father’s uncollected stories in Cupful of Anger, Bottle Full of Smoke: The Stories of Jose V. Montebon Jr. in 2018. Sir Didil died on 7 April 2024.
Chasing the Jealous Mistress
“The Law is a jealous mistress and requires a long and constant courtship. It is not to be won by trifling favors, but by a lavish homage.” ~ U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 1829
Efren patiently waited for the puyo to bite. On this lazy November afternoon, he was fishing by a small abandoned pond a few meters behind his rented bamboo and nipa home. He and Nene were expecting their firstborn anytime soon, and he wanted to be away by himself awhile to gather his thoughts.
Much had been on his mind lately. He and Nene, high school sweethearts, had been married for barely a year. He had also recently graduated from law school and was waiting for the results of the Bar.
It was his life’s ambition to become a lawyer, but the road to his dream was not an easy one. It was tough enough studying the law, memorizing the Codigo Civil, the Codigo Penal, the 1935 Constitution, and myriad other laws filled with confusing legalese. Then there also were the hundreds of cases to write digests and recite before the Law School’s Spanish Inquisitors passing off as law professors, scholars, and academics.
Early in his pursuit of a legal career, Efren grappled with the reality of the Law being a “jealous mistress.” Too often, his law studies took a toll on his relationship with Nene. On not a few occasions, this became a source of bitter marital quarrels: Efren was often an absentee husband, which led to jealous, unreasonable fits about infidelity with another woman…
Indeed, Efren had a mistress, but not of the warm-blooded type! His mistress was the Law, and those who swear fealty to her grandeur and majesty were often consumed by her demands, and sometimes to their self-destruction, often finding themselves lost by the wayside. For the Law, in upholding Justice, is not only blind to partiality or bias, but is harsh to the extreme in upholding that which was right and ought to be among men of peace and goodwill. She brooked no other devotion. The pressure to succeed and the competition in the classroom often led many a student to drink for cathartic release. Even then, many did not survive the rigors of pursuing a law degree.
Still, men of passion and direction such as Efren will joust the windmills of chance to realize their holy grail of the Lawyer’s Cause. To Efren, becoming a lawyer was a non-negotiable life proposition. In Efren’s case, two handicaps were added: he married young, which entailed all the responsibilities and sometimes distractions which married life brings; and, to support his young family, he had to work.
He and Nene were both employed in a local educational institution, where he was an assistant librarian of the Law Department’s Library, and Nene was Secretary of the College of Education. Working, of course, took away precious time from getting ready to take the toughest of national examinations in the Philippines.
Efren’s immediate thoughts centered on his personal fears and apprehensions about passing the Bar. He didn’t get to join a formal review course in Manila, like the rest of his classmates. He couldn’t afford it, and he could not leave a pregnant young wife alone in Dumaguete. He also had little time for self-study, as he was already working. The dread feeling of failure crept in and he felt a paralyzing grip of fear as he considered a bleak future. Then his thoughts wandered to his young family. How would he feed them if he didn’t make it? Efren desperately needed to become a lawyer on his first try.
A man of faith, Efren was greatly influenced by the American missionaries at the school where he studied. Somehow, this faith drew him away from darker forebodings, and he continued to daydream with more positive thoughts. If he became a lawyer, would he apprentice with the more established abogados de campanilla in town, or would he venture to open up a law office on his own? These concerns swirled around his brain as they built up mixed feelings of uncertainty, apprehension, and positive excitement
Fishing was a good respite from the confusion brewing in his troubled soul. Not that Efren should really worry. After all, he graduated cum laude and was among the top four of his class. Still, the expectations from school and family bore heavily upon his shoulders.
Efren was the youngest of five siblings—two sons and three daughters. He was born to a family with modest social standing. His father, a minor government official, was well-liked and respected in the community. Tracing his roots to a town called Tuburan in Cebu, his ancestor was supposedly some local hero whose statue stood on the village square. His great-grandfather migrated to Negros with a government appointment as the Provincial Auditor. This was how Efren’s branch of the family located and settled in Negros Oriental.
He grew up with the duwendes and the inmates at the Provincial carcél, where his father was the warden. Late at night, while still a boy, he would hear marbles rolling and scuffling on the floor above his bedroom, as if a group of children were playing. He attributed this to the duwendes guarding the carcél and protecting its inhabitants at night. Among Efren’s early childhood friends were the inmates waiting for their cases to be heard by the courts. The ever-curious and precocious Efren listened to the life stories of his more jaded and older friends. Perhaps, this was what drew him to the Law—the intricate way in which the balance of justice was administered matched against the dynamic of flesh and blood stories of human interest. In interacting with his friends, he developed a genuine empathy for the poor and their disadvantaged situations. Also drawing from his aptitude for investigating the human condition of his days, he developed his creative gift for telling stories and putting them on pen and ink.
Efren’s rumination shifted to thoughts on Tio Angie, his would-be part-time employer, whose truck Efren drove on weekends and holidays to carry a sundry of loads from bodegas in town to Tio Angie’s store in Sibulan. His arrangement with Tio Angie, his father’s cousin twice removed, was pretty good. He would get P500 for each trip he made. The coming long weekend meant making a maximum of six trips, translating into earnings of P3,000 for him and Nene. With the coming of the baby in December, they needed to save all they could.
Suddenly, a strong tug on his fishing pole snapped Efren out of his reverie. From the pull at the other end of the line, it seemed that he had either snagged a mature puyo or an even bigger haluan, the muddy fish with long whiskers! With adrenaline pumping inside him, Efren devoted himself to facing the challenge from his underwater adversary in the lily-covered pond. This was a tough one! Perhaps, a wizened victor of a previous unsuccessful struggle against a disappointed pond fisher.
As Efren exercised his skills in this ritual dance of wills, alternately jerking hard then leaving the line some slack to keep the fish guessing and confused, large beads of sweat formed rivulets which streamed down from the crown of his head through his face and forehead, and down the ravines on his chest and lower back, soaking the pelvic region of his lower torso. The excitement generated by this fandango heightened Efren’s blood pressure to a level of alarm spiced with satisfaction and enjoyment.
Suddenly—interrupting Efren in his preoccupation with the fish—he heard someone calling out to him from the direction of the nipa house they were renting from Nang Pandang. It was Picto, their all-around house boy. “Manong! Nang Nene wants you home right away!” Picto called out.
The urgency of Picto’s tone worried Efren.
Was the baby due? Was anything wrong?
A surge of panic overcame him, and Efren flew quickly from the pond to the house, the unconquered fish now a forgotten memory. As he raced up the creaky bamboo stairs, two steps at a time, he rushed through the front door to find Nene sitting on a chair in the sala, looking all serene like an angel.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” Efren breathlessly asked her.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she replied.
“Then why did ask for me to rush home?”
Silence overwhelmed the little rented house. Then, with a proud smile on her face, Nene said:
Here is an excerpt from “The Little Wars of Filemon Sayre,” specifically the beginning section of that short story written by Lemuel M. Torrevillas, whose birthday we celebrated last February 13:
Old Fil decided he was going to take it easy that day. His news supervisor had called in sick earlier that morning so Fil had to take care of the noon news to be read over the air by Michael, the newscaster. Fil did not find taking over his boss’ duty onerous. Not at all. He welcomed making decisions—what items to make the headlines, how stories are ordered according to his private assessment of their importance. And also, this nominally elevates his rank above mere news transcriber. He is editor, he is decider of fate.
DXWB used to have its studios near the center of a Philippine island town of Dumaguete, inside a college campus founded by American missionaries at the turn of the century. But in the 1970s when activism sprouted like bean sprouts in the islands, the American subsidies wilted. In order to survive, DXWB was forced to become a commercial radio station, its personnel shriveled into a skeleton staff, and being unable to pay its rent, it had to move operation to its transmitter site in the middle of rice fields by the sea.
Which suited Fil, because of the precious quiet. One also has an unobstructed view of the mountains to the west and the sparkling sea waves to the east. One hears birdsongs and occasional mooing of a cow in this isolated place far away from everywhere.
But inside this ersatz studios, there’s action.
“It’s twenty five minutes to news time!” squawked the on-board technician over the intercom and Fil Sayre hardly even looked up from his Remington-Rand typewriter at Pio, the technician who took over the console at aquarter to noon.
Fil had finished transcribing the international news transmissions half an hour ago, and now he only had to take care of composing the headlines.
“Twenty-seven,” Fil fired back into the squawk box, haggling, chuckling
“Hahaha,” joined Maria, who had just finished editing her four local news items, turned them over to the newscaster, and was preparing to leave for lunch. She was in college, working part-time; a petite, sneaker-shuffling kid with a high piercing voice. “Hahaha,” she repeated, slamming her steel cabinet shut with a boyish jab.
“Bye,” the technician-on-board said to her over the intercom.
“I’m off,” she announced, her hand doing its characteristic dissolve from an “okay” circle of the thumb and forefinger, metamorphosing into a “that-way” sign. Fil watched her aim at the front door as one would aim a 22-caliber revolver. “Lunch!” she announced
Fil whirled fresh newsprint onto the Remington typewriter roller and made the return carriage go Vhing!
Why does this all sound familiar? Because this story is based on the lives of employees at an actual radio station in Dumaguete. Because DXWB is really DYSR. Because DYSR, beset by financial challenges in the mid-1970s, really did transfer from inside Silliman campus to the middle of a rice field by the sea in Banilad.
Radio station DYSR has always been a significant part of Dumaguete’s contemporary history. It is Dumaguete’s oldest radio station, following the approval of House Bill No. 896 which established it. It started as an AM station owned by Silliman University [SR stands for “Silliman Radio”], as a nonsectarian and non-profit educational station, with a test broadcast on 1 July 1950—beginning with only two hours of broadcasting time in the evening. The station, whose studio and shortwave transmitter were located at the Guy Hall in Silliman campus, would continue test broadcasts, considerably extending its broadcasting hours as well as adding programming, until it was finally inaugurated on 26 August 1950, in time for Silliman’s Founders Day celebration.
Its initial staff included Roy Bell who served as station director, Abby Jacobs as program director, and Eliseo Araneta as engineering department head. The part-time staff was also composed of Silliman faculty, including Mary Reese as music director, Boyd Bell as director of farm programming, and Venancio Aldecoa Jr. as assistant director of farm programming. [Justice Aldecoa would later become President of Silliman University from 1983 to 1986.] In 1954, Dr. Henry Mack took over as administrative director, and while he was not DYSR’s founder, he is rightfully considered as the station’s foremost builder. When Dr. Mack died suddenly in 1964, Constantino Bernardez took over as director, followed by Benjamin Magdamo and Ernesto Songco in succession.
The station was notable for being the first radio station to launch in Dumaguete and the first to be broadcast in shortwave. Literature- and language-wise, it was also notable for being the first to air select programming in English and in Cebuano, and the first to air radio dramas as part of its programming schedule. [Some of these dramas are still archived at the Sillimaniana section of the Robert and Metta Silliman Library.]
It was ordered closed down on 23 September 1972 after Martial Law was proclaimed, reopened on October 20 that year, then closed down again for unclear reasons on 25 January 1973, and finally reopened once more on May 17 that year. Rev. Juan Pia Jr. served as executive director. By 1974, the management was transferred from Silliman to Incom Asia, Inc., although Silliman faculty remained a distinctive part of its staff. Around this time, the station moved both its studios and transmitter from the main Silliman campus to Camp Seasite in Banilad, where it is still currently located. [Camp Seasite would become the perfect complement to Camp Lookout in the foothills of Valencia, also owned by Silliman University.]
The Palanca-winning playwright and fictionist Lemuel Maristela Torrevillas, who studied and then later taught at Silliman, also worked for DYSR as a newscaster. He was born in Anakan, Misamis Oriental in 1949, and at a young age, he volunteered to accompany an older brother on medical and entomological expeditions in the hinterlands of the Mountain Province. But he soon followed the example of his elder sister—the late journalist Domini Torrevillas—and moved to Dumaguete to study at Silliman, where he graduated with a BA in Journalism and AB in Speech and Theatre Arts. [He also earned his MA in English at Silliman.] He was already a huge part of the theatre scene in Dumaguete, acting and directing plays [including King Lear], and serving as technical director of the Luce Auditorium. He would also marry Rowena Tiempo, daughter of Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, who is also a much-awarded writer on her own right.
Lemuel’s experience as newscaster at DYSR would serve as the backdrop to his story, “The Little Wars of Filemon Sayre,” which won third prize for the short story in English at the 1984 Palanca Awards. He had previously won an honorable mention at the 1980 Palanca Awards for full-length play Looking for Edison or What’s the Name of the Guy Who Invented Something, as well as a special prize at the 1981 Palanca Awards for another full-length play, Gateau La Sans Rival.
In “The Little Wars of Filemon Sayre,” Torrevillas chronicles the days of the titular character, an aging news transcriber working at the radio station. Once a respected USAFFE scout during World War II, Fil now fights quieter battles—his “little wars”—within the newsroom, trying to ensure significant news stories get proper attention despite the meddling of his overbearing news supervisor, Max—a gruff and cynical boss who constantly overrides his decisions. One such instance occurs when refugees from Vietnam—or “boat people”—becomes the top story for the noon broadcast. To Fil, the refugees’ suffering is a matter of urgent global concern, but Max, ever dismissive of Fil’s priorities, reshuffles the lineup, demoting the story in favor of political news about Japan’s Prime Minister Nakasone and U.S. President Reagan. Fil, recognizing the futility of resistance, quietly accepts the defeat but plots a small act of defiance: he will sneak the boat people story into the broadcast right after the commercial break, where it might still reach listeners with some impact.
Fil’s battles with Max mirror his larger struggles: the frustration of an aging man whose values no longer align with the shifting priorities of the world around him. His work, once meaningful, is now subject to commercial and political interests. Still, he clings to his principles, engaging in subtle acts of resistance—whether through minor editorial decisions or his unwavering commitment to truth in journalism.
This battle still feels true today.
Torrevillas would later migrate in the early 1990s with wife Rowena to the United States, settling down in Iowa City, where he earned another MA, this time for video art, from the University of Iowa, where he works as facilities manager. Today, he makes video art for his production company Collar ‘Em on the Spot Production. He has written and directed several short films, including Helicaloid in 1990, and Sister Margo Muse of Embers and …In Trento, both released in 2010.
There is always something about Dumaguete that invites a doubling of perception: the city as paradise, and the city as an escape into disquiet. In Bacolod writer Marianne Villanueva’s “Dumaguete,” the first story out in her most recent collection Residents of the Deep [Unsolicited Press, 2025], we get the story of Carlos and his mother’s sojourn to the city unfolding in the measured cadences of memory, edged with the sharp pangs of abandonment. Here, Dumaguete is ostensibly the backdrop—but really, it is the theatre of a child’s initiation into loneliness, betrayal, and premature knowledge of adult duplicities.
Stowed away by his mother away from his father and into the languor of promenades and resorts [specifically Seven Seas Resort, a stand-in for South Seas Resort of yore, now The Henry Resort], Carlos senses all too clearly the cracks beneath the performance of holiday. The crocodile farm and zoo, the old acacias in Silliman University—all these are catalogued with the innocent wonder of a boy, yet underscored with the shadow of a mother slipping away. Villanueva renders the mother with a troubling glamour: her green-eyed sadness, her floaty dresses, her sudden absences into the hotel lobby. Carlos’s gaze is both adoring and accusatory, and through it the reader sees the larger fissures in a family—his father’s affairs, his mother’s evasions, his yaya’s whispered warnings of aswang and witches.
The brilliance of the story lies in its refusal to be about Dumaguete as tourist idyll. The city becomes instead an emotional landscape, haunted by the boy’s fear of being left behind, the boy’s fragile strategies of mimicry and pantomime to keep his mother’s attention. Even the menace of strangers—drunken men in sunglasses, a pistol tucked against khaki pants—becomes a metaphor for the encroaching adult world that Carlos must learn to navigate.
Villanueva’s “Dumaguete” is also less a travelogue than a reckoning. It is about the terrible knowledge a child inherits when he realizes that paradise is never innocent, that even mangoes, ripe and golden, cannot mask the sour taste of abandonment. In that psychological regard, it is very precise.
There is indeed a precision to Villanueva’s fiction, as if each sentence were a scalpel cutting into the intimate flesh of exile, memory, and longing. She was born and raised in Manila, with Bacolod roots, and was later transplanted to the United States when she became a Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University in San Francisco, and has since then been writing and publishing stories about the Philippines and Filipino-Americans since the mid-1980s. She is the author of the short story collections Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila [1991], Mayor of the Roses [2005], and The Lost Language [2009]. Her novella, Jenalyn, was a 2014 finalist for the United Kingdom’s Saboteur Award, and her individual stories have been finalists for the O. Henry Literature Prize, nominated for the Pushcart, and included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 (Very) Short Fiction of 2016. She has also edited an anthology of Filipino women’s writings, Going Home to a Landscape, which was selected as a Notable Book by the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
In many of these works, Villanueva inhabits that unsettled terrain we call diaspora, where home is both a point of origin and a persistent ache. Her stories are deceptively quiet, but they shimmer with suppressed ferocity. They are, in fact, about survival: how women navigate silence, how families are fractured by geography and history, how desire is always tinged with danger.
Villanueva’s voice, one might say, is one of displacement, but it is never rootless. Even when she writes about Manila or Bacolod or Dumaguete, or elsewhere in the United States, she is charting the internal geographies of her characters—children abandoned to their own devices, women marked by absence, men diminished by betrayal. In her prose, places refuse to remain mere backdrops; they bristle with unease, as though the very air carries the weight of memory. The Dumaguete in her story, for instance, is rendered not as the idyllic “City of Gentle People,” but as a stage for a boy’s terror of abandonment—and perhaps imagined from real life. “I visited Dumaguete with my son and niece when they were both about nine. So, that’s the basis of the story,” she told me.
In Residents of the Deep, Marianne Villanueva returns with a collection that summons both the physical vastness and metaphorical weight of seas and oceans. The title story, in particular, uses the ocean not merely as setting but as a crucible of moral reckoning: a ship captain finds a submerged city beneath fathoms of water, and in its discovery is forced to confront what duty, responsibility, and human ambition demand when one explores what is meant to be out of reach.
This fascination with what lies beneath—depths unseen, lives unimagined—is matched elsewhere in the collection. The ocean becomes a threshold: between what humans can know and what must remain mysterious, between surface identities and submerged truths. In stories like “Ice,” Villanueva explores liminal spaces—post-apocalyptic wastelands, small cities, familial relationships—yet it is the deep waters of the title story that most fully dramatize that boundary between surface and abyss. “[I love] stories about the sea. I love writing about oceans,” she also told me.
Through recurring imagery of water—its calm, its hidden currents, its capacity to obscure—Villanueva probes human resilience. The sea’s depths mirror inner depths: guilt, longing, moral ambiguity. The ocean in this book is both metaphor and character: sometimes hostile, sometimes beckoning, always inscrutable. In Residents of the Deep, Villanueva’s seas are not places for escape so much as confrontations with what we carry beneath our skins.
Georgette Anna S. Gonzales, who once called Sibulan home before migrating to the United States, never set out to become a romance writer. In 2003, while working in Manila, she was simply looking for extra income when her best friend suggested they try their hand at romance novels in Tagalog. Five thousand pesos per manuscript, she recalls with a laugh: “Less taxes, that was still a big boost for our wallets.”
But what began as a pragmatic hustle quickly turned into a calling. The romance formula—boy meets girl, they fall in love, conflict ensues, and they live happily ever after—became her gateway into storytelling as a deeper, more resonant act.
Gonzales, who grew up in Quezon City surrounded by books, credits her imagination to childhood days spent devouring Nancy Drew mysteries and, later, the double rows of Mills & Boon novels owned by her godmother. “I just loved how two people found ways to love each other,” she says. Those well-thumbed paperbacks shaped her early sense of narrative rhythm and emotional honesty. She was drawn not to the artifice of love stories, but to their insistence on possibility—the idea that affection could flourish even amid life’s cruelties.
Her debut novella, Tulungan Mo Akong Lumimot, was written by hand in a notebook, and fragments of dialogue and scenes then stitched together on an old desktop. When her manuscript was accepted for publication that same year, her alter ego “Edith Joaquin” was born—named not after literary greats Edith Tiempo and Nick Joaquin, as some would assume, but after a nickname and a street in Frisco, Quezon City. That small beginning would lead to an enduring career in romance, where she would craft stories filled with kilig and complexity, and with women who are never mere recipients of affection but architects of their own desires.
For Gonzales, romance is both easy and difficult. The formula may be predictable, she admits, but its success lies in the execution: “How do you draw the same intense emotions in your readers as your characters are experiencing?” She writes her scenes like cliffhangers, each one pulsing with anticipation. Her measure of success is not awards or money, but when readers fight over her characters “as if they were all in The Bachelor.”
She has since built a body of work defined by her unwavering faith in the romance genre—not as escapism, but as a map of emotional truth. One book in particular—her 2016 collection of short stories, Of Love and Special Things—was inspired by the songs of Barry Manilow, and amply demonstrates how love stories can be lushly sentimental yet anchored in the grit of human vulnerability. Across four tales—“When Broken Hearts Find Love,” “No More Goodbyes,” “Memories and Our Song,” and “Undercover”—she turns familiar tropes into windows through which we glimpse the complexities of longing, resilience, and tenderness.
“When Broken Hearts Find Love” begins, as many romances do, with heartbreak and alcohol. A betrayed woman and a jilted man meet at a bar, their conversation a duel of cynicism and wit that slowly transforms into an unexpected intimacy. Gonzales deploys the classic rebound-meets-redeemer setup, but what saves it from cliché is her meticulous pacing and ear for emotional rhythm. The dialogue crackles with wounded humor—“That bad, huh?” he asks, to which she retorts, “Ass is an understatement”—and in those exchanges, Gonzales reveals her deft control of tone, moving effortlessly from bitterness to warmth. When their one-night solace becomes something more lasting, the story reads like a quiet argument for second chances, one that eschews irony for sincerity.
“Memories and Our Song” is perhaps the emotional centerpiece of the collection, a melodrama steeped in music and memory. Here, Gonzales takes the Manilow lyric “Weekend in New England” and spins it into a full-bodied narrative of lost love and miraculous remembrance. Elise, a singer, must rekindle her husband’s memory after an accident robs him of their shared past. The motif of song becomes both narrative engine and emotional metaphor—music as the vessel of memory, melody as the shape of love enduring against amnesia. It’s an unabashedly romantic conceit, but Gonzales writes it with conviction, balancing sentiment with restraint. When the final reunion comes—when the husband remembers her as she sings their song—the catharsis feels earned, not contrived.
In “No More Goodbyes,” the emotional temperature shifts darker. A police officer and his fiancée are caught in a tragic dance between duty and devotion, sacrifice and loss. Gonzales uses the language of action and urgency—a gunshot, a moment of fatal decision—to contrast the quiet ache of love unfulfilled. It’s her most cinematic piece, one that stretches the romance form into something approaching tragedy, reminding readers that love’s purity often survives only in its ruin.
Finally, “Undercover” provides a change of tempo—a smoky, sensual story of two lovers working together in the nightlife scene, navigating desire under the guise of pretense. Here, Gonzales flexes her command of atmosphere, mixing humor, danger, and erotic charge with the playfulness of a writer utterly at home in her genre.
Across these stories, Gonzales’s prose is polished, brisk, and unpretentious. She embraces the conventions of romance—the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the grand gesture—but reshapes them with emotional intelligence and feminine agency. Her women are not damsels but survivors; her men are not saviors but equals. In Of Love and Special Things, Gonzales proves that the romance genre, in the right hands, remains the most sincere chronicle of what it means to be human: to hope, to hurt, and to love again.
She has not written in a while, she tells me. Today, however, even as she juggles office work and editing stints, Gonzales dreams of returning fully to writing. Her stories endure because they speak to something elemental in us: the human need to love, to hope, and to begin again.
The poet and fictionist Cesar Ruiz Aquino—an eternal icon of both Dumagueteño and Zamboangueño writing—have been dazzling readers of Philippine literature for decades now, ever since he surged as a wordsmith of “robust eloquence” [from the words of Alfred Yuson, writing about the author for the Philippine Star] in the 1960s and the 1970s. As a member of a highly experimental group of writers that exploded with prominence in those decades—a generation that included Yuson, Ninotchka Rosca, Jose Lansang Jr., Erwin Castillo, Conrado de Quiros, and Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez—it took Sawi, as he is affectionately called by friends, quite a while to gather his writings together, but finally, in the early 1990s, he gave us the one-two punch showcase of the breadth of his writing prowess with his story collection Chronicles of Suspicion in 1990 and his poetry collection Word Without End in 1993. Both books instantly became classics of contemporary Philippine literature—albeit strangely out of print today—simply because there was no one else writing poetry the way Sawi was writing his poetry, and no one else writing fiction the way Sawi was writing his fiction—strange, musical, and—this has to be noted—highly autobiographical.
He became more prolific in his book publishing from the 2000s and after, coming out with an astonishing regularity with such poetry collections as In Samarkand (2008), Caesuras: 155 New Poems (2013), Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not the Shadow (2014), Fire If It Were Ice, Ice If It Were Fire (2016), and Figures In A Long Ago Mirror (2019), as well as the personal anthology Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader (2003). But aside from that brush with Chronicles of Suspicion, he has never published his fiction again in collected form—not that he was not writing fiction. He was still winning awards for the stories he did publish in various magazines—but only until the pandemic did we get new fictional work in a book from him, with Z for Short, the novel he has struggled to finish for what had seemed like forever. The novel is, of course, of the Sawi vein of fiction—still strange, still musical, and still autobiographical.
Here is an excerpt he is sharing:
Our window overlooked the rich orchard. From a branch of the tallest tree hung a dead bird, Fra Hernani and I discovered one day. How or why it died, there was no way for us to know. And the greater puzzle was how it managed to cling on to the tree branch, upside down, as if by sheer will and even beyond that as if it refused to let go of the tree's branch and plunged to the earth and turn to dust, become the earth. True enough it did not seem to deteriorate all the time I was in Manila. It did, of course, but its feathers continued to shield the bird—as if to hide from our sight, from the rest of the world, the fact of its annihilation.
What is the novel about? Here is an excerpt from it that explains itself: “I can’t write a novel is how I’ve come to decide autobiography is what it’s going to be, if failed nonfictionist as well. Autobiographer manqué. At any rate I will be the book. Or rather the book will aspire to be me. But of course, you will say, what book isn’t the author? I mean some reader, perhaps a French girl traveling in the Philippines, who knows English, will read it in bed on a winter’s night, fall asleep still holding the book, and wake up startled by the sensation of a man lying beside her and talking in his sleep, in a word, dreaming. Paris! Friends will recognize the slouch, the somnambular way of walking, the footsteps. The strange inconsistency in speech, by turns articulate and groping (now running over, now clamming up). The stranger inconsistency with the eyes: at times, from a natural inclination, riveted on—at other times, by habit, averted from—the face of the person he’s talking to. The palms. Which are what really rouse the young girl from Paris, though he’s caressing her only in a dream. His dream.”
The book, only recently published, is sold out and also now out of print.
It is almost Christmas time—but if we’re talking about local literature and the holidays, one of the things that come foremost to mind is a tale penned by a Muslim writer. His name was Lugum Lilao Uka, one of the earliest Muslim writers in English in the Philippines. He was from Maguindanao, but studied in Dumaguete, and delved into the local writing scene quite considerably while a student here. He led quite a remarkable life and contributed much to the geopolitics of Mindanao later on, but he is mostly forgotten today, especially as writer—although some of his compositions have found new life in the repertoire of his grandson, the folk singer Rocky Uka Ibrahim.
Uka earned his Bachelor of Laws from Silliman in 1952. As a student, he was involved with campus writing through the Sands & Coral, of which he was editor in 1950 and 1951. Along with fellow Mindanao writer Reuben Canoy, he was also a member of the law debating team from 1951 to 1952. Later on, Uka would play a key role in national legislation. He was appointed as Chairman of the Commission on National Integration on 10 July 1959, and was also selected by President Carlos P. Garcia in 1960 to be a member of the National Committee for the celebration of the 14th Anniversary of the Republic of the Philippines. He was one-time president of John B. Lacson Foundation Maritime University, and was also significantly involved in the drafting of the 1987 Philippine Constitution as the representative of the cultural community of Cotabato and the Muslim community as a whole. Many people claim him to be the unsung “Father of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.”
In 1948, in the very first issue of Sands & Coral, Uka contributed a Christmas story:
A Deer for Jesus
I can still see the forty-six naked youngsters staring at me with very wide eyes as I spoke of the age-old Christmas story to them one morning. It was in the pagan Bilaan Settlement Farm School in the remote barrio of Malungon; and I, a Moslem teacher, was talking nostalgically of the customs of the Christian world. That in itself was bound to produce the unexpected.
It had been a most lonely life during my first year of teaching. As December approached, I remembered with almost a wave of homesickness Christmas seasons at the Normal School. Then I conceived the plan of introducing a program for the children.
Forty-six pairs of Bilaan eyes snapped and danced as I told them that they, too, were to have a party and a Christmas tree upon which they might hang anything which they wished to give to their friends. And I meant anything, for our mountain school was hundreds of miles away from the towns and sea coast.
Christmas day came and we had prepared painstakingly for the first Christmas program that would be held in that remote Moro-land. We began with a beautifully symmetrical tree no more than two meters high. Our decorations were wild varicolored flowers strung together and arranged on the tree. As the children brought in their gifts, the tree grew heavy with corn, wild honey in bamboo tubes, ripe bananas, corn cakes, roasted camotes. It began to sag alarmingly as the collection of taro, papaya, pineapple, wild fruits, and sugarcane streamed in. The fauna, too, was represented liberally by four parrots perched on the tree, a wild rooster, one small monkey, and a large edible iguana tied to its base. It might not have been the most elaborate Christmas tree, but it certainly was the most unique and naturalistic. Jesus would certainly have smiled to have seen it. At the base of the tree was a last, loving contribution—a baby deer with this tag dangling about its spindly neck: “To Jesus and Mr. Lugum Uka. Merry Christmas to you two! From Mandoen Katuan, Grade III.”
The program that followed reached a hilarious climax as the children began a Bilaan dance. One of the class exhibitionists, a little drunk with glory, tripped over his feet and sprawled headlong on the floor. Violent gales of laughter greeted this spectacle. As the crowd rocked and swayed, almost crying with mirth, sudden hysteria broke out under the Christmas tree. Simultaneously, the deer, the monkey, the lizard, and the wild rooster bolted from the tree, the room, and the Christmas program in wild panic. In complete disbelief, we watched them stamping and tugging at the tree, which with their combined efforts soon gave way. They raced from the schoolhouse, dragging the tree with them at the rate of fifteen miles an hour.
Everyone raced after the tree, but when it was recovered, only two parrots were left of all the animal offerings. The children picked up most of the fruits and vegetables in the bushes on the hillside. The monkey, the lizard, and the wild rooster were nowhere to be seen. Gone, too, was the deer which was addressed both to Jesus and to me. Who knows but that it preferred to be with Jesus alone. I have no regrets.
* * *
On 11 September 1949, Francisco Arcellana [who would later become National Artist for Literature] reviewed this first issue of Sands & Coral, which was edited by Aida Rivera [now Ford] and Reuben Canoy, with Ricaredo Demetillo and Rodrigo Feria as advisers. Mr. Arcellana’s review, found in his column “Through a Glass Darkly” for This Week, appeared on page 27 of the paper, and this is the notice he gave of Uka’s story:
“The second story is a Christmas story. It is called ‘A Deer for Jesus.’ It is by a Moro by the name of Lugum Uka. It is a story that I personally like very much. I like to think that the writing of ‘A Deer for Jesus’ did something for Lugum Uka. Christmas stories are always fun to write. They are such happy things. Christmas is a happy time, the best time of the year. One likes to write about happy things. One likes to remember happy times. And this is the reason why it is such fun writing Christmas stories and also why it is such fun reading them. But sometimes there is something else, something more than fun that you require of the Christmas story. Sometimes Christmas stories are written not only for remembering happy things and happy times. Sometimes they are written to do something, to help one resolve, admit, accept. ‘A Deer for Jesus,’ I like to imagine, resolved the lovely Christmas myth for the Moro, Lugum Uka.”
Five days of the week Mr. Mc Lure was a familiar figure trudging along the Rizal Boulevard that fronted the shoreline for more than a kilometer to the post office. There were no boats from Manila or Cebu Sunday and Wednesday; the only first-class mail he expected was the one containing his monthly pension as a Spanish-American War veteran. What he got regularly from his P.O. box was his subscription copy of the Manila Daily Bulletin and the Philippines Free Press, periodicals edited by Americans. The hook-handled camagon cane in his right hand was a third leg, its nickel-covered point tapping the asphalt like a heartbeat. Most striking about Mr. McLure was the oleander flower in his left hand.
The oleander came from one of three clumps he had planted more than a third of a century ago around his house. Only one trunk remained and this could be seen from his bed, tall and sturdy, so close to his window he could reach out for a cluster from one of the branches. On warm afternoons taking his siesta or on bright moon-lit nights lying wide awake or waking up from a dream he would see the poplar-like trunk, almost the size of his leg, silhouetted against the sky…
Half a world away in a trim little garden in front of a modest brick house was an oleander clump his mother had planted. She had a knack for growing things, creepers and unpotted African violets burgeoning profusely among daisies and under the lilac bush. The oleander she called the giraffe because she could pluck its flowers from her window. She died two years before the end of the first world war.
After so many steps, two hundred or so, the old man would lift his hand; it trembled a little and he would stare at the oleander with idiotic concentration, as though he were recounting the stamens or tracing the purple curve, and then he would bring the oleander under his nose—a thin, pointed nose it was—inhale deeply and drop the hand back to his side.
The last hundred fifty meters to the post office along the Rizal Boulevard bordered part of the eastern section of the university campus. Within this distance McLure had to cross two streets to the P.O., the first one, really an extension of the boulevard, swerving off right to the wharf, and the other bisecting it on the P.O.’s north side. This portion of the boulevard where the crossing streets converged behind the triangular island about thirty meters from the P.O. was visible from the office of the American president of the university, an institution founded by the U.S. Presbyterian Church in 1901, three years after the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War. McLure was crossing the first junction when President Larsen saw him staring at the oleander. The man was oblivious to the traffic moving to and from the wharf.
A couple of minutes later there was a screeching of brakes. President Larsen stood up and walked to the window. A cargo truck coming from the wharf had jerked to a stop half a meter from McLure, who was in the middle of the street. The driver stuck out his head from the cab and shouted, “Do you want to get killed?”
The old man dropped his hand with the oleander to his side, turned to the driver, not seeming to understand him, and proceeded to the post office.
Before going home that noon President Larsen stopped at the office of Dr. Holtz, the minister of the university church. He told Holtz about McLure and the near-accident close to the post office. “I had the odd feeling the man wanted an accident to happen.”
Dr. Holtz was quiet. He was one of the old-timers among the fifteen American families in the university. He had written the lyrics of the school song whose music he had adapted from the “Old Nassau” of Princeton, where he had his theological training. When the college population was less than a thousand he knew every student by his first name. Outside of the American families on the campus he cultivated the friendship of three other Americans in town—one of them John McLure—who had arrived in Dumaguete within seven years of each other. The second was Theodore Fletcher, who owned two houses, one in Dumaguete and the other in Pamplona, forty kilometers to the north, where he owned the largest coconut plantation in the province. The third American was Charles Boynton, an engineer who had come as a tourist and a guest of a college classmate teaching in the university; he met and the daughter of a sugar cane farmer, established a construction firm, and co-founded the first Rotary Club in the province.
John McLure had brought some embarrassment to the small American community.
“I’ve known John McLure for twenty-six years. That’s how long I’ve been here. After his wife died about fifteen years ago, he started drinking heavily. About that time, too, he closed his bicycle store. He had good American bicycles, but he lost out to a competitor, a half-Chinese, who imported much cheaper bicycles from Japan. By the way, it was his wife’s inheritance that started the bicycle store. His wife was the only daughter of a prosperous farmer from Ayungon, some seventy kilometers north of here.”
“Does McLure have children?”
“A daughter who eloped with a drug salesman when she was seventeen. I understand she died giving birth to a baby who lived only a few hours.”
“How does he keep himself?”
“He gets a pension, he’s a Spanish-American War veteran. When he closed his bicycle store, he rented the space to a rice and corn dealer. Half of the second floor which he remodeled into an office he leased to a couple of lawyers. He’s all right financially. His pension converted to pesos takes care of his needs. The rent money he spends on alcohol.”
“What’s wrong with him, aside from his drinking?”
“You’re referring to the flower in his hand?”
President Larsen nodded. “But especially about his sight and hearing. He didn’t mind the traffic.”
“Reading is the only thing he does—when he is sober. He goes to the post office mainly for his papers. I had a talk with him a few weeks ago and he had no hearing problem.” He paused. “I’ll see him today.”
McClure’S house was across the southwest corner of the town plaza. Burgos Street on its north side hit the Rizal Boulevard three blocks to the east; on the west side Alfonso XIII, the town’s main street, cut through the university campus a kilometer to the north. Commercial stores lined both sides of Alfonso XIII for three blocks to the south. From the northwest window one had a good view of the park; concrete walks had been laid out under the acacia and trees; a line of tennis courts and a children’s playground just across Burgos Street; the statue of the national hero facing the east, and some twenty meters from it a kiosk which served as a stage for speakers at political and civic gatherings; facing the kiosk across Alfonso XIII was the Catholic church. Through the foliage of the trees beyond the eastern edge of the park, the City Hall and one wing of the East Central School were visible.
From his rattan-ribbed lounging chair in the narrow verandah overlooking the park, McLure could see, without being seen from the intersecting streets, several blocks of the town’s busiest section. Forty-one years ago, when he arrived, the park and the areas contiguous to it were just a carabao pasture. With the growth of the university the town expanded in all directions. To his idly observing eyes the ancient watch tower across the street looming beyond the verandah sill just a meter from his feet never ceased to be an anachronism. Of cut coral rocks it was built near the close of the seventeenth century like a section of a medieval fortress; it had originally been intended as a lookout for Moro pirates. The coastline from Dumaguete to the southern tip of Negros opens itself to the Sulu Sea, which for centuries had been dominated by roving marauders; neither the Spaniards nor the Americans after them were able to subdue the fanatical Moslems. The tower top served as a belfry of the Catholic church; at the bottom was a grotto with the image of Santa Catalina—the church itself was named Cathedral of St. Catherine—the town’s patron saint, who, it was believed, used to release a large swarm of bees to attack the Moro pirates as their vintas approached the Dumaguete shoreline. McLure had indeed seen a beehive hanging from a top branch of the acacia tree a few meters from the tower. As the only white infidel (he was not unhappy about this designation), he believed the beehive had been hung there and replenished from time to time by the Spanish friars in their desire to keep the superstition of Santa Catalina’s special power intact.
Someone was knocking on the door. He waited. The knocking persisted, so he stood up and crossed the living room and opened the door. Standing there was Dr. Holtz.
“Oh, Paul. Come in. It’s been months—three months—since your last visit.”
After he had closed the bicycle store nobody had dropped by to see him, except for the times Dr. Holtz came in for a chat. He felt all the other Americans in town treated him with condescension, were embarrassed by the notoriety of his drinking. As far as he was concerned, they were busybodies. All of them, except Paul Holtz. A year after his assignment as pastor, Dr. Holtz had invited McClure to attend the church services at the university. “What for? I don’t go to church. Any church. I have nothing to do with hypocrites. With sanctimonious people moving around with superior airs. Are you offended with what I’ve said?”
“You must have reasons for feeling that way.”
“Of course I have. Most of your people think I’m the plague. I drink, yes. On my money, nobody else’s. My drinking is nobody else’s business.”
“This is all probably in your head.”
“It’s not probably—it’s all there, all right. Because your people put it there.”
That first meeting Dr. Holtz was remembering as he sat in a large low rattan chair that had long needed a new coat of varnish.
“I hear you had a near-accident this morning.”
“Who told you that?”
“Dr. Larsen, our new president. A vehicle screeching loudly got him out of his chair. His office is just across the street where it happened.”
“So the man Larsen already knows the walking habits of John McLure.”
“It’s not like that, John. Anybody would be concerned.”
Dr. Holtz himself had known McLure’s peculiar habit with the oleander. President Larsen’s comment on what appeared to be the man’s suicidal behavior did not surprise him. And he was concerned. The man’s preoccupation with the flower, repeated after so many hundred steps, was a quirk that could cost him his life.
“That oleander outside, John, is like a tree. I thought the oleander is a shrub.”
The man’s chuckle, a rare sound from him, was a deep rumble that made his prominent Adam’s apple bounce under the loose skin of his scrawny throat.
“Yes, the oleander is a shrub, but I made that one into a tree. A simple matter of letting only one stem grow out of a cluster of three or four. The oleander is an Old World evergreen shrub of the North American dogbane family. A medicinal shrub. My grandmother, an unusual woman, took with her three oleander cuttings from Exeter in Southwest England all the way to Kansas. The root end of each cutting she wrapped in Devonshire soil. Three cuttings just to be sure. You of course know—or maybe you don’t—that the California vineyards were started by Basques who got the grape cuttings from Spain. And perhaps you don’t know—” there was the chuckle-rumble again the sharp valve bouncing in his turkey throat, “—that the Christian Brothers are famous producers of some of the best wines in the world.”
McLure fell quiet, as though to let that point sink in, about the winery of the Christian Brothers. “You, Paul, would consider my grandmother the more desirable immigrant. Oleander in Kansas sprouting from Devonshire soil. No greater Old World loyalty than that. Anyway, when I came here, I saw the oleander’s indigenous.”
The man’s reference to his grandmother recalled to Dr. Holtz a conversation he had with McLure a few years after he had known him, about the time the bicycle store was running down. The small American community had delegated him to speak to McLure; they we’re contributing money for his return home.
“Even if I had a place to go home to, how far will my pension go there? At least here it doubles. This is our home, my wife and me. We can manage. Our needs aren’t much.”
And he had gone on, suddenly conciliatory. “My father died in Kansas three years after I came here, the year Taft was inaugurated Philippine civil governor. My younger brother took over the farm—I sold my share of the farm to him. My only other kin now is a widowed sister in O’Keene, Oklahoma. The only time I had thought of going home was to visit my ailing mother. I was preparing to leave when the cable came. She’d died the week before. So you see, Paul, there’s nothing for me there.”
“What made you join the American troops for the Philippines?”
“I can ask you the same question: what made you come when you could have worked among our own people back home?”
He waited for a reply but none came. “Have you ever been through Kansas?”
Holtz shook his head.
“It’s mostly flat, unlike other prairie states like Iowa or Nebraska or Illinois. Finch is the village where my family lived, some thirty miles northwest of Topeka. In Finch all you see from anywhere you stand from one season to another is a flat horizon. No bumps of any kind for the eyes’ relief. And during the wheat season—as you know, Kansas produces the most wheat in America—you’re engulfed by wheat. And for me, anyway, breathing in the summer seemed difficult. The hottest day in Dumaguete is nothing like Kansas summer. My brother was never bothered by the Kansas landscape. I suppose I was an oddball. I had to get out, it seemed to be a constricting prison.
“Another thing. I don’t know how much of a reason it was for my leaving Kansas. My father fought in the Civil War. Bull Run Antietam, Shiloh—those places. You of course know the Kansas- Nebraska Act.”
Dr. Holtz looked at him with a new eye. “I forget the details.”
“That Act was passed by Congress in 1854, and it upset the balance of power between the slave and free states and helped to bring on the Civil War. Anti-slavery forces finally gained control. My father was among the first to volunteer. Not an educated man, but his sentiments were right. When he returned from the war, he farmed our land. Proved to be a good provider. He had stories for us about the war. And he was grateful for coming home alive. Hundreds of Kansas farmers never made it back. I suppose because he himself didn’t finish grade school he sent my brother Bill and me to a school in Topeka. I finished high school and Bill came home with me; he didn’t want to go back to Topeka by himself. When the Spanish-American War broke out I enlisted. My father didn’t say anything for or against my joining. But I knew how he felt; he didn’t want me to go through the same thing he had. I never told him about the Kansas horizon that could close you in—he thought I was enlisting for the same reason he had joined the Union troops. I knew how he felt when I didn’t go home after the end of the Spanish-American War.
“One other thing, Paul, and I’m done. I was very fortunate to be assigned to a peaceful province like Negros Oriental. Our U.S. military record in many other places in this country is something no American can be proud of. In places like Samar there was a lot of butchery. Not only of noncombatants, but also of animals. Horses and cows and carabaos and pigs—whatever moving thing the soldiers saw. The Spaniards had a term for it. Juez de cochillo. But we did that sort of thing to the Indians, too, didn’t we?”
Both were quiet. “I feel very much at home here, the way your people in the university feel at home. But I wish your people would leave me alone. My drinking is my business.”
He stood up. “I’ll make us some coffee.”
Dr. Holtz also stood up. “No, thanks, John. Two years ago my doctor said no more coffee for me. I must get going.”
“Thank you for coming. It’s good talking to you.”
“I wish you’d come to see me, too.”
“I know you mean that. Thank you. And you know you’re welcome here any time.” At the landing he said, “There was something I was going to tell you. I’ve left a letter for you with my lawyer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There are two lawyers renting half of the second floor of this house. The older one, Atty. Orteza, is my lawyer. The rentals I get from the lawyers’ office and the store below aren’t much, but the money can probably take care of one or even two students.”
“This is no time yet to talk this way, John.”
“Anything can happen to John Mc Lure in his condition. When the time comes, you’ll know how to use this house. The fee, my friend, for a decent burial.”
In Dr. Holtz’s office, five months later, the telephone rang.
“Dr. Holtz? … This is Atty. Orteza. Twenty-five minutes ago Mr. Mc Lure was hit by a car. He was crossing the street to the house…”
Edilberto Kaindong Tiempo was born in Maasin, Southern Leyte in 1913. He obtained his BA in English at Silliman Institute [now Silliman University] in 1937. He enrolled for graduate studies in 1939 at University of the Philippines but did not finish. In 1940, after marrying Edith Lopez, he returned to Dumaguete to teach at Silliman. He would later be accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he would obtain his MA in 1951. In 1957, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Denver. Upon returning to the Philippines in 1962, the couple established what is now the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. At Silliman, he served various positions, including chair of the English Department, graduate school dean, vice-president for academic affairs, and writer-in-residence. His novel, Cry Slaughter, published in 1957, was a revised version of his Watch in the Night, which he culled from his wartime experience in Negros Oriental. Cry Slaughter had four printings by Avon in New York, a hardbound edition in London, and six European translations. His other books include the novels To Be Free [1972], More Than Conquerors [1982], Cracked Mirror [1984], The Standard Bearer [1985], and Farah [2001], the short story collections A Stream at Dalton Pass and Other Stories [1970], Finality: A Novelette and Five Short Stories [1982], Rainbow for Rima [1988], Snake Twin and Other Stories [1992], and The Paraplegics and Five Short Stories [1995]. He also authored Literary Criticism in the Philippines and Other Essays [1995]. He won the Cultural Center of the Philippines Prize, the Palanca, the U.P. Golden Anniversary Literary Contest, and the National Book Award. He died in 1996.
What I am about to set down consists of three stories which I had originally wanted to write separately. How I came to think of weaving them together is not easy to answer. The first two were stories I had heard almost twenty years ago and could not get around to writing for such an unbelievable length of time. One day I understood that I’d never be able to write them and that perhaps this was the story I could write. I remember the occasion on which the idea occurred to me. I was talking to another literary person, in fact a gifted young girl from Manila well on her way to the writing vocation. I found myself telling her the two stories. I don’t remember having done it before, though I am fairly given to talking about stories I contemplated writing to friends. When I had finished I realized that what held my listener’s interest was not just the stories themselves but me telling them together. “Perhaps I should write them together,” I said with the enthusiasm of one who had faintly but unmistakably struck something. When days passed and the terror of the empty, white paper began to grow on me, when I began to suspect that this new story—the story of a writer and the two stories he could not get around to writing for twenty years—was headed for the same fate, the same limbo, I decided to hurl myself into the wilderness. In the confusion I involuntarily recovered two memories—one resplendent and the other shameful. I also tied in the third, which is the longest and of which I do not have to speak at this point.
Back in 1972, when I taught at Silliman for the first time, I formed a companionship with four other young men with whom I had nothing in common but an addiction: chess. The friendship was so close we were soon addicted not only to the game but to being together. For days on end, when there would be a string of holidays, we would eat, sleep, talk, play chess, gallivant, do evil things together. Chess is more often than not the passion of a lonely man. In our case, the loneliness became collective, if such a thing can be conceived—we were a pack of lone wolves. Martial law, imposed by Marcos late that year, abetted it, as did the success of the solipsistic Bobby Fischer.
I’ll heartlessly cut myself short on this part of my life to which belongs some of my fondest memories, since my business is only to relate where and how I got the two stories mentioned above. I heard them from two of my friends, on those nights when not even the fatigue of playing chess all day could relieve the torment of our own sap and we would spend the night talking about all sorts of things until dawn. The first came from Nestor Rimando and happened in Davao where he came from and where he is back. In the almost twenty years since our time in Dumaguete I have seen him again only twice— once in Manila and once when he visited Dumaguete in 1987. The second was told by Odelon Ontal, who lives until now in Dumaguete and who has forgotten his story. Both have married and have children; I have remained a bachelor, grown adept at gentle ways of coping with, in the phrase of Erwin Castillo, the terror of being unloved.
Rimando’s story can be sketched in a paragraph. In Davao in either the late sixties or early seventies (Rimando was not specific) a madwoman slept her nights at the market, where the tables in the meat section provided her with a bed. Let us assign her the age of twenty-eight and long, lice-infested hair. You have seen her, grimy, reposing on the pavement like an obscene bat, her eyes somehow never meeting yours. You never hear her voice either, even when she laughs and you wonder who knocked her teeth down. One day you see her with a swollen belly and although it comes as a shock you don’t find yourself wondering very long who the father is. Not even the coming baby mitigates her status as a nightmare, without substance. In Rimando’s story she gives birth to her child towards daybreak. The market vendors who had come early saw her deflated belly but were baffled that the child could not be found. Suddenly their minds froze, struck by lightning. They had not understood the blood on the table where she had slept and now they looked with horror at the dog sitting not far from where she was.
As in Rimando’s case, Ontal had not actually witnessed the story he told us and which, as I’ve said, he has forgotten. A very young couple—the husband about fifteen and the wife fourteen or thirteen—had come to Dumaguete for the husband who was sick to be confined and treated in a hospital. They came with ample money, but one somehow got the impression that it represented all their possession. They took a common room, which explains how their story came to be known.
On the first day of his confinement, a group of young girls, probably students from Silliman dropping in to visit another patient in the room, find themselves flocking around the boy-husband from the barrio. It is not hard to understand why they instantly take to him. They like his rustic ways; they are astonished, themselves not much older than he, to find one so young—just a little boy really—already married; they feel protective, motherly. Perhaps, too, the boy is dying. Let us call him Kip. It is five in the afternoon and Kip, waiting for his wife Moning to come back, has brightened up only too visibly. One or two of the girls are pretty. And Kip’s happiness, in turn, has set loose even in the shyer ones the floodgates of a hitherto unsuspected sweetness. It is in the midst of this that Moning comes back with a friend she has just acquired, a girl of eight, and the things they bought at the market. There is an awkwardness but Kip’s friends do not feel uncomfortable. They look at her with great interest and find her shyness just as poignant, except that of course she is not the patient and, moreover, they have to go. Moning goes out of the room soon after they do to see her little friend—who keeps throwing looks at Kip—to the gate. She does not return—neither in the evening as Kip keeps hoping she will, nor the next day, nor the day after the next until it is afternoon. Kip runs a whole spectrum of feelings—all shades of grey and black. First alarm, then anger, worry, fear, bewilderment, oppression, fury, pain. To assuage the torment, he imagines himself dead and the thought of Moning crazed with grief strangely revives his appetite to eat. It is an exaggeration to say that he ages in three days, but at certain moments we see a grown-up quality or manner that we failed to notice earlier, even when he’s not doing anything, propped up and stockstill, pensive in his bed. When Moning finally comes back, the joy he feels is outweighed, outwardly, by the need to express his outrage and maintain a touching dignity. He weeps at last and says, in a quiet voice, “Ako pay mamatay, ako pay ingnon mi!” (Roughly, “I’m the one who’s going to die and I’m the one who’s treated this way!”) Moning, eyes downcast, wants to hold and press his hand but his spare reproach totally wilts her.
These were the two stories. When I first pondered Rimando’s story, I conceived of the following idea: The story would be seen through a third-person point of view. This person is gradually revealed to be the father of the baby, and the revelation will be subtle, almost just hinted, but clear towards the end. I’m glad this didn’t materialize. It seems to promise bathos.
My present attitude indicates that I wish to preserve the story’s gruesome quality. Despite the ironclad objection: what for should one write a merely cruel story? There are hundreds of other such incidents, dizzying in their fiendishness, that have happened and can happen on this planet. Even in the realm of fact, the number of such cases may well approach the infinite. Thus the absurdity of a news item with such a subject in which the reporter pretends to be moved by the uncanny. And yet I remain infatuated with Rimando’s story as is—raw, uninvented, fact. Why?
Once in life I woke in the wee hours of the morning and heard from somewhere a baby’s cooing and laughter and knew it to be the most beautiful sound on earth or in heaven. Many years later I took to asking girls I liked what they thought was the loveliest sound they’d ever heard. A bird’s chirping was usually the answer. At other times, the sound of surf. Or early morning rain that made them linger in bed. There were others I’ve forgotten. Only one, if memory is not fooling, got it right—Emy.
How could a baby deserve either such a grisly end or such a loathsome origin as had the one in Rimando’s story? What possible virtue is there in telling of how it was so literally wiped out the moment it was born?
Ontal’s story, too, is disturbingly open-ended. Even if its tenderness tends to counterpoint, to allay the ferocity of the other. Ontal said no one seemed to know what happened afterwards when the young couple had gone back to the barrio where they came from. This open-endedness—Kip’s possible death—hovers over the story with the same menace that the woman’s madness, the unknown father’s lust, and the dog’s appetite in Rimando’s story hold for us. Here too my baby gurgles amid demons. Is this therefore why the two stories had been thrown into my hands—not by accident but because to me had been delivered the task of seeing them as connected? If Kip dies, the two tell the same story—Kip is the baby who is devoured by a dog—and I brood on the evil that unites them; Ontal didn’t have to tell his. If Kip lives, the two stories exclude—worse, annihilate—each other; Kip is the baby whose cooing, gurgling laughter work me up one magic, epiphanous night in my life—but Rimando, as well as Ontal, had to tell his. I must find a third.
Unlike Ontal’s and Rimando’s, it is a story I have seen. In fact, it is a story I alone have seen. For the two people in it—a man and a woman who casually crossed my path quite recently (only late last year) never met, neither one knew the other existed. Moreover, one is mad and the other dead. I believe their fates conjoined, and that it was I who brought this conjunction about—or rather my old, black jacket. It seems like a delirium and perhaps it is. Before getting round to it, I add a few necessary details about myself. I am forty-three, I teach part-time in Silliman. I live with a maid and my two parents. My mother has had a stroke and asthma has wrought on my father an almost equal devastation.
One afternoon I woke from a nap hearing some rock group on the cassette tape recorder and slowly making out the voices that drifted to my room. They were those of my father and a younger man, a man I didn’t know. The conversation was in Chabacano and my father was talking with more animation than usual. My parents have not lived in Dumaguete as long as I, and at their age do not get to meet too many people any more. Whenever someone happens along who comes from Zamboanga, their spirit is buoyed up, as though old times had returned. I tarried in bed for a while more, unable to help from eavesdropping. I gathered that the visitor had come in to fix the tape recorder, that his name was William, that he was an ex-soldier, that he (rather vaguely) was a CAFGU, that he worked as radio technician and operator at the military headquarters in Agan-an. I couldn’t avoid meeting his stare at once when I opened the door, they were sitting right-across from my room and he was facing my way. He was a slight man who looked as boyish as his voice, but the face, with its high cheekbones, had a menacing quality that impressed me greatly. He had the eyes of a man who lived with evil smells, or who was used to the sight of gore. But perhaps the cold, removed stare came from sheer hard times and I had overlooked it. I dwell on it at length because it was the only time I really looked at his face. He was to be seen in the house often after that, gladly fixing—after the tape recorder—the television set and the walkie-talkie which he had dug up while puttering around the storeroom. He always declined to join us whenever he happened to be around at mealtime, settling instead for a cup of coffee. Sometimes he’d doze off on the bench in the kitchen when, apparently exhausted from staying up late at some gambling place, he’d show up early in the morning. At other times, he’d spend the night at our place, sleeping on the bench which had become his bed. We soon realized, though we never asked him, that he was not living in any particular place—that there probably were other houses where he could sleep from time to time. But once a man who knew us asked me if it was true William was living with us. William had given our place as his address, care of my father who was a retired police major. And indeed he did his laundry at our place and kept some clothes in the storeroom. I do not know if those were all the clothes he had.
William told us he was a widower. He said his wife had died of tuberculosis. At the time he said this I thought it sounded like a good forecast of how he himself was going to die soon. He was very thin and always looked overwrought. He did die soon after, but not as I thought.
His wife left him no child. He said his wife’s parents were from Negros and lived in the nearby town of Valencia, and that his own mother, who was in Zamboanga, originally came from Dumaguete. We believed him. He spoke Chabacano and Cebuano very fluently—both with a rural accent, which astonished my father who is a Zamboangueño and my mother who is a Cebuana—oblivious that, though it’s true it was unusual, so did I, though neither with a rural accent. This will do for William. He is a dead man when I take him up again. Vastly different, we did not become friends. The only form of closeness we had was my lending him small sums which he was too shy to borrow from my parents. He never paid and I never expected him to. Just as we never paid him for fixing the television set and the tape recorder and the walkie-talkie and he never, I’m sure, expected us to.
For certain episodes in the past that we carry through life, memories is an inaccurate word; rather they constitute an ever lingering, bright present, separation or estrangement from which we are forced to admit only by the unappealable decline of our physical bodies. And then we feel as if perhaps we already have died. Others are matters of complete indifference. They could be as recent as a year ago but the faces that beam at us on a chance re-encounter are veritable abysses. As are the names.
“Ester Lim?”
“She says you were together in some writers conference in Manila.”
“Is she going to be in the program?”
“She’s just passing by. She’s on her way to Manila. She was looking for Marj.”
“If she didn’t know Marj is the Manila, she may have been just checking her out, too, from way back when.”
“Yes, that seems to be it. When I told her Marj is in Manila she appeared very excited and took her address. And then she sounded like she was going to Manila just to see her.”
“I’ll get back to the office. They might be there.”
“Lina was giving her directions to your house. She’s probably there now. That was almost two hours ago.”
“Oh. Okay, I’m going home then.”
“You can see that she’s odd, but she’s all right I think. Most people will get a more extreme impression after talking to her. She’s been through some terrible time. She’ll be telling you.”
“I’d have preferred to talk to her somewhere else though.”
“Lina told her to go back to her if it’s no go at your place. I would have taken her in but you know there’s literally no room for her here.”
“It’s going to be difficult. You don’t know my father. He’s a cop. But I know where we can take her to.”
By ten in the evening Ester Lim was out of my hands. I had ample opportunity, that evening, to know just how mad she was.
She was in her late twenties and I wondered why I absolutely couldn’t recall her from the writers seminar that we attended together. At the least, she must have been a pleasant kid to look at, and even now hell, which it was clear she was wobbling in, hadn’t taken away the sparkle from her eyes. She had a vague expression of physical pain on her face that became oddly pronounced when she smiled, which was often. After speaking, she would bend her forehead slightly forward—and somewhat askew—as if swallowing, her eyes not leaving yours and smiling with the queer pain. Perhaps reading my mind she explained that she had inflamed sinuses. I found out that she had stomach spasms besides. My hair almost stood at the way she consumed the entire loaf of sliced bread when I bought her a snack, ignoring the canned fish and the noodles which she ate after. At nine there are no more cheap eating houses open in Dumaguete and I didn’t have much money. Also, I was hoping Mrs. Tan, in whose house she would be staying, would feed her. (It amused me that she was Miss Lim and her hostess was Mrs. Tan. Mrs. Tan was head of some fundamentalist church organization on the campus.)
Ester Lim was going to Manila to seek help over a nephew whom she claimed her brother, the father, physically tortured. She said her nephew wanted her to take him but there was no way she could fight her brother. He had many connections in their place and was able to convince everybody that she was insane. I asked her what exactly it was she wanted done about her nephew. If she wanted custody, I said, she was certain to lose. She said of course that was the sure way to lose, and went into a detailed explanation of her plan which struck me for its legal shrewdness and clarity. I realized later that this lucidity, which must have impressed people she met for the first time, could be seen in a more sinister light. But at the moment I must have been visibly impressed, for her manner assumed a certain preening and soon she was telling me that her fight wouldn’t end with her nephew. She was going to start her crusade against child abuse.
I cleared my throat and told her surely there was some organization in Manila doing that sort of thing and it shouldn’t be too hard for her to find her bearings there after all. This seemed to please her further, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling she was holding back some tremendously good thing that I was not even beginning to understand. I wasn’t wrong. And I was not kept waiting. She began to tell me about the evil in her place, La Carlota, and my mind involuntarily flitted back to the half-amused, half-bewildered face of my mother earlier in the house when I had gone home and found her with Ester Lim.
“As long as the Beast is loose, the children of the world will suffer.”
Mrs. Tan’s house was in the outskirts of the town and tricycles would go only up to a certain point. There was no moon (missing emblem of madness) but the light from the electric posts made the green grass in the vacant lots all around us visible. Ester Lim continued: “I can’t lose, it’s in the Scripture: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars….”
She had turned her face to me and it bore the same expression, only more outrageous: it was as if she was looking at me and smiling though her tears. I heard my voice saying, “Don’t say a word of that to Mrs. Tan’s family. They’re very nice people; realize that they are taking you in, a stranger, out of kindness. You’re lucky, but if you tell them that, it could make things unpleasant.” “Why?” she asked. I saw that I was unnecessarily taking a further step in getting mixed up with a lunatic. “Do you really care for your nephew?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Then don’t say what you’ve just told me to anyone. Keep it to yourself or else, believe me, you are going to fail. You won’t even survive in Manila.”
“Why?” she asked again, and finally I said, “They’ll think you mad. That’s what happened back in your place. With that story you yourself, not your brother, convinced them you’re mad.” I uttered the word mad casually, to make it sound as if I was very far from believing it.
“I see,” she said thoughtfully, slowing down her steps somewhat. “It’s a real problem.” She seemed to brace herself before going on and then she asked me, “Do you believe what I just told you?”
Crazily polite (allow me some madness of my own), I groped. “I don’t know. Yes and no perhaps. You’re entitled to what you believe is your vocation. But you can’t be literal about these things. Anyway it’s out of my range. It’s a thing between you and God.”
This must have satisfied her for she changed the topic. “You’re right about Mrs. Tan and her family. I never knew such people existed. But that little child of hers—there’s something troubling her. Her eyes look disturbed.”
A horrible thought entered my mind, but I quelled it. “You really didn’t have to trouble yourself too much over me. I just wanted to find out how you are after all these years.” She was rambling, somewhat sprightly all of a sudden. But Ester Lim fired her last shot for the evening and I was not prepared for it.
“I feel cold,” she said. “Please hold me.”
Or perhaps I was. Without a moment’s hesitation, I took off my jacket and gave it to her.
All the repulsion that had been gathering inside me now slapped me like a wind. I knew even then that I wouldn’t be wearing the jacket any more. It was an old black jacket and it seemed to me as though its color, which sometimes made me uneasy, had finally fulfilled itself.
I took measures not to run into Ester Lim by any chance, kept in touch with Mrs. Tan like a fugitive, and helped put together enough money for Ester Lim to get a passage to Manila. Ester Lim did not cause a headache during her two days with Mrs. Tan. But Mrs. Tan’s little daughter wouldn’t go near her. “She’s stranger,” she said the first time she saw Ester Lim.
Not very long after this, our maid told me as I ate a late breakfast that William, who had not shown up for some time, had been in the house early and taken the black jacket which I had put away in the storeroom, leaving her word to tell me that he was borrowing it. My father, who dislikes familiarities of this sort, told me to remind William at once about the jacket if he forgot to bring it back the next time he came. I told him the maid had said he was returning it later in the evening. The old man said he doubted it. When after two weeks William had not returned, he said. “I told you. Now you’re the one without a jacket.” I had others. But he was wondering why I didn’t seem to care much.
“Perhaps he’s with his in-laws in Valencia,” my mother said.
The weeks went by and we forgot about William. One morning my father very casually told me, as I prepared to go out, to find out about William who had been stabbed to death, at the Eterna, the funeral parlor whose owner we knew. “When?” I asked, sounding just as subdued. “I don’t know—find out.”
I went to the funeral parlor in the afternoon. Chit, the owner’s wife whom I knew from way back in the early seventies, was there. I went to it at once: “Did you have a stabbing victim recently?” She turned on an expression that became more and more quizzical as I gave details. “The name is William Angeles. He was stabbed at the cockpit. He was from Zamboanga. A soldier….” At this she suddenly remembered. “That was last week!” And then we went into an incoherent exchange.
“Why?”
“Nothing. I happened to know him. Who stabbed him?”
“He may have left the hospital already.”
“What? You mean he’s alive?”
“Yes, his wound was not serious.”
“But I thought he was brought here?”
“No, I mean the man who stabbed your friend.”
William was able to pull out his gun and shoot back. I gathered from another person later—the man who once asked if William was living with us—that William was jumped by his assailant as he entered the cockpit and was reeling from several stabs when he pulled out his gun and fired.
He hadn’t seen the incident. Chit had seen the body when it was brought to the funeral parlor. I asked her, inevitably:
“Was he wearing a black jacket?”
She looked, I thought, startled. “Why, yes!”
William had been buried in Valencia. For us there remained the problem of what to do with his clothes. Mother had said, “They must be made to pay! The poor boy! He was with us!” Her outrage was sudden and brief but it moved me— though I remained indifferent to William’s death. As I burned the clothes I wondered why she spoke of William’s murderer in the plural.
Now I understand better the look in his eyes the first time I saw him. They were the eyes of a man who had seen his own gore.
It was he who had copulated with the madwoman in Rimando’s story. But his murder had made him the baby, made him Kip. William’s killer was as much an instrument as the knife with which William was slaughtered—and redeemed. The force came from Ester Lim who, with equal mystery, had without her knowing it fulfilled her hallucination—that she was the dazzling woman promised in Revelation, who shall crush the Beast by giving birth to her child. Of course, William is dead and Ester Lim repeats, God knows in what foul hole in Manila, the cycle of the madwoman. To me, who haven’t cared, is allotted the notion that the madwoman’s child had been engendered and obliterated so I could be forty-three, so I could use the word “resplendent,” so I could love Emy.
“I’m sorry about the jacket.”
I am almost unable to finish saying this, hearing William saying it too at the same time.
We meant differently. He was apologizing for not being able to return the jacket, or for having taken it without my knowledge, or because it now bore two or three holes. I was sorry I had not been able to warn him that it was fatal. I looked at his face in the dusk and felt relieved that he did not seem to bear the funeral parlor’s grooming and cosmetics. But I also felt his inconsolable sadness. “It was lovelessness. You were spared because you were less loveless than I.” I realized with a chill that William and I had certain resemblances. “Did it ever occur to you that your parents have felt the terror of your life? That you are Kip whose haplessness saddens them more than their infirmities? They’d have wished that you drifted less and fathered a child—a gift that could make them gentler with their slow annihilation. No matter. The memory of the baby’s laughter has served you well. Even Rimando’s story has served you well, for though you wanted to exploit its horrible aspect, you’ve been unable to write it. Love has served you well. It served you well when Emy could not love you. It served you well when you recoiled from Ester Lim, from me. It would not have abandoned you if you had gone and consummated your urge for the laundrywoman, old and ugly, with whom you found yourself alone one night when you were a much younger man, fighting the strange tide that drew you to her as the dog had been drawn to the messy, blood-covered thing in Rimando’s story—if you had been the baby’s father which, in a way, you are. Perhaps it’s not me but you. Or why should you let a dead man—moreover, an unlettered one—speak your final words?”
Cesar Ruiz Aquino was born in Zamboanga City, and has a Ph.D. in Literature from Silliman University. He writes both poetry and prose for which he has won virtually all the national awards in the Philippines and one international – the SEA Write Award from the royal family of Thailand in 2004. His books include the short story collection Chronicles of Suspicion, the poetry collections Word Without End, In Samarkand, Caesuras: 155 New Poems, Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not the Shadow, and Fire If It Were Ice, Ice If It Were Fire, and the personal anthology Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader. He lives in Dumaguete City.
Sweet Haven is set in the little city of Donostia, where bad news travels fast. So when 16-year-old Naia is found in an illicit pornography video, the tight-knit community is outraged. They want answers. The finger of blame soon points to Narita, Naia’s absentee mother, for putting career ahead of duty. Now Narita is back from Manila and must face her past and the memories of a life she fled. In search of the answers to her daughter’s scandal, she follows a trail of evidence to reveal a web of family secrets, corruption, prejudice and the barriers of social class. Sweet Haven is a story of a family buffeted by an ailing and intransigent nation, of the simple and bitter ways by which a family falls apart, and the brave leaps they can take to put themselves back together.*
The day that followed was designated for one of the ordeals of her life with Daniel: the Sunday service at the university church. Luth opened her eyes to gray dawn light. She turned over in the hope of getting more sleep and discovered her husband lying by her side. In discomfort she squirmed away. It was rare, nowadays, that they awakened in the same bed together. But last night he had crept in almost as soon as she had lain down. Perturbed from the meeting with the lawyer, she had immediately sought to lay a barrier between the two of them by means of a formal talk.
“How can you be serious?” she said in her normal voice now, picking up the conversation that had trailed off into nothingness the night before, when he had turned from her and lapsed into unconsciousness. “Why do you keep encouraging that man? Do you think I’m an imbecile, that I don’t know we’re being used?”
His eyes were wide open, too.
“You say you want to take her to the police station and then to court. Do you realize what that will do to all of us? The shame?”
She could not abide being next to him, the sweat-damp covers binding their limbs. Was he dead? she wondered suddenly. Had he had an attack of some sort, or was he asleep, like a frog, with eyes open? But she was afraid to drag herself up, lean over and verify, lest he, in this inappropriate moment, reach for her.
Her husband moved, stretched his than limbs. He seemed to have gained ten years in the night. Luth escaped to the kitchen. In the sink was a used plate. An empty can of tuna fish sat on the counter, besieged by ants. Naia had crept out of her room some hours before to eat, and left the clean-up to her.
Luth breakfasted furtively, chewing and swallowing long after the hunger had been sated. Daniel busied himself in the garage. He revved the car engine a couple of times, humming in an annoying, joyless way. Luth knew he was casting around for something to do so he wouldn’t have to talk to her. Why didn’t he just turn his computer on? In the last year or so he, a sixty-one-year-old PhD, had discovered video games. Atrocious military fantasies were his favorite.
The door to Naia’s room was closed, as always these days. Luth tried the knob anyway. The door opened without resistance this time. The girl was asleep, on her stomach, her breathing almost inaudible. The air-conditioner had shut down automatically hours before, but the atmosphere was chilly nonetheless. The drawn curtains kept out the harsh morning light.
She paused by the bed. Who was this creature? What was this horrible thing they had accused her of? When I was her age I was a good girl, thought Luth. Never went with boys, never read dirty books, never touched myself. There were bailes at the town plaza that the “ladies” could enter free of charge, but I never went to any of them. At fifteen I was a good girl—no, not a girl, a woman already. I had four siblings to take care of, and twice a month my father’s two bastards came to the back door to beg. We had no maid; I ran the house.
Naia had kicked the sheets to the foot of the bed; her legs were long and smooth, without the damaging insect bite scars that so many lesser creatures bore, those pale round flaws, edged in black, that in Luth’s childhood were called diet, after the ten-centavo coins. This perfect body, warm and breathing, submerged in the early morning light, had been host to God knows how many men, Luth grieved. The entire community had had her granddaughter. Lashed her and branded her with jets of hot seed. The Naia who lay there sleeping was irredeemably wealthy with experience.
Luth opened a drawer at random. It held the usual clutter a child cannot throw away: elementary school IDs, notebooks filled with messages from classmates, a grubby old Nokia phone. There was one photograph, of a baby. Luth squinted. Which one? It would have to be Naia, she thought; the photo was in color. The hand that supported the infant around the waist wore a white lace glove. Luth peered closer. It was not a glove. It was a bandage. The hand was Antonia’s, then. The old injury. She shook her head to dispel sad memories—the appalling violence, the damage in its wake. Where are you? she mouthed to her younger daughter, always her favorite. Why didyou leave? Weren’t you happy here? Antonia had been gone two years. If she had stayed to guide the child, none of this would have happened.
A movement caught Luth’s eye. It was the computer, still running, a screensaver—a woman with wild red hair—silently flipping through the same four images. Impatient with such modernity, she pulled the plug on the machine, banishing the hungry, knowing face.
Naia rolled over on her back, exhaled. She was no longer beautiful, thought Luth. She was used. What a waste, those long eyelashes, that lovely, tragic mouth with the droopy upper lip. A waste, a waste.
The lashes fluttered: the girl was awake.
“Lola.”
Her voice was thin, as though from disuse. She sat up, smoothing down her T-shirt to cover her navel, the simple movements pained. “Lola, what are you doing? Those are my things.” Her head snapped around, checking the room to see what else had been disturbed. “I was downloading music!”
“Waste of electricity,” Luth managed, her heart thudding in her chest. She could not meet the girl’s gaze. The dark brows, the crescent eyes that were no longer perfect, that were, damaged, diseased.
“Lola, this is my room!”
“You don’t own anything in this house. Get dressed. You should have talked to that man yesterday. He promised to save you from shame. But of course you’re the one who knows best. All the time. Now we go to church. This is a Sunday like any other.”
“Luth?” Daniel called from the next room. “Leave the child alone. Let her do as she wants.”
Now it was eight and the sky was cloudless, the heat unrelieved. Luth took a shower to cover her weeping. There was a great void within her. The warm water sluiced over the hull that was her flesh. Mercifully her husband left her alone as she dressed in the bedroom. Occasionally he liked to surprise her by easing himself through the door, watching her movements with the diffident smile she had once loved. She hated their mutual nakedness, hated the casualness with which, nowadays, she could shed her clothes and converse with him, impervious to the nut -brown shriveled organ nodding placidly at his groin. This was all it came to—the lust, the dreams, the dance.
The maid opened the gate for them, her gaze downcast, her movements self-conscious. Afraid of getting yelled at again. Daniel had washed the car. Wiped the windows with a squeegee, scraped off the layers of dirt flung up by the wheels. She knew he would be pleased with himself, and expect a few noises of approval from her. Luth could muster nothing. She got into the passenger’s seat. The backseat looked as always, a hodgepodge of books and student papers and, today, a crumpled supermarket bag. She gritted her teeth.
They chugged through the neighborhood, an enclave of fading wooden cottages sheltered by acacia trees. The Pastors had lived in a house rented from the university for nearly forty years, as did their neighbors, administrative staff and teachers like her and her husband. Luth had loved these unpaved lanes, their American names—Mercer, Dereham, Westbrook—the gardens bursting with bougainvillea and orchids and hibiscus, a riot of color all year round. Over time she had observed with chagrin the gradual decay of the houses. The university left maintenance to its tenants, but no one cared enough to spruce up their homes, not even with a fresh coat of paint now and then. It wasn’t part of the culture. But it was standard practice to gripe about how Sweethaven U worked its employees like slaves. On paper, their salaries had increased in proportion to their seniority, but those wages had failed to account for inflation or the devaluation of the peso that began in the 1980s.
Luth saw no one, but fancied eyes peering through the grimy screens at the windows of each cottage, the inhabitants gleefully tracking their progress. At last they reached Urbino Road, city territory, a route that connected their neighborhood of faculty homes to the university campus. Here they were just one vehicle among several traveling the two-lane stretch. The houses and store fronts had kept pace with the times—they passed a restaurant opened not two years before, a privately-run kindergarten in a residential bungalow, and a handful of Internet stations, their glass doors papered with video game posters. Money from a generation working overseas. Luth and Daniel entered the university through one of the side gates, the guard on duty peering at their faces beyond the access sticker on the windshield. Small brown discs of acacia leaves, shed for the summer, spun up from their wheels as they drove down the avenue to the church. Luth cast a helpless glance at the edifice as they parked. Its concrete walls gleamed with a fresh coat of white paint, as in those early years, when she was a newly minted Protestant matron. The chimes sounded about their ears, calling to all of Sweethaven. Pretending to be searching in the glove compartment of the car, they waited until most of the worshippers had come up the walk and through the portals and been seated. Students mostly, dormers by alumni from the neighboring islands: boys and girls in shockingly casual jeans and flimsy Made-in-China cotton dresses. The old guard of Sweethaven would have arrived long ago and found their usual pews.
“Showtime!” Daniel said in that cheery performance voice of his, and together they marched up the steps and through the iron-bound winglike wooden doors and found an empty space in the center of the nave, just as the recorded chimes, broadcast from a speaker on the roof, came to an echoing end.
Luth sweated in her size-forty-eight silk dress, a gift that Antonia had sent her from Europe. The fabric that sheathed her was all wrong for this climate. Electric fans that stood in the side aisles brought the smells of fresh-soaped skin and a hundred different perfumes to her nose, but did nothing to dispel the heat. Last year she had sworn to keep her pain to herself—the humiliations of her marriage, the shock of her husband’s betrayal—and show up at church by Daniel’s side. Staking her claim. That had been in August. She had kept her dignity, put on clothes too fine for the lives they led, styled her hair. Above all, she had kept her face frozen and turned to the front. No one would ever catch her scanning the crowd for some foolish young graduate student face. The worst period of her life, and it was not yet over.
The scripture reading ended, and the minister claimed the pulpit. Daniel grunted approvingly by her side. He was always attentive to what was going on, or managed to put up a passable show. Wretchedly she pumped her palm frond fan.
Today the sermon was about listening. The minister used the patronizing, engulfing “we.” Were we attuned to the voices of our children, could we discern God’s word in the jumble of our mundane concerns? One could be an intellectual giant and yet remain a spiritual pygmy. Reverend Manguerra gripped the Pulpit, glared at his congregation, looked directly at Luth and Daniel’s pew. Smug from a scholarship at—what was that American school now? Wesleyan. A scholarship to Wesleyan. What kind of school was that? Had he been there on a minority Program? In his day her husband had competed with the best of them, the best of those whites. In his day.
Now people were reaching for their wallets, and the soft strains of a guitar penetrated Luth’s thoughts. In the center aisle, a man stood before a microphone, one foot up on a stool to support the instrument. He smiled as he sang the offertory melody, inviting the congregation to share in a moment of folksy intimacy, and at the sight and sound of him, Luth’s heart thudded violently once more and she thought she might throw up right on her pointed leather shoe tips. It was Rinky Holland. In his mid-fifties but with a voice as sweet and seductive as a youth’s. He wore a sports shirt and khakis, as though to mock the perfumes and embroidered barongs of the old guard. Two girls in the pew in front of her plucked at each other in delight.
Then Reverend Manguerra was praying for wisdom and courage, that dads and moms and, yes, grandparents, too, might gently guide the beloved among them who had strayed. Only God could condemn, and only God could forgive. Heads swiveled in their direction: the dean of women and her chemistry teacher husband, the head nurse at the pediatric ward, the grade school principal. There they sat, poor things, Daniel Pastor and his wife, Luzviminda, such a comedown, but oh, how they deserved it. How wonderful the Lord’s justice was, in the end. Rejoice! How he managed after years of seeming indifference to I take the proud among them down.
A collective mumble and clatter and the peal of the organ in the choir loft marked the end of the service. Luth would have bolted, first out the door, but her husband was in the way. They stood trapped in the pew, while the congregation inched through the aisle before them, men beaming at one another, reaching out to clasp hands, women calling greetings to friends. Nobody addressed the Pastors, but their every breath was marked.
Rinky Holland made his way up the aisle, smiling to himself. His wife, Emily, followed. She was the high school principal; her signature was first on the letter that had informed them of Naia’s crime and punishment. They moved toward the rear of the church with a cat-clean confidence, the woman a beauty as she had been for as long as Luth had known her: pale, unlined skin; tiny, perfect figure; and dark, soulful Spanish-heiress eyes.
Emily stopped at their pew. “Dan, how are you? These must be terrible times.”
“How are you, Emily, and congratulations to Rinky. What a wonderful solo that was.”
Mrs. Holland frowned, took in his insane smile, then forged on.
“I know your present troubles are difficult to talk about. Our family has always been friends with yours. I would like to step in now and help you myself. Unfortunately it is not proper for a man to receive counseling from a woman. But your wife, Daniel, with all my heart I reach out to your wife.”
Luth’s eyes flickered warily from the upturned face. Emily had spoken as though she were not present. Her gaze fell on the young man who waited beyond his mother. His name was Brent; he was Naia’s age and was some kind of cadet officer at their high school. The almond eyes that met hers were unpleasant, watchful. Sweat trickled from Luth’s temples, down to her jawline and her throat. Her bosom heaved beneath the orchid-purple silk. She understood that he was laughing at her, laughing with his mouth in a perfect serious line, this dark, slender boy in trendy khaki trousers, fondling a late-model mobile phone, looking as if he came from a family of millionaire generals. Looking at her and laughing.
“Snake!” Luth spat.
The look of piety vanished from Emily’s face. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Snake.’ You’re vampires. Snakes. You feed off People’s misery.”
Emily’s eyes narrowed. “People are in misery, Mrs. Pastor, because they bring it on themselves, in their solitude and pride.”
Brent Holland nodded to a friend, smirked, and, pocketing his mobile, sauntered off toward a wing exit. Luth lunged after him, determined to grab him and shake the arrogance out of him as she might have done had he been a fourth-grader in her charge, but Daniel checked her, clamping a hand on her arm.
She surrendered to panic, turning this way and that to seek support from the other parishioners and seeing nothing but malicious glee in their faces. They could have been peasants gawking at a knife fight. Daniel was quietly leading her down the aisle. She tried to snap off the press of his fingers at her elbow.
Emily had quite recovered herself and pursued them a few token steps. “Luth, I know you are under duress,” she said. “I cannot even imagine what pain you must be going through. You really, really must open up now.”
“Tell that woman to shut up,” she panted.
Daniel steered her out onto the lawn and in the direction of the science complex parking lot. A woman behind them gasped, “What happened? Who was it?” Another declared, “Scandalosa.” She could still hear Emily Holland’s parting shot: “You are more than welcome to come to our home for a cup of tea.”
They walked rapidly away, heads down, two fugitives.
* The summary of the novel is slightly modified from the text in the Rocking Chair Books website.
Lakambini Sitoy is the author of two collections of short stories, Mens Rea and Jungle Planet. She received the David T.K. Wong fellowship from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom in 2003 and has an M.A. from Roskilde University, Denmark, in the fields of English Studies and Cultural Encounters, both under the Department of Culture and Identity. She has also received numerous prizes in the annual Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in the Philippines, was a recipient of the Philippines Graphic Literary Awards and Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, and was a columnist and editor at the Manila Times. She lives in Denmark. Sweet Haven is her first novel.
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