The Use of Force

The Use of Force

The Use of Force

🎥

by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

Approximate Word Count: 1564

They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick.

When I arrived I was met by the mother, a big startled looking woman, very clean and apologetic who merely said, Is this the doctor? and let me in. In the back, she added. You must excuse us, doctor, we have her in the kitchen where it is warm. It is very damp here sometimes.

The child was fully dressed and sitting on her father's lap near the kitchen table. He tried to get up, but I motioned for him not to bother, took off my overcoat and started to look things over. I could see that they were all very nervous, eyeing me up and down distrustfully. As often, in such cases, they weren't telling me more than they had to, it was up to me to tell them; that's why they were spending three dollars on me.

The child was fairly eating me up with her cold, steady eyes, and no expression to her face whatever. She did not move and seemed, inwardly, quiet; an unusually attractive little thing, and as strong as a heifer in appearance. But her face was flushed, she was breathing rapidly, and I realized that she had a high fever. She had magnificent blonde hair, in profusion. One of those picture children often reproduced in advertising leaflets and the photogravure sections of the Sunday papers.

She's had a fever for three days, began the father and we don't know what it comes from. My wife has given her things, you know, like people do, but it don't do no good. And there's been a lot of sickness around. So we tho't you'd better look her over and tell us what is the matter.

As doctors often do I took a trial shot at it as a point of departure. Has she had a sore throat?

Both parents answered me together, No . . . No, she says her throat don't hurt her.

Does your throat hurt you? added the mother to the child. But the little girl's expression didn't change nor did she move her eyes from my face.

Have you looked?

I tried to, said the mother, but I couldn't see.

As it happens we had been having a number of cases of diphtheria in the school to which this child went during that month and we were all, quite apparently, thinking of that, though no one had as yet spoken of the thing.

Well, I said, suppose we take a look at the throat first. I smiled in my best professional manner and asking for the child's first name I said, come on, Mathilda, open your mouth and let's take a look at your throat.

Nothing doing.

Aw, come on, I coaxed, just open your mouth wide and let me take a look. Look, I said opening both hands wide, I haven't anything in my hands. Just open up and let me see.

Such a nice man, put in the mother. Look how kind he is to you. Come on, do what he tells you to. He won't hurt you.

At that I ground my teeth in disgust. If only they wouldn't use the word "hurt" I might be able to get somewhere. But I did not allow myself to be hurried or disturbed but speaking quietly and slowly I approached the child again.

As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor.

Both the mother and father almost turned themselves inside out in embarrassment and apology. You bad girl, said the mother, taking her and shaking her by one arm. Look what you've done. The nice man . . .

For heaven's sake, I broke in. Don't call me a nice man to her. I'm here to look at her throat on the chance that she might have diphtheria and possibly die of it. But that's nothing to her. Look here, I said to the child, we're going to look at your throat. You're old enough to understand what I'm saying. Will you open it now by yourself or shall we have to open it for you?

Not a move. Even her expression hadn't changed. Her breaths however were coming faster and faster. Then the battle began. I had to do it. I had to have a throat culture for her own protection. But first I told the parents that it was entirely up to them. I explained the danger but said that I would not insist on a throat examination so long as they would take the responsibility.

If you don't do what the doctor says you'll have to go to the hospital, the mother admonished her severely.

Oh yeah? I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat, the parents were contemptible to me. In the ensuing struggle they grew more and more abject, crushed, exhausted while she surely rose to magnificent heights of insane fury of effort bred of her terror of me.

The father tried his best, and he was a big man but the fact that she was his daughter, his shame at her behavior and his dread of hurting her made him release her just at the critical times when I had almost achieved success, till I wanted to kill him. But his dread also that she might have diphtheria made him tell me to go on, go on though he himself was almost fainting, while the mother moved back and forth behind us raising and lowering her hands in an agony of apprehension.

Put her in front of you on your lap, I ordered, and hold both her wrists.

But as soon as he did the child let out a scream. Don't, you're hurting me. Let go of my hands. Let them go I tell you. Then she shrieked terrifyingly, hysterically. Stop it! Stop it! You're killing me!

Do you think she can stand it, doctor! said the mother.

You get out, said the husband to his wife. Do you want her to die of diphtheria?

Come on now, hold her, I said.

Then I grasped the child's head with my left hand and tried to get the wooden tongue depressor between her teeth. She fought, with clenched teeth, desperately! But now I also had grown furious--at a child. I tried to hold myself down but I couldn't. I know how to expose a throat for inspection. And I did my best. When finally I got the wooden spatula behind the last teeth and just the point of it into the mouth cavity, she opened up for an instant but before I could see anything she came down again and gripping the wooden blade between her molars she reduced it to splinters before I could get it out again.

Aren't you ashamed, the mother yelled at her. Aren't you ashamed to act like that in front of the doctor?

Get me a smooth-handled spoon of some sort, I told the mother. We're going through with this. The child's mouth was already bleeding. Her tongue was cut and she was screaming in wild hysterical shrieks. Perhaps I should have desisted and come back in an hour or more. No doubt it would have been better. But I have seen at least two children lying dead in bed of neglect in such cases, and feeling that I must get a diagnosis now or never I went at it again. But the worst of it was that I too had got beyond reason. I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it.

The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one's self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is a social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end.

In a final unreasoning assault I overpowered the child's neck and jaws. I forced the heavy silver spoon back of her teeth and down her throat till she gagged. And there it was--both tonsils covered with membrane. She had fought valiantly to keep me from knowing her secret. She had been hiding that sore throat for three days at least and lying to her parents in order to escape just such an outcome as this.

Now truly she was furious. She had been on the defensive before but now she attacked. Tried to get off her father's lap and fly at me while tears of defeat blinded her eyes.

All Over The World

All Over The World

ALL OVER THE WORLD
by Vicente Rivera, Jr.

ONE evening in August 1941, I came out of a late movie to a silent, cold night. I shivered a little as I stood for a moment in the narrow street, looking up at the distant sky, alive with stars. I stood there, letting the night wind seep through me, and listening. The street was empty, the houses on the street dim—with the kind of ghostly dimness that seems to embrace sleeping houses. I had always liked empty streets in the night; I had always stopped for a while in these streets listening for something I did not quite know what. Perhaps for low, soft cries that empty streets and sleeping houses seem to share in the night.

I lived in an old, nearly crumbling apartment house just across the street from the moviehouse. From the street, I could see into the open courtyard, around which rooms for the tenants, mostly a whole family to a single room, were ranged. My room, like all the other rooms on the groundfloor, opened on this court. Three other boys, my cousins, shared the room with me. As I turned into the courtyard from the street, I noticed that the light over our study-table, which stood on the corridor outside our room, was still burning. Earlier in the evening after supper, I had taken out my books to study, but I went to a movie instead. I must have forgotten to turn off the light; apparently, the boys had forgotten, too.

I went around the low screen that partitioned off our “study” and there was a girl reading at the table. We looked at each other, startled. I had never seen her before. She was about eleven years old, and she wore a faded blue dress. She had long, straight hair falling to her shoulders. She was reading my copy of Greek Myths.

The eyes she had turned to me were wide, darkened a little by apprehension. For a long time neither of us said anything. She was a delicately pretty girl with a fine, smooth. pale olive skin that shone richly in the yellow light. Her nose was straight, small and finely molded. Her lips, full and red, were fixed and tense. And there was something else about her. Something lonely? something lost?

“I know,” I said, “I like stories, too. I read anything good I find lying around. Have you been reading long?”

“Yes,” she said. not looking at me now. She got up slowly, closing the book. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you want to read anymore? I asked her, trying to smile, trying to make her feel that everything was all right.

“No.” she said, “thank you.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, picking up the book. “It’s late. You ought to be in bed. But, you can take this along.”

She hesitated, hanging back, then shyly she took the book, brought it to her side. She looked down at her feet uncertain as to where to turn.

“You live here?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“What room?”

She turned her face and nodded towards the far corner, across the courtyard, to a little room near the communal kitchen. It was the room occupied by the janitor: a small square room with no windows except for a transom above the door.

“You live with Mang Lucio?”

“He’s my uncle.”

“How long have you been here? I haven’t seen you before, have I?”

“I’ve always been here. I’ve seen you.”

“Oh. Well, good night—your name?”

“Maria.”

“Good night, Maria.”

She turned quickly, ran across the courtyard, straight to her room, and closed the door without looking back.

I undressed, turned off the light and lay in bed dreaming of far-away things. I was twenty-one and had a job for the first time. The salary was not much and I lived in a house that was slowly coming apart, but life seemed good. And in the evening when the noise of living had died down and you lay safe in bed, you could dream of better times, look back and ahead, and find that life could be gentle—even with the hardness. And afterwards, when the night had grown colder, and suddenly you felt alone in the world, adrift, caught in a current of mystery that came in the hour between sleep and waking, the vaguely frightening loneliness only brought you closer to everything, to the walls and the shadows on the walls, to the other sleeping people in the room, to everything within and beyond this house, this street, this city, everywhere.

I met Maria again one early evening, a week later, as I was coming home from the office. I saw her walking ahead of me, slowly, as if she could not be too careful, and with a kind of grownup poise that was somehow touching. But I did not know it was Maria until she stopped and I overtook her.

She was wearing a white dress that had been old many months ago. She wore a pair of brown sneakers that had been white once. She had stopped to look at the posters of pictures advertised as “Coming” to our neighborhood theater.

“Hello,” I said, trying to sound casual.

She smiled at me and looked away quickly. She did not say anything nor did she step away. I felt her shyness, but there was no self-consciousness, none of the tenseness and restraint of the night we first met. I stood beside her, looked at the pictures tacked to a tilted board, and tried whistling a tune.

She turned to go, hesitated, and looked at me full in the eyes. There was again that wide-eyed—and sad? —stare. I smiled, feeling a remote desire to comfort her, as if it would do any good, as if it was comfort she needed.

“I’ll return your book now,” she said.

“You’ve finished it?”

“Yes.”

We walked down the shadowed street. Magallanes Street in Intramuros, like all the other streets there, was not wide enough, hemmed in by old, mostly unpainted houses, clumsy and unlovely, even in the darkening light of the fading day.

We went into the apartment house and I followed her across the court. I stood outside the door which she closed carefully after her. She came out almost immediately and put in my hands the book of Greek myths. She did not look at me as she stood straight and remote.

“My name is Felix,” I said.

She smiled suddenly. It was a little smile, almost an unfinished smile. But, somehow, it felt special, something given from way deep inside in sincere friendship.

I walked away whistling. At the door of my room, I stopped and looked back. Maria was not in sight. Her door was firmly closed.

August, 1941, was a warm month. The hangover of summer still permeated the air, specially in Intramuros. But, like some of the days of late summer, there were afternoons when the weather was soft and clear, the sky a watery green, with a shell-like quality to it that almost made you see through and beyond, so that, watching it made you lightheaded.

I walked out of the office one day into just such an afternoon. The day had been full of grinding work—like all the other days past. I was tired. I walked slowly, towards the far side of the old city, where traffic was not heavy. On the street there were old trees, as old as the walls that enclosed the city. Half-way towards school, I changed my mind and headed for the gate that led out to Bonifacio Drive. I needed stiffer winds, wider skies. I needed all of the afternoon to myself.

Maria was sitting on the first bench, as you went up the sloping drive that curved away from the western gate. She saw me before I saw her. When I looked her way, she was already smiling that half-smile of hers, which even so told you all the truth she knew, without your asking.

“Hello,” I said. “It’s a small world.”

“What?”

“I said it’s nice running into you. Do you always come here?”

“As often as I can. I go to many places.”

“Doesn’t your uncle disapprove?”

“No. He’s never around. Besides, he doesn’t mind anything.”

“Where do you go?”

“Oh, up on the walls. In the gardens up there, near Victoria gate. D’you know?”

“I think so. What do you do up there?”

“Sit down and—”

“And what?”

“Nothing. Just sit down.”

She fell silent. Something seemed to come between us. She was suddenly far-away. It was like the first night again. I decided to change the subject.

“Look,” I said, carefully, “where are your folks?”

“You mean, my mother and father?”

“Yes. And your brothers and sisters, if any.”

“My mother and father are dead. My elder sister is married. She’s in the province. There isn’t anybody else.”

“Did you grow up with your uncle?”

“I think so.”

We were silent again. Maria had answered my questions without embarrassment. almost without emotion, in a cool light voice that had no tone.

“Are you in school, Maria?”

“Yes.”

“What grade?”

“Six.”

“How d’you like it?”

“Oh, I like it.”

“I know you like reading.”

She had no comment. The afternoon had waned. The breeze from the sea had died down. The last lingering warmth of the sun was now edged with cold. The trees and buildings in the distance seemed to flounder in a red-gold mist. It was a time of day that never failed to carry an enchantment for me. Maria and I sat still together, caught in some spell that made the silence between us right, that made our being together on a bench in the boulevard, man and girl, stranger and stranger, a thing not to be wondered at, as natural and inevitable as the lengthening shadows before the setting sun.

Other days came, and soon it was the season of the rain. The city grew dim and gray at the first onslaught of the monsoon. There were no more walks in the sun. I caught a cold.

Maria and I had become friends now, though we saw each other infrequently. I became engrossed in my studies. You could not do anything else in a city caught in the rains. September came and went.

In November, the sun broke through the now ever present clouds, and for three or four days we had bright clear weather. Then, my mind once again began flitting from my desk, to the walls outside the office, to the gardens on the walls and the benches under the trees in the boulevards. Once, while working on a particularly bad copy on the news desk, my mind scattered, the way it sometimes does and, coming together again, went back to that first meeting with Maria. And the remembrance came clear, coming into sharper focus—the electric light, the shadows around us, the stillness. And Maria, with her wide-eyed stare, the lost look in her eyes…

IN December, I had a little fever. On sick leave, I went home to the province. I stayed three days. I felt restless, as if I had strayed and lost contact with myself. I suppose you got that way from being sick,

A pouring rain followed our train all the way back to Manila. Outside my window, the landscape was a series of dissolved hills and fields. What is it in the click of the wheels of a train that makes you feel gray inside? What is it in being sick, in lying abed that makes you feel you are awake in a dream, and that you are just an occurrence in the crying grief of streets and houses and people?

In December, we had our first air-raid practice.

I came home one night through darkened streets, peopled by shadows. There was a ragged look to everything, as if no one and nothing cared any more for appearances.

I reached my room just as the siren shrilled. I undressed and got into my old clothes. It was dark, darker than the moment after moon-set. I went out on the corridor and sat in a chair. All around me were movements and voices. anonymous and hushed, even when they laughed.

I sat still, afraid and cold.

“Is that you. Felix?”

“Yes. Maria.”

She was standing beside my chair, close to the wall. Her voice was small and disembodied in the darkness. A chill went through me, She said nothing more for a long time.

“I don’t like the darkness,” she said.

“Oh, come now. When you sleep, you turn the lights off, don’t you?”

“It’s not like this darkness,” she said, softly. “It’s all over the world.”

We did not speak again until the lights went on. Then she was gone.

The war happened not long after.

At first, everything was unreal. It was like living on a motion picture screen, with yourself as actor and audience. But the sounds of bombs exploding were real enough, thudding dully against the unready ear.

In Intramuros, the people left their homes the first night of the war. Many of them slept in the niches of the old walls the first time they heard the sirens scream in earnest. That evening, I returned home to find the apartment house empty. The janitor was there. My cousin who worked in the army was there. But the rest of the tenants were gone.

I asked Mang Lucio, “Maria?”

“She’s gone with your aunt to the walls.” he told me. “They will sleep there tonight.”

My cousin told me that in the morning we would transfer to Singalong. There was a house available. The only reason he was staying, he said, was because they were unable to move our things. Tomorrow that would be taken care of immediately.

“And you, Mang Lucio?”

“I don’t know where I could go.”

We ate canned pork and beans and bread. We slept on the floor, with the lights swathed in black cloth. The house creaked in the night and sent off hollow echoes. We slept uneasily.

I woke up early. It was disquieting to wake up to stillness in that house which rang with children’s voices and laughter the whole day everyday. In the kitchen, there were sounds and smells of cooking.

“Hello,” I said.

It was Maria, frying rice. She turned from the stove and looked at me for a long time. Then, without a word, she turned back to her cooking.

“Are you and your uncle going away?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did he not tell you?”

“No.”

“We’re moving to Singalong.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Well, anyway, I’ll come back tonight. Maybe this afternoon. We’ll not have to say goodbye till then.”

She did not say anything. I finished washing and went back to my room. I dressed and went out.

At noon, I went to Singalong to eat. All our things were there already, and the folks were busy putting the house in order. As soon as I finished lunch, I went back to the office. There were few vehicles about. Air-raid alerts were frequent. The brightness of the day seemed glaring. The faces of people were all pale and drawn.

In the evening, I went back down the familiar street. I was stopped many times by air-raid volunteers. The house was dark. I walked back to the street. I stood for a long time before the house. Something did not want me to go away just yet. A light burst in my face. It was a volunteer.

“Do you live here?”

“I used to. Up to yesterday. I’m looking for the janitor.”

“Why, did you leave something behind?”

“Yes, I did. But I think I’ve lost it now.”

“Well, you better get along, son. This place, the whole area. has been ordered evacuated. Nobody lives here anymore.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Nobody.”

Big Sister

Big Sister

BIG SISTER
by Consorcio Borje

"YOU can use this," said Inciang, smiling brightly and trying to keep her tears back. "It is still quite strong, and you will not outgrow if for a year yet."

Itong watched his sister fold his old khaki shirt carefully and pack it into the rattan tampipi, which already bulged with his clothes. He stood helplessly by, shifting his weight from one bare foot to the other, looking down at his big sister, who had always done everything for him.

"There, that's done," said Inciang, pressing down the lid. "Give me that rope. I'll truss it up for you. And be careful with it, Itong? Your Tia Orin has been very kind to lend it to us for your trip to Vigan."

Itong assented and obediently handed his sister the rope. His eyes followed her deft movements with visible impatience; his friends were waiting outside to play with him. He was twelve years old, and growing fast.

Sometimes when Inciang toiling in the kitchen, sweeping the house, or washing clothes by the well in the front yard held a long session with herself, she admitted she did not want Itong to grow. She wanted to keep him the boy that he was, always. Inciang had raised Itong from the whimpering, little, red lump of flesh that he was when their mother died soon after giving birth to him. She had been as a mother to him as long as she could remember.

"May I go out now and play, Manang?"

And Inciang heard herself saying, "It will be a year before you will see your friends again… Go now."

She listened to the sound of his footsteps down the bamboo ladder, across the bare earthen front yard. Then she heard him whistle. There were answering whistles, running feet.

"TELL him, Inciang," her father had said. That was about three months ago. Inciang was washing clothes by the well with Tia Orin.

"Yes, you tell him, Inciang," said Tia Orin. It was always Inciang who had dealt with Itong if anything of importance happened.

Inciang rose to her feet. She had been squatting long over her washtub and pains shot up her spine.

"Hoy, Itong," called Inciang. Itong was out in the street playing with Nena, Lacay Illo's daughter. "Hoy, Itong," called Inciang. "Come here. I have something to tell you."

Itong gave a playful push at Nena before he came running. He smiled as he stepped over the low bamboo barrier at the gate which kept the neighbors' pigs out. How bright his face was! Inciang's heart skipped a beat.

"You have something to tell me, Manang?"

Inciang brushed her sudsy hands against her soiled skirt. "Yes. It is about your going to Vigan."

Itong sat down suddenly on the barrier.

"Your are going to high school, after all, Itong," Inciang said. She said it defiantly, as if afraid that Itong would like going away. She looked up at her father, as if to ask him to confirm her words. Father sat leaning out of the low front window, smoking his pipe.

Itong looked at her foolishly. Inciang's heart felt heavy within her, but she said, with a little reproach, "Why, Itong, aren't you glad? We thought you wanted to go to high school."

Itong began to cry. He sat there in front of his father and his sister and his aunt Orin, and tears crept down his cheeks.

"The supervising principal teacher, Mr. Cablana," went on Inciang in a rush, "came this afternoon and told us you may go to high school without paying the fees, because you are the balibictorian."

Itong nodded.

"Now, don't cry," said his aunt Orin. "You are no longer a baby."

"Yes," added the father. "And Mr. Cablana also promised to give his laundry to Inciang, so you'll have money for your books. Mr. Cablana is also sure to get the Castila's laundry for Inciang, and that will do for your food, besides the rice that we shall be sending you. Stop crying."

"Your Tata Cilin's house is in Nagpartian, very near the high school. You will stay with him. And," Inciang said, "I don't have to accompany you to Vigan, Itong. You'll ride in the passenger bus where your cousin Pedro is the conductor. Your cousin Pedro will show you where your Tata Cilin lives. Your cousin Merto, son of your uncle Cilin, will help you register in school. He is studying in the same school. Will you stop crying?"

Itong looked at Inciang, and the tears continued creeping down his cheeks. Itong was so young. Inciang began to scold him. "Is that the way you should act? Why, you're old now!"

Then Itong ran into the house and remained inside. His father laughed heartily as he pulled at his pipe. Inciang started to laugh also, but her tears began to fall fast also, and she bent her head over her washtub and she began scrubbing industriously, while she laughed and laughed. Outside the gate, standing with her face pressed against the fence, was Nena, watching the tableau with a great wonder in her eyes.

Inciang had watched Itong grow up from a new-born baby. She was six years old when she carried him around, straddled over her hip. She kept house, did the family wash, encouraged Itong to go through primary, then intermediate school, when he showed rebellion against school authority. When he was in the second grade and could speak more English words than Inciang, her father began to laugh at her; also her Tia Orin and her brood had laughed at her.

"Schooling would never do me any good," Inciang had said lightly.

She watched Itong go through school, ministering to his needs lovingly, doing more perhaps for him than was good for him. Once she helped him fight a gang of rowdies from the other end of the town. Or better, she fought the gang for him using the big rice ladle she was using in the kitchen at the time.

And her father had never married again, being always faithful to the memory of Inciang's mother. The farm which he tilled produced enough rice and vegetables for the family's use, and such few centavos as Lacay Iban would now and then need for the cockpit he got out of Inciang's occasional sales of vegetables in the public market or of a few bundles of rice in the camarin. Few were the times when they were hard pressed for money. One was the time when Inciang's mother died. Another was now that Itong was going to Vigan.

Inciang was working to send him away, when all she wanted was to keep him always at her side! She spent sleepless nights thinking of how Itong would fare in a strange town amidst strange people, even though their parientes would be near him. It would not be the same. She cried again and again, it would not be the same.

WHEN she finished tying up the tampipi, she pushed it to one side of the main room of the house and went to the window. Itong was with a bunch of his friends under the acacia tree across the dirt road. They were sitting on the buttress roots of the tree, chin in hand, toes making figures in the dust. And, of course, Itong's closest friend, Nena, was there with them. Strange, Inciang thought, how Itong, even though already twelve years old, still played around with a girl.

And then, that afternoon, the departure. The passenger truck pausing at the gate. The tampipi of Itong being tossed up to the roof of the truck. The bag of rice. The crate of chickens. The young coconuts for Tata Cilin's children. Then Itong himself, in the pair of rubber shoes which he had worn at the graduation exercises and which since then had been kept in the family trunk. Itong being handed into the truck.

Lacay Iban, Tia Orin, and Inciang were all there shouting instructions. All the children in the neighborhood were there. Nena was there. It was quite a crowd come to watch Itong go away for a year! A year seemed forever to Inciang. Itong sat in the dim interior of the bus, timid and teary-eyed. Inciang glanced again and again at him, her heart heavy within her, and then as the bus was about to leave, there was such a pleading look in his eyes that Inciang had to go close to him, and he put his hand on hers.

"I'm afraid, Manang."

"Why should you be?" said Inciang loudly, trying to drown out her own fears. "This boy. Why, you're going to Vigan, where there are many things to see. I haven't been to Vigan, myself. You're a lucky boy."

"I don't want to leave you."

"I'll come to see you in Vigan." She had considered the idea and knew that she could not afford the trip.

"Manang," said Itong, "I have a bag of lipay seeds and marbles tied to the rafter over the shelf for the plates. See that no one takes it away, will you?"

"Yes."

"And, Manang, next time you make linubbian, don't forget to send Nena some, ah?"

Inciang nodded. "You like Nena very much?"

"Yes," coloring a little.

Itong had never concealed anything from her. He had been secretive with his father, with his aunt Orin, but never with her.

From Vigan, Itong wrote his sister only once a month so as to save on stamps and writing paper. His letters were full of expressions of warm endearment, and Inciang read them over and over again aloud to her father and to Tia Orin and her brood who came to listen, and when her eyes were dim with reading, Inciang stood on a chair and put the letters away in the space between a bamboo rafter and the cogon roof.

"My dear sister," Itong would write in moro-moro Ilocano, "and you, my father, and Tia Orin, I can never hope to repay my great debt to all of you." And then a narration of day-to-day events as they had happened to him.

And so a year passed. Inciang discussed Itong with her father every day. She wanted him to become a doctor, because doctors earned even one hundred pesos a month, and besides her father was complaining about pain in the small of his back. Lacay Iban, on the other hand, wanted Itong to become a lawyer, because lawyers were big shots and made big names and big money for themselves if they could have the courts acquit murderers, embezzlers, and other criminals despite all damning evidence of guilt, and people elected them to the National Assembly.

Itong's last letter said that classes were about to close. And then, one morning, when Inciang was washing the clothes of the supervising principal teacher, with a piece of cotton cloth thrown over her head and shoulders to shelter her from the hot sun, a passenger truck came to a stop beside the gate and a boy came out. He was wearing white short pants, a shirt, and a pair of leather slippers. It was Itong. But this stranger was taller by the width of a palm, and much narrower. Itong had grown so very fast, he had no time to fill in.

"Itong, are you here already?"

"It is vacation, Manang. Are you not glad to see me?"

They ran into each other's arms.

Father came in from the rice field later in the afternoon. "How is my lawyer?" he asked, and then he noticed Itong wore a handkerchief around his throat.

"I have a cold, Father," said Itong huskily.

"How long have you had it?"

"For several weeks now."

"Jesus, Maria, y Jose, Inciang, boil some ginger with a little sugar for your poor brother. This is bad. Are you sure your cold will not become tuberculosis?"

Itong drank the concoction, and it eased his sore throat a little. It seemed he would never get tired talking, though, telling Inciang and Lacay Iban about Vigan, about school, about the boys he met there, about his uncle Cilin and his cousin Merto and the other people at the house in Nagpartian.

He went out with his old cronies, but he had neglected his marbles. The marbles hung from the rafter over the shelf for the plates, gathering soot and dust and cobwebs. It was a reminder of Itong's earlier boyhood. And he did not go out with Nena any more. "Have you forgotten your friend, Nena, already?" Inciang asked him and he reddened. "Have you been giving her linubbian, Manang?" he asked. And when she said "Yes," he looked glad.

On those nights when he did not go out to play, he occupied himself with writing letters in the red light of the kerosene lamp. He used the wooden trunk for a table. Inciang accustomed to go to sleep soon after the chickens had gone to roost under the house, would lie on the bed-mat on the floor, looking up at Itong's back bent studiously over the wooden trunk.

Once she asked, "What are you writing about, Itong?"

And Itong had replied, "Nothing, Manang."

One day she found a letter in one of the pockets of his shirt in the laundry pile. She did not mean to read it, but she saw enough to know that the letter came from Nena. She could guess what Itong then had been writing. He had been writing to Nena. Itong had changed. He had begun keeping secrets from Inciang. Inciang noted the development with a slight tightening of her throat.

Yes, Itong had grown up. His old clothes appeared two sizes too small for him now. Inciang had to sew him new clothes. And when Itong saw the peso bills and the silver coins that Inciang kept under her clothes in the trunk toward the purchase of a silk kerchief which she had long desired, especially since the constabulary corporal had been casting eyes at her when she went to market, he snuggled up to Inciang and begged her to buy him a drill suit.

"A drill terno! You are sure a drill terno is what you want?"

Itong patted his throat, as if to clear it. "Please Manang?"

"Oh, you little beggar, you're always asking for things." She tried to be severe. She was actually sorry to part with the money. She had been in love with that silk kerchief for years now.

"Promise me, then to take care of your throat. Your cold is a bad one."

Another summertime, when Itong came home from school, he was a young man. He had put on his white drill suit and a pink shirt and a pink tie to match, and Inciang could hardly believe her eyes. She was even quite abashed to go meet him at the gate.

"Why, is it you, Itong?"

He was taller than she. He kept looking down at her. "Manang, who else could I be? You look at me so strangely." His voice was deep and husky, and it had queer inflections. "But how do I look?"

Inciang embraced him tears again in her eyes, as tears had been in her eyes a year ago when Itong had come back after the first year of parting but Itong pulled away hastily, and he looked back self-consciously at the people in the truck which was then starting away.

"You have your cold still, so I hear," said Lacay Iban, as he came out of the house to join his children.

"Yes," said Itong, his words accented in the wrong places. "I have my cold still."

Looking at Itong, Inciang understood. And Itong, too, understood. Lacay Iban and Inciang looked at each other, and when Inciang saw the broad grin spreading over her father's face, she knew he understood, too. He should know!

"Inciang," said Father gravely. Inciang wrested her eyes from Nena whom she saw was looking at Itong shyly from behind the fence of her father's front yard. "Inciang, boil some ginger and vinegar for your poor brother. He has that bad cold still."

Inciang wept deep inside of her as she cooked rice in the kitchen a little later. She had seen Itong stay at the door and make signs to Nena. She resented his attentions to Nena. She resented his height, his pink shirt, his necktie.

But that night, as she lay awake on the floor, waiting for Itong to come home, she knew despite all the ache of her heart, that she could not keep Itong forever young, forever the boy whom she had brought up. That time would keep him growing for several years yet, and more distant to her. And then all the bitterness in her heart flowed out in tears.

In the morning, when Nena came to borrow one of the pestles. "We are three to pound rice, Manang Inciang; may we borrow one of your pestles?" Inciang could smile easily at Nena. She could feel a comradely spirit toward Nena growing within her. After all, she thought, as she gave Nena the pestle, she never had a sister, she would like to see how it was to have a sister. A good-looking one like Nena. Inciang smiled at Nena, and Nena blushing, smiled back at her.

The Story of An Hour

The Story of An Hour

The Story of An Hour

by Kate Chopin

This story was first published in 1894 as The Dream of an Hour before being republished under this title in 1895. We encourage students and teacher to use our The Story of An Hour - Study Guide to learn more about the story and Feminist Literature - Study Guide for more on the genre.

Carl Halsoe, Waiting by the Window, 1863

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under the breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.

Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."

"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.

Meeting

Meeting

MEETING
by Consorcio Borje

THE little church stood in the shadow of acacia trees. A narrow gravel path lined with cucharita hedges led from the street into its cool, quiet yard with the moss on the dim boles of the trees and the dew on the grasses. The roar of the dusty, blindingly white city surged and broke like a sea along the concrete pavements that skirted the churchyard, but went no farther.

At the whitewashed wooden gate, the young man stood diffidently. Nervously fingering his battered felt hat, he pushed in the gate, stepped inside, allowed it to swing back, and then slowly walked down the path.

The chilly dampness of the place rested like a cool hand upon his fevered brow, and he expelled a breath of relief. He walked as slowly as he could, savoring through all the pores of his lean young frame the balm of this sudden reprieve from the heat and brutal impersonality of the big city.

Three concrete steps led up into the vestibule. At the top step he saw the congregation inside the heavy hardwood doors, and hesitated.

"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that , and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."

The voice was long and sonorous, and it struck a responsive chord in the young man's heart, but he could not see the speaker. The last pew hid the altar from him. Over the pew he could see the fluted row of organ pipes, the massive rivet-studded rafters, light that streamed down at a deep angle from a tall window of colored glass.

"For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith."

For perhaps an hour the young man stood at the door, feeling deeply unhappy, frightened, and lost. He dared not enter. He looked down at his torn, dusty shoes, his stained clothes, felt the growth of beard on his chin, and already he could feel the cold eyes of the people in the church examining him. He retired quietly to one side of the vestibule, where he could not be seen from the inside, and leaned against the wall to rest his trembling limbs.

And then the people began streaming out, and he felt relieved that they did not even glance his way. After a while, he looked into the door. There was no one in. He crossed himself quickly and entered.

For a long time he sat there staring dully at the sounding emptiness before him, for breaking against the wall still was the reverberation of bells tolled a long time ago.

Through all this he could hear his heart beating in a weak slow measure, and again the beatific sense of completeness and of being filled his soul like mellow wine. The seat was deep and restful. The wood was firm and cool. He sank back and fell asleep.

When he woke up, he saw that his hat had fallen to the floor. The five-centavo pancit mami that he had eaten last night had already evaporated, and he felt a shot of pain in his middle as he stooped down to recover his hat. After the pain, a weakness and trembling seized his limbs, and cold sweat beaded his forehead. The church swam before his eyes.

Sunlight streamed through the west windows. From its angle he knew it must be late in the afternoon. He had been asleep in the church for the greater part of the day, and now he felt again vaguely forsaken, and the chill and the solitude were no longer very soothing but were almost terrifying.

Rocking from one foot to the other, he got up hastily and made for the door, and it was then that he saw the girl standing at his back.

"I've been watching you," she said, smiling gently, and her hair looked like a halo for the sunlight crowned it with gold. "You've been asleep," she continued.

"I'm sorry," he began weakly. "I didn't mean to--"

"Yes? But let's take a seat, please."

He licked his dry lips. "I didn't mean to sleep here. I just fell asleep, that's all."

"There's no harm in that, I'm sure," she said reassuringly taking her seat beside him and pulling him down. "You're a stranger here?"

"I came to the city about a week ago."

"Staying with relatives?" Her voice was direct and cool.

"No relatives, ma'am. I thought I could get a job here. I had heard so much about opportunities here, and I wanted to work myself through college…"

She listened quietly. The quick responsive look in her eyes brought his confidence back and made him give details about his life and his recent misadventures he would not have revealed otherwise.

"We are from the same province as you," she said. "My father works in the city hall. He got transferred here because my mother wants to see us through school. Come home with me, ha? We want you to tell us about the province. It was five years ago when we were there last. Yes, they will like to see you. Don't be ashamed. You can't blame people for not knowing any one in the city."

She was only sixteen, or thereabouts, he could see in the calesa which they took; she was dressed in white, simply and cleanly, almost to the point of the anaesthetic severity of the nurse, but there was a subtle perfume about her like that of rosal and then again like that of sampaguita, and the lines of her face were clean and young and sweet.

"Why, I'd be ashamed--" he began again, looking at himself with horror.

"No more of that, ha?" She flashed a smile at him, her lips a light rose like her cheeks, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

The horses' hoofs beat a tattoo on the street cobbles, round this corner, round that corner, ancient Spanish houses under acacia trees, rows of tenements, sounding walls of old Intramuros, a tangle of horse-drawn and motor traffic.

Everything went suddenly white at once.

The first thing that he knew was the mildly pungent smell of rubbing alcohol and liniment. The place he was in was dark, except for a street light that came in through the billowing curtain in the window. He was in a bed, a deep wide bed, with mattress and cool covers fragrant with soap and starch and ironing. From beyond the darkness to one side came to him the faint sound of voices and the tinkle of a piano.

He jerked up with a great consciousness of guilt, but he sank back again, dizziness swamping him back and overpowering him. Lying back there, accusing himself of imposing on a stranger's hospitality, he began to cry, but he wiped away his tears quickly when he saw the door slowly open and a head showed in the opening.

"Oh, you're awake now."

It was the girl, and she ran softly in. He felt greatly disturbed within. She was looking down now and her hand was upon his brow and he could feel the warmth of her and get the smell of her.

"Good!" she exclaimed and ran lightly out, closing the door behind her. In a minute, she was back with two other persons. A switch clicked and the room sprang into light, and he could see there was an elderly woman whom she resembled closely, and an elderly man in pajamas.

"Well!" said the man heartily. He had a pipe gripped by the bowl in one of his hands. "So this is the cababayan. Well!"

The woman came over and laid her hand on his forehead. A wedding ring shone on one finger. He looked up into her eyes, and all at once he knew he need not be afraid…

The girl's parents, it later developed, were among the more influential of the parishioners, and he was able to get a job through them as church janitor, with bed and board provided free in the servants' quarters of the rectory. Besides sprucing up the church, he had charge of the lawn which he mowed and the hedges which he trimmed. Out of his pay of twenty pesos a month he managed to send home ten pesos to his mother in the month's-end mail.

"Good morning," he would say humbly to the girl, Lita, when Sundays came and she was in the church. Then he would hurry before her to dust the pew she always took with her parents.

"How do you do?" Lita would ask, and sometimes she would say, "Pedro, you must come and get your Sunday dinner with us. You don't do it so regularly, now."

From the back of the congregation, dressed in his best white-cotton suit, his eighty-centavo necktie, his tan-and-white Gandara shoes, he would listen raptly to her sing in the choir. He could always tell her voice, and he could always see her lovely radiant face magnified among the rows of others.

Three afternoons a week, a calesa would halt at the church gate, and Lita would alight in her plain white dress. She would come down the cucharita-lined path, and she would enter the church where for an hour she would sit or kneel, just looking at the altar, and her lips would move silently. Then would Pedro hush his steps, and he would put aside his lawnmower and his shears and look at Lita longingly through the window, at her profile outlined against the lighted side of the church.

On her seventeenth birthday, Lita gave Pedro a picture. It showed her with eyelashes swept up and lips half-parted in a smile. A stray lock fell against one cheek. One dainty end of a lace bow curled against the straight line of her throat, while the other reclined against the swell of her bosom.

"I can keep this?" asked Pedro wonderingly, and Lita said with a thrill of laughter. "Why yes, it's yours. Why do you have to ask?"

He had enrolled in a night collegiate course prepared especially for working students, but out of the money for school fees and books he managed to save as much as fifty centavos at a time. He spent his savings for a neat little picture frame, painted black and silver, and put Lita's picture before him as he pored over his textbooks at home.

"How are you getting along in school?" said Lita one afternoon, after she came out of the church.

"At least I passed in all my subjects last semester."

"That's fine. I'm sure you'll make an engineer yet." She hesitated at the gate, and turned back to him slowly. "Don't let anything distract you from your work," she said. "put your mind on it and keep it there."

He thought, she looks very young, but too deadly serious. That frown on her face. That mature cast of her mouth. But he only said, "Thank you, Miss Miel."

"Miss, still?" She laughed again, and the world was shining once more, no longer full of problems and dark and weighty hues, but full of the silvery ringing of bells and the light patter of dancing feet.

"I think I can help you," she went on. "About trigonometry now. It's my favorite subject."

"I cannot understand the cosine of--"

"You mean Thomas' theory? It's easy. Like this." And thereupon she knelt on the path and with a twig traced figures in the light fluff.

"You should make a good engineer, there are such things as women engineers, you know," he ventured.

"My father said I should," Lita confided. "But my greatest interest does not lie in that way, Pedro. It lies somewhere else. Should I tell you?" She crinkled her nose at him, but again she was suddenly grave. After a pause: "I've never wanted to grow up," she suddenly shot at him and hurriedly picked herself up, ran out of the gate, hailed a calesa and drove away.

Pedro's perplexity was solved the following afternoon when Lita came again to the church to pray. It was Saturday afternoon and Pedro was dusting. This time she had on a black veil that fell to the tip of her nose. She was a tiny figure kneeling at the far end of the church. Her head was bowed low, but he thought he could see her lips moving. He moved about on tiptoe, used his mop gently.

He was on the floor reaching under a remote corner when he heard her light "H'lo" behind him. He rose up hastily and nodded his greeting, "Good afternoon, Miss Miel."

"Good afternoon, Mister Deño."

"Er, Lita"

"That's better. Did I startle you yesterday afternoon?"

"You did."

Then Lita was telling him she was going to be a nun.

"But why?" asked Pedro incredulously.

"Does it sound foolish to you?" Her lashes swept down on her cheek, and for the first time he noticed that she had the pallid look as of one in cloistered, moss-grown nunneries.

"I don't know," he said, "I don't know." And then he went on, feeling foolish, "But you can't want to give up all this for life imprisonment."

"It is not life imprisonment," she said gravely, "but the essence of what I've always wanted. All my life I've wanted complete communion with God."

He shook his head to clear it of the cobweb of pain and dizziness, and her hand crept to his. The touch of it sent an electric shock through his whole frame.

"Even as a child," she went on, "I had always wanted to have a room that looked much like a church, with a hard, bare floor, and hard, bare seats, and an altar, and an image of Mother and Child."

She was looking down kindly at him, red spots in her white cheeks. "Now, as I live from day to day, it seems as if I'm being swept farther and farther away from that childhood dream. I want my childhood back. I hunger for its simplicity and its faith. It seems as if deep inside me I'm parched and thirsty, and I need the coolness and dampness of seclusion. You understand, don't you?"

Again it seemed as if the church rustled with the prayer and devoutness of a congregation, and there was again, that sonorous voice saying, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God."

"Good-bye," said Lita, her long, white, shapely fingers tightening on his rough, dark ones.

"I'll not see you again?"

She shook her head slowly. Suddenly she bent down and kissed him on the cheek, and as suddenly she ran down the aisle and out of the door.

As he sat in a pew, the bells were silent, but still they seemed to be tolling from far away, the air vibrating with their ringing. He sat in the pew and stared dully in front of him. Light streamed in from an eastern window. The ghostly congregation still rustled with its faith and sacrifice. On his cheek her lips were still warm.

But suppose, he thought, it had been some other way. Suppose:

"I'VE been watching you," she said, smiling gently, and her hair looked like a halo with the sunlight crowning it with gold. "You've been asleep," she continued.

"I'm sorry," he began weakly. "I didn't mean to--"

And then they were walking down to the whitewashed gate, and he was vaguely surprised that there was no calesa waiting there. But he went on to cross the street nevertheless, keeping in his eyes the slim, white figure, with the clean, young lines of face.

Outside the churchyard, the traffic was heavy as usual, and the lorry drivers swore mightily at the broken-down old man, with that vague half-smile on his face, who was crossing the street and breaking all rules of pedestrian traffic and all the laws of self-preservation.

"That engineer, Pedro Deño, you know," said one of a couple driving a car near the scene. "Dirty rich, but damned absent-minded, too."

"That's the matter with these successful people," said the other. "They put their mind on a thing and keep it there, to the exclusion of all others, even motor traffic."

"Yeh, Deño, for instance. Must be thinking of house plans and bridges."

Thousand Year Eve

Thousand Year Eve

THOUSAND YEAR EVE
by Angelo Rodriguez Lacuesta

I HAD never been to a radio station before, and I was shocked that it looked so ordinary. Even the offices adjacent to the disc jockeys' booths resembled those government agencies where you got your license or paid your taxes: a row of desks, clicking typewriters, worn-out, obsolete computers in a dirty beige color, a bunch of hardened secretaries, and a gaggle of people shuffling around and waiting in vague lines.

Off to one side, facing a corridor filled with people, were big square glass windows. Those were the disc jockey's booths. From small speakers perched above the windows came the sound of a woman's voice. Presumably that was what was on air at the time. Sure enough, in a corner of one of the windows was a little sign that said "On The Air"--just as I had expected it to be. The woman was weeping while speaking, and from where I stood, in the main office area, I thought I could see the figure of the woman in one of the booths, through the glare of reflections on the window.

The woman was calling for her missing mother. She was 68 years old, about five feet tall, with graying hair, and had worn a dress with blue flowers on the day she disappeared. They had gone to the zoo a week before. They had gone there because it was a Sunday and animals fascinated her. After separating ways with her daughter for a half an hour, the old woman failed to show up at a small rest area, which was their prescribed meeting place. A three-hour wait ended in a search involving a gaggle of security guards. When closing time came--

The woman's voice was interrupted by the deep, booming voice of the announcer. His tone was kind and concerned. I was surprised that it didn't sound tired, or hurried, or irritated, as I would most likely have been. It sounded just like that--exactly like that radio announcer we imagine in our head, a dislocated voice overriding everything, but a kind voice. With enough character so you could talk back to it, regard it, but with a kind of indifference that comes from authority. It sounded as if it came from another world.

The woman then resumed, explaining that her mother had Alzheimer's disease. It was strange hearing the word Alzheimer's within the tones and textures of that voice, because I could tell the woman wasn't used to saying that word, and it sat in the middle of her sentences, perfectly enunciated, like a newly built landmark that divided the past and the present. The term had been taught to her by doctors, experts, but it had surely never arisen between mother and daughter.

As I joined the people huddled outside the booth I could see into it. The booth was small, and the acoustic boards that lined the walls were covered with posters of movies and singers and bands. There were old memos and announcements. Wires sprung out from a stack of equipment.

The announcer sat behind a panel decked with buttons and sliding switches. He was wearing headphones and moving some of the switches. After a few moments I recognized him as a television personality. He hosted his own afternoon show. In the show he sat on a couch and fielded a string of guests. That show had a little oval inset in the corner that showed a woman performing sign language. I realized now that the show was a public service program--a televised version of the radio program he was running now.

And just like that television show, his guests took their turn in front of him, entering the booth and speaking into the microphone. Their voices emerged from the speakers. After they spoke the host would speak. Then the booth door opened, a name would be called and someone from the hall would enter and sit in front of the announcer.

From time to time the sequence would be broken by a string of commercials advertising soap or insurance. Briefly, the sound would brighten and a jingle would play; after some minutes someone punched in the program ID, which was a short musical passage played on an organ that had the effect of a 1950's horror or mystery show. That was because the radio show was all about unsolved cases. Then, the announcements would resume.

One of the staff in the main office area called out my last name and I approached the booth. Before I could reach it the door opened and a little girl came out, tears streaming from her cheeks.

In my hands I tightly held a little piece of paper. On it I had scribbled some things that I imagined would be important. I had written out a long list, fearing I would forget something that turned out to be crucial information.

Inside, the air smelled of cigarette smoke and damp air-conditioning. There was a little three-foot high Christmas tree in the corner, with light bulbs that blinked on and off and a little foil hanging that said "Happy Holidays." The announcer looked at me briefly and squinted at a clipboard. He gestured to a chair and took a long drag from a cigarette.

He called my name and I nodded. He switched on the microphones and announced my name on the air. All through this I was turning the paper over and over in my hands until my hands and the paper had rubbed off on each other and shared the same color. I was folding and unfolding it, until I could barely read the pencil marks. I had written out phrases and underlined key words, listed details down to the minutiae, and now they were lost to grayness.

There was a microphone on a stand in front of me. I gripped the mike, adjusted its position and began to speak. I glanced down at the paper without looking, without reading, and spoke. My voice reverberated through the studio as I began relating all the details, stringing them together with prepositions, adjectives, words.

My father, last seen New Year's eve, wearing a striped collared shirt, jeans and red slippers. Medium build. Black hair with white and silver streaks. 58 years old. Missing, lost, or kidnapped since New Year's Eve, four days ago. I was looking at the announcer, guessing when he would interrupt me with his silky voice.

The announcer looked at me briefly, perhaps to see if I was done, and picked up the tail end of my fading announcement with a loud burst that was meant to add excitement to my case. The announcer looked at me as he spoke, and I recognized that he was giving me words of encouragement, telling me to leave his name and contact numbers on the master list outside. I felt, in that brief glance of his, that I found all comfort and solace. Then he switched his gaze to other matters: the control panel in front of him, the cue cards passed to him by an assistant. As he looked away he added that I would know in a few days. I stood up, afforded the announcer a nervous smile, but he had turned to his list and was calling for the next guest.

In the main office area there was another line of people, all waiting to sign the master list, which was merely a set of clipboards arranged in alphabetical order. There was a woman at the desk who acted officiously, reminding people to hurry up or fill in the proper blanks. After a while I noticed that the people respected her concern for order. After I filled in the blanks she offered me a Christmas greeting and reminded me that they would call me if there was any word. I stepped out of the office, past a fresh crowd that was gathering, and took a taxi to work.

Though it was the first day of work after the holidays, everybody knew that my father had gone missing. My wife and I had made sure to call every one of them over the past days. By New Year's morning, we had gone through the list of friends and neighbors, people we knew to know my father; by the next day we had gone even through those who didn't know him. It was quite an awkward thing, having to greet them for the holidays and then asking them if they had seen him, or heard from him. My father was a loud, gregarious man, and it was not unusual for him to call one of his friends, out of the blue, for a chat or a drink.

The office was still slumbering in the Holiday spirit when I timed in, with only a handful reporting to work. My cubicle, normally unadorned except for a wall calendar and an appointment book, was cluttered by Christmas gifts from co-workers. I turned on my computer, mindlessly sifted and reorganized files, looked at the time, and made a few tentative calls.

When lunchtime came around, someone came over to my cubicle and invited me to lunch. I could tell his tone was guarded and unsure. I accepted the invitation with a voice that I hoped would not be so tainted with grief and exhaustion. I realized that the last time I had heard my own voice, besides the small remarks I had made to the taxi driver, was in the radio announcer's booth. Hearing my own voice now, exchanging pleasantries for the New Year's and agreeing to have lunch, seemed a strange and dislocating experience.

Whether it was because the holidays had drained all our funds or because we were in a somber mood, we chose to have lunch at the company canteen, a few floors down. The company had set aside half an entire floor as a dining area, brightly lit and nondescript. A long stainless steel counter ran the length of the canteen, and although it was past noon, only a few people were lined up along the railing.

Over lunch they asked me what had happened. I heard my voice once again telling them, over the din and the soft music, with an accuracy that startled me, every detail of our separation.

After a small dinner, my father, my wife and my child went to bed to rest before the festivities. I sat in the living room, watching TV and drinking beer. An hour before midnight, my father appeared and sat with me. He said nothing, merely coughing a little now and then. Some minutes later my wife emerged with the baby. She frowned at the sight of us sitting there and immediately went into the kitchen to prepare.

We had all wanted to go somewhere else to spend the holidays. My wife had wanted to take our one-year-old child up to the beach in Ilocos, where her family would be staying, and Christmas and New Year's would be light and cold. I had made hotel reservations for myself and possibly a few friends, where I could sit and stew through the season.

After a while, my father and I took four worn tires from our garage and rolled them out to the street, piled them carefully in the middle, sprinkled a little kerosene and set the whole thing on fire. By that time our entire street was studded with tire bonfires and lined with people who had come out to watch the explosions and count the minutes.

That New Year's Eve was the millennium's eve. If anything, it meant that the explosions would be louder and the fireworks bigger and brighter. A half-hour away from midnight, the night sky was lit up with swirls of color, and from time to time, the swirls would reach down and ignite the street like lightning. On CNN they had followed the millennium celebrations as the stroke of midnight crept across the world, jumping from country to country, showing an assortment of cultural celebrations and fireworks. They had been doing this since early evening, and by the time it was almost our time, the whole thing had begun to weigh heavily on me. My wife was still in the kitchen with the maid, preparing the New Year's Eve dinner. There were only three of us living in the small apartment, but my father always had visitors--all old men--coming in after midnight, until the morning hours. By dawn our living room would be filled with old men, and the smell of old men, and the smell of cigars, cigarettes and liquor. I decided that after the midnight celebrations I would retire to my study and do some reading.

Because it was the millennium, we had stocked up on more fireworks than ever--and more than was necessary. By five minutes to midnight, the whole street was filled with fire and smoke. My ears were ringing and a thick fog of gunpowder smoke hung in the air. My father had changed from his pajamas into a striped, long-sleeved shirt and jeans. This was all protection--he always loved to stand close to the fire and toss in the fireworks, as though he were tossing garlic and onions into a frying pan. When the fire had reached its full height, we sat on either side of our pile of fireworks--worth a lot of money if you ask me, but still not worth much against the a sky that seemed like a sea of explosions. We tested our noise levels with a few firecrackers, and we were satisfied with the volley of small explosions they made, echoing back and forth against the high walls of our neighborhood fences.

As the firecrackers split open in the fire my father looked at me and said something I could not hear. By this time the explosions on the street had risen steadily into a continuous barrage. My father stood up and gathered an armful of big rockets. I was looking at my watch, counting down the seconds. I shouted for my wife to come out for the big bang, but she merely looked at me through the living room windows. The baby was crying hysterically from all the noise.

From the corner of my eye I thought I could see my father walking up the street, picking a path among the flare of fountains, the shockwaves of homemade bombs, and the sibilance of rockets shooting into the sky. I was seeing this from the corner of my eye; I didn't bother to call out to him because, thinking harder about it, I had believed all along that it wasn't him, it was someone else walking down the street. As the night turned to midnight and the sky and the street erupted into each other I looked around our bonfire for my father. When the next lull came, several minutes later, I realized that he had gone.

Is there any story that hasn't been told? Any incident that can be told without anybody thinking, I haven't heard anything like that before. Everything's been told, and told better. At the radio station there was a man who was calling out to his older brother who had neglected to send money from Kuwait, where he worked as an engineer. There was an old woman who cried for justice for her son, who had been raped and beaten to an inch of his life, and whose pulverized jaw could not even accommodate a whisper of the name of his attacker. And there are other stories, other mysteries, wherever we go.

They had mysteries like this day in, day out, at the radio station, at the police precinct, at the barangay hall. In fact, all these places and cases so closely resembled one another that the pictures of the dead and missing, the telephone numbers to call and the people to ask for on the phone, these names and things all vibrated into each other and began to look the same. Every 68-year-old woman stood five-foot tall, had graying hair, and wore a flowery dress. Every old man looked the same.

In the taxis I rode, the radios were constantly tuned to the AM band, where the mystery show aired in the mornings and in the afternoons. Occasionally, breaking news came through the airwaves, involving phone calls from lawyers offering help or concerned citizens reporting the whereabouts of those lost and those who had run away. There were agencies and offices and even individuals out there who concerned themselves with the lost and the disappeared and the uncollected. I had earlier tried to solicit their help, but they told me the sheer volume of their clientele meant I might be attended to in many weeks' time. At that I resolved to do my own searching. By the end of the second week my father was still missing and I had almost grown desperate, but decided that it would be too late to go back to the help agencies.

My wife had delayed her move to Ilocos for the meantime. Whenever I got home, often very late after long hours at work and a slow, thoughtful reconnaissance around our neighborhood streets, I would be mildly surprised to still find her in her room, sleeping with the baby in her arms. I would sit and watch TV in the living room and discover that the persevering presence of my family had a difficult, grating character. By that time I realized I had owed her more than I could ever hope to repay and repair.

During those moments I agonized over the unanswered questions. Was my father, in fact, dead, killed at midnight by an explosion? I imagined a stray bullet falling from the sky, or a rocket veering off course to strike my father's slow-moving figure dead center. But I shrugged off these possibilities as too impossibly fantastic. Surely the key to my father's disappearance lay in circumstances more spectacular.

I also reflected briefly on whether my father might have been the victim of a crime, such as an assassination or a kidnapping. I took to scouring the papers for any news of salvagings and unclaimed corpses. I was thankful for finding no such news, and decided that such a savage crime could not happen to my father. We were not exactly rich folk, and my father did not maintain a high position anywhere. If he was anything, he was simply and merely my father. It would have been a case of mistaken identity.

Still, I went to a newspaper to report it. A reporter asked me about the incident and, tired from the nth telling, I merely rattled off the details into his dictaphone. You forget the meaning of words the more you say them. But as I recited them I imagined the numbers and the details would bring my father from the void and contain him. I felt like a magician, a medicine man, uttering a spell composed of strange words, a litany of broken Latin that had to be repeated again and again, ad nauseum, until your familiar agreed to appear.

In a few days a small article appeared in the broadsheets, repeating my words, tucked under the bigger news of the current political expose. It also appeared in the tabloids, where it graced the pages where the small, sensational crimes of the day were reported.

More than once, the thought occurred to me that he might have faked his disappearance, that he might have walked away from our disintegrating life and marriage in order to save it. Or that he had turned an old pair of eyes upon himself and, seeing an old man growing older and unneeded in his son's household, decided to skip town and join his old gang in a journey to points unknown. After all, I seemed to remember that he had a thoughtful look in his eyes on the night he disappeared. Such possibilities lay open and waiting before me as I sat in my living room, looking at the news on TV and pondering my next move. I knew that such possibilities were very clear to my wife. After all, she had known my father all these years and she had come to know everything he was, as much as she knew everything about his son.

It was becoming an unsolved case. I remembered the organ stinger from the radio show and the woman at the radio station who had lost her mother at the zoo. I remembered hearing of old men and women going missing for days, even weeks, and I could see these old folks wandering from bus stop to bus stop, sleeping at the foot of buildings and begging for food. I imagined that after a while, they would have to build an entirely new life for themselves, without previous memories, like babies born to a new world.

It was at that time that I thought of summoning other, metaphysical means. A friend of a friend knew of a medium who specialized in lost items, and, wondering whether my father would count as a lost item, I contacted him. This time I was asked to bring a personal item of the lost individual. I could not bring anything very substantial, since my father had brought his wallet, put on his only cap, worn the watch I had given him many years before, and taken his only pair of shoes with him. I only managed to present a very old pair of bathroom slippers to the medium, who seemed to cringe at the sight of them.

The medium himself was an old man who wore a dingy robe whenever he performed his "readings." He clucked his tongue and declared that the item I had brought would certainly not do much, but added quickly that he would try, slapping down a worn down deck of Spanish cards on the table. He made reshufflings and rereadings and offered several vague guesses about my father. Then he glared at me and decided that the old man might not be in the realm he was searching, or that he could be eluding his third eye. For a fee he agreed to perform periodic searches in the ethereal plane and assured me that if my father wanted to contact me, he would find a way.

True enough, that night I dreamt of finding my father. I dreamt that it was a clear night, like the night he disappeared, except there were no fireworks, nothing in the sky, not even the moon or the stars. In my dream he wanted to return and to signal his intention he lit the fireworks he had brought with him. Each rocket burned perfectly and burst perfectly in the night sky, exploding cleanly, like five exclamation points.

In my dream world the phone rang: "We've found your missing relative." I dressed quickly, feverishly, even forgoing my pants and socks. But when I arrived at the station to claim him, they showed me a different old man, sitting on a chair, sipping Coke from a small plastic bag. On the table beside him lay a half-eaten sandwich. In dreams, it seems, food is always half-eaten and everyone, most especially the dreamer, is almost always half-dressed. In dreams there are only half-discoveries. In dreams we expect to be tricked and are constantly jumpy, awaiting the strange twist or the inevitable fall. In the event of the latter, even a peaceful death is denied us, and we awake, sweaty and eyeballs still moving. As we spend the first waking moments trying desperately to remember our dream lives or wondering if a death in dreams provokes our real deaths, everything is soon forgotten and we move and live in the natural world.

The morning I awakened to was bright, oxygen-rich, with the sounds of my wife and child in the next room.

I had dinner with my wife on the eve of her departure for Ilocos. She had prepared a simple meal, spare but thoughtfully prepared and accompanied by wine, as we had always had in the beginning. We did not speak at first, but after a few minutes I stammered a few compliments about the meal and thanked her for her support during the whole affair. I didn't know myself whether I was talking about my ordeal about my lost father, or the seven-year marriage. She smiled and as she spoke I could see in her eyes a new clarity and a great hope for her future and the future of the baby. Still, I was foolish enough to imagine that her pity for me and my continuing predicament would compel her to stay. Over coffee she gave me her contact numbers and e-mail addresses and offered an open invitation to visit. I returned her invitation.

Some weeks later I found myself at the radio station again, taking my place in the line across the booth. I looked at the announcer expectantly, to see if he remembered me. He didn't, of course. When it was my turn to speak, I discovered that time had rubbed the details down to an old, dull, unremarkable list of descriptions that could have matched anyone's. I might have been describing the old stranger I had dreamed of. I might have even been describing myself thirty, forty years later.

I imagined my own voice filtering through the mesh gate of the microphone in my hands, transported through the wires. I imagined it bursting through the overhead speakers like fireworks, bouncing off satellites, picked up by radios and skimming off the minds of listeners, sitting in their cars and their afternoon reveries.