Dead Stars
Paz Marquez Benitez
1 Through the open
window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him,
stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of
life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost
concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of
conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen
were busy puttering away among the rose pots.
2 "Papa, and
when will the 'long table' be set?"
3 "I don't know
yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be
next month."
4 Carmen sighed
impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over
thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."
5 "She does not
seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while
his rose scissors busily snipped away.
6 "How can a
woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned,
pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you
remember how much in love he was?"
7 "In love? With
whom?"
8 "With
Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of,"
she said with good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning
he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--"
9 Alfredo remembered
that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years
ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the
body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when
the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man
wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or
was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid
imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid
monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of
circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for
him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love
as he divined it might be.
10 Sitting quietly in
his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the
feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when
something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in
time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed
to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded
himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the
meantime, he became very much engaged to Esperanza.
11 Why would men so
mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the
desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from
the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but
half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the
craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the
hand of Time, or of Fate.
12 "What do you
think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.
13 "I supposed
long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are
oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to
prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--on
the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was
talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice
toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural
enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race
with escaping youth--"
14 Carmen laughed
aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--disturbed
in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.
15 "A last spurt
of hot blood," finished the old man.
16 Few certainly would
credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed
his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender,
he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight
recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow,
dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's
appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with
wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.
17 He rose and quietly
went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down
the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he
left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road
bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.
18 The gravel road
narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he
could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.
19 Six weeks ago that
house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and
occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant
nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now—
20 One evening he had
gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since
he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge.
This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded.
"A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man
had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the
thought—"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"—Don Julian
conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.
20
21 A young woman had
met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's
children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic
Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself
to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo
called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.
22 He was puzzled that
she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later
Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had
supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very
dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have
corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should
explain.
23 To his apology, she
replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I
remembered a similar experience I had once before."
24 "Oh," he
drawled out, vastly relieved.
25 "A man named
Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man
rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang,
Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"
26 He laughed with
her.
27 "The best
thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued,
"is to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his
mistake without help."
28 "As you did
this time. Still, you looked amused every time I—"
29 "I was
thinking of Mr. Manalang."
30 Don Julian and his
uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young
man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory
conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the
vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and
banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered
irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.
31 He was mildly surprised
to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's
wife, although Doña Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and
plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled
hips--a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a
likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same
eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with
underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of
abounding vitality.
32 On Sunday mornings
after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house
on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian
enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be
brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat.
She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours—warm, quiet
March hours—sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she
liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed
that it seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him
indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of
the girl next door.
33 Esperanza had
wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized
that for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the
church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring."
34 He answered that he
went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added,
"Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."
35 She dropped the
topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a
believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate
feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his
wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman.
36 That half-lie told
him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas
something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that
would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.
37 It was so easy to
forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so
poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows
around, enfolding.
38 "Up here I
find—something—"
39 He and Julia Salas
stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity,
laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"
40 "No; youth—its
spirit—"
41 "Are you so
old?"
42 "And heart's
desire."
43 Was he becoming a
poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
44 "Down
there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is
too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery."
45 "Down
there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars.
In the darkness the fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from
somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.
46 "Mystery—"
she answered lightly, "that is so brief—"
47 "Not in
some," quickly. "Not in you."
48 "You have
known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
49 "I could study
you all my life and still not find it."
50 "So
long?"
51 "I should like
to."
52 Those six weeks
were now so swift—seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the
living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the
past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by
day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded
him in his calmer moments.
53 Just before Holy
Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at
Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also
came with her four energetic children. She and Doña Adela spent most of the
time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the
likeable absurdities of their husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in
his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her on this visit
to her father; how Doña Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men,
sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.
54 After the merienda,
Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young
coconut looked like—"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"—while
the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the
rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge
of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving beach.
55 Alfredo left his
perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps,
narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he
removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.
56 When he came up,
she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.
57 "I hope you
are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.
58 "Very much. It
looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach."
59 There was a breeze
from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the
tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was
something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace,
distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm,
all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of the
spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body,
of a thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to
charm.
60 "The afternoon
has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last
time—we can visit."
61 "The last?
Why?"
62 "Oh, you will
be too busy perhaps."
63 He noted an evasive
quality in the answer.
64 "Do I seem
especially industrious to you?"
65 "If you are,
you never look it."
66 "Not
perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."
67 "But—"
68 "Always
unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.
69 "I wish that
were true," he said after a meditative pause.
70 She waited.
71 "A man is
happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."
72 "Like a
carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely.
73 "Who? I?"
74 "Oh, no!"
75 "You said I am
calm and placid."
76 "That is what I
think."
77 "I used to
think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."
78 It was strange to
him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.
79 "I should like
to see your home town."
80 "There is
nothing to see—little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them,
and sometimes squashes."
81 That was the
background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more
distant, as if that background claimed her and excluded him.
82 "Nothing?
There is you."
83 "Oh, me? But I
am here."
84 "I will not
go, of course, until you are there."
85 "Will you
come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"
86 "Well--Americans
are rather essential to my entertainment."
87 She laughed.
88 "We live on
Calle Luz, a little street with trees."
89 "Could I find
that?"
90 "If you don't
ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.
91 "I'll inquire
about—"
92 "What?"
93 "The house of
the prettiest girl in the town."
94 "There is
where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is
not quite sincere."
95 "It is,"
he averred slowly, but emphatically.
96 "I thought
you, at least, would not say such things."
97 "Pretty—pretty—a
foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite—"
98 "Are you
withdrawing the compliment?"
99 "Re-enforcing
it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that
when—"
100 "If it
saddens?" she interrupted hastily.
101 "Exactly."
102 "It must be
ugly."
103 "Always?"
104 Toward the west,
the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of
crimsoned gold.
105 "No, of course
you are right."
106 "Why did you
say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.
107 "I am going
home."
108 The end of an
impossible dream!
109 "When?"
after a long silence.
110 "Tomorrow. I
received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy
Week at home."
111 She seemed to be
waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."
112 "Can't I come
to say good-bye?"
113 "Oh, you don't
need to!"
114 "No, but I
want to."
115 "There is no
time."
116 The golden streamer
was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at
the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as
does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult
when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She
turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.
117 "Home seems so
far from here. This is almost like another life."
118 "I know. This
is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."
119 "Old
things?"
120 "Oh, old
things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly,
unwilling to mar the hour. He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers
for one whirling second.
121 Don Julian's nasal
summons came to them on the wind.
122 Alfredo gripped the
soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he
heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye."
II
123 ALFREDO Salazar
turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart
of the town—heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent
drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a
cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying
lens; heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers on
the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church
and convento, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the
afternoon itself. Into the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest
of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came the
devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this was
Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts.
Came too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree
near the church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on
display while from the windows of the older houses hung colored glass globes,
heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the
chief lighting device.
124 Soon a double row
of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street
like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints'
platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices of the
choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.
125 The sight of
Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly
destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into
component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look
unaware, and could not.
126 The line moved on.
127 Suddenly, Alfredo's
slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the
line—a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause
violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of
his life.
128 Her glance of
abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.
129 The line kept
moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back
again, where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.
130 At last Our Lady of
Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices
now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.
131 A round orange
moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky,
whitening the iron roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the
still densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males
loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home.
132 Toward the end of
the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had
dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther
out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while:
yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening" and fell
into step with the girl.
133 "I had been
thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was
both excited and troubled.
134 "No, my sister
asked me to stay until they are ready to go."
135 "Oh, is the
Judge going?"
136 "Yes."
137 The provincial
docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As
lawyer—and as lover—Alfredo had found that out long before.
138 "Mr.
Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate
you."
139 Her tone told him
that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.
140 "For
what?"
141 "For your
approaching wedding."
142 Some explanation
was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?
143 "I should have
offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about
getting the news," she continued.
144 He listened not so
much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to
enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early
acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice—cool, almost detached
from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.
145 "Are weddings
interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly
146 "When they are
of friends, yes."
147 "Would you
come if I asked you?"
148 "When is it
going to be?"
149 "May," he
replied briefly, after a long pause.
150 "May is the
month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of
irony.
151 "They
say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"
152 "Why
not?"
153 "No reason. I
am just asking. Then you will?"
154 "If you will
ask me," she said with disdain.
155 "Then I ask
you."
156 "Then I will
be there."
157 The gravel road lay
before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill.
There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was
pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the
present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife,
returning with him to the peace of home.
158 "Julita,"
he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose
between something you wanted to do and something you had to do?"
159 "No!"
160 "I thought
maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in
such a situation."
161 "You are
fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.
162 "Is--is this
man sure of what he should do?"
163 "I don't know,
Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes
downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask
whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him."
164 "But then why—why—"
her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after
all."
165 "Doesn't it—interest
you?"
166 "Why must it?
I—I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."
167 Without lifting her
eyes she quickly turned and walked away.
168 Had the final word
been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his
mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near
wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and
Esperanza herself—Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the
efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely acquisitive.
169 He looked
attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of
aversion which he tried to control.
170 She was one of those
fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She never
surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty.
At home, in church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first
bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a
slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious care, even
elegance; a woman distinctly not average.
171 She was pursuing an
indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their
note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding
imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of
it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.
172 "She is not
married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice.
"Besides, she should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up.
We never thought she would turn out bad."
173 What had Calixta
done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?
174 "You are very
positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always
positive.
175 "But do you
approve?"
176 "Of
what?"
177 "What she
did."
178 "No,"
indifferently.
179 "Well?"
180 He was suddenly
impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I
say is that it is not necessarily wicked."
181 "Why shouldn't
it be? You talked like an—immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like
that."
182 "My
ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The
only test I wish to apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring
anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a
man to whom she is not married—is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may
not."
183 "She has
injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.
184 "The trouble
with you, Esperanza, is that you are—" he stopped, appalled by the passion
in his voice.
185 "Why do you
get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been
indifferent to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps
some are trying to keep from me." The blood surged into his very eyes and
his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?
186 "Why don't you
speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what
people will say." Her voice trembled.
187 Alfredo was
suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people
will say—what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are
broken almost on the eve of the wedding?
188 "Yes," he
said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to
be fair—according to his lights—but it is hard. One would like to be fair to
one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare—"
189 "What do you
mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings,
and no doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my
place, to find a man."
190 Did she mean by
this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert
attack on Julia Salas?
191 "Esperanza—"
a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you—suppose I—" Yet
how could a mere man word such a plea?
192 "If you mean
you want to take back your word, if you are tired of—why don't you tell me you
are tired of me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him
completely shamed and unnerved.
193 The last word had
been said.
III
194 AS Alfredo Salazar
leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he
wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He
was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the
Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been
if Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to find that
elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town
which was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed
to a degree utterly out of proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That
inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used
to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia
Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The
climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the
chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He
looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he
knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease
even to look up.
195 He was not unhappy
in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he
recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life
had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions
that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a
strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being in the
core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims
encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner
fastness, and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote
and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel
baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away,
beyond her reach.
196 Lights were
springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town
nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside
the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the
sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple shadows of
the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly luminous as the coral tints
in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.
197 The vessel
approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the
dark water. Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled
to meet the boat—slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna
lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he
had no way of knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just
then a voice shouted.
198 "Is the
abogado there? Abogado!"
199 "What
abogado?" someone irately asked.
200 That must be the
presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.
201 It was a policeman,
a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy—Tandang
"Binday"—that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar's second letter had
arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado
and invite him to our house."
202 Alfredo Salazar
courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat
would leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his
first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an
answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write
because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to
find her."
203 San Antonio was up
in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him.
It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.
204 Eight o'clock,
lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a
somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too
bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk
around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the
rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the water.
205 How peaceful the
town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing
forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An occasional
couple sauntered by, the women's chinelas making scraping sounds. From a distance
came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--tubigan
perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The thought of Julia Salas in that
quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness.
206 How would life seem
now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That
unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of
incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why?
Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It
was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability.
Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices
in a dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to
an insistent, unfinished prayer.
207 A few inquiries led
him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove
indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw
its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight
the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.
208 Somehow or other,
he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting
at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low
and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable relief.
He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.
209 "Good
evening," he said, raising his hat.
210 "Good evening.
Oh! Are you in town?"
211 "On some
little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.
212 "Won't you
come up?"
213 He considered. His
vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling
to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a
lighted candle to open the door. At last--he was shaking her hand.
214 She had not changed
much—a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He
missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes.
She asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat
meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing
wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her
face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity
creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a
blush.
215 Gently—was it
experimentally?—he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed
and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly
interested him.
216 The young moon had
set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.
217 So that was all
over.
218 Why had he
obstinately clung to that dream?
219 So all these years—since
when?—he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet
seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
220 An immense sadness
as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of
the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in
unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.
(1925)
Meet the Writer
Paz Marquez Benitez, born in 1894 in
Lucena City, Quezon, authored the first Filipino modern English-language short
story, Dead Stars, published in the Philippine Herald in 1925. Born into
the prominent Marquez family of Quezon province, she was among the first
generation of Filipinos trained in the American education system which used
English as the medium of instruction. She graduated high school in Tayabas High
School (now, Quezon National High School) and college from the University of
the Philippines with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1912. She was a member of the first freshman class
of the University of the Philippines, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree
in 1912.
Two years after
graduation, she married UP College of Education Dean Francisco Benítez, with
whom she had four children.
Márquez-Benítez
later became a teacher at the University of the Philippines, who taught
short-story writing and had become an influential figure to many Filipino
writers in the English language, such as Loreto Paras-Sulit, Paz M. Latorena,
Arturo B. Rotor, Bienvenido N. Santos and Francisco Arcellana. The annually
held Paz Marquez-Benitez Lectures in the Philippines honors her memory by
focusing on the contribution of Filipino women writers to Philippine Literature
in the English language.
Though she only had
one more published short story after “Dead Stars” entitled "A Night In The
Hills", she made her mark in Philippine literature because her work is
considered the first modern Philippine short story.
For
Marquez-Benitez, writing was a life-long occupation. In 1919 she founded
"Woman's Home Journal", the first women's magazine in the country.
"Filipino Love Stories", reportedly the first anthology of Philippine
stories in English by Filipinos, was compiled in 1928 by Marquez-Benitez from
the works of her students.
When her husband
died in 1951, she took over as editor of the Philippine Journal of Education at
UP. She held the editorial post for over two decades.
In 1995, her
daughter, Virginia Benitez-Licuanan wrote her biography, "Paz
Marquez-Benitez: One Woman's Life, Letters, and Writings."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paz_Marquez-Benitez)
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