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THE OTHER FOREST Now hurrying to Carmay, down the footpath that sliced across the parched edge of the town, he brought to mind the pleasure of other vacations much |
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Sandra B. Torrijos |
Recalling all these as he hurried along the lane flanked by blooming madre-de-cacao trees, a smile came to his face. Only yesterday, he was in the city. Cecile, Helen's closest friend, had just returned, and she had called on him.
"I just can't figure out what has happened to her," she sounded perplexed and had turned to him as if it was only he who would be able to explain Helen. "Perhaps," Cecile guessed, "this is what happens when one reads the papers and takes to heart all their headlines. Why, you would think the world's end would come tomorrow!" But Cecile was different; she cared only for good times, the movies and the parties that the girls in the school had discreetly attended in spite of the nuns' constant warnings. She had asked him if he knew what Helen had planned, and he professed ignorance. Then, it all became clear: he had visited Helen at school once, and at dusk before he left, they lingered on the broadwalk that traversed the green to the stone chapel. From within the church, there had suddenly welled music that flooded the serene campus.
"It is the nuns saying their office," Helen had briefly explained. But more than that, she had told him matter of factly, too, that she might yet decide to join them. He had dismissed her stray comment with a shrug.
After the line of madre-de-cacao that were in bloom, the white house appeared, old, massive, and surrounded by a tumbled wooden fence. Beyond it, the provincial road writhed in the afternoon glare. Small farmer homes surrounding the house made it look even bigger.
Helen was knitting in a low canvas chair in the balcony. Seeing him, she hurried down the graveled path and opened the gate. She as wearing a yellow blouse. How young she looked! In the white school uniform in which he often saw her, she appeared ordinary. "You look tired," she smiled broadly. Without waiting for an answer, she asked when he arrived.
While he was packing in the city, and even on the train, he had rehearsed how he would greet her, the simple conversation that would convey his dejection, but now he was grinning. "I missed you," he said huskily.
As they went up the flight, he told her how Cecile had called on him at his office, and for an instant, he saw her stiffen. As they paused on the threshold, her eyes on his face, her hands in his, it seemed as if she wanted to speak, but silence prevailed, and then the kids broke like an irrepressible flood from within the house, ringed around him, shouted his name, and after them, her mother came out, too, and the usual niceties. She asked to be excused as she hurried to the kitchen to prepare refreshments. Helen drew him away from the kids to the balcony.
It was not in his plan to question her, but he was brusque when he finally said, "I just can't believe it."
She looked dumbly at him, her large dark eyes searching his face for confirmation of his anger or his despair.
"This talk," he was almost stern. "Even Father knows it. At the station, when I arrived, Tony was there, and he said, 'Sorry, Chicoabout Helen, I mean. Maybe she's sick in the head; or, you aren't using the right approach.'"
She turned away, her fingers drumming the wooden arm of her chair. "I am sorry," she said, "you are drawn into my affairs like this . . ."
"I said nothing." He rose slowly and sat on the low coffee table before her. "I'm only repeating what the others said."
She met his gaze, her eyes now serious. Out in the kitchen, Coke bottles were being opened, glasses clinked. Her kid brothers and sisters who were playing on the balcony had fled noisily to the yard, raising a bit of dust.
"It is difficult to talk about it," she repeated, her voice sounding remote. The sun was warm, and the air was heavy with the scent of April and of the old earth thirsting, but all Rosales beyond the blaze of madre-de-cacao had grown inexplicably dim. She moved closer to him, spoke softly, as if this was the long secret she had kept and didn't want anyone else but him to hear: "I couldn't tell you; just as when you were finally well, I couldn't tell you how I prayed. When you were gone, I stayed awake nights listening to every sound, wondering what you were doing, where you were. And when we learned you were wounded and you had died, I hope and prayed just the same that it was never so, that you'd return."
"But what has all this got to do with you?" he asked.
Her lips parted again, but before the words were spilled, she turned and went to the house in a flurry, leaving him numbly watching the green door-curtains behind which she had vanished. She reappeared after a while with Coke and cookies. Now laughter crinkled the corners of her mouth, but he knew from the moistness in her eyes that she had cried.
As he helped her with the tray, he tried to be jovial. "I hope while I am here, we can have a party or go to one, something like Nina's last birthday party in the city."
There was a dance at Nina's plush suburban house, and she had invited him together with her circle from the convent school; but that evening, while the rest rushed the hours on the dance floor, he sat with Helen on a stone bench beneath a young mango tree aglitter with colored bulbs, talking about how as children they roamed the fields beyond the creek searching for spiders and the big green grasshoppers. They talked about the war, the dark future, on and on, till Nina prodded them to join the party and they rose finally. Under a cool, cloudless sky, he held her, felt her vibrant nearness; visions of the wounded and the dying in an ancient and ugly carnage vanished as does nightmare during the waking; there was only this peace, Helen clinging to him, her warm breathing, the smooth touch of her cheeks. And he had whispered, what the exact words were he had forgotten, but what he said, as fragile as hope, she surely heard. And later, when they were on their way back to the dormitory, close to each other in the backseat of Nina's car, she said, "Please, it's enough that I think of you." That was the most she had conceded, and he didn't ask for more, and many times, recalling this, he had mused that perhaps all the notions she entertained about religion and how she must live her life would yet wane.
'I remember Nina's birthday," she said brightening up, and then, as if she guessed what he had implied, she added, "But the timesthey are so uncertain. They say another war is coming, any time, that its threat hasn't really left us. And many will go again as if it will be another picnicmaybe because they have nothing to do, or nowhere to turn to . . . "
"You were only a child when the last one came," he said. "We shouldn't concern ourselves too much with what we have no hand in making or unmaking." He shouldn't have told her that, but it served to allay her fears. If they would go on talking, he might tell her yet, and he could never speak again of those days in the wilderness, a Red Cross armband on his shirtsleeve, hearing the shrill whine of shells and their explosions, seeing the bloated carrion heaped on the margin of the mountain trails scraped off by bulldozers.
"Will you join again if another war comes?" she suddenly asked.
He rose stiffly and strode to the balcony railing. Before him, the fields stretched brown, the trees palisading the fringes of the town were scraggly, and the sun beat upon them all; there was another time like this when the earth was ready for dying; there was a war, and the wounded were packed on the floor of the schoolhouse near his father's house in the town, and from there and in the rooms heaving with the suffocating smell of drugs and blood, he had watched the light flicker out from their eyes.
Months afterwards, he saw more men die. Finally, he knew God's nearness when a long, horrid night came and he was gripped by fear. It was a time, too, when there rang in his ears the laughter of better days, and he remembered them keenly when he saw the dark scar in his leg after the scab was lifted. He never showed the mark to her or to anyone, nor the shrapnel removed from it which he had religiously kept. He entertained no remorse, no regrets; the war was over, and he was twenty-four and had a steady job, even a future. Helen would grow older, and she might appreciate his dreams.
"Tell me," she prodded him, "would you join the army again if another war broke out tomorrow?"
"Yes," he replied quickly, "I would. I'd do again what I was trying to be good at, sticking morphine syrettes and wrapping up neat bullet wounds with ineffective dressings." Then, sullenly, "But look at you; every girl, especially those who have studied in schools managed by nunsat one time or anotherthey all hold this ambition. Why, when I was seventeen, I, too, wanted to be a priest. Ask Tony. We all planned to be Jesuits because we studied at a Jesuit school . . . "
"And why didn't you?" she asked unexpectedly. "You went away playing doctoror soldier. But in a way, it's almost the same."
He had no reply. The sight of men in impeccable formation, bands blaring, these appealed to him. But he never wielded a gun, much less fired a shot, even when he lay cowering in a ditch, the bleeding in his leg coloring the stagnant water, while above him earth and high heaven fused and exploded. There was no justification at all for what happened in the past; he could find nothing in it now to prove that even what he did was right, much less provide the sanctuary where he could hide in security. And knowing this, he suddenly felt miserably small before this young stubborn girl who wanted to be a nun.
"When will you leave, then?" he asked dully.
She didn't answer. She asked, instead, if he was vexed with her still and if she would see him again. She looked at him intently. Months ago, when he was finally able to walk without crutches, he had visited her. During the long dry season, he had seen nothing but bleak olive-grey hospital tents, and then it was June, and the grass along the road to Carmay glinted in the morning sun; the wind that swept over the land was rife with the preludes of the rainy season. He was driven over in a jeep by her father, and remembering how she appeared then, trembling with joy, he turned to her and asked if she would be as happy to see him as she was that June day if another war should come, and surviving it, the first thing he would do would be to go see her wherever she would be.
She bit her lower lip and, holding his hand, drew him into the sala and asked him to sit with her on the long piano stool. Her fingers rippled sketchily over the keyboard. In the afternoon light, he noticed how pretty she was and grown up, too, her hair done in simple braids.
She stopped running her fingers over the keys," Are you angry still?"
He shook his head.
"Now, I'll tell you," she said rising. "I have thought about it for a long time." As she spoke, anxiety pounded against the walls of his chest.
"So, you are really going, then."
She nodded.
He rose after her. His eyes meandered about the room, to the faded picture of the family on the wall. He had teased her once about there being so many of them. In the city one Sunday afternoon, he took her out for a walk in the boulevard; they came upon a couple with their six children tagging along. He had whispered to her that when they got married, they'd rear a dozen.
"There is no turning back?" he asked.
She shook her head. Still without looking at him, she said, "I'll leave in June. Mother cried when I told her. Father said I should have studied in a public school where I could have met more boys and gone to more dances . . . "
"But we already had . . . "
"And gotten married," she went on, not minding him.
" . . . and raised a dozen kids," he continued.
She spoke his name. "You have a good memory," she said. Then silence, the chime of the bronze clock by the door, the purr of the watertank engine, the crackle of children's laughter farther down the lane.
"It will be hard work where you are going," he said after a while.
"I know," she said. "But I also thought how hard it must have been for you, too, when you went away. I didn't hold you back? saw men stumble down that road, gaunt-faced and hungry. Another war is coming, and yet not all the good fighting is done where they or you will be going . . . " She leaned close to him, and her breath was like silk on his face.
They walked to the balcony and sat on the canvas chairs. The day mellowed. Her youngest brother came out with a new tray of refreshments and, after cramming his pockets with cookies, left.
He suddenly felt so old, as if all youth had been squeezed from him. It was as if he was again confronting that other forest, feeling so committed as he hacked away at the tall, wild grass.
"I'll miss you," he merely said.
She smiled at him. Out in the yard, the children were shouting as they chased their pet dog; an old Ford rounding the bend sputtered and raised a cloud of dust. He headed to the door, past the palmetto pots at the top of the flight where the late afternoon lay among the green leaves in silver puddles.
"Father will be home soon," she said following him. "He wants to see you, too, and will be able to drive you back to town."
He shook his head as he hurried down the stairs past the children whose shouting had ceased. They followed him to the iron gate, full of questions. He didn't look back. Helen would always remind him of this long dusty road ahead, the kind which he had also followed when he finally went to the forest, when he was afraid to seek the shade lest with his wound, he would fall there and no one would find him.
F. Sionil José, whose work has been published in twenty-four languages, is the founding president of the Philippines PEN Center and the former publisher and editor of the journal Solidarity. In 2001, he was named a National Artist for Literature by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts of the Philippines. His novels, all written in English, include , , and the five-volume Rosales Saga, an epic work that provides a sweeping look at life in the Philippines during the twentieth century. The Rosales Saga has been published in the United States by Random House/Modern Library, in three volumes: , , and .
"The Other Forest" is from ©1998 by Francisco Sionil José published by Solidaridad Publishing House, Manila. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.