DEAD STARS
by Paz Marquez Benitez
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.
"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"
"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand
Esperanza wants it to be next month."
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."
"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don
Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.
"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?"
"In love? With whom?"
"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--"
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.
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.
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.
"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her
thought.
"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--"
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.
"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.
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.
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.
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.
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--
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.
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.
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.
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."
"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.
"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!"
He laughed with her.
"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."
"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time
I--"
"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
"Up here I find--something--"
He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing
unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"
"No; youth--its spirit--"
"Are you so old?"
"And heart's desire."
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every
man?
"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct,
"the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of mystery."
"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.
"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so
brief--"
"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."
"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
"I could study you all my life and still not find it."
"So long?"
"I should like to."
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.
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.
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.
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.
When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.
"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning
inflection.
"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have
such a lovely beach."
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.
"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then,
"This, I think, is the last time--we can visit."
"The last? Why?"
"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."
He noted an evasive quality in the answer.
"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"
"If you are, you never look it."
"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."
"But--"
"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to
herself.
"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.
She waited.
"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."
"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely
"Who? I?"
"Oh, no!"
"You said I am calm and placid."
"That is what I think."
"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."
It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look
and covert phrase.
"I should like to see your home town."
"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing
on them, and sometimes squashes."
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.
"Nothing? There is you."
"Oh, me? But I am here."
"I will not go, of course, until you are there."
"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one
American there!"
"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."
She laughed.
"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."
"Could I find that?"
"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.
"I'll inquire about--"
"What?"
"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."
"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned
serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."
"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.
"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."
"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy
I did not mean that quite--"
"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"
"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the
eye--it is more than that when--"
"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.
"Exactly."
"It must be ugly."
"Always?"
Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad,
glinting streamer of crimsoned gold.
"No, of course you are right."
"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as
they turned back.
"I am going home."
The end of an impossible dream!
"When?" after a long silence.
"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday.
They want me to spend Holy Week at home."
She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this
is the last time."
"Can't I come to say good-bye?"
"Oh, you don't need to!"
"No, but I want to."
"There is no time."
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.
"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another
life."
"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get
rid of the old things."
"Old things?"
"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.
Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.
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
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.
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.
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.
The line moved on.
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.
Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said
in a voice that was both excited and troubled.
"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."
"Oh, is the Judge going?"
"Yes."
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.
"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to
congratulate you."
Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.
"For what?"
"For your approaching wedding."
Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would
not offend?
"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know
mere visitors are slow about getting the news," she continued.
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.
"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out
quietly
"When they are of friends, yes."
"Would you come if I asked you?"
"When is it going to be?"
"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.
"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what
seemed to him a shade of irony.
"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"
"Why not?"
"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"
"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.
"Then I ask you."
"Then I will be there."
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.
"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?"
"No!"
"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could
understand a man who was in such a situation."
"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.
"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"
"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."
"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what
do I know? That is his problem after all."
"Doesn't it--interest you?"
"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the
house."
Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.
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.
He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly,
and with a kind of aversion which he tried to control.
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.
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.
"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."
What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?
"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly.
Esperanza was always positive.
"But do you approve?"
"Of what?"
"What she did."
"No," indifferently.
"Well?"
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."
"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not
know that your ideas were like that."
"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."
"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight
with resentment.
"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he
stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.
"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?
"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.
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?
"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--"
"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."
Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought
her; or was that a covert attack on Julia Salas?
"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words.
"If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere man word such a plea?
"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.
The last word had been said.
III
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.
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.
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 snub crested
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.
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 presidentewas there to meet him or
not. Just then a voice shouted.
"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"
"What abogado?" someone
irately asked.
That must be the presidente, he
thought, and went down to the landing.
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."
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on
board since the boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So thepresidente 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."
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.
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.
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 chinelasmaking 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.
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.
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.
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.
"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.
"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"
"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of
painful constraint.
"Won't you come up?"
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.
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.
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.
The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one
half of a star-studded sky.
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
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.
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.
