Dusk: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks) (17 page)

And once, when he was very insistent, she said, “I don’t want you to strain yourself. If you persist, I will sleep outside.”

She was right; there was enough time in the coming days. He could wait. He prayed that the way to the new land would not be difficult. It should not be, not only because Dalin knew the way, but also because she was beside him. In the late afternoon, the clouds boiled in the horizon, then pushed up and hid the sun. The land smelled of heat and dead leaves. April was ending. Soon it would be May, and with it, the rains.

Istak was finally almost completely well; he could climb out of the cart and walk about. But his pallor was the continuing object of curiosity and pity. His hair had thinned and it seemed as if he had been ravaged by those dreaded diseases—typhoid and tuberculosis—which had afflicted so many in Cabugaw, their spittle scattered in the churchyard to be avoided and swept over with dirt.

Again, they traveled by night. To use the road, they would have to circle around the towns where the Guardia would be.

“We must change our names now, Father,” Istak said. “If they ask where we come from, we must be truthful and say we come from Cabugaw. And our names will begin with
S
just the same. They can’t know all the barrios there, so we won’t say we came from Po-on …”

Ba-ac was seated on the side of the cart, his crumpled face somber in thought. His striped shirt, which Mayang had woven, had not been washed for days and was lined with dirt and sweat. They must stop by a stream soon, to wash and bathe.

“What should we call ourselves now?” Ba-ac asked sadly. “Salvador has always been our name. Yes, the Spaniards gave it to us, but we grew up with it.”

“To survive, Father, we have to change,” Istak said solemnly. He turned to his brothers, Bit-tik and An-no; they were talking
with the daughters of Blas, who had joined them in Tagudin. Like his, their hair was long now and they needed a haircut. He remembered the stories of the Bible. “Samson, Father—it begins with
S
, too, but there is not a single Samson in the registry in Cabugaw—I know, because I wrote in it for the last five years every time there was a birth or a death.”

“And how about our
cédulas
?”

“We will throw them away—and we will say that they were burned in our house when we left. We will have new ones when we reach the valley, and we will have our new name on them …”

New land, new name. They had always been Ilokano, with all the faults, the vices, that had shaped them, the habits which the narrow and infertile plain had etched in them. This is the way you are, Padre Jose had told him, but you are also a loyal people who know how to return a trust, to stake your life for a friendship that had withstood storm, earthquake, and fire.

He had wanted to ask the old priest what precisely he had meant. Was this the hell he had been talking about? Why was it impossible for the three priests who were executed in Cavite to serve God as they saw fit? Was this the Guardia Civil marauding the countryside and forcing tribute from people who did not even have enough to eat? He was not going to live with the people in their wretched villages—he was going to be a priest, and he would have a new name, just as the high and the mighty had new names, the Don, the
gobernadorcillo
, the Apo. He would not be just Eustaquio Salvador, the peasant from Po-on. He had suffered through Latin, gotten up every morning at five to clean the sacristy, to toll the bells. He was going to be near God, said Padre Jose, and to be so, he must have a good name. It is what one really owns in the end, a name. If it were silver, you would
have to polish it every so often with deeds. Even in isolation, silver tarnishes. Look at the candelabra, the crucifix, the chalice—aren’t they streaked with tarnish if we don’t polish them? But someday an earthquake or some heavenly fire will destroy everything and ashes will be blown in the wind. What then? There are names which will live forever, and he had read them, in Latin, in Spanish. And would Eustaquio Salvador—or Samson—endure? Would he engrave his name on the land that he would clear, in the children he would sire?

As these thoughts came, the image of Dalin—her quiet face, her long tresses—swooped into his mind. He dreamed of that day in another country when he would finally be strong and able to clear and plant, and after the first harvest, he would ask her. His name would then be written down in the registry—
Registro de Casamientos
—as he himself had written so many times in Cabugaw. Now they flitted across his mind, the pages with carefully written names, among them, Salvador. His father knew his grandfather—but that was as far as Ba-ac could go. It was now too late, but he should have looked it up in the ledgers when he was still in Cabugaw—found out who they were, for there had been Salvadors in Po-on before them, and in that dim past, they must have suffered, too, as all Ilokanos had done. Why did they take punishment without question? Did they really believe that man was made to suffer so that he could receive the final reward that only God could bestow? Be patient, his mother had dinned into his cars. And be industrious. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God. And the meek are many and nameless.

They now traveled in the daytime, following the dusty road, just like the other carts leaving the Ilokos, carrying settlers like
themselves, looking for land, free land. Land! What a melancholy and elusive word!

Sometimes they would come across a telegraph pole that had leaned and the wires were within reach. If there was no one to witness it, Ba-ac lashed at the wires with his bolo till they were sundered. “Don’t tell them about us,” he would say hoarsely.

In many places, the road was nothing but a swath of dust which swirled up like a funnel when the day was hot. These funnels sometimes loomed ahead, and once they were caught in one and could see nothing as dust enveloped them, and with it, this hot wind that seemed to suck everything. What a sea of mud the road would be in the rainy season! In some places, however, were cobbles of brick, but these only covered brief stretches of the road. Before the approaches of a town, they would head toward the nearest village instead to spend the night there, using the wells and the stoves of kindly Ilokanos.

It finally rained a week after they had raced down that hilltop. Every afternoon, the clouds had gathered and darkened but no rain fell. Now, gusts of wind tore down upon them and the clouds that had thickened on the rim of the sky loomed—a black and massive wave about to engulf them. Raindrops, big as pebbles, thudded on the dust and shook the grass. Then it came in slanting sheets, covering everything, and they could no longer see what lay ahead, the shapes of trees, the paths that now turned into rivulets of brown.

They had stopped to put up the detached palm frond doors of the carts, but the wind lashed against the doors, against the walls of the carts, and sent the rain through the tiny slits of bamboo siding, through cracks in the disheveled roofs. The children asked if they could go outside and bathe, and were quickly given permission.

It was May at last, and the first rain had a special magic.
They must bathe in it, wash their clothes in it, drink it. Mayang laid her pots outside till they were full, and after the children had bathed, the older folk went out, too. Istak went out without his shirt, his ribs protruding. An-no and Bit-tik were with the girls who had joined them and he could see them through the rain, laughing and joking. Maybe An-no had already forgotten Dalin.

Dalin was close by, bathing the bull, scrubbing its white hide. She was wet and her hair came down behind her in dripping strands. Her wet blouse clung to her body and in the rain he saw her breasts, the nipples dark and distinct. She turned to him briefly and smiled.

He gazed at her, at the skirt that clung to her legs. He admired her, seeing for the first time the fullness of her body. A pleasant sensation coursed through him—desire, just as he had once desired the daughters of Capitán Berong when they would bend before him so that he could see their breasts. Then they would face him while the blood rushed to his face, smile at him, and he would stammer, unable to continue with his teaching.

But the daughters of Capitán Berong were beyond the compass of his imagination. He was from Po-on and they were fair of skin, unreachable; the men who could claim them would not be brown like him.

Dalin was brown.

They stopped that night in a mango grove close to the road and a village where the women went to cook. The firewood that they had strapped behind the carts was drenched and would not kindle. It stopped raining shortly after sunset and the smell of earth blessed with rain, the leaves still dripping, was about them. The whole world was alive and breathing.

They gathered the carts in a semicircle and put the
cambaos
and the bull within the are, and while the men talked the women prepared their meal or hung their wet clothes on the maguey
twine which they strung from cart to cart. They cooked rice and vegetables for the next day’s breakfast as well so that all they would have to cook in the morning would be the coffee to warm their stomachs before they started out again. They had one more mountain to cross and the trails through the forest would be tortuous and slippery, but thank God, they were now free from the land of the Bagos.

Earlier in the evening, An-no had found a
kutibeng
in one of the carts and was strumming it. Ever since Dalin had taken Istak into her cart, An-no must have concluded it was no longer possible for him to possess her. It was just as well, for there was this girl Orang. She had a younger sister, but Orang was more mature, although flat-chested, and her eyes were always bright. Now, in the dark, Istak could hear his younger brother singing an old ballad, and the words were meant for Orang.

Since his recovery, Istak no longer slept in the cart but beneath it. Tonight, however, the ground was wet and Dalin told him to come up. He had demurred. “They are already saying many things about us, how I have been taking care of you,” she said. “Would it matter if we slept together now?”

He did not go to sleep at once. She sat before the cart looking out into the night, listening to the laughter in some of the carts, the mooing of
carabaos
. Cicadas called from the black shroud of trees around them, and beyond the shroud, in the open field, fireflies winked at them. The cooking fires of the houses beyond the grass kept them company as well.

It was cool, not like in the past when he was forced to take off his shirt, and this he had done with great difficulty because the wound, though healed, did not allow him easy movement. He needed a blanket now. Dalin faced him and their legs touched.

“Soon you will get back all the strength that you lost. I am happy,” she said.

“You will really go with us wherever we go?”

She did not speak; he could not see her eyes but knew she was looking at him. Then she turned and lay down beside him. She had turned on her side and so did he.

“I will decide when we get there,” she said.

“Suppose I asked you to stay with me …”

“You are not a farmer,” she said quietly. “I knew that from the very beginning. I do not think you can stay long on a farm. Not that you will not work.”

“I cannot be anything now but a farmer.”

“You can teach. You know many things we don’t know.”

“There is no place for people like us except the farm, Dalin,” he said. “Or the road, or the sea.”

She asked him how his arm was. He lay on his back and extended it to her. He could move it but the shoulder reminded him of a greater pain each time he lifted his arm.

She felt the scar with her hand. He liked the feel of that hand on his shoulder and impulsively, he turned and held it.

She understood. “You are not yet strong,” she said. “There are still many things you cannot do.”

He could feel himself stirring, the blood rushing to the tips of his fingers.

“I am not a virgin anymore,” she said with some sadness.

“You will be my first,” he said.

He kissed her, but she pushed him away tenderly.

He could not leash the animal stirring, he could not stop. His hands groped for her, found her warm and trembling, but she would not let him. “You are not yet strong,” she whispered into his ear as she half rose, looming so close, her face almost touching his. Then she kissed him and he tasted her lips, felt her tongue probe into his mouth.

“Don’t move then,” she told him. “I will do everything for you. And then, when you are strong …”

“You are the first,” Istak said again, then there were no more words.

So this is how two bodies melt into one, a communion, a celebration. This is what he had longed for and would have missed had he entered the seminary. He was a weakling after all, unable to withstand the devil call of the flesh. They were not even married—this was what he was taught, this was what he knew. Yet, within his deepest conscience, this was not wrong. It was bound to be, not temptation, but fate that brought them together, not just her stumbling into Po-on but her going back to the village to take him away from the avid clutch of death. She had given him life, now she was giving herself to him as well.

He slept well afterward, then woke up to the twitter of birds and the scurrying all around him, the boys hitching the carts, the women collecting children, animals, and clothes, getting ready to move. The pots had all been washed and he had slept through it all. He pretended sleep when Dalin went inside the cart and looked at him. The cart started to move, the solid wooden wheels squeaking. The children were talking about the falling star that night. Think of your birthday—and your wish will come true.

The air had a freshness to it; clean and washed, it flowed inside the cart. Dalin’s back was before him and he remembered how he had embraced her, felt the smooth fall of her shoulders, the softness of her breasts.

“Dalin,” he whispered.

She turned to him, her face radiant as morning.

“Thank you,” he said gratefully.

“Are you hungry?”

He nodded.