Gregorio C Brillantes - On a clear day in November, shortly before the millennium: Stories for a quarter century

in November,

Shortly Before

Grateful acknowledgment is here made to National Bookstore, which published ten of the storLs under the title The Apollo Centennial:Nostalgias, Predicaments and Celebrations (1980); and to the following magazines in which the stories in this collection first appeared: Philippines Free Press, Asia-Philippines Leader, FocusPhilippines, Expressweek, Weekend, Mr. & Ms., and NationalMidweek.

On a Clear Day in November, Shortly Before the Millennium:Stories for a Quarter Century

Gregorio C. Br ill antes

Copyright GREGORIO C. BRILLANTES, 2000

All rights reserved.

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Cover design by INSEKTO KONSEPTO DESIGN STUDIO

Interior design by ANI V. HABULAN

ISBN 971-27-0974-4 (bp)

ISBN 971-27-0928-0 (np)

Printed in the Philippines

To Rcinc Arcache Melvin, Maria Atfnes Prieto,and Fr. Miguel A. Bemad, S.J.

1 The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957

15 The Quintuplets

25 Journey to the Edge of the Sea

55 The Mayor of San Felipe

65 The Fires of the Sun, the Crystalline Sky, the Dark Ocean, and Some Women and/or Girls,

Including Napoleon Espiritu's First Granddaughter 99 A Taste for the Fine Whiskey of the Bourgeoisie 107 Janis Joplin, the Revolution, and the Melancholy Widow of Gabriela Silang Street

137 Help

151 Excerpts from the Autobiography of

a Middle-aged Ghostwriter with Insomnia

185 Stranger in an Asian City

207 A Mission for Heroes

247 The Flood in Tarlac

265 On a Clear Day in November,

Shortly Before the Millennium

283 The Apollo Centennial

The Cries of Children

on an April Afternoon

CONTEMPLATE the light of this April day: first, a dazzle of the purest blue, high above shimmering clouds of leaves. In its clarity the vertical light is as flawless, abstract, and infinite as the future. But such perfection cannot hold the eye for long; consider, then, the light as it falls in small bright pools beneath the trees that shade this street and this house, in Tarlac. The leaves bend and turn in brown and yellow ripples flowing up towards the white flaring center of the light, pause and slant back, and become green again in repose. But even after each rushing fall of wind, the filtered light is not becalmed but still shifts and trembles in gleaming flakes.

It is three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, the Second Sunday of Easter, in the year 1957. On the porch of the house, which stands vivid and still in the summer light, a youth of seventeen or eighteen lies asleep on a rattan sofa. He is thin, shirtless, clad only in green basketball shorts, and sweat is beaded on his bony chest.

His mouth is open, in an expression at once defiant and defenseless; his left arm, outflung in a disjointed angle, hangs touching the floor on which are scattered the pages of a newspaper, Time magazine with Dwight Eisenhower on the cover, a paperback entitled Tales ofMystery and Horror, and a clothbound copy of Why I Am Not aChristian, by Bertrand Russell. He stirs, scratches his neck, and is suddenly awake.

He swings his legs down to the floor, picks up the hard-cover book, and with a fresh cigarette moves to the rocker at the far and more shaded end of the porch. One leg flexed up on the seat and serving as a prop for the book, the other pushing against the floor to move the chair, he exhales smoke forcibly through pursed lips, blowing it away with an impatient breath audible enough to disturb anyone watching close by; but he is alone, isolated where he sits reading and flicking off the cigarette ashes on the floor. On the ox-blood tiles on which rests his foot, the toes splayed out and looking fragile, the light never ceases moving, pieces of sun wavering among shadows pale as smoke and shadows of a darker tone as the wind rustles warmly in the vine trellised above the railing.

He is an agnostic this year, and on this afternoon searches the pages of the book for confirmation of his new-found faith. The love of Christ, the communion of saints; heaven and hell, and the vast and ancient theology that accounted for both: he has no more use for them this summer, and when he closes his eyes to rest them in a red-tinged darkness, he seems to hear the silence of the eternal spheres which so filled Pascal with dread but which stir in him no fear, only a desire, he reminds himself, to comprehend the accident of his own existence. The girl who owns the book has underlined entire paragraphs and in the margins of these, as though to refute any skepticism, has drawn a series of parallel lines and exclamation points. Admiringly, he nods at the calm revelations of the philosopher: "If everything must have a cause, it may just as well be the world as God... What the world needs is reasonableness, toler-ance. It is to such considerations that we must look, and not to a return to obscurantist myths... What the world needs is not dogma, but an attitude of scientific inquiry." Not dogma but inquiry, he repeats to himself, scratching an armpit and glad to be in a universe shorn of all mystery, made lucid and commonsensical as a book.

But even Bertrand Russell, the cadences of whose logic can make him suck on his cigarette in fierce agreement, is no match for the languor which again presses down upon him, a lassitude induced by the warm blending light and the muffled sounds of this April afternoon. He was tired and hungry when he came home this noon, after playing basketball with Alex Concepcion and Nonoy Sunglao, and he ate more than his customary fill, finishing three helpings of his mother's pochero, prompting his sister Menchit, who is not too friendly with him this summer, to ask where he put all those calories, what an awful waste: a remark he chose to ignore, one more dismal wisecrack attempted by such as she and her gang from the Holy Ghost Institute. He can still taste the juices of the large noon meal at the back of his tongue as, heavy lidded and lethargic, without rancor or regret, and pleased to have found the consolations of unbelief, he tosses the book onto the coffee table to one side and stretches and slouches deeper in the chair.

He looks down over the knobs of his knees at his feet exposed and pale against the tiles, and down the length of the veranda at the leaves twinkling in the full blaze of sunlight. The tiers of leaves arched over the front steps stop swaying and revert to their unruffled green, which reflects less light, and from where he sits, the front of the porch seems to pass into a dimmer shade. It is like a setting arranged for the longings which often flicker in his daylight dreaming, and without effort he conjures up an image of the girl who owns the book. From the hot bright screen of light in the yard she comes in his reverie into the softer tones of this house in Tarlac, the shadows gliding off her as she moves, with that pur-poseful gait he remembers so well, closer in his attentive gaze. How like her to yield to his fancy, how pliant and generous, as he well knows from having loved her. Her face is moist, glistening, and the mole is stark on her flushed cheek as she wets her lips and he begins to undo the topmost button of her blouse. Suddenly shy, she embraces him to avert her face and shield the small taut fairness of her breasts. The shyness, more than any word or gesture from the first evening they loved, brings a tremor of desire and tenderness so keen he catches his breath and groans, as if wounded, and twisting erect, he gropes blindly for another cigarette.