| |
| Life and Death of a
Filipino in the USA |
| Carlos Bulosan |
| |
|
|
| American Period |
| |
| |
I
first saw death when I was a small boy in the
little village where I was born. It was a cool
summer night and the sky was as clear as day and
the ripening ricefields were golden in the
moonlight. I remember that I was looking out the
window and listening to the sweet mating calls of
wild birds in the tall trees nearby when I heard
my mother scream from the dark corner of the room
where she had been lying for several days because
she was big with child. I ran to her to see what
was going on, but my grandmother darted from
somewhere in the faint candlelight and held me
close to the warm folds of her cotton skirt.
My mother was writhing and kicking frantically at
the old woman who was attending her, but when the
child was finally delivered and cleaned I saw
that my mother was frothing at the mouth and
slowly becoming still. She opened her eyes and
tried to look for me in the semi-darkness, as
though she had something important to tell me.
The she closed her eyes and lay very still.
My grandmother took me to the field at the back
of our house and we sat silently under the
bending stalks of rice for hours and once, when I
looked up to push away the heavy grain that was
tickling my neck, I saw the fleeing shadow of a
small bird across the sky followed by a big bat.
The small bird disappeared in the periphery of
moonlight and darkness, shrieking fiercely when
the bat caught up with it somewhere there beyond
the range of my vision. Then I thought of my
mother who had just died and my little brother
who was born to take her place, but my thoughts
of him created a terror inside me and when my
grandmother urged me to go back to the house I
burst into tears and clutched desperately at two
huge stalks of rice so that she could not pull me
away. My father came to the field then and
carried me gently in his arms, and I clung
tightly to him as though he alone could assuage
my grief and protect me from all the world.
I could not understand why my mother had to die.
I could not understand why my brother had to
live. I was fearful of the motives of the living
and the meaning of their presence on the earth.
And I felt that my little brother, because he had
brought upon my life a terrorizing grief, would
be a stranger to me forever and ever. It was my
first encounter with death; so great was its
impress on my thinking that for years I could not
forget my mother's pitiful cries as she lay
dying.
My second encounter with death happened when I
was ten years old. My father and I were plowing
in the month of May. It was raining hard that day
and our only working carabao was tired and balked
at moving. This animal and I grew up together
like brothers; he was my constant companion in
the fields and on the hillsides at the edge of
our village when the rice was growing.
My father, who was kind and gentleman, started
beating him with sudden fury. I remember that
there was a frightening thunderclap somewhere in
the world, and I looked up suddenly toward the
eastern sky and saw a wide arc of vanishing
rainbow. It was then that my father started
beating our carabao mercilessly. The animal
jumped from the mud and ran furiously across the
field, leaving the wooden plow stuck into the
trunk of a large dead tree. My father unsheathed
his sharp bolo and raced him, the thin blade of
the steel weapon gleaming in the slanting rain.
At the edge of a deep pit where we burned felled
trees and huge roots, the carabao stopped and
looked back; but sensing the anger of my father,
he plunged headlong into the pit. I could not
move for a moment, then I started running madly
toward the pit.
My father climbed down the hole and looked at the
carabao with tears in his eyes. I did not know if
they were tears of madness or of repressed fury.
But when I had climbed down after him, I saw big
beads of sweat rolling down his forehead,
mingling with his tears and soaking his already
wet ragged farmer's clothes. The carabao had
broken all his legs and was trembling and
twisting in the bottom of the pit. When my father
raised the bolo in his hands to strike the
animal, I turned away and pressed my face in the
soft embankment. Then I heard his hacking at the
animal, grunting and cursing in the heavy rain.
When I looked again, the animal's head was
completely severed from the body and warm blood,
was flowing from the trunk and making a red pool
under our feet. I wanted to strike my father, but
instead, fearing and loving him I climbed out of
the pit quickly and ran through the blinding rain
to our house.
Twice now, I had witnessed violent deaths. I came
across death again some years afterward on a boat
when, on my way to America, I befriended a fellow
passenger of my age named Marco.
He was an uneducated peasant boy from the
northern part of our island who wanted to earn a
little money in the new land and return to his
village. It seemed there was a girl waiting for
him when he came back, and although she was also
poor and uneducated, Marco found happiness in her
small brown face and simple ways. He showed me a
faded picture of her and ten dollars he had saved
up to have it enlarged when we arrived in the new
land.
Marco had a way of throwing back his head and
laughing loudly, the way peasants do in that part
of the island. But he was quick and sensitive;
anger would suddenly appear in his dark face,
then fear, and then laughter again; and sometimes
all these emotions would simultaneously appear in
his eyes, his mouth, and his whole face. Yet he
was sincere and honest in whatever he did or said
to me.
I got seasick the moment we left Manila, and
Marco started hiding oranges and apples in his
suitcase for me. Fruits were the only things I
could eat, so in the dead of night when the other
passengers were stirring in their bunks and
peering through the dark to see what was going
on, I sat up. Suddenly there was a scream and
someone shouted for the light. I ran to the
corner and clicked the switch and when the room
was flooded with light, I saw Marco lying on the
floor and bleeding from several knife wounds on
his body. I knelt beside him, but for a moment
only, because he held my hands tightly and died.
I looked at the people around me and then asked
them to help me carry the body to a more
comfortable place. When the steward came down to
make an inventory of Marco's suitcase, the ten
dollars was gone, We shipped back the suitcase,
but I kept the picture of the girl.
I arrived in America when thousands of people
were waiting in line for a piece of bread. I kept
on moving from town to town, from filthy job to
another, and then many years were gone. I even
lost the girl's picture and for a while forgot
Marco and my village.
I met Crispin in Seattle in the coldest winter of
my life. He had just arrived in the city from
somewhere in the east and he had no place to
stay. I took him to my room and for days we slept
together, eating what we could buy with the few
cents that we begged in gambling houses from
night to night. Crispin had drifted most of his
life and he could tell me about other cities. He
was very gentle and there was something luminous
about him, like the strange light that flashes in
my mind when I sometimes think of the hills of
home. He had been educated and he recited poetry
with a sad voice that made me cry. He always
spoke of goodness and beauty in the world.
It was a new experience and the years of
loneliness and fear were shadowed by the grace of
his hands and the deep melancholy of his eyes.
But the gambling houses were closed toward the
end of that winter and we could not beg any more
from the gamblers because they were also
starving. Crispin and I used to walk in the snow
for hours looking for nothing, waiting for the
cold night to fall, hoping for the warm sun to
come out of the dark sky. And then one night when
we had not eaten for five days, I got out of bed
and ate several pages of an old newspaper by
soaking them in a can of water from the faucet in
our room. Choking tears came out of my eyes, but
the deep pain in my head burst wide open and
blood came out of my nose. I finally went to
sleep from utter exhaustion, but when I woke up
again, Crispin was dead.
Yes, it was true. He was dead. He had not even
contemplated death. Men like Crispin who had
poetry in their souls come silently into the
world and live quietly down the years, and yet
when they are gone no moon in the sky is lucid
enough to compare with the light they shed when
they were among the living.
After nearly a decade of wandering and
rootlessness, I lost another good friend who had
guided me in times of helplessness. I was in
California in a small agricultural community. I
lived in a big bunkhouse of thirty workers with
Leroy, who was a stranger to me in many ways
because he was always talking about unions and
unity. But he had a way of words in utter
simplicity, like "work" which he
translated into "power," and
"power" into "security." I
was drawn to him because I felt that he had lived
in many places where the courage of men was
tested with the cruelest weapons conceivable.
One evening I was eating with the others when
several men came into our bunkhouse and grabbed
Leroy from the table and dragged him outside. He
had been just about to swallow a ball of rice
when the men burst into the place and struck
Leroy viciously on the neck with thick leather
thongs. He fell on the floor and coughed up the
ball of rice. Before Leroy realized what was
happening to him, a big man came toward him from
the darkness with a rope in his left hand and a
shining shotgun in the other. He tied the rope
around Leroy's neck while the other men pointed
their guns at us, and when they had taken him
outside, where he began screaming like a pig
about to be butchered, two men stayed at the door
with their aimed guns. There was some scuffling
outside, then silence, and then the two men
slowly withdrew with their guns, and there was a
whispering sound of running feet on the newly cut
grass in the yard and then the smooth purring of
cars speeding away toward the highway and then
there was silence again.
We rushed outside all at once, stumbling against
each other. And there hanging on a eucalyptus
tree, naked and shining in the pale light of the
April moon, Leroy was swinging like a toy
balloon. We cut him down and put him on the
grass, but he died the moment we reached him. His
genitals were cut and there was a deep knife
wound in his chest. His left eye was gone and his
tongue was sliced into tiny shreds. There was a
wide gash across his belly and his entrails
plopped out and spread on the cool grass.
That is how they killed Leroy. When I saw his
cruelly tortured body, I thought of my father and
the decapitated carabao and the warm blood
flowing under our bare feet. And I knew that all
my life I would remember Leroy and all the things
he taught me about living.
|
| |
|
|
| To
print or copy, highlight the selection and
right-click using your mouse. |
| |
|
|
 |
| |
 |
 |
 |
| |
|
|
| Everyone is
free to copy and print from this site provided
that the original works of the Filipino authors
remain unharmed... |
|
