Week 4 - Paragraph Development: Narration, Description and Definition Flashcards
from the root word narrate, originated from the Latin word
narrare— which means related or told. It gives a written account of an
event or story, or simply, storytelling. The sequence of events is told in
chronological order. It usually contains the following: the who, what and
when
Narration
This must have “vivid description of details, a consistent point
of view and verb tense, and a well-defined point or significance.” (Tiongson,
2016) At the end of writing it, it must send a clear message to its readers
through the story.
Narrative
This type of paragraph development requires the following elements:
- The character is vital in a story as they are the ones primarily involved in
it. The characters may be divided into the protagonists (who serve as the
main character/s) and antagonists (who initiates conflict for the
protagonists in a story). - The setting determines a clear picture of the place where the story takes
place. It may be a significant part of the story or it may set the mood. - The plot gives life to the characters and gives sense to the setting. The
events that will happen in the story contribute to the plot. - Point-of-view refers to the perspective in which the narrative was
written. There are three main types of point-of-view:
a. First person POV– where the writer tells the story from his/her
own perspective
b. Second person POV – the writer tells the story in his own words
from an observer’s point of view.
c. Third person POV – the writer objectively tells the story or
events that happened to another individual.
This is vital in a story as they are the ones primarily involved in
it. These may be divided into the protagonists (who serve as the
main character/s) and antagonists (who initiates conflict for the
protagonists in a story).
Characters
determines a clear picture of the place where the story takes
place. It may be a significant part of the story or it may set the mood.
Settings
refers to the perspective in which the narrative was
written
Point of view
There are three main types of point-of-view:
There are three main types of point-of-view:
a. First person POV– where the writer tells the story from his/her
own perspective
b. Second person POV – the writer tells the story in his own words
from an observer’s point of view.
c. Third person POV – the writer objectively tells the story or
events that happened to another individual
where the writer tells the story from his/her
own perspective
First person POV
the writer tells the story in his own words
from an observer’s point of view
2nd person POV
the writer objectively tells the story or
events that happened to another individual.
3rd person POV
Figures of speech are often used as techniques in building a narrative
writer’s style. This often creates variety and uniqueness in a composition. Some notable figures of speech used in narratives are
the following:
- Personification
- Metaphor or simile
- Hyperbole
This is a narrative technique that “flashes back” to an event in the not
so distant past. This contributes to the story as it adds background,
meaning and depth to the current situation in the story.
Flashback
This is a narrative technique that “flashes back” to an event in the not
so distant past. This contributes to the story as it adds background,
meaning and depth to the current situation in the story.
Flashback
technique that the writer uses to present hints
to future events. Hints may be inserted into dialogues and into the
events occurring in the story, suggesting the possibilities and what is
going to happen.
Foreshadowing
A story cannot be without a foundation.
Backstory
gives the readers a
view of the story behind the story and how the characters and the
events came to be. This will give insight to the characters’
personalities, upbringing, and history, leading to a better
understanding and analysis of the story as a whole.
Backstory
gives life to the characters. This shows their spoken
language and the manner in which they speak it.
Dialogue
One example of a narrative is the following short story, 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 bricktiled 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.” 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 shoerepairing 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 selfconsciously, tried to look unaware, and could not.
The line moved on.
Suddenly, Alfredo’s slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A gir l 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 halflistened, 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 uptilted town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested 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 presidente was 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
the presidente 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.
