Iguana

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1) Title – Iguana 2) Author – A. R. Enriquez 3) Author’s Bio – A. (Antonio) R. (Reyes) Enriquez born and raised in Zamboanga City and educated at a local Jesuit school, Ateneo de Zamboanga –an all-boys institution then –is the author of several books of short stories and novels. He has been published in his homeland, the Philippines, and abroad. His short stories have been included in anthologies and translated into Korean and German. It was his fearful and unforgettable experience in Liguasan Marsh in Mindanao that likely started his career as a novelist. Liguasan Marsh was the setting of his first novel, Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, 1981. Other novels: The Living and the Dead, Giraffe Books, Philippines, 1994; Subanons, University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 1999; most recent work: Samboangan: the Cult of War, (epic novel), University of the Philippines Press, 2007. However, his “happiest and memorable times” in his grandfather’s land in Labuan, 35 kms. northwest of Zamboanga City, and the last coastal village reachable by land from there, which prodded him to write about farmers, fishermen, and the rural folk. Labuan village is the setting of his stories in the collection, Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories, 1977. The aforementioned novel and story collection were published by UQP Press, Queensland, Australia. Other short story collections: Spots on Their Wings and Other Stories, Silliman University, Philippines, 1972; The Night I Cry and Other Stories, New Day Publisher, Philippines, 1989; The Unseen War and Other Tales from Mindanao, Giraffe Books, Manila, 1996; The Voice from Sumisip & Four Short Stories, Giraffe Books, Manila, 2003. He is a much awarded writer, among the notable awards: UMPHIL—Writers Union of the Philippines—; University of the Philippines National Fellow for Literature lifetime award; S.E.A. Write Award; Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers Fellowship; and Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for the short story and its grand prize for the novel He and his wife Joy, with their five grandchildren, now live in Cagayan de Oro City. 4) No. of pages - 13 5) No. of words – 6,829

6) Attachment:

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IGUANA By A. R. Enriquez

WE HEARD the mother hen croak. “Get up, Macario,” Ma said. “The mother hen…” “What?” said Pa, awakening. We heard the hen croak again and then, all of a sudden, become quiet… “The mother hen,” Ma said. “Maybe the iguana has entered the chicken house. Quick.” “Léche!” Pa said.

I AM sitting on the top rung of the kitchen steps with a .22-caliber rifle in my hands. I sit there waiting for the iguana to come out of the bamboo thickets across the river. It is morning, soft and light. Just then I hear mama call me from the flower garden. I lean the rifle against the wall of the kitchen and go down the wooden steps. Then I go around the back of the house and on to the footpath, worn smooth and scoured by countless interminable feet, and then across before the now useless, broken-down chicken house. I go on. Suddenly the path levels off as straight as a plumb-line toward the garden. I walk a small way on the footpath before stopping in front of the garden. Ma is squatting on the ground before her flower bed of daisies. Her hands are busy turning the soft black loam over and patting it gently around the stems. “Where is the water I asked you for?” she says without yet looking up at me. “Did I not tell you to bring me some water?” I have forgotten all about the water. “You did not tell me, Ma,” I say. She stands up, her hands caked with black loam and hanging rigid at her sides. She turns toward me. Her eyes become locked with mine, quiet and searching. But I still don’t move. “You must help me in the garden, hijo–son,” she says. “For your father won’t lift a finger to help me.” As I look back at her, I notice the reddish blotches on the balls of her eyes and the swelling around them, and I think, She cried some more after Pa left. She cried there in her room. Alone there in her room she cried as papa tramped angrily out of the house. Earlier Pa had shouted at her and was very red behind the ears with anger. I was then under the house, the bamboo-split floor not three feet above my bare head, and I was about to take the fodder to our pigs when I heard him, in the sala, say: “I’m not giving

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you even a centavo. Not one centavo, do you hear? Nothing for that foolishness of a chicken house.” “The iguana will kill all my chicks,” said Ma. I suddenly stood stock-still under the house, not making any noise that would warn them. Then she said, “Last night I lost my last chicken, the mother hen of those chicks. If you don’t give me money to repair the coop, the iguana will eat all those chicks tonight. See if I am wrong.” I could hear them talking loudly in the sala through the bamboo-split floor. I heard Pa say, almost hissing with anger, “That wouldn’t have happened if you had listened to me. But you would not listen. What you listen to are those foolish ideas which go around in your head.” “You do not care about the chicks,” I heard mama say. “You would rather see them all eaten up by the iguana than give a centavo to repair the chicken house.” Standing under the bamboo floor directly where they both stood or sat I heard papa’s chair scrape as though he were about to rise, and then just as suddenly he changed his mind and remained seated, still and immobile. When papa spoke again, he was mincing his words carefully. “That is enough talk. I’m telling you, you won’t get a centavo from me anymore for your foolishness.” It was at this time I heard ma’s feet scrape on the floor and hiss up toward the room. Yet I did not even move, still standing stock-still, not even to look up through the splits of the bamboo floor, as she came into the room and stood by the window overlooking her flower garden. Now I heard papa’s chair scraping roughly on the floor, and then he stood up and walked out of the house, red behind the ears. I knew they were red without seeing them, because his ears always turned red when he got angry. But that was not what I was thinking then. I was not even thinking, but listening to ma as she cried there by the window. Now she is through crying, I am thinking. But her eyes are red and swollen and the crying is till there, only deeper now in her eyes. Now I say, “I’ll get the water now, Ma.” Her eyes suddenly become blank, turning inwardly into her sockets. She is no longer looking at me, her face bent down, but staring at her brightly colored daisies. Her eyes seem to gape blankly. She turns to speak to me, but already I am going down to get the water from the well below the chicken house. After a while, I come back carrying a long bamboo tube over one shoulder. “When are your city friends coming, Ma?” I ask, emptying the water from the bamboo tube into a petrol can, which papa had emptied and scrubbed hard with soap and ashes some time ago, and which we now used as a water container. Then I go to the house and lean the bamboo container against the sawali–woven strips wall. Ma picks up a dipper, its bottom perforated with nail-holes, and dips it into the water can, and, with the dipper raised above them with one hand, she begins to walk up and down between the beds of daisies. “Maybe this coming Saturday,” she answers. She draws the dipper above the flower beds as she moves up and down between them. With one hand cupped under its bottom, she sprinkles the water on the flower beds. “Are they really coming here, Ma?” I ask, thinking, But that was the other-other Saturday yet. “Pa says they’re not coming to buy your flowers.” I see her stop then. The hand, with the dipper, is half-raised in a silent dumb gesture while the other is suspended midway between sprinkling the water and cupping the bottom of the dipper. Suddenly a cloud passes her face. “Did your papa tell you that?”

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she asks me, still and rigid, with the now-empty dipper in her hand. “He must have made fun of my garden, hijo.” “He said that those city women were merely talking,” I say. “And you believed them.” As you believed that building your chicken house beside the river was the best place for the chickens. Then the flood came and drowned your chickens and washed away the bamboo poles and left holes in it as wide as a man’s chest for the iguana to come later and kill your chickens. I stop thinking now and say, “Pa said Mang Pedro would grow hair on his pate if those city women would come back. “Why would they come here,” I say, imitating papa, “some fifty kilometers from the city just to buy one peso of flowers? Even at half the price in the city or even for nothing, they wouldn’t waste time coming here.” I watch her hand that has begun to move above the flower beds, with the perforated-bottom dipper raised above the daisies. Mama moves up and down between the beds of her daisies. “They will come,” she tells me. “They told me that if I sell them daisies a half the price, they would come even from the city to buy them. So why should they not come?” Now she moves rapidly. “I’m selling the flowers to them at half the price. No, not for nothing, as your papa said.” She does not say anything for a moment. “Oh, your papa,” she says. “Sometimes I cannot understand him. He never does anything that would bring us some extra money.” “That was Saturday,” I tell her. “But the Saturday, Ma, of last three weeks, and still the city women have not come.” I watch her moving rapidly back and forth among the beds of her daisies, thinking, Even if they come this Saturday, the daisies would be too old and wilted by then. Ma is watering the daisies to keep them fresh when all the water in the world cannot do it. She stops then. “Por favor,” she says, straightening up and arching her back slowly, “would you bring the can of water closer?” I walk over and stoop down to pick up the can of water. I take it closer to her. Then I walk off down the feet-scoured path, not looking back at her, following the path which goes straight as a plumb-line the same way I had come into ma’s flower garden. I return to the kitchen and sit back on the top rung of the steps. I reach out a hand and pick up the rifle leaning against the wall and lay it down across my lap. Across, the river is beginning to glitter under the new sun. I think, Poor mama. O, poor mama, that the river should swell just at the time that her mother hens were having their chicks. Pa told her not to build her chicken house so near the river and she said to him, “They love to be near the river and to scratch in the sand.” “Oo,” said Pa. “And when the July flood comes, your chickens will be finished, and even your chicken house will be washed away.” And that was exactly what happened. The flood came last week and drowned all of mama’s 75 chickens except for a rooster and a few hens and some six chicks. I think, Now she is watering her daisy flower garden, which will never sell a single flower, and Pa would say what he had said to her then: “How can you be so gaga, Isabel? Turning that vegetable garden into a daisyflower garden, the flowers no one would buy, which, in the first place, before it became a flower garden had not produced a single vegetable. Because you were hard-headed and insisted on sowing it with seeds you had bought from the city in small plastic packages. The seeds would not grow here in our land for they were not sowed here, no coming from here but from another country like American—yes, American seeds. Phhfft!”

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That is what Pa would say. Then Ma would say, “But the first lettuce crop was big-big. You saw it yourself, Macario, and you even ate some yourself. Only the second crop was small, and that was because you would not help me or Chu to carry the water up here from the river.” And then Pa would look at her unbelievingly and say, “You mean those two or three tiny stalks of lettuce? You don’t call that a crop, Isabel. Not when you spent more than ten pesos on seeds, watered it day and night—the American seeds needing more water, you said, than our own—and using our entire vegetable lot for it.” He would be fuming and unbelieving, though he’d sometimes laugh inwardly at her. As he had laughed that time they were talking about the chicken house; only he would be laughing in that queer way. I think, O, pobrecita mama. Oo, muy pobrecita–poor woman mama. “You, Isabel,” my father said, “what crazy things get into your head. A whole river for the chickens to drink and all its shore for them to scratch for pebbles and shells.” He was getting bulbous and tomato-red around the face as he often got when he fumed or laughed at Ma’s “crazy” ideas. They were both standing on the vacant lot above the river bank. Here Ma wanted her chicken house to be built, because “the shells along the bank,” she said, “will make them hatch more eggs.” Ma gazed toward the river below the lot. Pa is hurting her, I was thinking then. He is hurting her laughing at her there, and why doesn’t he stop that? Instead Pa said, “You must have read that in a revista--magazine. What do you call it, Farm Magazine? Perhaps it also tells you to build a chicken house beside a river.” Only he was not serious, but getting more bulbous and tomato-red around the face. O, pobrecita mama. To be laughed at, yet not rally laughing, laughing inwardly in the face, and he tomato-red, ridiculing her as she stood in the vacant lot there. “The water of the flood does not reach up to here,” she said. “It has never risen higher than up to that rock there.” I can see her even now. She, standing above the bank, pointing to the old rock, rigid and stiff beside papa. She seemed to break like the brittle, dry bark of datiles trees which collapses at the mere weight of one’s foot. Pa was quiet for a moment. “It rose once,” he said. “Some seven years ago. You remember, Isabel, when it reached even up to the front stairs of our house. Wouldn’t it be surprising if it does that again now just to spite you?” Only he was not serious, but even mama could tell he was laughing inwardly behind his tomato-red face. And I think, Four months later the river did swell and almost all her chickens were drowned. Léche! Come on, iguana, I’m ready for you now. Léche, if I’m not ready for léche y léche y léche! I grasp the rifle lying across my lap. Shifting the weight o the right of my haunch, I face toward the bamboo thickets which explode and crack like coconut shells as they clash and bend against each other in the wind. In the meantime, the light has become brighter and up along the river bank the dappled shadows are thin and green on the thick mat of grass. I remember what Pa had said: “O, hijo, this rifle is yours now. It had been your papalolo’s—my papa—and he bequeathed it to me when I was just 14 years old. So, as my papa before me had done, I now bequeath it also to you.” I was looking at some pictures in the magazine in the sala–living room, which mama had given me, and he laid the rifle down in front of me. He had to bend over as he set it down, carefully, for I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, bent way over the pages of the magazine. “Take this

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rifle, hijo,” he repeated. “Go out and make use of it like a man. With this rifle, not with comic books and magazines.” I said nothing. I had not killed anything then, much less with a rifle, and now even with the rifle I still haven’t killed anything. Not even a tanśi bird which is the smallest of God’s creatures, so tiny and very friendly that it is easy to kill one. “You must have hate in you to do anything,” he had said to me once. “If you’ve only all love you become a milksop, and the worst kind is one with all ideas in his head, too. You see your mama. She has only ideas in her, and so she never gets anything done. But hate propels you. It’s that which makes you do things; it makes you make what you want of yourself.” I remember that time he said he would grow rice on the slope of his kaingin. The folks in the barrio laughed at him but while they laughed he ordered some upland rice from a friend in Cotabato and then planted it beside the slope of his kaingin. And his upland rice grew in his hatred for the ignorant barrio people, who were surprised that rice could grow without water on the hillside. No one before that had thought that rice could grow except in paddies in the lowland or in savannas. “It’s not enough to have ideas,’ he told me after this. “But hate makes them practical; it makes them work.” I think, Still I’ve not killed anything with this rifle. Not even a tanśi with this rifle that Pa has even killed a wild boar with. Now I listen to mama. But I do not hear her moving in the garden anymore. I think, Maybe she’s at the back of the garden, and the water can is almost empty and her city friends are not coming back to buy flowers. What’s the use of watering them? And my legs are still twitchy with the climbing in getting water from the river. “Oye–Listen, even nature has to assert herself,” said my papa. “Why do you think she swells and overflows her banks, destroying your mother’s chicken house? Because there is hatred in herself; without this hatred, without this flood, she ceases to be: to assert and to exist.” The two of us were standing before the debris and flotsam of the chicken house. We were not even looking at each other, standing there in the mire and slush that the flooded river had dumped that night until early morning onto the bank. “O, yes,” he said, “a river that has not swollen for almost seven years, but swelled just when your mama’s hen had its very first brood. If this is not hatred, do not call me ‘Macario.’” He was thinking as one thinking aloud to himself, and I listening to him as though listening to myself; I who would also perhaps speak so to myself as my pa did then. I still did not say anything to him, listening: “Your ma has much love, but look what happens to all her ideas. It is true that she gets angry sometimes, just as the river swells in hatred to become itself, for nature–if she only has love–would soon be ignored.” I was truly listening to him, but I didn’t understand what he was saying then as I do not understand him even now. Thinking then to myself, It’s three weeks now since, yet I have not killed anything with this rifle. Not even a tanśi bird, the easiest thing to kill for it is the friendliest and it is not wild…. “As I hated your papalolo,” he went on, more to himself than to anyone else. “My own papa, who was like your ma, who was full of ideas from books and who would have made all of us beggars. But I hated him enough to cheat him, to hide the copra money from him before he had time to spend it all on any of his foolish ideas of planting tobacco that would not grow near the sea, or put up, of all things, telephone lines in the barrio that were broken down by falling coconut trees in the wind.” Still I listened to him, the two of

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us standing there in the mire and slush of the flooded river, and I did not understand him then as I do not understand him now. I looked at the three hens and several chicks and a rooster, the only rooster out of ten that was still alive, all that was left of her 75 chickens, inside the chicken house–wet and soaked at the same time with water and slush. A few days later there would be only the mother hen and the six chicks. And then this morning even the mother hen was gone, devoured by the iguana last night. And tomorrow the chicks too would be gone, to be eaten alive and digested in the iguana’s stomach; for papa would not give mama a centavo to fix and cover the holes in the chicken house made by the flood a weeks and a half ago. Yet I was not thinking of this at that time nor of the fowls and the six chicks. I was then wriggling my toes in the mud and slush, watching the alluvial sand as it oozed between my toes. Then I heard his voice again, standing there with his flat feet in an old pair of Marcelo rubber shoes, heavy and oozing with mud, which he had bought nearly two years ago during the Fiesta del Pilar in the city, and they smelling now of athlete’s foot; he never wore them, not even in the farm, except when he got his feet wet, saying, “That was the ultimate. It was truly the last thing a man would do to impoverish his own brood. Put up telephone lines through coconut land.” Still I was listening to him and not understanding a word. “So I cheated him of his copra money, rather than see my own younger brothers and sisters with nothing to eat later on.” He stopped then while I went on listening, listening on to the silence, the hiatus after he had ceased talking. He went on, "It was not easy to do this to the old man, my own father. But then there was enough hatred for me to cheat him, of what is mine too–even to his death bed.” I had now ceased listening to him, though his words somehow were droning in my head. I think now Not even a tanśi. A rifle that has killed a wild boar already. “Chu,” says Pa from the sala. He walks through the length of the sala and comes into the kitchen. I turn around on the step. Pa lifts up the matambaka fish dangling from a nawi string, swinging them up in one swift complete motion into a bateya–basin. I watch his back and listen to the plop-sound that each of the matambaka fish makes as he slides it from the nawi–rattan string into the basin. “The fish are already dead,” I think aloud. “Yet they are now swimming around in the bateya, black and slimy.” Pa says, “I don’t understand your mother. Gardening from the first light of day.” He bends sideward and reaches down into the water jar for a tabo–dipper of water. “Léche! She has not even done anything in the kitchen yet.” “She went to see Piloy,” I tell him, not even thinking about it. I repeat, “Mama went over to see Piloy after you’d gone this morning.” He sets the dipper down beside the sink. “Piloy,” he says grimly, pulling out the gills of the fish with his forefinger. “Oh, yes…Piloy.” Still he has his back toward me. “Has the carpenter come yet?” “No,” I answer, “not yet, Pa.” I think, Piloy has fixed the roof several times already. Every time it stops raining, Ma calls Piloy to fix the leak in the roof. “It is Ma’s fault that the roof leaks,” says Pa. He said, that time when it rained for a week, “You, Ma. Look at the rain pouring through our roof like it was a river.” He stood before the sala wall, looking up between the joint where the roof edges against the wall. “Look at your work,” he said. “I told you, you can not have that type of modern roof with nipa materials. But you’re so hardheaded, so see what has happened.”

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What Pa meant was that you cannot build a roofless house with nipa and sawali. Ma had seen the plan in a magazine and it was for a modern house, which from the design showed the roof hidden from one’s sight, and she wanted our house to look exactly like it. So when Pa built the new house, she also had her roof that is invisible from the front. “It only leaks when the rain is very strong,” said Ma. She was standing behind him. The water came pouring down the sides of the sawali wall as though someone was overturning buckets of water up on the roof. Pa was standing before the wall. “I told you it wouldn’t work,” he said. “But you wanted a roofless house. ‘It is the modern house,’ you said. Oh, yes, the plan which you saw in a magazine, which hid the roof from your view if you were in front of the house.” He turned around and faced her. He was not really angry yet. He would be very angry later on that night. “It was all right,” he went on, “maybe if you built it in the city with concrete walls and iron roofing. But, no, you must also have a house just like it, I mean, the front with the invisible roof.” He stopped, and I was thinking then Pa is breathing harder, as though he is trying to catch up with his words, the words that come pouring, raining like torrents. This time Ma spoke before he could catch his breath. “We will call the carpenter. When the rain stops we’ll call Piloy to fix the roof——” But he did not wait for her to finish. He said, “Only, the wall of your house is sawali and your roof is made of nipa.” I think, And Pa got really very angry that night. Even when he went to the kaingin the next morning, he was still very angry. “Milk of your mother!” he said to her. Because it had rained all night that night and all the rain collected in a sag in the roof, and in the middle of the night, while Papa was sound asleep in his bed, the roof caved in and a ton of water came pouring down on him. Pa sprang up from the bed and fell on his rump on the floor. “Coñodeputamadre– Cunt of your mother!” he swore. “Now, just look at your work, Isabel. Do you see it now?” as though Ma were also responsible for the rain. He was completely soaked with the rain water. He looked even worse than the chickens would when the flood came later and drenched all of Ma’s chickens. And that night, shivering with cold, and Mama sitting silently on the edge of the drenched bed, Pa was very angry. The carpenter is coming again to fix our roof. He will go up the roof with buckets of water which he will pour on the roof to see where it leaks leaks leaks…. “Look out you don’t fall,” said Ma. “No,” he said. “No—ha ha ha—I won’t fall.” Holding the fish in one hand, Pa slices each side on a block of wood and then sprinkles salt in the wounds. He puts the fish into the basin and goes over to the stove. “Go get some firewood, hijo,” he tells me, “because your mama is eating only flowers.” The fish is bleeding now, I am thinking But they were already dead even before they reached the fish vendors’ tables in the market. I lean the rifle against the wall, thinking, Dead and bleeding and swimming no longer but floating in the water. I stand up and go under the house only to find that the woodpile is used up. So I go to the small forest beside the river and pick up some sticks and dry branches to carry back home in my arms. As I turn around the bend and pass the chicken house, I look into the garden. Mama is no longer there, though the empty water can stands between the flower beds

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with the dipper up-ended on its wooden handle. She must have gone back into the house. I go on up the steps of the kitchen and roll the sticks of wood down from my arms under the stove. I hear Pa say in the sala, “A library. What would we do with a library, Señora Concha?” I turn and look into the sala. The woman is sitting with her back to the window, facing toward the kitchen. Her husband Señor Felipe Santos sits beside her, legs crossed over, leaning stiffly against the back of his chair. Pa says, “We don’t need…a waste of money.” “Not really a library,” Señora Concha answers. “It will be just a small reading center, where our boys can come and read.” “It’s a great opportunity for our boys,” the man says. He sits upright on the chair, his back pressed against the back of the chair like a hot iron. “We have so many intelligent boys here, Macario. Their agrarian minds will be greatly enriched by this sort of opportunity.” Pa bristles like a hog at the long words, that tell nothing of the man himself but only his university background. Maybe Pa is thinking, University people think they know all the answers. They think they’re even smarter than God. “Reading books will only make them lazy pícaros–rascals,” he says. “All they need to know is how to plow–and that God has already taught them. It’s enough.” “No,” says Señor Santos, “not in our modern world, Macario. The competition for more learning and more knowledge is too great and demanding to be utterly ignored.” “You talk with your feet above the ground. That’s why, I think, this library is a crazy idea,” says Pa. Ma says quickly. “My husband does not really mean that. He’s just against anything new, that he has not seen put to practical use. You’d be very surprised how oldfashioned he is.” I see her trying to smile at Señor Santos and at the other woman. “I believe, Señora Concha, it will be nice to have our own reading center. Every barrio should at least have a small one.” “Your wife is right, Macario,” Señor Santos says. “No, she is not…” says Pa. “And don’t tell me I am wrong. For I know my wife better than you do—ay, even more so perhaps about her foolish dreams and her crazy ideas.” “Please, Macario,” Ma says. “Señor Santos and his wife are our visitors and you must not talk that way. You’re only showing your lack of breeding.” “Your visitors,” Pa tells her. “They’re not mine. I didn’t ask them to come to my house and ask money from me for their crazy ideas.” And, fuming visibly, he turns away from the woman who had said to him: “It was your wife’s idea…‘Ñor Macario—” and then, turning to Ma with a sudden jerk of his head—“Your idea! Ah-ah-ah,” he says as though he was about to cough the words out. “And how did she…to hide this idea behind you…to make use of you”—still facing Ma, not even turning to the other woman. “So that you’d come here and solicit the money, cheat me of money by hiding the fact that it was my wife’s idea from the beginning!” Señor Felipe Santos, who had been educated in the University, speaks with a voice so soft even his wife can hardly hear him. “Señor Domingo, please keep calm. Your wife means very well, and her plan to put up this library for the barrio is so generous.”

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Pa jerks his head toward him. “Ah-ah-ah,” he says to Señor Santos, “she has used you, too! What did she tell you? My wife, hah?” He stops, looking straight into the man’s eyes. “Did she tell you of the library house she put up before—there, behind the crazy flower garden?” “Oh, you, Macario,” says Ma. Still Pa looks into the man’s eyes. “Which she built some three years ago,” he tells the man. “You were not here yet, Señor Santos. You were nothing to us then, you and your city wife, not even a name yet—you who came only two years ago to inherit your papa’s vast yet already barren farm. So you’d not know of our nice little library.” “Stop it!” cries Ma. Now he turns to her, slowly, not with the same quick-jerky motion of his head. “Why not, Isabel?” he asks her. “They’ve the right to know. They are all the way in this foolishness with you, too, aren’t they?” Pa now jerks his head back toward Señor Santos and his woman, with that same quick savagery, gazing at them at one and the same time. “I’ll tell you about my wife’s nice little library,” he begins, filling the baleful voice with his slow, droning voice. “Well, three years ago my wife had this brilliant idea she has now. So, three years ago, she built her little library, not with her own money, for her father had left her nothing, but with money from my own pocket. She built it, just as you’re planning now, for the barrio. And then she stocked it up with second-hand books and old magazines that were given to her by her friends from the city, or she bought them herself in second-hand stores. “Which you saw on your way here,” Pa goes on. “You couldn’t have missed it. That old fallen-down building you passed coming here. The same…that looks like a church—once did anyway—behind her flower garden. Yes, that was her nice little library.” The three are all quiet, listening to him who does not care whether they hate him or not, who speaks on, knowing that once he begins, there will be no end to it, not even when he knows that the library building he speaks of no longer has any resemblance to either a library or to a church. He goes on, concluding now with the same slow, droning voice: “But which is now used by pigs and goats to litter or to throw off their excrement.” Pa stops and looks around him. “Yes, Señor Santos,” he says, “to litter and to throw their excrement.” O pobrecita Mama, and that is not the end yet. “Oo, o, now filled with excrement and stinking of pigs’ urine. And her daisy flower garden—that will soon wilt and die before her city friends come to buy them, or her flooded chicken house—she wouldn’t listen to me who knows about fowls more than she can ever learn in a hundred years—which cost us 250 pesos, and for which she now asks more money from me to repair as she would want me to give my money to your foolish library.” I listen on: “Even our own house leaks every time it rains,” says Pa. “The house she wants with an invisible roof, that she had seen in a magazine, and that now leaks and leaks and leaks.” When Señor Santos and his wife leave by the front stairs, I sit back on the rung of the steps and cradle the rifle in my lap. I gaze across the river to the bamboo thickets, and I think: Come on out, iquana. You, lechery of your mother. Hen killer They are going down the steps without making any noise. I listen but even the second wooden slab of the last step does not squeak, which it usually does when anyone goes down the stairs and steps on it. Ma says in the sala, “You’re a beast!”

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Pa, who has gone out to the porch, now comes back to the sala. He stops abruptly, halting in front of her as though a horse had kicked him. Come, iguana. This time I’ll kill you. Come now, hen killer He stands still, standing stock-still, and staring fixedly at Ma. He says to her, “You baited them. Do you think because Señor Felipe Santos went to the University, he would awe me with his presence? Insulted them and he sat there cool as a cocoon. If the University makes you a coward, I would rather be un ignorante.” All this time Ma has sat up right on her chair and now she slumps down on it. “You didn’t have to tell them,” she says. “Oh, no, you didn’t need to, Macario, but you were deliberately cruel, so you would embarrass me and keep your filthy money to yourself!” “But I thought you wanted them to know,” Pa answers mockingly. “Isn’t that what you brought them here for? That they’d know about your nice little library and how generous you’ve always been?” He starts to imitate Señor Santos: “‘Her plan for the barrio to put up a library is so generous, Macario,’” and then he laughs, Ha ha ha ha. “And when I insulted them he says cool as anything, ‘Señor Domingo, please calm yourself…’ wasn’t that like a really educated university man, Isabel?” “You told them,” she says. “You told them to shame me! You did not have to tell them anything! Of the poultry, the garden, the leak in the roof…not anything!” He begins to laugh again, in that same half-laughter. “Ha ha ha ha,” he says. “‘It is not really a library,’ Señora Concha says to me. ‘Just a little reading center.’” Pa walks out of the sala and through the dining room into the kitchen. He stops before the kitchen door and peers over my shoulder. His eyes fly quickly across the river to the bamboo thickets on the crest of the bank. After a while he speaks as though he is speaking to himself: “Don’t you know that the price of copra, Isabel, has gone down to only 23 pesos a sack? If it keeps on going down some more this week, I don’t know I can pay even my own laborers. Ay, it has never been this low before. Yet we’ve to force the Chinese merchants to buy our copra practically for nothing.” He is quiet for a while. I feel him standing beside me, staring now over my shoulder and across the river to the bamboo thickets on the other side of the bank. “You’ll ruin us yet,” Pa says seriously. “If you don’t stop this foolishness, you will send me to jail for debt.” Ma answers him from the sala, “It is not that you’ll go to jail. You only wanted to embarrass Señor Santos too just because he favored my putting up a library!” “Léche!” says Pa in the kitchen. “You and Señor Santos are not getting a centavo from me for your ‘crazy idea.’” I sit on the top rung of the steps, the rifle half-raised to my chest in my hands. Pa walks over to the sink and peers into it. Suddenly, he swings up his hand at the basin of fish, knocking it over on the sink with a sweeping blow of his flat hand and spilling the matambaka fish all over the sink. Some of the fish plop down on the floor, and the basin clutters emptily. “Macario!” I hear Ma cry shrilly in the sala. Yet I continue sitting there without moving. I am holding the rifle in my hand, thinking, Come out, iguana. Show your natural ugly snout now, and I myself will erase it for you with this rifle. Ay, come out, ugly-snouted one Pa turns and looks through the dining room door into the sala where Ma sits alone. “Oo, Macario,” she cries, “what are you doing?” He does not say anything. He walks back to the sala. Ma sits slumped on her chair. He watches her for a minute without saying anything, perhaps thinking, “If I listen

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to her, there won’t be anything even for the boy. But as the boy in me hated the father, so will there be enough hatred now in the man for the woman.” He halts before Ma and looks oddly at her as though it were the first time he had seen her. I look over my shoulder into the sala. I see Ma’s face begin to twitch like a child’s. “You, Macario,” she says, “you don’t have to be so mean and cruel!” “Lechery of your mother!” says Pa to her in the sala. Her face twitches and contorts like a child’s. “I hate you,” she says. “Truly I hate you, Macario!” Ma puts her face in her hands and cries. Her shoulders shake with her crying, and she tries to stop it by clapping both her hands over her mouth; but her crying oozes out just the same through her fingers like vomit. Papa spins on his heels, and I look away and then I hear the heavy squeak on the second rung as Papa tramps out of the house Come out, iguana. Come, you hen killer. I raise the rifle against my shoulder, point it toward the bamboo thickets across the river and squint one eye through the sight of the rifle. In the meantime, Pa has crossed the river and is now climbing up the foot-worn path toward the bamboo thickets, and as he turns round the incline, the bamboo thickets between him and me, and is suspended briefly, as it were, in the sight of the rifle, I draw the cock back and slowly pull the trigger. A quick report echoes across the river and, at that moment, Papa falls down on the ground and then lies quietly among the bamboo thickets…. -End-