The Doubters

By Timothy R. Montes

“Has a people ever changed its gods although they were no gods?”
~ Jeremiah 2:11

I.

Four ten. Rev. Daniel Balein sat on the edge of the bed dazedly looking at the desk clock in front of him. From the distance, he could hear the breastbeating of fowl wings followed by the cacophonous crowing of cocks. The morning sounds reverberated in his numb brain as he rubbed his eyes and took a second look at the tine. Four ten: the luminous green arms of the clock looked like a snake’s open jaw. Four ten, indeed. He numbly sat there, gazing at the sea-green marks on the clock’s dark face, until the fact sank home: it had failed to ring again. Its unreliability irritated him. He muttered to himself as he braced himself for another morning task: that of looking for his slippers. Somehow, his slippers had acquired along the way the strange propensity of hiding under the bed. His feet, groping for the tsinelas, only struck a cold floor. He shivered. I must finish the sermon, he told himself; the coldness of the floor, by one of those exceptional elliptical thoughts of his, reminded him of his sermon about Jesus walking on the sea. Carefully, he got up from bed so as not to disturb his sleeping wife. His groping feet scanned the floor, cold inch by cold inch, and, finally, when the sole of a foot swiped the slippers, they only slid further under the bed. Gingerly, he stood there breathing heavily in consternation as he tried to fight the urge of switching on the light; but, as he was ashamed of waking his wife up, he just managed to express his helplessness by expelling air through his mouth before he heard some of his joints snapping in their balls and sockets when he bent down to look under the bed. Crouched on all fours, he peered into the dark cavern under the cobwebby vault of the bed — it smelled of dust and floorwax — and after a while, when his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he saw the shadow of the slippers. He made sure, when he reached for them, that they wouldn’t slip farther into the abyss.

His bones creaked when he stood up.

His wife stirred and moaned. “What time is it?’ she asked with half-closed eyes.

“Did I wake you up, Elena?” Hastily, he dropped the slippers to the floor and slipped them on. “Four ten. And the alarm clock failed to ring again.”

“I heard your bones creaking,” Elena said through a yawn. “I thought they were the bamboos in the yard bending in the wind.”

He chuckled. Something gurgled in his throat and he made an effort to swallow it down.

“What time did you go to sleep?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

“One o’clock. And I still didn’t finish the sermon.”

“Help me get up,” she said, stretching out her hands to him, “so I can prepare us our coffee.”

He heaved her up from the bed in one forceful pull. It was a very intimate act, this pulling his wife up from the bed, and he was always moved by this although they performed this almost every morning. His wife’s long flowing hair perpendicularly combed back by gravity rippled into a delayed reaction to her whole body, swinging itself into a life of its own. This, together with her familiar smell, made him look forward to and relish their early-morning rituals like coffee at the terrace — although he had noticed of late that she was getting plumper and plumper and he was not getting any stronger for the weight she took on.

“Your bones creaked again,” she whispered in his ears while clinging to his neck for support. He could only gasp in answer as he tried to conceal his heavy breathing while clinging to the bedpost. “We’re getting old,” she said, swivelling her legs to the edge of the bed.

Still out of breath, he chuckled in assent, but another gob of phlegm caught in his throat and made a gurgling sound. He had to rub his Adam’s apple before he could speak. “You didn’t have to be.”

Suddenly, his mind went blank. His wife’s smell assailed him like a stabbing edge of senility. For a while, they just sat silently on the edge of the bed while his mind groped for the thing that had vanished in mid-thought.

It was only when his wife stood up to make the bed that he remembered wanted to say. We are getting old, the words hit him again, more shattering than when it was spoken. The words induced a kind of wakefulness in him, like a pursued exhortation that was at the point of breaking forth into an unanticipated illumination. He looked at his wife’s pale oval face and noted where the crow’s-feet at the corners her eyes wove a tapestry with the small checkers of the mat marks on her skin. Slowly, as if in a trance, she reached for the hooks of the mosquito net, which she deftly folded by skirting around him. Then, spreading the corners of a blanket, she tucked the folds between her breast and chin, folded into smaller squares, and laid it on top of a pillow with facile grace. It was a fascinating sight, he realized as she went on folding the matrimonial beddings. The flesh sagging under her arms, waving with the cloth she folded, reminded him of the same act she performed when hanging laundry at the clothesline. We are getting old, we are getting old: the amusement with old age made him realize the fact that grace was not what they lacked. She was right, he told himself. They were affirming old age by their lackadaisical attitude towards their isolation, for he could almost feel the heavy silence that pervaded their house.

“No wonder it didn’t ring,” Elena was saying, holding the alarm clock to his face. “You set it at six.”

“Really,” he said without a trace of embarrassment in his voice.

She smiled, tenderly, and without waiting for his apology, she proceeded to open the wooden jalousie windows. A very faint gray light washed in, heightening the whiteness of the hair on her temples; instinctively, by an associative thread of thought, he rubbed his own eyebrows, his own thick, bushy eyebrows, which were also turning white. It had strangely amused him lately to see his eyebrows turning whiter and whiter before his very eyes whenever he looked in the mirror every morning. A bald Santa Claus, he called himself. The eyebrows were the only accent to his hairless head, and as they were now turning white, the loss of color made his baldness more obvious. He massaged his forehead and let his palms run up to his bald pate, all the way to the back of his skull, down to his nape, and then began rotating his head. When he ceased his neck exercises, he felt light-headed. The room tilted before his very eyes; slowly, his vision straightened the images of the books on the table, the open windows, and the gray light streaming in from outside. A dizzied stare made him aware of the framed picture in front of him. Smiling, a kalachuchi lei around his neck, his son stared back at him from his graduation picture. The big, big smile arched the thin eyebrows above the small eyeslits: John Balein, Valedictorian (the words were inscribed on the lower margin of the frame), March 25, 1987. Two years in college and growing a mustache — he tried to remember how his son looked like the last time he came home: long hair (he dropped his CMT), lanky, and miserly in smiles. John was turning out to be a serious man, a typical serious young man given to long, intense silences; a good-looking young intellectual in his late teens who had his deep, sunken eyes and her wife’s prominent cheekbones.

A clatter of pots and pans startled him.

“Gloria’s awake,” Elena said. “Did you give Manuel money for the pan de sal?”

“No, I forgot to.”

“I’ll wake him up,” his wife said as she laid down the last pillow on the bed with a flourish of the hand. “Money?”

“In my pocket.”

Elena went over the pockets of his trousers hanging on a nail at the back of the bedroom door. “You better finish your sermon,” she said as she rummaged in his pockets. “You only have a few hours left.” Elena fished out a ten-peso bill, which she tucked inside her duster pockets.

When she faced him, she wore a soft, weary look on her face. We’re getting old: the words hit him again.

“I think I’m beginning to look like my voice,” he said.

“Nothing’s wrong with your voice. If you ask me, I think you shout too much in your sermons.” She went over to him and kissed him on the cheek. Her breath, warm on his ears, sent waves of familiar feelings, which made him smile reluctantly. “In other words,” she tenderly murmured. “you’re getting deaf.”

“We’re getting old. I know that.”

“I love you,” she said in a tone, which, to him, also meant good-morning-darling. Briskly, she disentangled herself from his casual embrace and left the room.

He shivered again. The cold was getting into his bones. He stood up and went to the window. There was a thin drizzle visible only where a lamp post spread a mantle of light on the street; otherwise, the rain remained imperceptible in the cold dawn, the coldness of which cast a soft haze on the monsoon scene outside. He remembered how he would watch his son, when John was still small, walk by that light every morning on his way to buy pan de sal at the Chinaman’s bakery on the other side of the river. He had been a good child, his son. Seventeen years … He could not believe seventeen years had passed and it surprised him now why his mind, when he tried to think of his son, dwelt only on memories of his childhood: laughter in the yard, the sunburnt smell of his hair, kissing him goodnight… Not that he blamed distance, time and space, for his present state of loneliness, but he thought more of their separation as just another rite of passage which both of them had to undergo.

His wife’s voice came to him from the next room incoherently blending with the sound of the rain on the roof. She was waking Manuel up. He felt a certain warmth in listening to the unintelligible voices, a warmth so binding to the memory as that one he felt during the funeral service he held for a church elder a few weeks before. From the pulpit, he had looked down at the row of black-dressed relatives of the deceased huddled together like boots in a shoe shop window. They were all looking up to him for some kind of divine comfort while he made his way out of the rhetorical brambles of the resurrection of Lazarus. The rain came so suddenly, drumming on the roof of the chapel, drowning out his sermon with a thousand liquid voices; but he went on talking, his words borne by the sound of the rain. The suddenness of the shower relieved the tension in the small Protestant congregation and he saw their heavy-lidded eyes, distracted by the sudden rush of water, glassily turning away to watch God’s rain out the window.

It was comforting. Listening to it now made him feel like a child again.

Manuel, the new boy, passed under the light holding an umbrella he recognized as his wife’s. He was a good boy, too, he said to himself as he inhaled a cold rainwind. For want of better words, he had classified people under the simple traits of good and bad, a categorization which, to him, had nothing to do with sin, a moral dichotomy that was slowly being swamped out by the certainty that most people were inherently good, a certainty that lately had become as pronounced as the old man’s notion that the rain had a particular smell. He smiled to himself as he realized the subtle wisdom he thought his life had revealed to him as he watched the boy twirling the umbrella in his hand. He had taken in the child a few days before as a manifestation of Christian understanding for a woman in distress. Maria, one of his new converts to Protestantism, was going away to the city because, she said, her marriage was not working well. With a liberal conviction that even surprised himself, he readily took in the child; it was an act, and he was aware of this, motivated by the tacit faith in Maria’s right to lead the life she wanted, and no matter where she might presently be, leaving behind a broken home and a child to his care — he was certain, as the rain smell, that she was fulfilling one of God’s many unknown ways so that he did not consider her going away as a form of escapism but a renewed struggle against the forces of life which threatened her spiritual survival.

He had been so willing to take in the child thinking that, somehow, the lad would enliven the atmosphere in the old house and fill the space of silence, which John had left behind. But the boy, instead of dispelling the gloomy air, often only reminded him of his own child’s alienation. Manuel was a fine lad all right, but he was very quiet and evasive. Even now as the boy walked past the light and into the still-dark-streets of the town, he could sense a certain emotional remoteness which the figure of the boy evoked. It was not a personal incongruity; it was rather a dam-bursting feeling of the past coming back with the intensity of visions, philosophical visions that age seemed to affirm for him. He remembered how, the day before, while drinking coffee at the terrace with his wife, Manuel came running in from the road chased by a moving sheet of rain. They had stopped their coffee talk and watched him as he ran straight inside the house without slowing down just as the rain needles hit the galvanized iron roof. For some minutes afterwards they continued to sit there watching the rain falling in their yard. Suddenly, he saw the wet slipper marks the boy left on the floor and it filled him with this kind of encompassing wholeness, like a blessed moment when his whole life took on a form and he could almost perceive the beginning and the end merging in that instant…

The rain was coming down in bigger drops. Manuel became a collaged through the perforations of rain needles.

“How many cups of coffee did you drink last night?” his wife’s voice jolted him. “There’s no more water in the thermos.”

“I don’t remember,” he replied, turning away from the window.

His wife, smiling, failed to conceal the lines of worry on her forehead.

“Oh, five, six cups. I guess I spent more time thinking than writing,” he explained. “Things just went round my head.”

“Is it John?” she asked.

He smiled in his own heavy-chinned manner and wordlessly sat down in front of the dresser.

“Shall I close the windows?” Elena asked.

“No, no, it’s okay. I like the rain.”

Elena looked out the window and was enthralled with the sight of the strings of water streaming down the eaves.

“The boy is going to get wet,” she said after a brief silence.

“Maybe we should let him come to church with us — or is it too it early to do that?”

“No,” his wife murmured from the windowside. “He hasn’t even adjusted himself to the house yet. It’ll take time.”

“But Maria sometimes brought him to church — ”

“I know. I know. But he’s quite new here. Don’t impose yourself on him. Besides, he’s extraordinarily sensitive.”

Rev. Balein placed his son’s picture in the middle of the dresser and hunched himself as he half-glanced at his own face in the mirror.

“Did I tell you how Maria came to decide to leave the boy with us?” he asked, as if talking to his son’s picture. “The last time she went to church with the child, her husband beat her up for having failed to cook lunch on time.”

“Poor boy,” sighed Elena. “To see all the violence — ”

“I guess I’d better be writing,” Rev. Balein said. “Otherwise I won’t ever finish my sermon.”

When his wife went out, Rev. Balein continued to look at his son’s picture. He almost knew every scratch on the laminated lacquer, every browned edge, every discolored patch. Photography’s chemical preparations did not last long in the island because of the monsoon moisture coming in from the Pacific. Wood warped easily, pictures turned brown and faded in so short a time; even times worth remembering were lost in the periodicity of typhoons. The family photo album was once found in the muddy yard after a very strong tropical storm and it was only through the patience of his wife who carefully extricated the pictures from their plastic encasements that some of them were preserved after drying. But the pictures never did look the same again, what with the smudges and tear and discoloration. It was only in the big framed picture of his graduation from high school that John looked freshly alive to him.

He walked to his study and opened his table drawer.

The letter was there, the first and only letter he had ever received from his son in two years. Except for some brief telegrams, John had not bothered to write him since he went to college. All night, he had kept on wondering what might have propelled his son to suddenly write him this long, intense letter.

Dear Father (it said, and the address evoked a Catholic ring to him):

I sure am having one hell of a time convincing myself that things are going to be all right in life. I feel like slowly being sucked into a vortex of impulsiveness and hesitance wherein things move along the threshold of nothingness. I’m not doing anything worthwhile ever since I stopped believing in God and the hibernation of the Self has kept things askance. For example, I’m always having the illusion of falling in love with every beautiful girl that comes my way only to find myself laughing at the preposterousness of the things I imagine in my solitude.

The letter had a quaint seriousness, which reminded him of the confessions of St. Augustine. His son had obviously been reading a lot for he was not an honor student majoring in political science in a prestigious university, his own alma mater at that, for nothing. His son’s youthful uncertainties had not really troubled him that much. He had also experienced those doubts himself even as a theology student in the divinity school. It was the frankness, the precision of a vivisector’s cut, the bravery to have said them that way which had taken him aback the first time he read the letter.

Last night (he continued reading), walking in the campus all by myself, I suddenly noticed how silent everything seemed to be, and how punctuated my existence was. If I wrote a poem, it would be about death; or if I drown in my own sea of uncertainty, the meaninglessness of life. Alone in the darkness of my room, I started fumbling for the flesh between my legs and thought, “How biological I am, yet wrapped in intangible monsters!”

Rev. Balein’s theological musings on his son’s letter gave birth to that Sunday’s sermon on faith. A rereading of his son’s letter now made him think that the resolution of his sermon was too dogmatic to be convincing. In fact, it sounded fatuous. I should change it, he said to himself as he skipped to the last page of John’s letter, which had been done in an existential mode.

It is only when we see each other eye to eye, disregarding whatever relations we may have, that we realize our alone-ness, This alone-ness becomes our Being, and the metaphor of the sailing ship loses its poignancy. Father, I am drifting away from you, from God, from everything, in a painful yet necessary journey.

One thing religion deprives me of is the necessity of worshipping with the intellect. If I could only worship God with closed eyes, I would still be holding on to the faith, which I am steeped in, but as it is, religion has only become a dead-end for the soul.

Rev. Balein folded the letter and returned it to the drawer. Then he sat down and looked absently at the rain. It’s-raining-cats-and-dogs, he remembered his American professor in Church History enunciating the colloquialism in an ironic tone when nobody could answer his questions in class. A certain vividness, almost photographic, came to him as he remembered his teacher’s face in a flash of memory. He looked down at his unfinished manuscript, feeling the convergence of memories in one meditative moment while the rain on the roof sang itself into a deluge of water.

He wrote furiously in his study until seven o’clock. The coffee, when it came, was “just right,” he told his wife, feeling a comfortable warmth envelop his stomach each time he took a gulp while he went on making notes on the margins of Barclay’s Bible commentary. The words spilled out from the tip of his fingers, his ideas rushing out of his head as intensely as the morning rain outside, and when at last he sat back to read what he had written, he felt victorious. He was, for a moment, carried by an impulse to send a copy of his sermon to his son. No, no, he said to himself getting up to his wife’s breakfast call, a more intimate message was needed for his son.

Over steaming chocolate porridge at the breakfast table, Rev. Balein regained his usual Sunday morning elation when he noticed the rain subsiding to a thin drizzle. The sun became discernable through a thick gauze of December clouds. While munching at his pan de sal, he watched the boy, Manuel, blowing at his bowl of champorado across the table. Etched against the window, his small head reminded him of a chiaroscuro of Jesus’ haloed head glistening amidst a dark, stormy sea. Out the window, behind the boy’s head, he could see the wet sheen of the banana leaves in the yard. Poor boy, he said to himself as he watched the boy eating his food in silence. But he’ll get used to the house. Three days could not break down the walls that easily. In God’s time, yes, in God’s time; he sighed and turned to his wife.

“Where’s Gloria?” he asked.

“Still feeding the pigs.”

“That woman feeds those animals better than herself. Works, works, works, and eats very little.”

“I can’t blame her. I myself don’t like to eat what my hands have cooked.”

Gloria appeared at the kitchen door holding a cluster of roses in her hands. “The yard’s muddy. I almost slipped,” she said as she went to the table and replaced the withered chrysanthemums with fresh roses.

“Are you coming to church?” the pastor asked.

“Of course, she will,” Elena came in fast. “She wouldn’t miss the chance to see Mr. Vi-as.”

“That phlegmatic widower?” Gloria’s eyes widened in mock shock. “Thank you. I’d rather be a spinster all my life. Why, the last time he was the liturgist, he could not even pronounce Deuteronomio during the scripture reading. Deu-to-mo… Deu-mo-ro… Deu-temo…” And she emitted a loud chuckle.

“The old man was — ,” Rev. Balein gesticulated, “tired. Come to think of it — he’s been a church elder for ten years now.”

“He sleeps in church.”

“Gloria. I don’t know why you don’t like the old man. He’s almost as young as you are.”

The old maid laughed. “You know I’ve lost the dream,” she said, wistfully. “Taking care of John was enough maternal experience for me.”

A solemn silence followed. Rev. Balein poured himself another cup of coffee. “I think you’re drinking too much coffee, darling,” his wife complained.

Gloria, after washing her hands, took her place at the table, prayed, and when she opened her eyes, she stared at her roses.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” the minister said, pertaining to the roses.

“Yes,” his wife concurred.

“I’m glad it rained this morning,” Gloria said. “I don’t have to water the plants anymore.”

In the few minutes that followed, the clinking of their spoons and forks became their unworded conversation. The minister looked at his wife and sister-in-law. In between them, the child was eating with bowed head, the spoon and fork in his hands scraping the porridge on his plate. The minister was struck by the resemblance of the two sisters, a resemblance which also brought out the significant difference connected with the child: the two women were separated by a strange feminine thing called motherhood. Gloria, aside from being older, had a narrower forehead and a facial contour which diminished the warmth that only now and then glowed in her eyes. He almost believed now in the myth that an unmarried woman ages faster than married ones, for while Elena continued to move in a vibrant glow of youth, her sister carried with her an aura of lugubrious persistence towards work. She did almost all the chores in the house and ever since she moved in with them shortly after their marriage, they had never found the need for a hired helper. Rev. Balein had gotten used to her mechanical attitude towards work, and later on found out that in her own way, she was as caring and gentle as his wife, and she manifested this toward John whom she had pampered as he grew to manhood.

Elena pushed a plateful of bread towards Manuel. “Have some more bread, Manuel.”

“Don’t be ashamed, Manuel,” the other woman said. “You must eat well.”

The boy took a pan de sal from the pile on the plate and continued to eat silently.

The boy is really shy, Rev. Balein thought. Such an isolated upbringing in Campidhan must have shrunk the boy’s spirit into this timidness.

“Gloria,” Elena entreated her sister. “Take care of Manuel while we’re in church, ha?”

“You’re not going to church?” asked the surprised minister.

“Of course, of course,” Gloria said, disregarding Rev. Balein’s question. “Manuel can pump water for me while I wash the clothes. No, Manuel?”

“Gloria, can’t you postpone your laundry? It’s raining you know.”

“I can hang the clothes in the dirty kitchen. It’s been a week since I’ve done my laundry and I’m running out of clothes to wear.”

“Gloria, God does not look at superficialities. He is more concerned with what’s in the — “

“Heart.“

“… soul.”

“All right, all right. Do you expect me to go to church dressed this way?”

Rev. Balein fell silent. He took a sip of coffee and looked out the window. “I miss the sun,” he said after a while. The rainy months in that part of Samar was a terribly dreary season. The rainforests were natural precipitation magnets that dragged down the monsoon clouds and wrapped the land in a cocoon of mist. The yards were all muddy and even if it did not rain on some blessed days, the clouds never lifted and the town silently slept through the mud and cold and somber days. Now, looking out the window, Rev. Balein noticed that the persistent drizzle had, at last, stopped. “I hope it shines today,” he said, his voice straining to sound jolly. The silence that made his words echo in his ears had a ring of contradictory foreboding. “I hope it shines today,” he repeated in a whisper.

When he looked across the table, he saw Manuel staring at him with a torpid gaze. The boy, meeting his eyes, immediately bowed his head and continued to eat in silence.

II.

At noontime, when they arrived from church, Rev. Balein was caught off his guard with the news that greeted him at his doorstep. “Manuel ran away,” Gloria said before he could even stamp his foot on the doormat.

“Ran away?” Elena exclaimed.

“Yes. He must have ran away,” answered the sister, talking fast. “Right after you left for church, I sent him out for a bar of laundry soap at Anda’s store. I waited and waited but he did not return. I went to Anda’s and asked if they saw the boy. He had not gone there…”

“Calm yourself, Gloria,” Rev. Balein said. “Maybe he just got stranded along the way.”

“Stranded? It’s almost three hours since he…”

“He’ll come back,” Elena said, following her husband into the sanctum of their bedroom. “What did you cook fur lunch?”

“Sardines. I wasn’t able to go to the market because Manuel had the money with him.”

“The hundred pesos I gave you this morning?”

“Yes. I had no change and I needed the soap.”

The boy’s absence took on a haunting grip over the three people in the house. At lunch, as they silently ate their meal of canned fish, Gloria, the old maid, once in a while cast sidelong glances at the empty seat beside her.

“I wonder what happened to him,” she said, breaking the familiar, strained silence.

The minister and his wife, infected by the old maid’s anxiety, looked at each other.

“I tell you, he ran away. I know the boy. He must have felt lonely.”

Rev. Balein stopped eating. “How long has he been gone?”

“Three. Three and a half.”

Sad silence came back with the fresh impact of a tumbling wave after the last one has receded.

“And he hasn’t come back for lunch. He ran away,” Gloria said, standing up.

“Are you through eating?”

“Yes.”

“Gloria, you should eat.”

“Excuse me.” She cast a last look at the empty chair beside her and, with a truculent air, went to her room.

Left to themselves, the minister and his wife continued to eat in silence. After a while, Elena also stopped eating.

“What’s the matter?”

“Maybe we should look for him.”

Rev. Balein drank a glass of water then stood up from the table.

“I’ll look for him,” he said, placing a comforting hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“Where?”

“I think he must have gone back to his father in Campidhan.”

And so it was with heavy steps that Rev. Balein found himself climbing the hillock of Campidhan an hour later. From the poblacion, he had taken a pedicab to the junction at the edge of the town where he alighted near the waiting shed, a district called Devil’s Harpoon. Here the road trifurcated at the base of the small hill of Campidhan, two routes diverging around the foot and a bisecting road going uphill. “Do you know where Maria’s house is?” he had asked a stranger along the road. “Which Maria — ” the man had asked in return. “Maria the fish vendor? Maria the rice cake maker, Maria protestante…” “Maria protestante,” the minister replied. “Up,” the man pointed to the road uphill.

He was perspiring now as he ascended the slope of the hill. It was hot, although the sun barely peeped through the gauzy clouds. He stopped for a while to catch his breath and looked down at the town he had left behind. In the far distance, past the dull houses lined along the coast, he could make out the gray, fluid stasis of a sea that looked as dismal as the puffs of dark, heavy rainclouds emerging from the horizon and were now scuttling landward from the sea. The small island of Divinubo, a floating mass of seaman’s isle, looked like a dark brooding cloud itself. A portentous gust of cold wind made the perspiration tingle on his skin. It wasn’t long before the grasses on both sides of the road were bending like waves in a treacherous sea; strong winds rattled the midribs of the coconuts nearby.

It was going to rain. He was sure of it.

He walked on, faster, until he reached a clump of huts where, again, he inquired about the house of Maria protestante.

“At the end of the road,” a man said.

It began to rain just as he came to a small street flanked on both sides by low-lying huts. The minister half-ran through the muddy street. The rain was pelting the puddles on the road, he noticed as he hopped over the mud pools. A few meters farther he found himself facing a small nipa house with a soggy roof. He looked around. It was the only house at the end of the truncated street. Rev. Balein stood at the door and shouted “Good day” while trying to adjust his vision to the dark recesses of the house. Only the pattering of the rain answered him. Stamping his muddy feet on the ground, he called out “Good day” once more.

Presently a gaunt figure appeared from the darkness of the inner chambers.

“Good afternoon,” Rev. Balein said.

The man just looked at him through his big, bloodshot eyes. He looked as if he had just awakened from a deep sleep; he kept on brushing back his unkempt hair with his hands while exhaling forcefully through his nostrils.

“I’m Rev. Balein,” the pastor was forced to introduce himself. And when he said it, it sounded, to him like another person’s name. His voice sounded strangely apologetic; the name sounded depraved.

The man eyed him from head to foot.

The minister blustered: “Are you Maria’s — “

They stared at each other. The man hesitantly nodded. “Husband,” he said, his nods getting stronger and stronger.

“I am Rev. Balein,” the minister repeated.

The man’s eyes gleamed as the first sign of recognition hit him. “Come in,” he said self-consciously.

It was very dark inside. Rev. Balein was surprised why, at that particularly gloomy day, the man of the house had not bothered to light a lamp. Rev. Balein, taking the rattan chair that the man offered to him, soon realized that the icy coldness of the furniture was intensified by this unwanted darkness.

“I was having my siesta,” the man said sitting on the chair beside him.

Rev. Balein, as he watched the almost slothful posture of the man in the rattan chair, felt a wave of uncertainty. Square-jawed, the muscular biceps pressed to the chair’s armrests, the man looked menacing in a passive manner. He exuded an air of unconcern for other people’s feelings and, maybe, even the present state of his life. Slouched in a morose manner, he exhibited a perceptible middle-age flabbiness, and Rev. Balein, rigidly seated beside him, could not help noticing the bulging stomach beneath the wave-folds of his unstraightened shirt. They sat in uneasy silence for some time.

At last, the man straightened himself, and spoke.

“Maria…”

He looked up to the wooden rafters and searched for words to say but he only came to that undefinable dead-end; the spouse’s name rang in the rain-silence with a distinct resonance, and his voice dropped to a sigh in his lips.

Rev. Balein coughed.

The man suddenly stood up, searching for something in his pockets. Murmuring “Excuse me,” he trod off to the back of the divider where he swiped a curtain and disappeared into an inner chamber.

Rev. Balein, left alone, took the time to collect his thoughts. His feet felt chilly; his shoes were soaking wet. He was caught in an unbearable moment of procrastination for he was at a loss how to talk to the man about his missing son. He looked down and absent-mindedly watched a small water puddle which the hard-packed earthen floor took long to absorb.

He was still gazing blankly at this small pool on the floor when the man came out. Conspicuously waving a lighted cigarette in his hand, the man hardly looked at the minister as he plopped down on the chair he had left behind. He sat there without saying a word and proceeded to take long puffs on his cigarette. His gaze was fixed on the lawanit wall in front of him. Rev. Balein cleared his throat.

“I came here,” he said cautiously, “to ask about your son.”

The man looked at him, eyes half-squinted in surprise. He leaned forward from his seat and spoke with trembling voice. “Yes, and what about my son?”

“Maria left him in my care. She said she’d come back for him…”

“I know. She told me.”

At that instant, Rev. Balein felt a painful lash of silence that obtruded into this spurt of conversation. He sat back and realized that his hands were trembling. The dull sound of the rain on the nipa roof took on a pronounced contrast to the seething silence between them, a silence that, to his trepidation, defined for him his fear.

The man, his gaze now fixed upon him, leaned back and jerked his cigarette to his lips. He took a deep drag and exhaled a dragon’s breath while flicking the cigarette ash on the floor. “Listen,” he said. “I told my wife this. I told this to everybody — I have nothing against God. I’m no churchgoer and I have nothing against it. Maria was a very devout Catholic when I married her. I had nothing against it. Then she was converted to your religion, became a protestante. I had nothing against it. But when she started looking at me as if I was the devil himself — “ He emitted a loud chuckle and, as if to command attention to his derision, was gripped by a fit of smoker’s cough.

When the man subsided, Rev. Balein took the plunge. “Manuel is missing. I was just wondering if he was here.”

The man stopped coughing. Rev. Balein thought he saw an unnameable fear in the man’s eyes. The man straightened up and took another drag. Then in a low whisper, he said, “He is not here.”

The minister once more became aware of a silent tension which the sound of the rain accentuated even as he shed off some of his doubts about the man’s integrity. Looking him intently in the eye, he soon realized that the man was telling the truth; or at least, the fear in the man’s eyes could not have betrayed the truth.

“He ran away this morning,” the minister explained. “We were in church and he was left in the house with my sister-in-law. She was going to wash some clothes and she sent him to buy soap. He did not return. He has not come back since then.”

“If he ran away,” the man spoke with apparent conviction, “I’m sure he wouldn’t come here. His mother taught him to hate me.”

Rev. Balein was shocked at the man’s unabashed admission of his incapacity to have a tender bond with his child. In a casual tone, Rev. Balein tried to divert the man’s attention from some ominous discordant note, which he was in danger of striking. “Maybe,” the minister said after another long silence, “maybe he’s gone to some of your relatives.”

The man, after a moment of thought, said, “We have no relatives here. That’s why Maria left him with you.”

“Friends — do you know of any friends who might have taken him in?”

The man did not answer. He took a deep puff and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. His shoulders sagged forward. He only had to shiver, Rev. Balein said to himself, to look like a wet chicken.

But pity soon overtook him: Rev. Balein recognized in the man’s bowed head the semi-paternal pose of a guilty sinner; in this case, however, he perceived a dignity of the spirit which he seldom encountered in remorseful sinners.

The man stood up and threw his cigarette out the door.

Rev. Balein, when the man turned his back on him, also stood up, and the man, turning around, was surprised when he suddenly came face to face with the standing minister.

“I’d better be going,” the old man said smiling.

“I’ll go with you,” the man stammered. “I’ll help you look for Manuel.”

Rev. Balein found himself groping for words. He did not really find the idea much to his liking. He stood there, blankly smiling, as he vaguely heard the man saying: “Just a minute. I’ll just get my capote.” And the man disappeared once more behind the curtain.

Left to himself in the dark chamber of a strange house, Rev. Balein was faced with the spatial profundity of the gloomy room. Outside, the rain pattered down in dreamy crystal-breaking sound which now filled him with a deep sense of relief. Suddenly, from out of this feeling of cold darkness, he was struck by a mystical remembrance of the man’s name. Tomas. The name came to him just as a flash of lurid lightning framed him against the doorway and cast an eerie steel-like glow to the shadows in the room. Tomas. The name rumbled in his brain like thunder that wracked the earth he stood upon. Tomas beat me, Maria’s voice came back to him. And then, as suddenly as it came, the blinding light vanished and he was once more looking at the shadows in the room while the faint echo of thunder rumbled in the distance.

“There’s going to be a thunderstorm.” The man suddenly appeared from the door curtain.

“It’s not a typhoon, though,” the minister said. “But I hope the weather does not destroy the electric lines.”

“Here,” the man said. “You can use my raincoat. I’ll use the plastic table cover for myself.”

Rev. Balein tried to shove away the plastic coat that the man reached out to him — “no, no,” he said, “I’m wet anyway” — but the man persisted in his idea that he should use the coat and the minister, out of courtesy, had to give in to the man’s peculiar kind of hospitality.

Together, they went out into the rain.

It turned out that the cape was too big for the minister. As they walked down the declivity of Campidhan, down the steep muddy slope of the hillock, Rev. Balein had to raise the hem of the raincoat so that his feet wouldn’t trip on it. The rain was coming down hard, making a deafening rattle on the plastic hood of the raincoat as water sloshed down the cape and washed down from his feet to the muddy road. He could even feel the cold rainpricks that fell on his thinly-covered head and struck his skull with hammering persistence. Looking beyond the rain haze, he could barely see the contour of Divinubo island in the distance and it was only by a strained effort of his eyes that he made out the dark floating mass of land suspended in the horizon, like an immobile cloud floating between sea and sky.

Beside him, the man was walking, holding a wide plastic tablecloth over his head. As they wound down the muddy road, his foot searched for footholds among the lime rocks jutting above the eroding mud.

“Careful here,” he said as they came midway down the incline of the hill. “It’s very slippery in this part.”

Rev. Balein stopped to catch his breath. The man also stopped and waited for him.

“It was much easier coming up,” the old man said, breathing heavily. “And not as muddy then.”

“You dig your toe into the mud, not your heel, so you won’t buckle backward when you slip. From here on, I lead the way. Step where I step.”

In slow agonized steps, Rev. Balein followed the man while he tried to keep his balance by cramping his toes on the mud, as the man had instructed. But the effort easily tired him out; his knees began to shake with fatigue and cold.

“Wait, let’s take a rest,” he called out to the man. The man was way ahead of him and could barely be seen through a seemingly impenetrable curtain of rain. Treading on the man’s footmarks, he walked faster.

“Slowly, slowly,” the man cautioned him as he tottered on the slippery mud.

They stopped for a while for even the man was breathing hard with the effort of walking downhill. Rev. Balein clutched the man’s shoulder as his vision blurred in the thick sheet of heavy downpour. He looked beyond the rain needles but could not see anything except some hazy shapes of coconuts nearby; the horizon, together with the island, had been totally erased from his vision. An unbroken stream of water rushed past their feet making gurgling liquid sounds that made him, just listening to it, tired and sleepy.

“Come on,” the man said. “It’s just a few meters more to the waiting shed.”

It was then at that moment that, deprived of his anchor-hold, the old minister tumbled over to the road. Things happened so fast and all he remembered later on was how he tried to stop the momentum of his fall by holding on to lime rocks. He was rolling fast with the rivulets of chocolate water down the slope of the hillock, rolling faster and faster as his sight whirled around the mud and the rain, while in the distance, he thought he heard somebody shouting his name, soft in the mud, loud in the rain, until he came into a dizzy stop at the foot of the hill, half-soaked in a crater of rainpool, the mud on his back, the rain striking his face in vicious drops.

Dazed, he blinked, tried to get up, but fell back on the pool of water.

“Are you all right?” He suddenly saw the man bending over him.

“Yes, yes. I’m all right.”

The man heaved him up to his feet and half-carried him to the waiting shed nearby while talking rapidly with words that were too masculine for comfort. “Lucky we were almost at the foot,” he said. “Had it happened while we were still high up there, you would have been badly injured.”

Rev. Balein sat on the bench and laughed half-heartedly. The man sat beside him and continued to talk about the times he himself had slipped on the road as they waited for a tricycle from the other side of the mountain. The rain came down with compelling intensity and soon strong gusts of wind sprayed water into the unwalled shed where they sat. The old minister felt numb with cold and he was shivering as he tried to collect himself from the shock of the mishap.

“Your hands are bleeding.”

Rev. Balein looked at his hands and saw the bloody gashes of his rock-scraped palms.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Scratches.” No sooner had he said it when the burning pain of realization came upon his lacerated palms, a searing pain which he tried to clench away. After some time, the numbness drove away the burning pain although he was in no way comfortable with the cold and the numbness of it all.

A few minutes later, an unoccupied tricycle came by and took them to the poblacion. Side by side on the cramped seat of the sidecar, the minister and his companion were silent and uncommunicative all the way. They could almost hear each other’s breathing but it seemed as if intimacy was out of the question now that they were leaving the place behind; the gloomy scenes they passed by gave both of them enough reason to bring back the silence that had cleaved their two souls apart. Rev. Balein, watching the dumb nipa houses, muddy yards, and trees sodden with rain gliding by like misty shadows, could not help feeling sad about this loss. When they hit the asphalt road at the fringe of the poblacion, Rev. Balein opened his mouth and said, “We’d better pass by the house first.” The cold wind gurgled in his palate so he clumped his mouth shut because he was susceptible to gas pains.

Passing the bridge, Rev. Balein observed that the river was flooded again. The roiling waters made the smoothness of the floorboards feel like they were drifting on air; the tires of the tricycle barely made a wheezing sound as they crossed over to the other side of the town.

When the tricycle driver stopped the vehicle at the edge of the footpath to his house, he painfully reached to his trouser pockets for money, but just as he felt his wounded palms scratching against the tight opening of his pockets, his companion handed a two-peso bill to the driver. The minister protested, but the man merely patted his shoulder and, so much like the incident about the raincoat, he had no choice but to give in. Besides, the man had already alighted and was standing in the rain, waiting for him to get down.

They ran toward the house where, to his surprise, he saw a figure waving to them from the terrace. It was only upon reaching the apron of the terrace that Rev. Balein heard his sister-in-law’s remonstrations.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said stay in the tricycle because I was going to bring an umbrella to you.”

“It’s no use. We’re already wet.”

“He’s here.”

“Manuel?”

“Yes.”

“Where?” the minister asked, rushing inside.

“In your room. Elena’s talking to him.”

As he slowly pushed the door open, Rev. Balein felt a strange coldness that made him shiver. His skin suddenly tightened around their pores, his hair bristled, and he felt the mud and grits breaking apart around them. The dresser was the first thing he saw through the crack, and, slowly, two feet dangling from the bed. The boy was sitting on the edge of the bed. His wife, leaning against the bedside table, stopped talking when she saw him standing there.

“My God,” Elena rushed to meet him. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” replied the minister as he went past her. “Where have you been?” he shouted at the child.

At a loss for words, the boy merely gaped at him with a frightened look in his eyes.

“Where,” he repeated in a half-whisper, “have you been?”

“Under — ” the child feebly murmured, tears welling in his eyes. He bowed his head and made sniffing sounds.

“Under the bridge,” Rev. Balein heard his wife’s voice behind him. “He lost the money; he was afraid to come back. He stayed under the bridge the whole day and when the flooded river began to rise he decided to come back. I’m glad he got back before it got dark.”

Rev. Balein, as he stood there, suddenly saw the boy’s wet hair gleaming in an unearthly glow. Lightning. A very loud thunder rumbled and shook the house. The boy, frightened, rushed to him and hugged him on the hips. “I stumbled on a plank, the money fell to the water. I did not mean to do it…” The boy mumbled, pressing his face to his belt; then he broke off into incoherent babbles as his small, frail body was wracked by a spell of sobbing.

Consumed by a painful kind of grace, Rev. Balein held the child’s head in his hands, murmuring, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” even as the boy’s short hairs pricked the raw wound of his palms and made him wince in pain. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he kept on caressing the boy’s head until his own tears blurred his vision and, looking out the window, it was as if the impenetrable sheet of rain he saw was already within him.

“He’s gone.”

Rev. Balein turned around and saw Gloria standing in the doorway behind his wife.

“What?”

“The man who was with you — he’s gone.”

Rev. Balein rushed back to the terrace. The man was gone. Save for the rain that spelled the cold darkness of the incoming night, he saw nothing to comfort him as he tried to picture the man walking into the heavy downpour. He sighed, and the distinct purity of the rainsmell came to him. It’s-raining-cats-and-dogs: the memory hazed the sight of the rain-drenched yards. He turned around and saw that the women had followed him to the terrace.

“He left his raincoat,” he said tiredly.

“Who was he?” Gloria asked. “He just asked if Manuel was all right and then he said he was going.”

The old minister did not answer. He turned around and blankly gazed at the rain.

A loud crack tore the air and a brilliant flash of lightning illumined the rain needles and the steel ghost of trees in the yard. The minister shuddered. He blinked, then his eyes became glassy. He forgot again. It was at the tip of his tongue, but he could not remember the name. He was aching all over. He dropped onto a wet porch chair and absently watched the rain. His mind was gripped by a stone-cold atrophy which, to his senile disgust, sent the man’s name hurtling down an abyss of forgetfulness. His memory strained to recapture the man’s image which might bring back the name, but it came to him blurred and nameless. It was Maria’s face he saw once again, telling him the travails of a woman and a wife — and yet the man’s name escaped his mind’s grasp. He tried to bring back the sensation — standing in the doorway of the hut, the bolt of lightning, the name coming back — but he failed to remember the man’s name. A helpless tiredness overwhelmed him.

“Darling, you should take a bath. You’re muddy.”

“I’ll heat some water so you won’t get chilled.”

Rev. Balein, as if in a dream, plodded back to his room. He tore off the muddy raincoat from his body and threw it on top of the pile of laundry in the corner of the room. His wet clothes had, however, stuck to him like an icy layer of integument and it took a lot of grunting and wriggling before he found himself naked in front of the mirror. From the living room, there drifted in the women’s voices, blending with the sound the rain.

“Darling, you ought to hang your wet clothes.”

“Oh, God, there’s no electricity again. Where did you put the overnight lamp, Elena?”

“I don’t know. Manuel? Where’s Manuel?”

“He’s with me. Where did you put the lamp?”

Rev. Balein, naked, felt now the thickening numbness of his wounded palms. He picked up a bottle of rubbing alcohol on top of the dresser, poured it over his palms, and rubbed his hands together. A hot, searing pain rose to his arms and tears sprang in his eyes. He dropped onto the chair in pain and exhaustion.

“We have no soap. How can I wash the dishes?”

“Let Manuel do it. I still have to cook supper.”

Suddenly, in the dim shadow of the rainy evening, Rev. Balein came face to face with his son’s picture, John smiling with an innocent glow on his face, a boy radiantly beaming through the lacquered surface. Sensations washed over him: cold, burning pain, mud and rain, the sound of women’s voices and a roof singing; drifting on a prophet’s vision, he saw everything falling into place in the darkness. The cold void called out to him the man’s name, Tomas, Tomas, and to his shock, he realized that the man’s face had an uncanny semblance to the boy in the picture he was now holding and the face in the mirror half-discernable in the darkness before him.

This story won 3rd prize in the 1989 Palanca Awards, Short Story in English category