Guillerma of Bicolandia

Guillerma, our Bicolana character, did go on to high school, learning to parse the English language from the Thomasites, the tall woman wearing wide, ankle-length dresses and lovely hats, the men sweating in their blue-gray suits, all of them fired by a sense of mission. She loved Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” rolling its rhythms on her tongue (the primeval forest and the murmuring streams), reciting it to herself as she walked home from school to the house of Tia Esmeralda, her aunt who lived three blocks away from school.

The Albay Normal School was offering scholarships for Education majors, said the announcement on the bulletin board in front of the administration building. She squinted to make out the letters, because she had just come from the street outside, the sunlight blazing on her back, onto the cool shadows of the school building. With the blessings of her parents and teachers, she took the train bound for Legazpi City to vie for the scholarship. And there, on the sprawling college campus, she met Alberto. “Excuse me, but you’re also in the normal school?” asked the man beside her. She looked at him – a dark, young man who was almost good-looking, trying to be witty on the first day of class.

She gave him a tight smile. Then: “So are you.”

But he just smiled back, widely, with a chuckle, then said his name. She told him hers. He said, “So you’re Guillerma Regala? Your surname begins with the letter R, you must be from Oas then.”

“Yes,” she said, but their conversation was cut short when their teacher, Mr. Dale, who had a particularly bad case of freckles on his arms and face, asked for their class cards.

Alberto and Guillerma finished college, with honors. She began teaching at the Oas Central Elementary School. The buildings were now of wood and the floor of concrete, with the capiz shells on the windows shutting out the glare of the sun. Alberto taught in Camalig, and they kept up a lively correspondence that he addressed to her friend, Estrella, for her father forbade her from entertaining suitors.

“At the young age of 23?” he would ask, puffing at his cigarette, whorls of smoke framing him. She wanted to argue that he married her mother when she was only 15 (imagine 15!). But you never, ever answer back. To do so would mean a sharp rebuke from him (“Is that what you learned in school?”), or a stare from him that could burn you to ashes, or when he was really roaring drunk and the fuse of his patience had gone out, a slap across the face. Then the silent and empty days, when a raw hurt would throb about the house, leaving everybody on edge. Since she did not want any of these things to fall upon her (especially the last, at the age of 23?), she just kept her peace.

So she taught at the elementary school, and every end of the month handed her pay to her father. Thirty pesos, quite a sum in the 1930s, the crisp bills inside the long, brown envelope, along with the list of things she needed: five pesos for a dress, two pesos for sundry. Every month, they would talk about “sundry.”

But she thought everything was worth it. There was enough food in the house. Her brothers and sisters were certainly going to school, their cheeks beginning to puff up from the Liberty condensed milk and the Star margarine that her mother could now afford to buy every week.

Seven long years of these: the walk from house to school, then back to the house again; the letters from Alberto, written in blue stationery, then folded in a blue envelope, which Estrella would wrap in a plastic sheet, hide in the bottom of her wicker basket brimming over with fish and vegetables and meat (for she always passed by Guillerma’s house after she had gone to the market), and hand over the letter to her friend, a wicked smile playing on her lips; the twice-a-month dates with Alberto, on the pretext of a teachers’ seminar, or an errand for the district supervisor . . .

Before the glasses of halo-halo in their favorite restaurant in Legazpi City, Alberto and Guillerma would talk about the days that had just passed, their students’ enthusiasm (or lack of it), their families and friends, probing each other’s feelings.

On the first week of December 1940, with the blessings of their families, finally, and at the age of 30, Alberto and Guillerma were married. She remembers that day, photographs that will never fade from her mind: her father uncomfortable in his crisp, new Barong Tagalog, escorting her gallantly to the altar, but you could see from his eyes a mixture of sadness and hesitation in giving her away to “a complete stranger” (his own words); her mother beaming in her new saya, surrounded by her nine grown-up children; the rain of rice grains, the explosion of light and white noise that greeted them as Alberto and Guillerma walked on the soft red carpet toward the heavy baroque door of the church.

But after that, the war. Time’s shutter clicked so swiftly, so mercilessly: Pearl Harbor, the Japanese in the Lingayen Gulf; Manila being declared an “Open City”; her husband, her brothers, her father (who insisted he would go, “I’m only 50 years old”), all of them joining the guerillas in the hills to drive back the new conquerors, the daily humiliation of bowing deeply before the uncouth Japanese soldiers (with their garrulous language, their hobnailed boots, the long bayonets on the tips of their rifles); the difficulty of teaching with textbooks whose pictures, whose very words, had been drowned in a flood of black ink; the sense of danger rising out of her skin, so strong it would swamp the entire room, whenever Alberto – almost in rags, unshaven, his eyes tired and sad – would drop by for his sudden and secret visits.

And then, after three years of leaving on the edge, the so-called Liberation: the American tanks rolling on the streets and fighter planes shooting down the Japanese hiding in the walled city of Intramuros, the Americans bombing the grand old buildings, pounding the ancient churches with cannon balls, walls and roofs falling, leaving nothing else but a sea of ruins.

This essay is for National Artist Nick Joaquin. Comments can be sent to [email protected]