philippine literary selection

Pieces of String Tita Lacambra- Ayala Tita Lacambra-Ayala is an acclaimed writer, poet and painter. Born in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte, Tita studied at the University of the Philippines, and after a fruitful stint as freelance writer for various major magazines and as press officer of the UP Los Baños College of Agriculture Extension Office, she eventually settled in Mindanao with her husband painter Jose V. Ayala, Jr. (deceased). She has published four books of poems: Sunflower Poems (Filipino Signatures, Manila, 1960), Orginary Poems (Erehwon Publishing, Manila, 1969), Adventures of a Professional Amateur (prose) (UP Press, 1999), and Friends and Camels in a Time of Olives (UP Press, 1999.) She co-edited the visual and literary arts journal Davao Harvest with Alfredo Salanga, Gimba Magazine, and Etno-Culture. She produced and edited the 30-year-old Road Map Series, a folio of Mindanao artistic works and literary writings. She won the Palanca in the English Short Story Category “Everything” (Third Prize, 1967), and for Poetry in English “A Filigree of Seasons” (Second Prize). She also garnered the following awards and citations: Gawad Balagtas Awardee for Poetry in English (1991), Manila Critics Circle Special Citation for Road Map Series (1989), Philippine Free Press Awardee for Short Story (1970, Third Prize), Focus Philippines Poetry Awardee, Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas UMPIL Achievement Award (1991), and National Fellow for Poetry, UP Creative Writing Center (1994-95). Lacambra-Ayala is a founding member of the Davao Writers Guild, and is the mother of famous songwriter-musicians Joey Ayala and Cynthia Alexander and poet Fernando (Pido) Ayala. GRANDMOTHER SITS on a stool beside my table. Her head is gray, seems grayer even in the quieter hours of the night, domestic chores done, when she sits still except for fingers moving in and out of stitches with a crochet needle. Every night it is like this. She crochets square upon square of design which later she puts together into bedcovers. It is her pride when, on someone’s birthday, she spreads one of her handiwork on my bed and listens to praises that go to her work. How exquisite, how pretty, the visitors say. And she hangs her head shyly like a girl and smiles out of the corner of her eyes, her lower lip thrust out in a pout. Slowly this shyness goes away with the heaping of praise until suddenly, her eyes glinting; she goes into intricate and sometimes trivial details of how the bedspread came into being. Ten months, she would say, fondling a lacy corner of the spread not consciously but with that passing motherly tenderness with which a mother pats the knee of a nursing child. Ten months it took me to do this. Do you devote your time to crocheting? They ask her.

Oh no, she says, pouting again. In the morning I hardly ever have yje chance to do a row of stitches. I work in the house, cook, go to the market. If I had the chance to crochet at any time I pleased, I would finish the spread in less than half the time. Is it difficult to make this design? Well, no, this design is very simple. The beauty of the spread comes not so much in the individual design of the pieces as in putting together of so many to form the whole…. Just as the visitors are about to go, either because they must or because they have had enough on the making of bedspreads, my grandmother pulls a low wooden chest from under the bed. Stay, she says, I have more that you may like to see. They are all as exquisite. Before they can protest, she has opened the chest and has hung one spread against her body, her arms stretched out from each side. The guests desist from leaving, not merely for politeness, but because the spread is very exquisite, though oh very much unlike the one upon the bed. Does this not look old- fashioned, like Venetian lace? And look at the edges. So fine, so evenly done. You like it? She asks them. Then she would name a price. They say, Naku! Or Susmariosep! The price, she tells them, is nominal. I can charge more but you are friends of the family. If you compute how much I spent, and the work that I have put into it…. As she waits for my brothers to come in from their Saturday escapades or for my sister who goes on hospital duty at three and comes home at eleven at night, she sits on her chair beside my table and works. The white loops of string against the gleam of the steel hook interpret, it seems, all she must feel, must think, must be made of. Sometimes she nods into an unguarded moment of tiredness and her fingers are still, the square of crochet is suspended and does not grow. A mosquito biting her arm, or the temptation of slumber, wakes her and her fingers resume their movement, the square resumes its growth. The lured visitor then makes a bargain. Can’t she have it for forty? I’ll give it away for fifty, she tells the visitor. How about forty- five? No. Fifty.

The visitor digs into her bag for the customary twenty pesos given down payment. Grandmother looks at the handiwork still spread on her arms and drawn against her body, as if counting the pieces, as if thinking whether or not to go on with the sale. In a while, she gathers it in her arms, folds it and wraps it up in two or three rustling sheets of old newspaper. She has been with us ever since I can remember. Very clearly in my childhood do I recall that she had always been there to call me away from mudpies or piko in the morning that I might have my daily bath or that I might shooo the flies away from a tray of fish fillets drying in the sun. And in the afternoon she would force me to gulp down a glass of milk after a ritualistic nap. At night she slept with me on a mat spread on the floor of the sala. I was afraid of the night silences too for they were too vacant, made me feel that in the whole dark world I was all alone. When sounds or silence came into the nights of my childhood, I merely had to reach my arms into the dark and her hands, warm and protecting, would pat my cheek, smooth the hair away from my forehead, or pull my blanket up to my shoulders. I would not be afraid. She had taken care of Benita before me. As the three younger boys grew up after us, they in turn knew her as she and I did. With the three boys she was fierce, for they were uncontrollable. She shouted at them to come down from the trees when it was time to wash up. She pinched them on the buttocks for the nails and razor blades that she found shredding the pockets of their pants. She refused to serve meals until they stopped quarrelling at table. She tweaked their ears for refusing to change into their pajamas, and then later for refusing to say their night prayers. The boys shouted at her, cursed her, made play with her. But when they saw that she had grown silent, too tired to shout at them, or to reprimand them, their faces grew still and penitent. Francis, the oldest boy, was the closest to the three to Grandmother. He would, in his quiet, almost mature way, steal to the kitchen when he was hungry in the afternoon, when she was starting to be busy with supper. He would watch Grandmother with his dirty hands folded behind him, follow her in her domestic trips to the sink, stove and table. What is that? He would ask Grandmother. Cauliflower, she would say, hiding a smile behind a wet hand. It looks like a cloud, he would say. I like cauliflower. It makes young people grow big and strong, she would say. Grandmother watched him from the corner of her eyes. He would look furtively at her face, waiting for the right moment to request a favor. He would make a move to go, half turning, but his young body would twist back to Grandmother in appeal for the unsatisfied hunger.

I will go out to play very soon, he said. I have no more marbles left. The older boys always beat me. Why do you allow them to beat you? It is just bad luck, Francis said. Are you going to play marbles again very soon? In a little while, he said, affecting interest in a pot boiling over. Grandmother would go to the cupboard, reach for a cookie jar, and place some cookies on a saucer. Then, as if on sudden thought, she would put the saucer on the table in front of Francis, saying something about the fish she had left on a tray to dry in the sun, or about having to water bleaching clothes. She would leave the kitchen in a hurry, knowing that when she came back, the saucer would be empty; there would be a few crumbs on the edge of the table, and a used drinking glass on the sink. In snatches of conversation between Ma, Pa, and relatives, we picked up a vague knowledge about Uncle George. Uncle George was Grandmother’s son. He was Ma’s cousin, because Grandmother is the sister of Ma’s father. Uncle George was in a picture in the family album. In it he wore white pants, a white coat and a striped bowtie. A stiff straw hat with a black band was jaunty on his head. He was standing at attention beside a chair with a tall straight back. His eyes and lips were composed in a gravity I usually see on Grandmother’s face. But there was a curve to his cheeks that showed that he was eighteen years young, very prone to laughter and to song. Uncle George is in the States. He had gone there to study when he was nineteen, one or two years before I was born. In the States he studied during the daytime and worked during his free hours, including sometimes at night. For many years after he left, he wrote to Grandmother regularly and sent her money once in a while. Grandmother made fine things for him. Once she sent him a pair of pillow cases with his initials embroidered in bold red satin stitches. At another time she sent a set of hand- hemmed pocket handkerchiefs. Once a pair of striped cotton pajamas with his initials cross- stitched on the pocket. Grandmother was annoyed at the War when it came, first because the blackout practices left her with no light by which to crochet or embroider. Later, there were no classes and children messed around the house most of the time. But the real impact of the War came to Grandmother not with the plans and bombs that pursued us from one evacuation to another but from the realization that no mail from abroad could entry the country. This break of communication made the world too utterly big, and Uncle George much too far, impossibly far away. Grandmother took to prayer while we could only respond to fear cowering in dugouts, our heads against each other.

After months of losing weight and hope of safety, we received word that the capital city, fourteen kilometers or so away, was American territory, was peace and plenty. We gathered light packs on our heads and followed other families up the mountain trail leading to the city. It was midmorning when we gained a mountain top from which we could overlook the village of our birth, Antamok. The village was there unmistakably, with the river that had divided it into two zones and into two social functions, those whose children took piano lessons and those whose children did not. But as we could see, all distinctions were gone. The village was black earth, black fallen tree trunks, black concrete posts. Ma and Pa must have thought of the cottage with its green porch and hanging orchids; they did not say anything. My sister gripped my shoulder; I remembered her garden and her well- loved begonians. The boys wanted to know where the birds could have gone now that the trees were fallen, if their eggs had hatched in the fire, or were cooked. Grandmother, turning away from the scene, complained for the first time of pain on her thigh and hip. She put down the load on her head (she had taken on the heaviest, including pots and pans) and said she would go no further. I reckoned her losses to two large wooden chests full of embroidery and crochet work. Most of them she had made to give to Uncle George when he would come home and get married. It took sometime of rest and cajoling for Grandmother’s pain to leave and enable her to lift her load back upon her head. In the city, we occupied the last vacant room on the second floor of a two- storey bunkhouse that stood beside a black river. The room had no door to protect us from prying eyes of neighbors in the other rooms, so Ma hung up an old blanket in the doorway. It was very hot inside this room during daytime. Water drenched us and our belongings when it rained. All able members of the family, excepting Grandmother and the youngest boy, left the house early in the morning to work for the Americans. We cleared the street of ruins, swept the barracks, mopped floors, ate meals consisting mostly of strange- tasting soaked prunes and apricots, too polished long- grain California rice, thick slices of Spam, omelets made with dehydrated eggs doled to us in army trays by tall aproned winking American soldiers. We worked till four in the afternoon when we would be brought home in large army trucks. And we would get home to find Grandmother dividing her attention between the black river that was just outside the window and the youngest boy who sat on the floor juggling empty cartridges and pieces of shrapnel. Always now there was nothing, no flicker of expression on Grandmother’s face outside of ordinary interest in the cigarettes and bars of laundry soap that we brought home , to show what she felt of the past or what she wanted of the future. She got up when the lone cock in the neighborhood told her it was time to put on the coffee. She went to sleep on her part of the floor just as soon as she had put away the lamp where the kerosene would not spill.

One afternoon after about a month of sweeping barracks floors, I got home to find the room looking smaller than usual. It was the presence of a khaki-clad man that made the roof seem nearer to the floor, shrinking everything. He was sitting beside Grandmother on the bench, an arm around her shoulder. Their similar eyes were smiling, bright with tears that must have been shed over eighteen years of not seeing each other. His kiss on my cheek was as gentle as Grandmother’s hand. How much schooling have you finished? I was three months in grade six, I said with a GI accent You speak good English, he said. What would you want to do when you finish school? I wanna be a painter, I guess. I wanna paint pictures, you know. He laughed deeply, his very even teeth white against his swarthy face. He reached for his open travel pack near his feet and took out an olive- colored knit sweater with sergeant stripes on it. This will keep you warm, he said, tousling my bangs. He came regularly every afternoon. We piled into his Willy’s, my sister beside him, the three boys at the back. We rode through the city and saw different places over and over again inbetween bites of chocolate candy and canned cheese. We brought him home to supper to eat the adobo, pinacbet, sinigang and other dishes that Grandmother cooked specially for him. He stayed with us until it was eight, then he would go back to camp. He left the city without telling us. We only knew he had gone when he did not come for three days in a row and we received a letter to say that he was in Leyte where his unit was stationed. He was sorry he could not tell us, army regulations, we must understand. After three weeks he wrote again to say that he was back in San Francisco with his discharge papers. He was due to return to Ohio, where his job in an engineering plant awaited him. We must not worry. Grandmother lost patience with living among us. She slept late. She sat by the window and looked into the black river. When it was time to eat, she did not call us. Hungry, I would go to the kitchen and find her standing in front of the wood stove letting the cooling embers burn just a moment longer in the steady gaze of her eyes. Uncle George had been with us in summer. The rainy season set in after he left. The landlord came to the bunkhouse with a couple of men and went up to the roof to cover the wounds through which rain fell to the floor in dark pools. One morning after a heavy rain, Grandmother picked up from the ground a piece of canvas that had fallen from the roof. She brushed the canvas in the river and set it on a large flat stone to dry. She pulled the dried fabric apart into lengths of string which she knotted together and wound into round balls.

Digging into little bundles of cloth and paper which she kept in a woven bamboo basket that was part of her growing old, she found a metal crochet hook. The rust on it she wiped away with a piece of cloth dipped in the kerosene of the lamp. She wound a breadth of string around her left forefinger and began to crochet. She made pieces of triangles, squares, circles that she sewed up together like patchwork into cushion covers and bedspreads. The things that she created filled up the room and overflowed into the lives of others who came to see and to buy. They came into the room, the women with knotted hair and red hands, examining finished and unfinished pieces, spreading them over their palms, over their arms and in front of their eyes to better admire the lacework. They brought in with their interest what gossip they could lay as tribute to the power that Grandmother held captive in the slender movements of her gleaming crochet hook among the knotted pieces of string.