The Weight of the Sun

By Geronimo Tagatac

A Vietnam veteran stalks a teenage boy through the summer night. A magical ring infects a community of farm workers with nightmares. A first meeting with a man’s father-in-law at an expensive restaurant turns into a celebration of bloodshed. In the endless cubicles of a state bureaucracy, another man mysteriously ceases to exist. These are a few of the stories that comprise this extraordinary collection in which acclaimed author Geronimo Tagatac explores themes of culture and identity, belonging and alienation. Through the eyes of returning Vietnam veterans, migrant laborers, immigrants, and civil servants, Tagatac delves into the experience of being an outsider with a rare candor and insight. Tagatac draws from his diverse experience to deliver narratives that are at once spare and eloquent, vividly capturing the terror of jungle combat as well as the painful flush of first love. In these short, unflinching, deeply felt tales, rifts are not always healed. Unbridgeable gaps remain between people and between worlds — sometimes deliberately, sometimes despite everything. Driven by the honesty of self-appraisal and joy for life that is evident in every line, The Weight of the Sun reveals to us that it is as much through our failures in trying to bridge these gaps as through our successes that we come to discover the best parts of ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ooligan Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781932010367

Geronimo Tagatac

Geronimo Tagatac, after returning from Vietnam, began to write on scraps of paper as a way to deal with the strong ideas that would come into his head. At first, his writing was without form or direction. When he moved, he would throw the scrap piles out. Then he began to write on napkins in coffee shops, stuff them in envelopes, and send his thoughts to his friends. Eventually he started to keep a journal. He finally took a writing class and within a few years, he began publishing his stories in magazines. In 1997, Tagatac was awarded the Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship and in the summers of 2001 and 2003, he was invited to teach at the Fishtrap Fellowship.

Book preview

Stretched toward Him Like a Dark Wake

.

On the night of August 15, 1929, a heavy-set man in a luminous, white linen suit stood and announced to the audience that anyone who could spend ten minutes in the ring with the heavyweight champion of the Philippines would win one hundred dollars. Jacinto’s friends, knowing that he had a few fistfights to his credit, goaded him into the ring. Twelve terrible minutes after the attendants laced the gloves onto his hands, he climbed shakily out through the thick ropes, his seventeen-year-old cheeks swollen and bruised, his lips split and bleeding, and two of his left ribs cracked. He was nearly blinded by the blood in his eyes. In his dark hand, he held more money than he had ever seen in his life. Jacinto stayed in Manila for ten days, waiting for the bruises on his face to fade and the swelling to subside. Then he took the bus north to his family’s hamlet, in Baay. He went back, one last time, to the smells of rice paddies, the dense walls of cane fields, and the cool shadows of the bamboo groves of his boyhood. He spent a week saying good-bye to his father and mother, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. The day before he left, a feast commemorated the one-year anniversary of his grandfather’s death. When the priest prayed aloud for his grandfather’s soul, Jacinto heard his mother’s voice among those of the older women in the gentle refrain. After the sun had fallen beyond the soft fringe of trees, he looked across the firelight into his father’s eyes. He knew by the iron stillness in the older man’s face that his father was mourning both the loss of his own father and the impending departure of his eldest son.

The next morning his family walked two miles with him to the north-south highway. They waited more than an hour in the rising heat for a two-wheeled horse cart to arrive. When it did, Jacinto’s weeping mother embraced and released him. Then his father held his head between hands that were as hard as wood and kissed him on both cheeks. Do not forget us when you are gone.

Jacinto looked into his father’s sharp face and deep-set eyes. For the first time in his life, he began to understand what it was like to give up a part of himself in exchange for the promise of something over the horizon. In the brief seconds that remained, he mapped the country of his father’s face and voice, the feel of his hands, and the smell of his deep brown skin. And then he was in the bouncing cart, trying to hide his tears as he watched his father’s form diminish into the shining apex of the road.

From Manila, Jacinto sailed east across the Pacific in the hold of a ship filled with men like himself, dreaming of returning to their villages one day, laden with gifts for their families, carrying enough money to buy land, to marry and to have children. The men often stood together on the ship’s deck, looking out at the circle of the horizon, where the blue sky met the green-blue sea. They sailed on and on, day after day. Beyond the slow rise and fall of the ship’s hull, nothing seemed to move except the ship’s wake, which was a restless arrow, pointing the way back toward their homeland.

In the ten years that followed, Jacinto held jobs in a hundred places, washing dishes, harvesting asparagus, sugar beets, beans, and corn. He knew the ways of hoes and shovels, of pruning shears and ladders, of kitchen knives and saws. For five years he lived in a world of farm labor camps at the edges of fields and orchards. He walked through towns where the sidewalks were filled with sounds of men speaking Tagalog and Visayan. Little Manilas, they were called. He learned to fox-trot, waltz, and samba in the taxi-dance halls, on the outskirts of places like Sacramento and Stockton, where he paid the women a nickel for a dance and practiced his English on them. Sometimes he found himself pulled into the mouths of late-night brawls that arose out of real or imagined insults. Jacinto spent a thousand nights beside lonely irrigation ditches, empty roads, and railroad tracks gleaming beneath the stars.

In all those years, his only links with his homeland were the intermittent letters from his brothers and sisters. They came in faded white envelopes with stamps bearing the serious face of Jose Rizal, his country’s national martyr. The postmarks were always months old. He would slit the envelopes with his pocket knife and unfold the thin sheets of paper. They crackled as though they would break. And then he would read and re-read the pages filled with tight black script. Victorio’s brother Antonio died in January. Ophelia had another baby girl in March. Marciano has gone to Laoag to find work. Times are hard here. Could you send us a little money if it is not a lot of trouble for you? The end of each letter said, We miss you very much, dearest Jacinto. Please say that you will be coming home soon.

In 1940, Jacinto moved east and got a job as chauffeur and houseboy in a large house in Stamford, Connecticut. He was twenty-eight. On his first night off, he went with friends to a nightclub party in New York City. Sometime during the evening, he looked across the dance floor and saw a fair-skinned, dark-haired woman in a blue dress watching him. He had a moment of worry. The last time a woman smiled at him, he had had to fight his way out of a bar and wound up with a knife cut across his right forearm. When he looked into Jean Glixman’s gray eyes that night, he felt as though he had been floating through the years toward her without knowing it. He told her about his family and his decade-long journey. She told him nothing about her people except to say she didn’t see much of them. They married a month later. There were no laws in New York forbidding marriages between Asians and whites, but none of Jean’s family attended the wedding.

They had a son the next winter and then, dreaming of raising the boy under the high western skies, they moved to a farm outside Isleton, California. In the boy’s fifth winter, Jean ran out into a rainstorm to pull her flapping sheets off the clothes line, like a desperate sailor shortening the sails of a ship in the face of an oncoming gale. She died of pneumonia a month later.

Two weeks after his wife’s death, Jacinto received a letter from the Philippines with a nine-month-old postmark. His father was dead. He looked out the window, at the dirt road that seemed to divide the world into two damp halves and remembered his father standing beside the shimmering road, growing smaller and smaller in the dust. He looked down at his dark hands lying on the bright surface of his kitchen table and wept for his lost wife and father.

He returned to the life of a migrant farm worker. Jacinto took his son from one camp to another, where they were surrounded by Filipino men whom the boy came to regard as uncles. Some of them were married to Mexican women, but it was mostly a world of men. They lived in spare shacks, slept on beds with thin mattresses on metal frames, and bathed in common bathhouses with walls and roofs made of corrugated metal. They moved every few months, always within a world of brown and green fields stretching to the surrounding horizon. Sometimes, at the far edge of this world, one could hear the whisper of a car or the deep voice of a truck on a road. During the days, Jacinto brought his son into the fields where the boy learned to play alone along the irrigation ditches and among the piles of empty crates.

In the summer of 1947, they went southeast of the lifeless Salton Sea, to a large farm between Niland and Calipatria, in the dry, pale reaches of the Imperial Valley. It was miles off the highway, a place made possible only by irrigation. Jacinto labored alongside other Filipinos from Ilocos Norte, Batangas, and Samar. He worked six days a week, waist deep in endless rows of deep green tomato plants, under the palest skies he had ever known. As he worked, Jacinto remembered his mother’s footsteps on the split bamboo floor of his family’s house. He recalled the sharp bark of his father’s voice urging on the wide, gray water buffalo that pulled the wooden plow through the dark flesh of his family’s earth. When Jacinto looked across the green expanse of tomato plants, he remembered standing in the stern of the ship, somewhere between Manila and Honolulu, looking back at the deep water churned white by the ship’s propellers.

Once in a great while, a quick breeze rippled the tops of the tomato plants. All the men would raise their heads in unison, as though they had each heard the same voice calling to them. And then they would bend their heads toward the earth again. There, the nights were so still that it seemed the only sound in the world was the hum of the large, green cooler on the side of the bunkhouse, which could be heard a mile away.

One morning, Jacinto’s son told him that he dreamed he was standing in the middle of a field and did not know how he had gotten there because he could not see his footprints in the soil. On the following day, the boy said that he had had the same dream but this time there had been a man at the edge of the field watching him. When Jacinto asked him who the man was, the boy replied, An old, old man.

The next morning, the boy could not open his eyes. His eyelids had been sealed shut by a thin film of mucus that dried in the night. Jacinto bathed his son’s eyes with a damp, warm towel until he freed the eyelids. But when the boy tried to open his eyes, he could not bear the light. He told his father between sobs that the man in his dream had walked across the field to him and put his hands softly over his eyes. He said that the man’s hands felt and smelled just like his father’s.

Jacinto put the back of his hand on his son’s forehead for a moment. I’ll take you to the doctor when I come home for lunch, he said.

Pinkeye. In both eyes and as bad as I’ve seen it, the doctor said, after examining the boy. He gave Jacinto a blue glass bottle of liquid, instructing him to bathe the boy’s eyes with its contents once a day. Then he took a strip of white cloth and blindfolded the boy. He should be better in a week.

That evening, all the uncles came by to see how Jacinto’s son was doing. Cleto, the oldest, ran his dark, callused hands through the boy’s black hair and made a clucking sound with his tongue.

Early the next morning, as Jacinto worked in the fields, he became aware of a sudden stillness among the other men, as though the air had frozen. His eye caught a faint movement at the end of his row. It was his blindfolded son. The boy had somehow managed to find his way out of their shack and, in the semi-darkness, feel his way down the half-mile dirt track to the edge of the tomato field. In his blindness, his son had found the very row he was working. One of the men behind Jacinto crossed himself and murmured, "Jesus y Maria."

At the end of the second week of his son’s blindness, Jacinto went to old Cleto and asked him what he should do.

Has someone in your family died? the old man asked.

My father.

And when was that?

Two years ago.

You had a feast one year after he died?

No. Who could I invite to such a feast? I had lost my wife and I had no money.

Cleto looked at the ground and shook his head. Have you dreamed about your father?

No.

What about your son?

He dreamed a man touched his eyes.

It is not good that you did not have a feast.

Do you think my father is angry with me?

The boy does not get better.

Do you think it will help to have a feast so late?

It cannot hurt, said Cleto, smiling.

The next day, Jacinto bought a pig. The men pooled their cash and sent one of their number into the nearest town to buy a fifty-pound bag of rice, cooking oil, garlic, vinegar, and the other things they would need. From Cleto’s small vegetable patch, they picked light green bittermellon and deep, purple eggplants.

The men killed and butchered Jacinto’s pig early on Sunday and cooked all through the morning, making denuguan, adobo, pinakbet, and pansit. They made three large pots of snowy steamed rice. The boy, drawn by the sound of the men’s voices and movements, wandered among them, his small hands before him as though he could feel the sharp smells of cooking food. When they were done, the men went to bathe and put on clean clothes.

A Catholic priest, whom Cleto invited from town, blessed the food and said prayers for the soul of Jacinto’s father. He put his soft, white hands onto the boy’s head and prayed for the return of his health and sight. Jacinto asked the priest to eat with them, and he accepted their food. Before he left, Jacinto gave him an envelope containing ten one-dollar bills.

Later that night, as the boy stood with the others around a fire, one of the men played old, sentimental songs on his mandolin, romantic melodies from the time when the Spanish ruled the Philippines. Several of the men raised their voices to sing about love and longing, young men’s songs sung by men in their forties. Above them, the stars shone in the black, black sky, reminding them of the restless nights of their youth.

Jacinto stood in the fire’s wavering light and told them the story of how, at the turn of the century, his father had joined the fight against the Spanish, and then the Americans. They fought with the Americans near Bataac and the insurrectos, defeated, had scattered. His father, alone and exhausted, fell asleep beside a small stream. When he woke, he found a stone beneath his head—a clear, yellow stone with a tiny, coiled lizard embedded in its heart. Thereafter, Jacinto’s father was able to set broken bones and extract bad teeth, neither of which could he do before.

As Jacinto told this story, he watched his son standing very still with his blind face turned toward the sound of his voice as though Jacinto’s words were pushing their way into his son’s skin.

The boy began to heal in the following days and his eyes grew well enough that by the following Wednesday he did not need his blindfold. The doctor said it was the eye wash that did the trick. Jacinto said nothing, out of politeness and respect.

Afterwards, the men often saw Jacinto’s son walking carefully along the edge of the field, his eyes closed and his hands before him, as though he were trying to find something he had misplaced in the dark terrain of his blindness. One evening, at the end of the tomato picking season, just before sunset, Jacinto found his son standing in the middle of a freshly disked field. Jacinto watched as the dusty, red sun stretched the boy’s shadow toward him like a dark wake. From where he stood, he saw that the boy was looking west, as though he were waiting for the arrival of someone who was just beyond the horizon’s sharp edge.

The Center of the World

.

Tony waits for his father at the edge of the yard, beside the dirt road. He has done this every day after school for the last three years. He stands in the slanting light, beneath the dark blue sky, and feels a growing dampness in the air. There is a breath of movement, a small distortion on the horizon, and he knows it to be the blade ends of hoes, then the heads and shoulders of the men coming over the gentle rise at the far end of the dirt road. He knows his father a quarter-mile away by the angle at which he carries his hoe—steeper than the angles of those carried by his uncles, Stanley, Mariano, and Tamayo.

The light shades from yellow to deep orange, and the sun falls toward the aquamarine layer that lies on the western horizon. The men are like the first wisps of darkness rising out of the earth. To Tony it seems as though the contours of the fields, and plants that lie in them have given up the men in deference to the night. He can almost feel the mixed cadence of their walks, the textures of their faces, and the soft give and take of their voices. The irrigation ditch by the side of the road is a deep scar across the face of Tony’s world. He watches the men coming toward him and feels as though the center of the world is approaching, because to Tony, these men possess an intimacy with the dust, leaves, air, and light.

When Tony sits in his classroom at William McKinley Public School watching Mr. Dickerson, his heavy-set, clean-shaven teacher, he sees a man almost without form, definition, or color. In contrast to the sharp angles of his father’s dark face, Mr. Dickerson’s face is pink and smooth. Sometimes Tony watches Mr. Dickerson’s white hand, writing dry, scratchy words on the blackboard, and thinks of his father standing naked under the shower pipe in the bath house. The water makes the muscles of his father’s brown shoulders, arms, and chest gleam like the blade of a new knife.

Coming to the edge of the field where Tony waits, the men stop and talk for a while. Tony stands beside his father and listens as they speak softly, in the Ilocano dialect of their Philippine homeland. Their laughter is light as dust, the laughter of men held in the familiar, gentle embrace of fatigue. When his father takes his hand in his own warm, callused hand, Tony feels as though he is connected to a hot, bitter current that runs through his father’s arm from somewhere deep in his body. He remembers the windy March afternoon when his father showed him the plants he had thought were weeds, telling him which were good to cook and to eat. His father told him how he and his uncles had often lived with loneliness, hunger, and exhaustion in the