The Music Child and Other Stories: Contemporary Philippine Fiction

By Alfred A. Yuson

From the multi-awarded Filipino author of novels, essays, and short stories comes a coming-of-age and riveting tales of hope and innocence. This collection of contemporary Philippine fiction by Alfredo Yuson, also known as Krip Yuson, has been awarded several times and has been published in many platforms. The compilation includes titles such as Romance and Faith on Mount Banahwa, Big Street, Voice in the Hills, Avenida Vignettes among others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712733383

Book preview

ROMANCE AND FAITH ON MOUNT BANAHAW

I

It is Thursday once again as it had been Thursday years before and Thursday, though only in his dream, hours ago.

There are four radios in the apartment and all blare the news of a national romance. Approving emotions are aired by city editors, midwives, basketball fans, the heads of rural plumbers’ associations … All in a series of twilight hour interviews. There is hardly any static, though the radios are of different makes, sizes, colors and facades.

Hours ago it had been a Thursday in his sleep. There are birds in the house he is lost in, thin walls of plywood boards, and an unlit corridor which leads to a kitchen where a kitchen maid looks up from her onions, winks at him. Her approval is not enough, he feels lost. At his desire a group of men arrive and offer quick and tidy encouragement. There is a door they enter and leave through, leaving the one tall one with a callow grin to check on his persistence, or progress. The girl he wants is still in the room, and he can feel she is well protected, though her face remains alien and her character remote. All he has at hand is her image. The one tall one beside him looks up at the birds unmasking the ceiling. Their tiny throats say, Embroidery has a function and that function is to please. A bowl of chestnuts is offered him, perhaps by the father or one of the brothers, he is not sure, but they are little golden balls dipped in egg or is it honey, and they are Oh so pleasing to look at, they are staring up at him like eyes. He touches them delicately. The eyes are warm. But they are Oh so pleasing to look at, and he loses even the girl’s image as he tries hard to decide whether to take them entirely or offer token pieces back, if they won’t have some perhaps the winking maid will. And what of the one tall one with the callow grin holding his own against the tiny birds unmasking the ceiling?

II

What of them? he hisses under his breath as he breaks his stride down the apartment stairs. What of it? He is amazed at the multi-station broadcast, the Thursday voices sounding intelligent, well-researched, in their crisp four-cornered crackle.

Perhaps they’re showing their documents on TV, he thinks.

Little red button is pushed and a fourteen-inch wave of white light materializes, corrects itself into the figures of cops. Who leap out of the Solid State box into the living room. Out the door across the driveway through the gate. A dozen of them in a mad run, waving their twilight sticks. The last cop struggles in his mad run to tuck in the finite blue of his shirttails, there is a glimpse of his white undershirt, stamp-ironed with stickpaper giraffes, chimpanzees, Mandrake and Lothar …

Perhaps she knows. Perhaps she knows about this too.

He picks up the phone and dials through the buzz. Yes, the cops have gone out of my room, too, she says gently. I suppose we’re still seeing each other tomorrow?

Sure we will, he reassures her in turn.

Do you have the money for your boots? she asks.

I’ll take care of that, I’m stepping out now.

I’ll bring the beans and the spices, she says. Don’t forget the book.

He was seeing her now, up close, very close, and the passion was in touch, the way it was after their first lay, when she stood naked balancing glasses of warm milk on her palms before the Hitachi fan, she was Libra and on the ascent, so was his romance for her.

Yes, I’ll bring the book. Bye, my romance, goodbye for now.

Click went the phone. The TV.

The four radios.

III

Outside, in the twilight. It felt good to walk down the street.

The neighbors in the third door, beside his, were on to their Thursday boozing again. They made a lot of noise, but it didn’t bother him this time, perhaps because he saw the smile of the two-year-old from the second door.

It was the same interplanetary group clinking their glasses in a haze and a cluster on the driveway, the gate was more than a trifle open, and the familiar crewcut punk from Saturn had stood up on his chair and with his Saturnine falsetto taken the lead in their improvisational ritual of the Santa Clara Pinong-Pino series of bawdy quatrains. Roaring more than singing, they did not notice the kid from the second door who stood by the open gate, a two-year-old with a two-year-old’s curious grin, smiling at their religion.

IV

He bought the black Spartan rubber working boots for P12.50 at a stall in Farmer’s Market.

She hustled for the beans and the spices in her aunt’s old castle.

There was rock music coming from the adjoining store in the Yellow Avenue, Crosby and Stills eating their hearts and strings out in protest and rapport.

Her aunt was playing Boguljubov’s Surprise Symphony on her 1945 Seeburg as they rummaged in the castle cellar.

The saleslady asked him to try the pair on, but he said he was sure they’d fit, and he smiled at her for her interest seemed genuine, she looked like the type of saleslady whose affection for customers was precise in its dimensions, as big as old Siam which was of course as big as the American states of Kentucky and Wyoming combined.

Her aunt who was a deposed and aging princess wrapped the Limas in one of her wasted favors, a blue lace one, and the spices which were in little triangular cellophane packets in a red gingham one.

He handed the saleslady a ten-peso bill with the serial number AD 997704, two pesos minted in 1972, and two quarters minted in 1966, and she looked at the cash and then up at him and said flatly, Why not Nixon?, to which he replied, with no hint of belligerence, and very simply, Hee-haw!

She declined her aunt’s offer of a Calyptus Invictus bonsai in a shallow green-glazed pot but the deposed and aging princess insisted she at least take with her the Red Billbergia in a two-kilogram Klim can and she had to accept, liking anyway the yellow-and-white combination of the container and the big bold letters which reminded her so much of that afternoon in Dumaguete when he had announced bravely to her that he had found out exactly how many pedicabs the city had, having traced the one with the highest number on its front and back which was 1874, but she said they can’t be more than what they have in the Pantal district alone of Dagupan City and as she cradled the Klim can with the still unblooming Red Billbergia in her right arm she remembered the morning they trysted in the cacti greenhouse of Baguio City’s Philippine-German Forestry Station admiring the three peyote buttons in the grey sand on the red cement shelf and he had remarked soberly, Our romance will never be out of kilter for you are Lophophora to my Williamsii and she thought it was achingly sweet and funny that now as she bade the deposed and aging princess a fond farewell she couldn’t help reminiscing about the moonrises they had watched from the verandah of the Nasugbu beachhouse which was the summer hangout of the Dean of Philippine Couturiers but which they availed themselves of during off-season week-ends by befriending and bribing the caretaker whose brother had offered them some bari-wana very cheap but they had said they didn’t think its smoke was necessary to drive away the gnats and moths from their room when actually they had a stash of their own properly labelled in her readjusted compact covered by a dozen pieces of Marca Aeroplano cigarette paper and she remembered it all now because insects were taking their leave too of her aunt’s ex-royal decolletage and she remembered and reminisced and imagined him in all the places and their strengths, Taluksangay, Sagada, Bagawines, Larap, Valencia, Bonuan, Infanta, Tagudin, Larena, Liliw, Maasin, Jalajala, Calapan, Sampaloc, Parañaque, and indeed, though pell-mell and willy-nilly, how her romance for him was great and fast becoming.

V

Her dream of risible energy:

A green lane which led straight and nowhere, not in particular. Alone, she was walking. A pit, she reaches a pit. Across the pit, a windmill, solitary, unmoving. In the pit, people. Her friends, relatives, memo-mates, bosses, subalterns, confidantes, contemporaries, fellow romancers, adolescents she had traded intimate penned secrets in slumbooks with, suitors and seducers who had handed her little white calling cards with 1-4-3 or ITALY scribbled