A short story by my granddaughter set in the time of the Philippine revolution against the Spanish then the Americans. About women trying to cope when the men were conscripted to fight, and the father of the family died. Subplot is the tension between the local customs and the Catholic religion.
Title: Hunger
Crouched in the convent’s underbelly, Gloria and Marisol sit in stifling, deafening silence. As if they were once again four, Gloria places her hand on Marisol’s chest. Marisol startles then softens, touching this intimate was not a common practice within the con nes of the thick, archaic, black stone. In the darkness, the siblings parse through the lost. In silence, they tried with slow awkward subtlety to enact habits of the unfamiliar love now long forgotten. Like playing with an old straw doll or trying on a torn up summer slip of years past. Marisol’s bosom rises and falls in rapid succession, following the deep pounding of a rapid, restless heart.
“Hinga, Marisol, hinga-” Gloria demands her sister to breathe with a voice as hard as steel, deep and guttural–the years of her voice evoking melody and music gone. The daintier, gentler, thinner, and smaller voice had hardened over time.
Marisol closes her eyes and lets her older sister guide her breathing. She doesn’t push her away, doesn’t shy away from the familiar, she leans into the hand with force. Wanting to be one with the comfort, wanting to be stilled. Attempting to push the fear away. As if Gloria could make the heaping piles of shit that lled the crevices between them go away.
For a moment Gloria hesitates and begins to pull her hand away. Unsure if she could help, unsure if she could be the sister she was. Almost instantaneously Marisol stills it in place, grabbing her wrist with a rm grip.
“Saglit lang, Ate, don’t take it away.”
Gloria complies, peering at her sister with a queer curiosity. Her sister’s wimple slips and glimpses of dark brown hair peek beneath ironed white cloth. She reaches up to secure it in place. The sisters sit in silence until Marisol loosens her grip and Gloria could feel the stilling of her heart.
Marisol sits there, like a marionette without strings, without the seemingly permanent defensive air she carried around that always accompanied her straight posture and elevated chin. Marisol sat there and looked as if she had sat for so long as a forgotten character of a long-rehearsed act. Despondent and old – with eyes that carried the knowledge of worlds beginning and ending like an endless cycle. When a war comes to an end only to start another: there isn’t really much left to say when the endlessness stings and the cyclical nature of helplessness becomes habit.
drip. drip. drip. drop. drip. drop. drip. drip. drop. drip. drip. drip.
The sounds of leaky church ceilings and the distinct musk of a windowless basement filled the empty space with alive sounds. Eyes adjusting to the darkness in their crouched corner–what was a moment of deep intimacy was now flooded with a mountain of distance.
“Does he love you?” Marisol asks steadily, pushing away Gloria’s prodding glare.
The marionette moves. Gloria picks at her longer fingernails, clean and dainty, just like William liked it.
“I suppose so.” Gloria finally says, voice dripping with a performative nonchalance, slow walls creeping back up between sister and sister.
Gloria thought of how William seemed far too gentle for war with his angel blonde hair, cherub-like light blue eyes, soft voice, and slow honey-sweet whispers. To her, he seemed to belong much better as part of the fresco on her sister’s church ceiling – untouchable, safe, and unmarred by the corruption of being a white human man. Real—and complicit to a new era of violence spilling blood onto innocent soil. A metallic bitter taste lled her mouth. Love. Love seemed to be an exotic item in a foreign market she would never be privy to. He loved her. How could one find love when they were sent to kill? To her he seemed to truly belong on the fresco of a church she didn’t worship in.
“Nakakatawa-” Marisol says, a mechanical chuckle creaking out of her mouth.
Gloria looks over at her sister, “I’m your sister and yet I’ve found myself always the last person to find out who has most recently fallen into your spell. You’d think I’d be the first to hear the chismis.” Marisol continues, feigning intimacy, feigning that she’s not hurt.
“I’m sure you’ve heard plenty, Marisol. Even with a waging war, wimple bearing nuns still know how to keep their chins high and their mouths moving especially when women with legs open to the world decide to switch positions.”
There were moments when they did not sit so tensely. When touch was a habit, when laughter was an immediate response, when they stumbled and bubbled over space so frequently drunk with bliss. Quiet mornings shrouded with evening dew and farm cold. When they awoke before the rooster did and walked in heavy slumber through the silent kitchen to get breakfast ready. At times they would cut fruit for each other, an incredibly
intimate gesture. There was so much chatter between them but also sweet, knowing silence and with that kind, comical shared looks that held a treasure trove of inside jokes just for them.
Almost as if she was paying homage to these moments Marisol hesitates before she asks, “What does it feel like, Ate?”
“Alin, Marisol?” Gloria asks.
“To lie with a man.” Marisol blushes at her own question, susmariosep, she thinks to herself–praying in her own way about things she wonders about having entered the convent a few years shy of marriage.
Gloria stills and peers at her marionette sister with a curious gaze, “It has been different each time-” Gloria begins carefully, she chooses to settle her gaze on the steady pool of stale monsoon rains in the corner of the room.
“With Gabriel it was… rushed. Frenzied. Like we were always running out of time or at the cusp of being caught.” Gloria starts with a boy that Marisol knows to be the only one she’s loved.
“We were both young and unsure, your rst is always a stumble. We stumbled over each other as much as we could with the time we were given.” Marisol knew she was referring to a time before Gabriel, a boy, became Gabriel, a man, a guerilla fighter, a massacred body on the streets after an initial attempt to ambush a group of Castillan soldiers.
“It is always different with a man who knows you a little too well. A boy who has given you his hand after you’ve scraped your knee. A boy who has taken a cold cup of water from you after chopping bamboo stalks only to nd you are no longer a girl. You, of course, have always known the man trapped inside the casing of a boy. Mama taught us that well.”
Gloria shakes her head and shifts her gaze to another drip, drip, drop leaking spot in the dark old cavern. “Then, of course, was Don Julio.” Gloria’s eyes harden.
“Some men are not gentle, Marisol, that is a blessing you will have the grace not to know sitting entrapped among these stone walls with your prayers, statues, and rosary beads.” Marisol breath hitches, feeling a chill that shakes her limp body.
“Why him?” Marisol asks gently, perceiving there to be more to a story she heard only in whispers of gossip in the marketplace as she scurried along with the other nuns.
“We were going to lose the land.” Gloria said simply, “There were mouths to feed.”
“I thought leaving might-” Marisol stopped herself, “I thought you would take the convent’s help-”
Gloria stops her, “The nuns are kind to Anito’s who no longer cling to their ancestors and pagan tradition. It would have never worked. There are more willing hungry stomachs who are more eager to cling to chants recited to pale statues for a morsel of bread than me.”
Marisol quiets down and an understanding descends upon both sisters.
“I found William on a walk through the market.” Gloria says, an olive branch.
Marisol keeps herself from commenting further on how she’s heard this story before—recounted in words less kind. Happening upon men was not something Gloria does, happening upon men is something she intends.
“He lies with me as if he does not know me.” She says simply, “He is gentle but also rushed. He has awe in his eyes but also a sort of distance I am always unsure of. I am unsure he will ever lie with me. You know… Beyond what he thinks of us and what we represent.”
“Then why, Gloria?” Marisol asks
“Because he is gentle and it is important for us to know if the war is truly ending or not.” Gloria states.
“So did you see this coming?”
“No… and I don’t think he knew we could be bought so easily… or at all.”
drip. drip. drip. drop. drip. drop. drip. drip. drop. drip. drip. drip.
“Iyong lumang bahay, Gloria. The old house… how is it?” Marisol begins after a sizeable silence.
“The upkeep is hard, Marisol, but it is still as lovely as it was if not for all the quiet.”
“You always loved the quiet though,” Marisol says with a soft smile, looking out into the darkness, lost in the memory of long ago.
Creeping out of her room a little late to the breakfast making that occurred in their house each morning, she nds her sister looking out into the beautiful foggy landscape they were met with each morning – rice stalks reaching up to touch the sky, fog descending to give each grain a kiss. The sun was a distant, bright light hidden behind morning clouds that shaded them gently to ease a lovely awakening. Each morning, the rooster would call out to her in shrill sounds, urging her to help her sister. She awoke this morning with a start, annoyed by the rooster’s persistence. She stumbles out of her room and when she happens upon the kitchen, the serene look on her sister’s face melts any negative feelings. She stands there for a little bit, in awe of the beauty of a small daily moment, wondering why she had never noticed the gentle contours of her sister’s face, the way a natural smile graced her lips at every moment even when it was at rest.
“Marisol, come wash some rice please. The barako is ready and the eggplant stalks have been fried.” Is all her sister said that day to invite her to her quiet and lovely.
“The quiet is different when it is a glaring reminder of loss. The quiet is only nice when there is the loud to come and interrupt it.” Gloria interrupts Marisol’s journey back in time.
“Are you implying that I’m loud, Gloria?” Marisol responds in a chuckle.
“No, of course not, sister. Just terribly noisy, especially in the mornings when you whine endlessly about having to wake up at dawn. Mama used to have to lecture you for wearing your saya inside out.”
The sisters share a laugh. They indulge in the moment as if it hadn’t been stolen from them by death, by hunger, by war, by the powers that be that decide when one gets to live a life or not. The sisters both knew that those quiet mornings did not end when Marisol left for the convent, the quiet stopped and got replaced with the roaring hunger that came with being unable to tend the land after their Tatay died. His heart stopped beating in midafternoon out in the elds, they had found him hours later with a jug of water and halted laughter. Their mother had wailed for days, Marisol sobbed with her, Gloria ran to fetch the village healer. It had all been too late. For months they worried over their mother, Marisol refused to leave her side, Gloria couldn’t bear the sight and fixated on writing their Tatay’s brother. She knew the land could not give without nurture, the land could not produce food without offerings of hard labor. Their Tatay’s brother who lived up in the Ifugao mountains received their correspondence too late. The village beyond the old and the incredibly young was robbed of its young men as one by one they disappeared into the province of Nueva Ecija to join guerilla armies ready for revolution and independence. Besides, Gloria had already stumbled into Don Julio in the streets when the revolution had made things hard for the village women to help. Stumbled was a strong word for one that found the grain pot emptier and emptier each morning.
Stumbled was a strong word for one who had already taken it upon herself to attempt to hire extra hands in an attempt to plant for the next crop only to be met with disapproving glances from groups of old elitist principled men that wondered why an unmarried girl was found roaming the streets propositioning young boys. Stumbled was a strong word for one who had already prepared meals with no protein nor avor. The mornings held no quiet. The rooster no longer called to Marisol but the aching hunger and growing sorrow kept them all wide awake just as well.
Don Julio was a haciendero’s son. She thought herself lucky that the son had taken a liking to her and not the father. She didn’t know that he had a wrath in him that rivaled his senior. But he could talk to his father’s men, he could get them to work on her father’s land with the promise of payment post harvest. She paid in advance in other ways that made her stomach turn but after the deals had been made she returned home with the same softness that came with content mornings. This softness was robbed just as soon as it was acquired when she arrived to find that her sister had made plans of her own. Marisol had left quietly, with burning hunger in the pit of her belly and with a distinct awareness of her sister’s sacrifices. She thought, no more–no more late night visits to the hacienda’s dark corners. She thought that converting to Christianity, dedicating herself to a life full of rosary beads and meager filling meals with protein and some flavor would be a small sacrifice that would rectify the ways in which her sister had to whore herself out to the slithering snake of a man that often creeped around the streets in wild, ravenous pursuit.
In the end, neither sacrifice did them well. Gloria continued to meet Don Julio until the end of the harvest, until the payments had been given and the farm hands had promised return for the next planting.
Marisol had already been inducted as a marionette for Spanish catholic tradition and the certainty of a full belly and the promise of her family’s ease in sharing the limited food they had pushed her into the quiet life within the convent.
The sisters assumed lives as shells of function, moving through performances of humanity and a semblance of sanity. Silence descended upon the sisters like a sinister fog and the quiet mornings ceased to house a loving contentment. Until their mother died.
drip. drip. drip. drop. drip. drop. drip. drip. drop. drip. drip. drip.
“You left Marisol… I-” Gloria took a deep shuddering breath, “You didn’t leave so much as a letter.”
“Ate, you wouldn’t have let me.”
Gloria scoffs, “Of course not! I was doing something about it–I was saving papa’s land! You could have waited a little longer-”
“And what? Watch you come home with bruises you covered up with heavy shawls in the middle of a boiling summer? Did you want me to keep watching you silently as you gave us more and more food than your own? Did you want me to continue watching as the light left your eyes? I’m not stupid, Ate!”
“You were stupid enough to leave without so much as a conversation or the courtesy of a goodbye!”
“You wouldn’t have let me go to the convent.”
“You do not make sacrifices for this family. You are young. That is not your place.” Gloria hu s.
“And it’s yours? Ate, please see reason. You would have starved yourself dry filling my plate.”
“That was my choice to make, Marisol. Leaving me behind with mama… I did what I did to make sure we could stay together.”
“You let him take you to dingy corners - you-you let him take your dignity, ravage you senseless in the dark like a breeding pig in the night! Papa would not have wanted this for you!” Marisol hu ed breathlessly, frustration seeping into every word.
“Papa was gone, Sol. Stop being a child, I may not have chosen a pious road like you had but I chose one that could buy us time. It wasn’t going to be for forever-”
“And yet here you are. Another man to ll the plate, huh? What does he bring to the table, Ate?”
“That’s not fair. You left me-” Gloria broke into an earth-shattering sob, “You left me alone with mama. You don’t understand– When you left she wasn’t even surprised. She just
sat beside the window and watched the street. She stopped speaking. She ate and slept and lived only to watch out that stupid window.”
Gloria closed in on herself, hugged her knees to her chest and rocked herself as sobs wracked her body—pleading for release. A release she had not allowed herself beyond the night of the Bogwa. Marisol’s silent tears morphed into loud and angry ones. The sisters found themselves entangled in a tight embrace that made them look like one shuddering, mourning, wailing entity. They stayed in that embrace even after the sobs softened and the tears stopped.
drip. drip. drip. drop. drip. drop. drip. drip. drop. drip. drip. drip.
“Ang tahimik, Marisol. The house was so quiet, so peaceful – almost as if the house itself was saying goodbye to Mama that day. The monsoon rains had stopped for a moment and I woke up on that old rattan chair with beautiful sunlight streaming in through the capiz shell windows. I folded the windows back and let the breeze welcome the smell of sunshine and fresh morning air. Ang ganda, Marisol. The birds were singing that day. I walked to the kitchen in a daze, I hadn’t even thought to check on her… She looked like she was nally getting a peaceful moment of rest. I made breakfast not knowing she was already gone. I took my time in the kitchen, spent a whole hour tediously making the rst full meal we’ve had in a while. Don Julio had chickens sent to our house the day before and I took one for Arroz Caldo, to warm mama up early in the morning. I chopped the ginger, I seasoned the rice porridge, I made sure the chicken was tender… And she wouldn’t respond to my calls–” Gloria could feel the ringing in her ear the same way she did when her own head pounded from her own wails that morning. After Manang Nena had come all that was left inside her was silence and when Marisol came that’s all there was between them. Gloria stepped out of the room to give Marisol her own privacy as she wailed for their mother, as she did when she was a child and Mama was out in the fields.
Silent, stubborn tears leaked from Gloria’s eyes as she felt the sensations of that day like her body remembered it as a treasured memory. The dread, the insurmountable loneliness mounted her that day as though it would never leave. She had felt possessed, inconsolable until Marisol had come and everything that was left hanging out for the world to see had clammed back up—if only to serve the higher purpose of being the stronger one. Marisol left after the funeral. The funeral seethed in its silence, it was bitter and sorrowful. Those who came to pay respects were of the Anito and Marisol kept her distance, they inquired of the Bogwa in hushed tones so as not to o end the nun in the room. Don Julio had come brie y to remind Gloria that now that she was orphaned and abandoned, a place by his side at the hacienda was most reasonable – she denied his o er politely with bile rising at the back of her
throat and indignant tears ghting to stay behind hateful eyes. Though he wasn’t one to take no for an answer, the room full of Anito women – all healers and rumored witches – was enough to have him scurrying o with a distinct feeling of a curse creeping its way into the caverns of his life. Beyond this unpleasant encounter, the funeral fulfilled its purpose. It was never meant to have been a moment of healing, but a moment of manifest pain within the community. Healing would come later, hopefully through the Bogwa.
“I’m sorry I left you. I didn’t realize what I was leaving you with.”
Gloria wiped her tears and looked away from Marisol, “It’s okay, Marisol. You came back when I most needed you to.”
The Bogwa was a sacred tradition passed down from the Ifugao peoples in the mountains. It was an Anito tradition sacred to families who held ancestry in the hidden crevices of high places. It was three days long and often the tribal elders, the gong beaters, and the mumbakis preceded over the ceremony along with the immediate family. This was a community event, but in the outskirts of Manila the Spanish Catholic priests forbid any pagan rituals that they felt were sacrilegious and demonic in the eyes of god. A three day feast over pigs and cattle, where one exhumes and cleans the bones of loved ones definitely met this criteria. So Gloria decided to do this alone, the Bogwa would be done in secret with just her and her Uncle who had just arrived from the mountains just in time for the ceremony to take place. This was what needed to be done to honor her father and to bring peace to her mother.
Gloria didn’t think Marisol would come. She didn’t believe Marisol would participate in something that not only terrified her as a child but was now also forbidden to her even more than it was to the rest of them.
The Spanish priest that accompanied Marisol to the funeral had done his best to do what he could to usher in a Catholic mourning that was not welcome in the home he was entering. Marisol had indulged his desires and had comforted him as he stood paralyzed by the immense feeling of grief that hung heavily in the room. He would later on mutter something about curses and hell as he marched back to the kalesa that awaited him. Marisol followed him. A year later, just as Gloria had decided that this would be the week to do the Bogwa, Marisol came with a bag in hand that held enough clothes to stay for the three nights of the ceremony. Neither sister attempted to combat the silence, they knew what needed to be done.
When the sun had set and the knives had been sharpened, an old man and two women descended upon the burial site in twilight. The site was close to their home as it was traditionally meant in the mountains. Armed with knives and a shovel, they began to dig. After the wooden co n was retrieved, their Uncle began to perform baki as the two sisters
worked at the bones, separating remaining esh from bone. No words were spoken before they started to sing the hudhud–it was a loud song. It was the kind of wailing grief that made you forget your time and place, they remained in this delirious state throughout. Methodically, as if peeling fruit, the sisters cleaned the bones as the ceremony called for. Hours and hours later, sore from scouring decomposing matter on bone they took the bones back to their home, carrying it carefully in a new gamong, woven with colors that held colors of their father’s tribe. The ceremony was stilted, practiced awkwardly by those who were told only by word how it worked. Their Uncle played the role of every elder man, every mumbaki, every gong beater, and every community member. They didn’t have a lubuk, a burial cave that made this easier to practice. In the days that followed they slaughtered cattle and poultry to honor their dead. The practice was devoid of celebration and community. The three drowned in rice wine and performed the hudhud relentlessly. The days passed by in a blur of chants, quiet tears, hudhud wails, excessive eating, and ancestral offering. Hidden by midnight twilight on katlu, the final day of the Bagwa, an old man and two women returned the bones to the grave. In a rush, the old man runs with only his Wanoh, exposing ropey muscle and strong bone. He runs from the grave with cogon grass that has touched the burial cloth in his hand up the hill and back to the colonial home. The sisters follow quietly behind him, singing the hudhud as a loud wail to signify the end of the ceremony.
Marisol slipped out at dawn, early enough that the old man and the other woman were still locked in heavy sleep from sore bones that tirelessly worked through the Bagwa. The ceremony brought little peace to the home, as the knowledge that it hadn’t been done as it ought to have been completely plagued the minds of those who had sat through it.
drip. drip. drip. drop. drip. drop. drip. drip. drop. drip. drip. drip.
When Gloria found Marisol walking frantically past the silent Manileño streets, squinting under the unforgiving afternoon sun, she was just as frantic. Instead of passing her as she would–chin up, gaze averted, chest puffed–Marisol stops her, grasping her arms desperately. She could feel the tight grip of sweaty palms clenching tightly, she could hear the leaking desperation, she could smell the nervous afternoon sweat masked by thick black and white cloaks un t for the Filipino heat. Her sister was delirious. Whispering mama’s necklace over and over again like a chanted prayer. It was her outright refusal to indulge the request, the deep concern for an oncoming heatstroke, and her need to ee the streets that brought them both to retreat into the cold solace of the church’s underbelly.
“Why do you need Mama’s necklace, Marisol? Why now?” Gloria prods.
“I’m leaving–I should be leaving soon.” Marisol begins, “Padre Juan Andres is the last of the priests in Manila that are leaving–” Marisol coughs, “before the American soldiers lock the city up indefinitely.”
“I’ve been asked to serve his parish in Seville.”
“How pious.” Gloria swallows the stinging blow of being left behind yet again.
“And Mama’s necklace, made from coconut bone carved and blessed by Manang Lisenya during the last whispers of revolution as a defensive symbol against war—most importantly, an Anito heirloom, belongs on your Catholic neck? Why exactly?” Gloria seethes, crazed with a steely seething voice.
The marionette stills. “Ano, Marisol? Ano? What could you possibly say, what could your gull produce at this point to take this last piece of truth away from me?”
“Does your cross not protect you enough? Don’t you pray through each rosary bead with enough earnestness? What is there to expect of the ancestors?”
The cold seeps in as the warmth of the sun trapped in sweaty skin leaves like a thief in the night, the musky, heavy, and stale takes its place like a dew filled fog leaving them slick with dread.
“Ate… Mananatili ka dito. You will stay on Manileño streets and feel the crisp dew the Pacific brings in the morning. You will eat the tangy, savory marinated chicken and siesta in the afternoons—belly warm and heavy with rice planted just beyond the city bounds. You will taste the ripe fruit from mama and papa’s mango tree, partake in bitter, sour cheeks of green mango with bagoong in the o seasons. You will ebb and ow with the land–even as we go like whores in the night, from the bed of one white man to the other, and yet you will feel the hope the motherland will give you. You have worn this coconut bone as if it gives you more proof than you already have. Ate, give me this. It is all I will have left of hope.”
With that, the leaky ceiling continues to drip, drip, drop. With that, the sisters sit in silent admission to their fate, to a lost hope now accepted, now resigned to. With that, the marionette fastens her strings, pins her whimple, and sits straight — chin held down. With that, the steely, guttural, and deep retreats from whence it came to make way for dainty fingernails dirtied by invisible underbelly lingerings and soft spoken words.
The two sisters scurry out of the cold, leaking solace–leaving the drip, drip, drop behind them as time regurgitates them from the underbelly of a Spanish fortress. Bigger things stopped them on the street that day - not just Marisol’s frantic pursuit for their mother’s necklace but now more evidently—fate. Silence ensued after their departure, the ceiling kept dripping, and a musky, heavy, stale began to descend like fog over Manila. American soldiers built their own places of worship, prayed their own protestant prayers in indignant ignorance of Mother Mary. The remaining milled the streets with a death led acceptance echoing in their eyes, muttering incoherent phrases in English as opposed to Spanish, as opposed to Tagalog, as guerrilla ghters cried along the borders of a failed revolution. The heroic elite that left the keys to the city and nation up for grabs on a table near the foyer, continued to drink themselves dry in the whoring pursuit of white, delicious prosperity. And the Anito still met at midnight, resting under ancestral trees, staring into candle lit mirrors to see their destiny. A ship in the distance sails with the last of the Spanish and a select few Filipino nuns, ancestral necklace folded into a high collar.
drip. drip. drip. drop. drip. drop. drip. drip. drop. drip. drip. Drip.
