philippine literary selection

8/13/2019 philippine literary selection

1/7

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 forvarious major magazines and as press officer of the UP Los Baos 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 someones

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 thebedspread 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.


2/7

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 forpoliteness, 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!

Theprice, 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. Cant she have it for forty?

Ill give it away for fifty, she tells the visitor.

How about forty- five?

No. Fifty.


3/7

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 recallthat she had always been there to call me away from mudpies or pikoin 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.


4/7

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 Grandmothers son. He was Mas cousin,

because Grandmother is the sister of Mas 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 Grandmothers 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.


5/7

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 haddivided 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 potsand 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 Grandmothers 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 hotinside 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 andpieces of shrapnel.

Always now there was nothing, no flicker of expression on Grandmothers 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.


6/7

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

Grandmothers 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.

Helaughed 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 onit.

This will keep you warm, he said, tousling my bangs.

He came regularly every afternoon. We piled into his Willys, my sister beside him, the

three boys at the back. We rode through the city and saw different places over and over again in-

between 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 forthree 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.


7/7

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 patchworkinto 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.

philippine literary selection

Documents

Transcript of philippine literary selection