An Excerpt from The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957
by Gregorio C. Brillante
Contemplate the light of this April day: first, a dazzle of the purest blue, high above
shimmering clouds of leaves. In its clarity the vertical light is as flawless, abstract, and infinite as
the future. But such perfection cannot hold the eye for long; consider, then, the light as it falls in
small bright pools beneath the trees that shade this street and this house, in Tarlac. The leaves
bend and turn in brown and yellow ripples flowing up towards the white flaring center of the light,
pause and slant back, and become green again in repose. But even after each rushing fall of
wind, the filtered light is not becalmed but still shifts and trembles in gleaming flakes.
It is three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, the Second Sunday of Easter, in the year 1957.
On the porch of the house, which stands vivid and still in the summer light, a youth of seventeen
or eighteen lies asleep on the rattan sofa. He is thin, shirtless, clad only in green basketball shorts,
and sweat is beaded on his bony chest. His mouth is open, in an expression at once defiant and
defenseless; his left arm, outflung in a disjoint at an angle, hangs touching the floor on which are
scattered the pages of a newspaper, Time magazine with Dwight Eisenhower on the cover, a
paperback entitled Tales of a Mystery and Horror, and a clothbound copy of Why I Am Not A
Christian by Bertrand Russell. He stirs, scratches his neck, and is suddenly awake.
He swings his legs down to the floor, picks up the hard-cover book and with a fresh
cigarette moves to the rocker at the far and more shaded end of the porch. One leg flexed up on
the seat and serving as a prop for the book, the other pushing against the floor to move the chair,
he exhales smoke forcible through pursed lips, blowing it away with an impatient breath audible
enough to disturb anyone watching close by; but he is alone, isolated where he sits and flicking
off the cigarette ashes on the floor. On the ox-blood tiles on which rests his foot, the toes splayed
out and looking fragile, the light never ceases moving, pieces of sun wavering among shadows
pale as smoke and shadows of a darker tone as the wind rustles warmly in the vine trellised above
the railing.
He is an agnostic this year, and on this afternoon searches the pages of the book for
confirmation of his new-found faith. The love of Christ, the communion of saints; heaven and hell
and the vast and ancient theology that accounted for both: he has no more use for them this
summer, and when he closes his eyes to rest them in a red-tinged darkness, he seems to hear
the silence of the eternal spheres which so filled Pascal with dread but which stirred in him no
fear, only a desire, he reminds himself, to comprehend the accident of his own existence. The girl
who owns the book has underlined entire paragraphs and in the margins of these, as though to
refute any skepticism, has drawn a series of parallel lines and exclamation points. Admiringly, he
nods at the calm revelations of the philosopher: “If everything must have a cause, it may just as
well be the world as God…what the world needs is reasonableness, tolerance. It is to such
considerations that we must look, and not a return to obscurantist myths...what the world needs
is not dogma, but an attitude of scientific inquiry.” Not dogma but inquiry, he repeats to himself,
scratching an armpit and glad to be in a universe shorn of all mystery, made lucid and
commonsensical as a book.
But even Bertrand Russell, the cadences of whose logic can make him suck on his
cigarette in fierce agreement, is no match for the languor which again presses down upon him, a
lassitude induced by the warm blending light and the muffled sounds of this April afternoon. He
was tired and hungry when he came home this noon, after playing basketball with Alex
Concepcion and Nonoy Sunglao, and he ate more than his customary fill, three helpings of his
mother’s pochero, prompting his sister Menchit, who is not too friendly with him this summer, to
ask where he put all those calories: what an awful waste: a remark he chose to ignore, one more
dismal wisecrack attempted by such as she and her gang, from the Holy Ghost Institute. He can
still taste the juices of the large noon meal at the back of his tongue as, heavy lidded and lethargic,
without rancor or regret, and pleased to have found the consolations of unbelief, he tosses the
book back onto the coffee table to one side and stretches and slouches deeper in the chair.
He looks down over the knobs of his knees at his feet exposed and pale against the tiles
and down the length of the veranda at the leaves twinkling in the full blaze of sunlight. The tiers
of leaves arched over the front steps stop swaying and revert to their unruffled green, which
reflects less light, and from where he sits, the front of the porch seems to pass into a dimmer
shade. It is like a setting arranged for the longings which often flicker in his daylight daydreaming,
and without effort he conjures up an image of the girl who owns the book. From the hot bright
screen of light in the yard she comes down in his reverie into the softer tones of this house in
Tarlac, the shadows gliding off her as she moves, with that purposeful gait he remembers so well,
closer in his attentive gaze. How like her to yield to his fancy, how pliant and generous as he well
knows from having loved her. Her face is moist, glistening and the mole is stark on her flushed
cheek as she wets her lips and he begins to undo the topmost button of her blouse. Suddenly
shy, she embraces him to avert her face and shield the small taut fairness of her breasts. The
shyness, more than any word or gesture from the first evening they loved, brings a tremor of
desire and tenderness so keen he catches his breath and groans, as if wounded, and twisting
erect, he gropes blindly for another cigarette.
She is called Leny and she is an only child. In the wide and massive house in Paco, with
its empty rooms for the other children who were never born, he would come upon her alone in the
sala, looking forlorn and smaller and more withdrawn among the shelves of books, the shrouded
piano which she refused to play, the tall bemused portrait of her father in a jurist’s robe fading on
a wall. Somewhere in the house mahjong tiles rattled through the afternoon; he never saw the
players, nor did she ever mention them, unseen strangers who assumed in his mind a secrecy
that belonged to her life before she knew him. Fat and preoccupied, her mother would emerge
from a hallway to pass through the sala, scarcely glancing at their corner of the spacious room
where they exchanged, behind a newspaper they held up as a screen, brief nibbling kisses.
“Not here, Ricky, not here, please, Ricky,” she would say when he pleaded for more, and she
would begin to discuss Sartre and Camus or relate, with a vague, somewhat puzzled mockery,
the week’s misadventures at the UP in Diliman, where she was a liberal arts sophomore. Then
with a toss of her hair, an awkward and decisive nonchalance, she would stand up and stride off
and hurry down the stairs, an unlighted well in the dusk, and out to her Volkswagen in the
driveway. She drove expertly, leaning shortsightedly forward, knuckles bone-white in the
dashboard glow. She would park by the sea and they would start walking, going nowhere in
particular. Once, they hiked from the Luneta all the way to Baclaran, following the sea-wall beside
the spray of breakers in the starlight.
Back in the city for the new school term, in June, he will start seeing Leny again but certain
things will be gone, her reluctance to hurt, his spontaneous, light-hearted candor. In September
they will quarrel over some trifle, caught in a spell of thick bitter anger; for almost a month, he will
not call her. They will be reconciled in a fumbling confusion of tears and caresses in the
Volkswagen, but it will not last; he will feel confined, oppressed by her girlish certitudes, and soon,
without remorse, he will discover that he no longer loves her. One rainy evening in November,
they will agree to meet in a restaurant in Ermita, to talk things over, to find out what has gone
wrong. They will be formal and polite with each other, and find nothing more to say, and after their
coffee, he will walk her to a cab waiting off the entranceway. She will roll the window up against
the rain, and the last that he will see of her will be a blur as of a face drowning, the mouth open,
moving soundlessly behind the streaming glass. Eight years later, at a party in San Juan, he will
be seated by the hostess beside a large and slightly tipsy woman, who will turn out to be one of
Leny’s innumerable cousins from Malabon, and who will tell him that Leny is dead. The woman
will not recall when it happened, but she will be certain of one or two details: Leny’s American
husband at the wheel, the car plunging into a frozen lake in Michigan. Late in the morning after
the party, he will wake up to the memory, coming to him clearly for the first time in years, of the
silent, almost unrecognizable face vanishing swiftly behind the wet cab window in the November
rain; but try as he might, he will not be able to remember her married name.