O PERFECT DAY
Estrella D. Alfon
“You cannot write a story about today.”
Bebe was sitting on the seat beside me in the lurching bus that was taking us
home from Guadalupe. It was evening and there was a full moon. There were many
of us in the party.
Why can I not write about today? What happened
that would be so hard to write about?
“For one thing,” she said, “ we were very
happy. I try to read all your stores and they are never happy.”
But I can write about today. Very early
this morning, we went to the wharf to meet the boat that was bringing your
sister to us.
“Yes,” Bebe said, “and we started being
very happy then.”
We started being very happy then. How many
we were! There were my mother, and your mother, and your sister, Bingbing. Then
my brothers, Nene and Boy. That is the family. Of the others, there were
Asnsiang and her husband. And there was Luis, who is in love with your sister
Inday. And there was Kint.
When we arrived at the wharf, there was
your father, too. And we waited, for the boat was late. Soon the sun was
glaring fiercely. It seems soon, because there was so much laughter to push
away the hours. Boy made a pretense of jumping into the sea and we cried, “ Oh
please don’t.”. The people looked to see what we were screaming at and then
smiled to ook at us. We laughed so. Because who would jump into the sea?
Certainly not Boy, who is fifteen and is in the throes of growing pains. We all
know he is in the grip of puppy love--- and for a girl older than himself. We
tease him so about it: about his sudden consciousness of neatness; the wave he
tries to put in his hair; his efforts to keep to the side of the road when we
are walking and she is with us; and about girls in general. He
tries to pretend he is angry, but how evident it always is that he only huge a
baskets on their backs, hung from their heads by straps of banana trunk fiber.
There are tomatoes, cheeky and colorful, in shallow woven trays on the heads of
children who have rolls of smoking tobacco in their mouths.
We come at short last to the cottage that
awaits us. Set at the foot of a hill; bamboo and nipa, unpainted, browned by
sun and rain. Torpedo, the keeper’s dog, chases some pigs away from the
cultivated plants and the rosebushes. There are chickens; and hens very jealous
of their chicks. There are green coconuts that await the splitting. And there
is a mango tree with its branches hanging low with clusters of green mangoes.
Boy finds a carabao lying placidly in the river. It is the keeper’s beast and
it knows Boy, so he clambers on its back, and now that animal is climbing
ponderously up the side of the hill, until Bebe screams that is should not be
ridden, pity the beast, it has just had a baby!
The keeper’s wife smooths out a mat and
brings out pillows, white-sheeted. We are so tired without eating; it is very
welcome to lie down and pat our stomachs. But someon suggest volleyball. There
is a court somewhere near; we can hear the smack of a ball being met by hands
and served and returned. There are men playing there, and we wait for them to finish their game. Then we take
sides--- all the women on this side; all the men on that side. We are so many
against them, and except for Inday, who captains all three (gosh!) of her
school’s teams, not one of us knows enough about the game to keep from chiding
the men because they serve hard balls, or because they toss the ball too far
out of our reach! But what is a game for except for shouting and jumping, even
if one never touches the ball at all!
We played volleyball until the light grew
rather dim, and even then waited only because the ball fell plunk on to a cake
of carabao dung.
Someone brought out some patadyongs and we girls scurried into
what cover there was to change into them. Armed with dippers of coconut shell,
we went, Bingbing and I, to the riverbed where there was a well that we cleared
of moss and dipped into. There were wild bushes by the river’s bank, with many
flowers. We gathered these, and plucked their petals and sent them with the
water coursing away. How lovely they looked floating thus, petals of orange,
very small like confetti, many like stars. And then Bingbing, digging in the
well to make it deeper, said, “Come and see what I see.”
Dusk was falling, but in the well,
nevertheless, the lightness of the heavens was very clear. I leaned over
Bingbing’s shoulder and watched my face among the clouds reflected in the
water; clouds that kept forever moving, so that now the well darkened, and now
lightened again. And then---I clasped my hands in delight, for while we watched
one star glimmered in the well. “Star light star bright, first star I’ve seen
tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.” Bingbing
threw her head down and bent over so that her wet hair hung into the well, and
drops dripped from it and disturbed the image of the solitary star in the
water. Then the water cleared again, and now there were other early stars in
the sky. How early they were! Bingbing got up and went away.
I should be afraid. All around me there
are trees, and no the river there is now no person but myself, beside the cold
well, under the early stars. Bathing at night, or even at dusk had always held
a kind of fascinating terror for me. The cold water seems to envelope me in a
mantle that grips my limbs and prevents me from moving. A coldness creeps into
me that seems to reach my very bones and makes me shiver in chilled terror. I
remember how one night, with some friends of my mother, we went to Talisay in
our car, with Mother driving. I was a girl of twelve and I sat beside Mother in
the driver’s seat. The other matrons in the seat behind us were very gay, and I
joined in with their laughter. In Talisay, where there are swimming pools, we
asked the owner to fill a small pool for us. We changed into our bathing suits;
then we waited for the pool to fill until the moon was high. And the coconut
palms around the tank cast shadows of their leaves on the water. And then one
of our party announced that the pool was almost filled. We went into the water,
I staying in the shallow end. As soon as my body was wholly in the water, with
just my head out, I felt suddenly afraid, yet somehow, I didn’t want to get
out. Someone stood on the diving board, a slim mestiza, in a bathing suit that
for those days was very daring because it was white and molded her body like a
sheath. She poised herself, her body very straight, very white under the light
of the moon; her arms stretched out before her, her feet a tiptoe. She sprang
upl there was an arc of white through the air and a gentle cutting of the
water, and then she disappeared from view. I held my breath and waited for her
to come out, and when she did, she was near me, and my mother and the others
were clapping their hands.
There was still that chilled terror with
me, but I gritted my teeth and bent my knees so that my head was covered by the
water, I was in the shallow end, yet somehow, with my head under the water and
my breath held, I had a sudden feeling I was alone in the world, in the pool,
that I was near to drowning and must hurry to save myself. I had only to stand
up, and my head would be out of the water, but some unreasonable panic
possessed me, and I thrashed my arms wildly about and opened my mouth to shout,
but I only drank in quantities of water; and then I had managed to stand up at
last, and I was breathing in hungry gasps of the cold air. There were my mother
and the others, out at the deep end, and they were laughing, and telling
stories, and daring each other to dive. But the feeling of being all alone
would not leave me, the feeling of danger from the water stayed with me, and I
grasped the iron railing that ran around the entire tank, swung myself out of
the water, and changed hurriedly into my clothes. But the chilliness never left
me. I wrapped myself in some towels but I could not drive away that awful
feeling of fear. All that night, I dreamed I was in the water, and my mother
woke me up once because I was screaming, and then in the morning, I was sick,
and the doctor said it was my lungs.
That was so long ago. Here it was dark and
it was cold, and I was, I realized, afraid again. I poured some dippers full of
the water over myself. I imagined bogey men in the trees that clustered on the
banks, and when some chance winds made the bamboos creak, I thought it would be
someone calling to me, someone of the evil creatures that hide themselves and
prey on humans, like vampires, like witches--. I stood up quickly, left the
well, and ran to the others in the cottage. They were singing again, and
preparing a bamboo table out under the moon to eat our supper from. They seemed
so busy with their preparations, everything was so cheerful—the songs, the
moonlight, the food on the table--, that I laughed at myself and changed into
dry clothing, chiding my fancy for weaving such frightening thoughts.
We had no lights to eat by except a
solitary candle that someone found somewhere in the cottage. Usually the
keepers do not need light. This early, they are already in bed, all their
chores done. But there was light from the heavens and we saw well enough by
that. Our mothers began putting into the basket what things we must not leave
behind. We soon finished with supper and prepared ourselves for the walk to the
road, and the ride back home.
There are no lights to walk by. There will
be mountains and there will be shadows. Ansiang whimpers we shall be so afraid.
But the keeper of the cottage gathers some withered coconut palm leaves, and
twists them into tight bundles, gives one to every boy in the party, and ligts
each torch from the precious candle. Kint keeps beside me, and Luis keeps
beside Inday. There is a sudden brilliance as the torches flare up; brilliance
that startles after the preceding dark. Te shadows move away, and draw up in
walls beyond the reach of our flares. Kint holds something in his hand that
looks lovely, a nosegay of white kamuning
flowers, and in their center, ringed around by their curling whiteness, a
single pink rose bud. Kint holds it out to me and says, “Picked it for you.”
We raise our voices in song, through the
short walk to the road. There is more water in the river, and sometimes we
cannot help wetting our shoes. How ineffective is moonlight when there are so
many trees and mountains and your fears to cast their shadows!
We are out on the road. We are in the
courtyard of the church. Behind the roof of a house, there appears a luminous
glow as of a fire rising up in flames. We point to it and wonder aloud what it
is. We do not have long to wait. The moon peeps over the roof, and we clap our
hands in delight. There are bamboo trees with turfs that look like giant
feathers when the moon’s glow is behind them; and coconut palms, their fronds
hanging demurely down, so that with a little fancy one can say they are maidens
casting their eues bashfully down before a suitor too bold.
Kint looks at the moon, and stamps out his
flare. He says, “ Do you remember?” I know what he has in mind: nights when we
used to walk to the pier and sit down and talk and sing; a whole crowd of us.
That was before he fell in love with me. When he did, he was barred from the
group and its singing, for he had committed a grievous breath of friendship. He
says, “ I am always asking do you remember, when there is nothing to remember!”
I look at him in silence, then before I know it, the cruel words have sprung
from my mouth. “Haven’t I shown you yet how bad I can be? Are you still in love
with me?” He turns his head away, and there is a fierceness about his mouth.
I walk away, feeling sorry for him. I
watch Luis sit on a big stone beside the church door. I watch his eyes follow
Inday about. And Inday keeps on singing and walking about among us, flinging
jokes at us, slinging off smart talk she must have learned in Manila. Inday’s
mother and my mother are talking together. I know them so well. Their talk will
be about me and Inday, and the others; about their hopes for us. They will
mention so many things they feel they can be proud of. They will have so many
dreams to tell about, and all through their words there will run their love for
us, their fear of anything happening to us. I go back to Kint and let him watch
me being careless with the flowers he has given me. I tell him of someone I
love very dearly. And he smiles at me and says he hopes I will be happy.
I sit down beside Luis and ask him not to
put his chin that way on his hand. But he says it is restful that way, and he
tries to join in the singing there is. The bus arrives and we take our seats in
it. Bebe sits beside me, and tells me I cannot write a story about today. There
is a moon in the sky. There are fragrances carried on the breeze. We pass a
cemetery and Ansiang points out the grace of her sister. There are so many
crosses, and they look so peaceful standing there in rows. My brother Nene
sings lustuly. But always Nene will be by himself; he and his jokes about women
and their defects, his apparent hardness to everything that one can cry about.
How hard it goes with a picture of him I have in my mind, when one day I saw
him taking a bath and he crossed himself before getting his head under shower.
My brother Boy, how big he is! Only yesterday I was boxing his ears and
bullying him.
I look at Kint and realize how I must have
hurt him… how I always have hurt him. A woman may feel triumphant about such
things but it will never be true that she is happy about them. There is Luis.
He will always love Inday too. Inday’s mother will always think of him or any
many unworthy because she loves Inday so much. Luis will always follow her
about and not speak to her, and dance with her but nit look into her eyes.
There are our mothers. They will always have such dreams of us, and we shall
always never quite fulfill them. They will always love us so much; it will
always hurt them to see us fall in love. Inday leads the singing. “Another
perfect day has gone away,” What peace that song breathes! Perfect day. Bebe
sings but she looks out of the bus window and watches the moon.
Today was perfect not just because it held
laughter; but because, like every other day, there were yesterdays to remember,
to cry about and to be glad about; and tomorrows to look forward to in fear and
hope.
Reference:
"O Perfect Day" by Alfon, Estrella. Booksgoogle.com. Web. 16 March 2013. <http://booksgoogle.com.ph/book:-philippine+book+short+stories>
Reference:
"O Perfect Day" by Alfon, Estrella. Booksgoogle.com. Web. 16 March 2013. <http://booksgoogle.com.ph/book:-philippine+book+short+stories>
There seems to be some missing text in the 7th paragraph in the line "evident it always is that he only huge a baskets" -- i can't make out what the sentence means. . . Is the frequent change between the past and present tenses a literary device, or some copying error, as are some of the obvious typos? Nevertheless, i like the story very much, Alfon has succeeded all too well in evoking a feeling of nostalgia, and an intimation of romantic pain in the exchange between the narrator and Kint.