Region 1 GRADUATION by F. Sionil Jose

I always knew that someday after I finished high school, I’d go to Manila and to college. I had looked ahead to the grand adventure with eagerness but when it finally came, my leaving Rosales filled me with a nameless dread and a great, swelling unhappiness that clogged my chest.

I couldn’t be sure now. Maybe it was friendship, huge and granite-like, or just plain sympathy. I couldn’t be sure anymore; maybe I really fell in love when I was sixteen.

Her name was Teresita. She was a proud, stubborn girl with many fixed ideas and she even admonished me: “Just because you gave will be accepted.”

It was until after sometime that I understootd what she meant and when she did, I honored her all the more. She was sixteen, too, lovely like the banaba when it’s bloom.

I did not expect her to be angry with me when I bought her a dress for it wasn’t really expensive. Besides, as the daughter of one of Father’s tenants, she knew me very well, better perhaps than any of the people who lived in Carmay, the young folks who always greeted me politely, doffed their straw hats then, close-mouthed, went their way.

I always had silver coins in my pockets but that March afternoon, after counting all of them and the stray pieces, too that I had tucked away in my dresser I knew I needed more.

I approach Father. He was at his working table, writing on a ledger while behind him, one of the new servants stood erect, swinging a palm leaf fan over Father’s head. I stood beside Father, watched his hand scrawl the figures on the ledger, his wide brow and his shirt damp with sweat.

When he finally noticed me, I couldn’t tell him what I wanted. He unbuttoned his shirt to his paunch. “Well, what is it?”

“I’m going to take my classmates this afternoon to the restaurant, Father.” I said. Father turned to the sheaf of papers before him. “Sure,” he said. “You can tell Bo King to take off what you and your friends can eat from his rent this month.”

I lingered uneasily, avoiding the servant’s eyes. “Well, won’t that do?” Father asked. It was March and the high school graduation was but a matter of days away. “ I also need a little money, Father.” I said. “ I have to buy something.”

Father nodded. He groped for his keys in his drawer the he opened the iron money box beside him and drew out a ten-peso bill. He laid it on the table.

“I’m going to buy…” I tried to explain but with a wave of his hand, he dismissed me. He went back to his figures. It was getting late. Sepa, our eldest maid, was getting the chickens to their coops. I hurried to the main road which was quite deserted now except in the vicinity of the round cement embankment in front of the municipal building where loafers were taking in the stale afternoon sun. The Chinese storekeepers who occupied Father’s buildings had lighted their lamps. From the ancient artesian well at the rim of the town plaza, the water carriers and servant girls babbled while they waited for their turn at the pump. Nearby, travelling merchants had unhitched their bullcarts after a whole day of travelling from town to tonw and were cooking their supper on broad, blackened stones that littered the place. At Chan Hai’s \store there was a boy with a stick of candy in his mouth, a couple of men drinking beer and smacking their lips portentously, and a woman haggling over a can of sardines.

I went to the huge bales of cloth that slumped in one corner of the store, I picked out the silk, white cloth with glossy printed flowers. I asked Chan Hai, who was perched on a stool smoking his long pipe, how much he’d ask for the material I had picker for a gown.

Chan Hai peered at me in surprise; “Ten pesos” he said.

With the package, I hurried to Camay. In the thickening dusk the leaves of the acacias folded and the solemn, mellow chimes of the Angelus echoed to the flat, naked stretches of the town. The women who had been sweeping their yards paused; children reluctantly hurried to their homes for now the town was draped with a dreamy stillness.

Teresita and her father lived by the creek in Carmay. The house was on a sandy lot which belonged to Father; it was apart front the cluster of huts peculiar to the village. Its roof as it was with the other farmer’s homes, thatched and disheveled, its walls were of battered buri leaves. It was washed away. Madre de cacao trees abounded in the vicinity but offered scanty shade. Piles of burnt rubbish rose in little mounds in the yard and a disrupted line of ornamental San Francisco fringed the graveled path led to the house.

Teresita was sampling the brothe of what she was cooking in the kitchen . There was a dampness in her brow and a redness in her eyes.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” she confronted me. In the glow of the crackling stove fire, she looked genuinely surprised.

I could tell her at once or show her what I had brought. “I wanted to see you,” I said, which was true. “But it’s really late and you have walk quite a long way back,” she said. She laid down the ladle on the table and looked puzzled. She must have noticed w\then what I was holding behind me.

I laid m package on the wooden table cluttered with tin plates and vegetables.

“It’s for you“ I said, My face burned like kindling wood. “I hope you like it.”

Here eyes still one me, she opened the package. When she saw what it was, she gave a tiny, muffled cry. She shooked her head, wrapped it back then gave it to me. “I can’t,” she said softly. “It doesn’t seem right for me to accept it.”

“But you need it and I’m giving it to you. ” I said firmly, the burning in my face ease at last. “Is there anything wrong in giving one a gift?”

And that was when she said, “There are thing you just can’t give away such as you are doing now..”

I think it all started that evening when we were in the third year and Teresita recited a poem. It was during the graduation exercise and she was the only Junior in the program. I can’t remember distinctly what the piece was about except that it was something that tugged my heart. She spoke of faith and love and as she did, clamminess gripped me, smothered me with a feeling I never felt before. I recall her edged resonant voice cleaving the hushed evening. I was silently one with her. We didn’t go home immediately after the program for a dance in honor of the graduates followed. Miss Santillan, who was in charge of the refreshments, asked me to wait for her so she would have company when she’d go home. Teresita helped serve the refreshments as usual. I sat on one of the school benches after I got tired of watching the dancers file in and out, giggling. When most of them had eaten, Teresita asked permission from Miss Santillan to leave.

“My father, Maam” she said. “He doesn’t want me to stay out very late because of my cough. Besides, I have work to go early tomorrow.”

“Going home alone?” Miss Santillan asked.

“Im not afraid,” she said.

I stood up, strode past the table laden with a an assortment of trays and glasses. From the window, I saw the moon dangling over the sprawling school buildings like a huge sieving basket and the world was us, pulsating and young.

“I’ll walk with you” I said.

She protested at first but Miss Santillan said it was best I went along with her. After Miss Santillan had wrapped some cakes for her, we descended the stone steps. The evening was clean and cool like a newly washed sheet. It engulfed us and we didn’t speak for some time.

“I live very far,” she reminded me later. She drew a shabby shawl over her thin wasted shoulders.

“I know, I’ve been there.” I told her.

“You’ll be very tired”

“I’ve walked longer distances. I can take Carmay in a run.” I tried to impress her.

“I’m very sure of that, “ she said. “You are strong. Once, I was washing in the river and you outraced the others.”

“I didn’t see you,” I said.

“Of course,” she said bitingly, “You never notice the children of your tenants, except those who serve in your house.”

Her remark stunned me and I couldn’t speak at once. “That is not true.” I said meekly. “ I go to Carmay often.”

She must have realize that she had hurt me jfor when she spoke again, she sounde genuinely sorry. “That was not what I meant, “ she said. “And I didn’t say that to spite you.”

Again silence.

The moon drifted jout of the clouds and lighted up the dusty mud. It glimmered on parched fields and on the buri palms that stood like hooded sentinels. Most of the houses we passed had a long brown out their kerosene lamps. Once in a while, a dog stirred in its bed of dust and growled at us.

“You wont be afraid going home alone?” she made alight after a while.

“There is a giang ‘capri’ near the bridge which comes out when the moon is full, “I said. ”I’d like to see it. I’ve never seen a ghost.”

“When I die.”, she laughed. “I'll appear before you.” “You'll be a good ghost and I wont be afraid,” I said.

On we trudged. We talked more about ourselves, about the friends that we ought to have but didn't. We walked on to where the row of homes receded and finally reached her house near the river that murmured as it cut a course over reeds and shallows.

When we went up the house, her father was already asleep. In fact, he was snoring heavily. At the door, she bade me good night and thanked me. Then slowly, she closed the door behind her.

So the eventful year passed, the rains fell, the fields became green and the banabas in the yard blossomed. The land became soggy and the winds lashed at Rosales severely, bowling over score of flimsy huts that stood on lean bamboo stilts. Our house didnt budged in the mightiest typhoon; with us, nothing changed. The harvest with it's usual bustle passed, the tenants – among whom was Teresita's father- filled our spacious store house with their crops. The drab, dry season with it's choking dust settled oppressively and when march came, it was time for Teresita and I to graduate.

Throughout a whole, hot afternoon we rehearsed our part for the graduation program. We would march to the platform to take our high school diplomas. When the sham was over, Teresita and I rested on the steps of the crude school stage.

She nudged at me: “I will not attend the graduation exercises. I can feign illness. I can say I had a fever or my cough got worse - which is the truth anyway.”

“Why?”

“ No one would miss me in the march if I don't come.”

“You are foolish,” I said.

“I can't have my picture, too, I suppose.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I can't come. I just can't,” she repeated with finality.

She didn't have to say anything more. I understood, and that afternoon I asked money from father to buy a graduation for Teresita.

And that same week, father ordered Teresita's father, who farmed a lot in the delta in Carmay, to vacate the place as father had sold it. Teresita's father had to settle in the hills of Balungaow where there were small, vacant parcels, arable patches in the otherwise rocky mountainside. There, he might literally scratch the Earth to eke out a living.

April, and a hot glaring sun filtered rudely through the dusty glass shatters and formed a dazzling puddle on the floor where father lounged. The dogs that lolled in the shade of the acacia tree struck out their tongues and panted.

The smudges of grass in the plaza where a stubbly brown; the sky was cloudless and azure. From the kitchen window, Sepa, the maid, asked me to come up the house. Father, she said, had something important to tell me.

He was at the balcony reading and fanning himself languidly. The question he asked stunned me, “When do you want to leave for the city?”

For some time I couldn't speak; the summer vacation had just started and the college opening was two months away.

“It all depends upon you, Father.”

“You'll leave tomorrow then,” he decided abruptly.

“But, Father,” I objected, “June is still weeks away. College doesn't start till then.”

“I know,” Father said. “But I want you to get well acquainted with your cousins there. You don't know much of each other.”

In the street, the heat waves rose up like little angry snakes, all swallowed up by the dust that fluffed high when a passenger lumbered along. Father's arid voice: “You will grow older.” he hammered this notion into me. “You will grow older and realize how important is this thing that I'm doing. You will leave here many faces. You will outgrow boyish whims. In the city, you'll meet new friends.”

I did not speak.

“The time will come when you will return to me-a man,” “Yes, father,” I said as he, having spoken, went on with his reading.

The dark came quickly ; the sun sunk behind the coconut grooves of Tomana and disappeared below the jagged horizon. Before the twilight thickened, I left the house and journeyed into a world where the houses are decrepit, where the urchins where clad most of the time in unkempt rags and when a stranger would stumble in their midst, they'd gape at him with awe. Beyond the squat cluster of homes came the barking of dogs lying in the dust.

I went up the ladder and squeaked and when Teresita's father recognize me in the light of the flickering kerosene lamp hanging from a rafter, a shadow of a scowl crept into his leathery face. When I said, “Good evening,” He retained his sour mien. He returned my greeting, then he walked out and left us alone.

“I'm leaving,” I began. Teresita wiped the soap suds from her hands. She had just finished the dishes. “I'll go to the city tomorrow- to study, Father is sending me there.”

She said nothing; she just looked at me. She walked to the half-open window that bared the benighted banks of the river and the black fields.

“We'd soon leave, too.” she murmured, holding the window sill. “You're father sold this place, you know.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“There's nothing to be sorry about.”

“Yes, there are. Many things,” I said.

“Won't you go to school anymore?” I asked. She was silent again and didn't prod her for an answer.

“What course are you going to take?” she asked after a while.

“I'm not yet very sure,” I said. “But maybe, I'll follow the advice you gave me.”

“Please do,” she said. “Please be a doctor.” With conviction: “You can do so much when you are one and you are so good.”

I didn't know what else to say.

“Don't write to me when you are there,” she said.

“But I will.”

“I will do no good,” she insisted. “Besides, it will not be necessary. Thank you very much for coming to see me.”

“I have to,” I said.

“She followed me to the door. The floor creaked under my weight. She called my name as I stepped down the first rung and I turned momentarily to catch one last glimpse of her young fragile face and on it, the smile, half born, half free.

“Please don't write,” she reiterated, wiping the soap suds on her hands with a piece of rag. “It's useless, you know.”

“But I will,” I said, and in my heart, I cried, “I will!”

“I'd be much happier and so would father if you didn't,” she pressed on.

“And besides I wouldn't be able to answer to answer your letters. Stamps costs...”

“I'll send you...” I checked myself quickly.

The smile on her face grew wan but, anyway she went down the flight and walked with me as far as the gate.

The children who played raucously nearby stopped and ogled at us. And in the other houses, though it was very dark. I knew the farmers and their wives watched me leave, knowing how it was going to be with us, how I would leave Teresita and thus make father happy, how, I will forget everything: the orchids I gave her that now adorned her window and which, I am sure, would someday wither, the books I lent her which she rapaciously read, the neat eager laughter that welled from the depths of her. I would forget, too, how we hummed to the music of the towns brass band and walked one sultry night from the high school to Carmay.

The night was vast and deep and the stars were hidden by clouds. In the darkness, I couldn't see the banabas along the path, and the bright purple of their blooms.